This is not a movie review.

Universal

Lisa Van Dusen

July 23, 2023

“Tyrants always fear art because tyrants want to mystify while art tends to clarify.”

~ Iris Murdoch

When Schindler’s List arrived in theatres in 1993, it wasn’t delivering any facts that society hadn’t already metabolized for the record. The details of Adolf Hitler’s insistence on the extermination of more than six million European Jews as a requirement of his vision for a new world order were already known, the crimes litigated to the extent that they were able to be, and the stories of life within the bowels of that systemic evil told by everyone from Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi to the yes-men prosecuted at Nuremberg and Jerusalem.

The story had been told before, but never with the storytelling skills of someone whose instinctive mastery of the overlap between art and popular appeal could make it the blockbuster it needed to be to register as a collective experience. Never by a director whose film-to-film calling cards include what the late Martin Amis called Steven Spielberg’s “line to the common heart.” To say that Schindler’s List has aged well is both accurate on its artistic merits and inadequate as to its place in the filmography of titles that have made cultural history.

At a time when human rights and democracy, the founding principles of the state of Israel and the soft power of Hollywood storytelling are all under assault, Schindler’s List is worth re-watching and re-appreciating. In a moment when antisemitism is again on the rise, its artistic clarity is indispensable.

As an exercise in setting the record straight for posterity, Spielberg’s treatment of Thomas Keneally’s biography of German businessman Oskar Schindler is blessedly subversive — a beautifully shot, beautifully acted, beautifully written, beautifully scored, beautifully directed film about evil. The meticulous rendition of the choices, motives, rationalizations, fateful assumptions and operationalized depravities of people functioning within a context of state-sponsored lunacy is executed with such care, such faith in the emotional intelligence and psychological maturity of the audience, that it expresses a love for humanity even as it chronicles the very opposite.

At a time when human rights and democracy, the founding principles of the state of Israel and the soft power of Hollywood storytelling are all under assault, Schindler’s List is worth re-watching and re-appreciating.

In that humanization of dehumanization, in the capturing of its quotidian normalization until sadism consumes a society, Spielberg not only issues a warning, he universalizes the treatment of Jews during the Holocaust in a way that respects the exceptional nature of their persecution while relating it to the experience of every human being, anywhere, who has ever been singled out for harassment, degradation or death based on the arbitrary whims and pathologies of tyranny — from victims and targets of anti-Black racism to LGBTQ+ people to Iranian protesters facing execution for demanding their human rights. In the course of making art out of hell, Spielberg takes the finger of perverted power pointed to play God (you’re in this line, you’re in that line; you’re a kommandant, you’re a slave; you are elevated, you are doomed) — Amön Goeth’s trigger finger replacing the one extended by Michelangelo’s Creator — and demystifies the madness behind it.

As a historian, Spielberg documents the devaluation of a group not just via objectification and dehumanization but through the incremental mutation of work into slavery. As history has proven repeatedly, the business model of slavery depends on demonization for social license. Spielberg establishes the economic context for that propaganda-fuelled hatred and the financial adaptations of both its perpetrators and its targets, re-enacting the role money played as a gateway drug to the most barbaric mass atrocity ever committed, starting with the retaliatory alienation of Jews from the economic life of society and devolving toward that ultimate expression of utilitarian degeneracy — the existential sorting of human beings based on their economic value to the regime.

“Not essential? I think you misunderstand the meaning of the word. I teach history and literature,” says the actor Uri Avrahami as Chaim Nowak, a middle-aged Krakovian about to hastily embrace a second career as a metal polisher in Schindler’s factory. “Since when it’s not essential?”

These narrative bricks erect a wall between the before and after, the after a transformed reality in which up is down, good is bad and the new rules reflect all the moral absurdity of the tyrant behind the tyranny. Schindler’s List has aged well not just because it is timeless, but because the anthropology of industrialized evil is: The mass disenfranchisement of people; the subjugation of their rights to corrupt power and profit; the systematic obliteration of truth; the colonization of public discourse by propaganda; and the lives of individuals targeted, entrapped and exploited both economically and as repositories of commodified hatred to rationalize that exploitation. That confluence of madness, power, motive, opportunity and pathocratic persuasion has never been more effectively, objectively immortalized.

At the same time, Spielberg produced an irrefutable reminder to the world, 45 years after its creation, of why Israel exists, why it needs to exist, and why its existence matters. In three hours and 15 minutes, Schindler’s List — whose valedictory queue of real survivors at Oskar Schindler’s grave on Mount Zion attests to not only the undeniable reality of their lives but to the extrapolated loss of the millions and millions of those stolen — may have done more to advance the world’s understanding of the role of history in Israeli democracy and identity than any other depiction of that history since the country’s creation.

Policy Magazine Associate Editor and Deputy Publisher Lisa Van Dusen has served as a Washington columnist for both the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, as an international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News and as an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington. She was also director of communications for the McGill Middle East Program in Civil Society and Peace Building.