Arts
Genocide as soap opera
Rhoda Koenig
New York
In Coming Home, the latest Technicolour tract from the Hollywood Left, there is a scene in which Jane Fonda, playing the wife of a Marine off in Vietnam, goes to bed with Jon Voight, a semi-paralysed but exceedingly well-built war protestor. After a fair amount of writhing and moaning, Fonda turns to Voight and says, reverently, 'That never happened to me before.' Now, Corning Home is a movie which otherwise is Marshmallowy vague — for instance, although it is set in a period when protestors Were in fact marching, closing universities, and burning selective service files across the 'country, Fonda and Voight seem to be the only people in America to think the war a bad thing. But it does in this scene, put its
ideological point with admirable concision: Pacifists are good in bed; militarists can't cut the mustard. One gets the feeling that the entire protest movement might have been deflected by a trained detachment of servicemen and women roaming the country to perform unnatural acts.
The Orgasm Theory of historical revisionism fits right in, however, with the general American muddle-headedness about events in the dim past, or more than six weeks ago. The presentation of the recent television 'serial, Holocaust, was just one More illustration of it.
Unlike Roots, whose popularity NBC was hoping to duplicate, Holocaust was not a PM-sold commodity: it was not preceded by a best-selling book or a nationwide trend, except for a very minor increase in the numbers of the Nazi party. So the network Went the dignified route, putting together Holocaust kits for use in schools, getting endorsements from clergymen of all faiths, and generally spreading the idea that raising 1113C's ratings for four nights was a moral duty. (The idea, however, didn't spread as far as the advertising department, which happily cranked out ads identical to those for any enjoyable lurid disaster epic: 'Helena Slomova's story — Her love for kudi Weiss was more powerful than all the forces of war'; 'Heinz Muller's story — He knew being a prison guard meant privileges and one of them was the prisoners' ‘vives.') Coupled with this appeal to highMindedness was a lightly veiled threat: if Holocaust died in the ratings, NBC intimated, all three networks would be reluctant to air serious programmes in the future. Thus, in return for NBC's courage in presenting an unpopular topic, we were asked to reward it with popularity. The Orgasm Theory was being evoked once more: if one is right, one must be gratified, and, if one is gratified, one must have been right. Fortunately, NBC's notions about the rewards of virtue came through unharmed. Holocaust was a smashing success in the ratings (120 million viewers), second only to Roots in popularity. There were a few carpers: the television critic of the Village Voice ' called the show vulgar and clichéridden; Sidney Zion in New York magazine pointed out that there was no mention of Roosevelt's and Churchill's responsibility — as a result of their inaction — for the extermination of the Jews. But, in general, writers and commentators fell all over themselves hailing the contribution of NBC to the brotherhood of man. The newsmagazhies published attractive colour pictures of Nazi terror. And, although two critics of the New York Times despised the programme, its author, Gerald Green, was given space for an article in which he insisted that every other major critic and educational group in the country had found the series 'of high moral value'. (The news side of the paper was happy to crank the publicity machine for the show; its feature writer provided a background article on the death camps, and, with characteristic enterprise, its reporters found and interviewed survivors of the Holocaust, who confirmed its unpleasantness.)
As for the show itself, it was the usual soap opera, punched up with sex and violence for the evening viewers. Two families —one Jewish, one Nazi—were used to trace the history of the Holocaust in a manner that amply demonstrated the evil of banality. A casual viewer could have gathered that all Nazis were motivated by bizarre (hence un-American) sex problems, or that social-climbing, if unchecked, can end in genocide. ('Erik,' purred tlie Nazi officer's wife, 'don't you think you should ask Major Eichmann's wife to dance?') Far more entertaining were the commercials that interrupted scenes of beating and torture with cheery starlets selling wine, or, following a description of the gas chambers, informed viewers of the value of Lysol in 'killing terms'.
Holocaust, its creators claimed, was intended as a teaching tool, not as art or entertainment. But any programme on network television — whose aim is to increase ratings and therefore profits — is by definition entertainment. There is a certain unpleasantness in the picture of TV viewers munching sandwiches and chatting as they amuse themselves with films of Jews being tortured, a change from being entertained by cowboy violence the night before or gangster violence the night after. (The idea of the Holocaust as entertainment was furthered by the blurb on the paperback version of the show: 'A novel of consuming passions. Of hatred, and love, too.') The lessons learned from such instruction turned out to be rather dubious. On the first night of the series, an Israeli flag was stolen from a church in White Plains that had decided to fly it as an ecumenical gesture. Then, two nights later, it was returned by two men who had learned about the suffering of the Jews from watching television, and, as the New York Times reported, 'now realised they were wrong'. Less play was given to the arrest, three days later, of two boys who had set fire to a synagogue in Queens.
As for the less tangible effects of the series — well, the sort of people who are made aware of bigotry by television programmes usually think their own emotional distress to be reparation enough. After all the breast-beating and ululation over Roots last year, it's hard to detect any improvement in the lot of the blacks; if there were any changed attitudes, they seem to have gone the way of most New Year's resolutions. (Some of the lessons of Roots were imperfectly learned to begin with. The columnist Jimmy Breslin reported that one patron in a working-class bar where Roots was being shown was moved to exclaim 'Oh, Jesus, why did they have to come here?').
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