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Re: Evidently, the widow of Howard Fast (who wrote the book on which Gibson plans to base his movie) doesn't share Ross's enthusiasm for the forthcoming flick. There might be other reasons for concern. When Fast's book, My Glorious Brothers, first appeared in 1948, Milton Himmelfarb reviewed it in Commentary.
"A historical novel can have two kinds of merit," he wrote. "Of these,
the higher is that it should be an honest work of art in its own right.
Failing that, it can be a conscientious popularization of history. My Glorious Brothers is neither."
As Himmelfarb points out, the book already reads like a Gibson movie (think The Patriot): Every
gesture in the story staggers beneath the weight of heroic or tragic
symbolism, the heroism of the heroes is equalled only by the villainy
of the villains, and no chapter is without several ringing affirmations
of the doctrine that resistance to tyrants is obedience to God. If this
confusion of Benjamin Franklin with Judas Maccabaeus were Fast's only
anachronism, we should be cheated of the joy of reading that the
village teacher in Modin was named Lebel. How does it happen that a man
presented as living two centuries before the destruction of the Second
Temple, of Aramaic speech and Hebrew education, should be endowed with
a characteristically Yiddish name, of German origin, from the East
European pale of a few years ago? (The answer is that
if you confuse the Yiddish name with a Hebrew one, you get a name thick
with symbolism: "Heart of God.") There's another Gibsonian tendency: The
book breathes a love of bloodshed...it is the ferocity one finds in
German and Soviet war films and novels. There are few chapters in My Glorious Brothers
that do not show the Maccabees wading knee-deep in the blood of five
thousand more Seleucid mercenaries. Alexander Nevsky hath slain his
thousands, and Howard Fast his ten thousands. But it's the politics of the book that Himmelfarb finds especially objectionable: On
the surface, the book is a tract to arouse admiration for a great
national resistance to a foreign oppressor intent on wiping out the
national culture; its real purpose is to make this respectable
sentiment a vehicle of propaganda against American policy toward the
Soviet Union. This Fast seeks to accomplish by putting in the mouth of
his Roman legate, a sinister figure, expressions of hatred against the
Jews (read "popular democrats") because they represent a threat to the
Roman "free slavey" system (read "American 'free enterprise'") and to
"Western civilization" in general. Indeed, Howard Fast himself, writing in The Daily Worker,
drew lessons from his Maccabees for a "colonial liberation movement
against the advanced imperialism of capitalist nations." (Louis Untermeyer, for his part, found the book
"deeply moving and greatly inspiring.") While Mel Gibson isn't a
communist, he surely evinces tendencies towards revolutionary zeal and
historical anachronism -- not to mention his fascination with physical
violence. In any event, it's no surprise that Gibson finds the Fast
version of the story appealing.
(Himmelfarb also condemns Fast
for "unconscious racism" because he depicts the Hellenized Syrians "as
mongrel rabble, vicious precisely because they are a mixed breed," but
I'm not one of those who levy such charges against Gibson.)
This may be a ready-made Gibsonian story, but it's an anachronistic one -- like a Hasmonean Braveheart. And it would be doubly so if the movie focused on the Jewish civil war angle
or told a parable about religious conservatives in modern America with
"shades of the 2004 presidential election." David Klinghoffer has his own agenda regarding secularism among today's Jews, but the Book of Maccabees is unmistakably about Jewish resistance to a foreign occupier, and credits Antiochus rather than assimilationist Jews with outlawing Judaism and defiling the Temple. The decision to celebrate Hanukkah is made after "the disgrace brought by the Gentiles was removed" (4:58-59),
not because of the internal struggle against Hellenization. (The Book
of Maccabees account is canonical for Gibson, and he has a penchant for
stories about national liberation in any case.)
For his part, Klinghoffer "would like to see [Gibson] get back to the kind of spiritual thriller that caught his imagination" in the movie Signs. That spiritual element is what the rabbis had in mind when they changed the Hanukkah story
to focus on a divine miracle of lights. But Gibson plans to adopt a
materialist version of the story written by a Marxist-Leninist in the
1940s. One suspects that Gibson was mostly interested in the
pools-of-blood angle, anyway.
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