On Monuments and Men

It's been too long since I touched this blog. As I told my friends recently, I'm too busy applying for jobs to do my job! This post on THE MONUMENTS MEN (2014) is too good to pass up, however, especially as it can work nicely in conjunction with my post on memorials (monuments, memorials, you see the connection).

I was excited about the release of THE MONUMENTS MEN because I'm a sucker for films about art (and art in general, as you can see in my last post), Matt Damon (BOURNE IDENTITY 4-evah), and Cate Blanchette (no clever aside, she's just fabulous). We watched it over the weekend at, appropriately enough, Midtown Art Cinema. I'm actually not at all a sucker for films about Nazis because they're (obviously) largely war films and that just isn't my genre. This may be a surprise considering how much I write about the Holocaust on this blog, but I really don't spend a lot of my personal entertainment time consuming Holocaust texts. Truth be told, I'll pretty much watch a cartoon over anything else if given the chance. Anyway, despite all of that, this post and my next one should both be about contemporary films that feature Nazis in some way. MM here followed by a post on 2011's THIS MUST BE THE PLACE which I really enjoyed and can't wait to talk about. However! MM is fresher in my mind and harder to rewatch since it's still in the theater so we'll tackle that one first.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the film, here's a trailer that sums things up pretty well: 

The film was fairly poorly reviewed, with a 34% on Rotten Tomatoes. LA Times critic Kenneth Turan says, "the film never finds a consistent tone and ends up lacking in all areas" while The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis believes it "slices off a sliver of a great World War II story and turns it into a lightweight entertainment that doesn’t ask you to think too hard." However, I found myself thinking only too hard about what remains largely unsaid in this film about eight men who go to save the great treasures of Europe from the Nazis.

Frank Stokes, played by director George Clooney, has a voice over which states "If you destroy an entire generation of people's culture it's as if they never existed...That's what Hitler wants." Yet the culture that's being destroyed here is curiously nondescript. Hitler, after all, wasn't aiming to destroy European culture in general. While there's an acknowledgement of the importance of the arts to "our" identity, the statement remains a fairly hollow one. 

Stokes' claim in this first preview seems to attempt to engage with one of the central elements of genocide itself: the concept of social death, without actually asking with the difficult questions of whose culture is being destroyed or why that even matters. ("Because it just does" isn't an acceptable answer for me.) Claudia Card's article, which I've linked to above, is a great analysis of culture, genocide, and their relationship to feminism, and I recommend reading it. Her summary of social death is the following:

Social death, central to the evil of genocide (whether the genocide is homicidal or
primarily cultural), distinguishes genocide from other mass murders. Loss of social
vitality is loss of identity and thereby of meaning for one’s existence. Seeing social
death at the center of genocide takes our focus off body counts and loss of individual
talents, directing us instead to mourn losses of relationships that create community
and give meaning to the development of talents.

Genocide is, at its core, an eradication of not only individuals but of identity and culture. Card, like Judith Butler in Precarious Life, asks us to reframe our understanding of genocide so it allows us to mourn not abstract numbers, but instead, reminders of what we all share. Relationships. Community. Culture. Seen in this way genocide or mass murder becomes less about the moment a life is extinguished and more about the process of removing all cultural signifiers from one's life. It is a violence against the symbolic, before the violence against the physical being, and each are equally important when conceptualizing genocide.

So, let's turn back to THE MONUMENTS MEN. Whose social death does Clooney as Frank Stokes seem to fear in this trailer?

He warns us of the "high price that will be paid if the very foundation of modern society is destroyed." What is that price? What comprises the foundation of modern society? The film fails to answer these questions. Just briefly in this trailer you can see one of the film's few references to Jewish victims: around 1:30 Cate Blanchette answers Matt Damon's question: "What is this?" with "People's lives." Surrounded by furniture, packed crates, and nicely arranged tea sets we see the tidy way that social vitality can be removed, inventoried, and stored away. This process mirrors the physical violence that is being enacted elsewhere: removal of bodies to camps, records of arrivals and deaths, and mass graves or crematoria. Yet this scene in the film is hardly longer than the one we see in the trailer itself. The movie rushes on without allowing us a moment to reflect and ask ourselves: wait, whose culture are we saving?

Now, MONUMENTS MEN never purports to be a story of Jewish culture, and perhaps I'm being too hard on it. Yet all we seem to come away with a sort of sense of smugness. Modern society hasn't been destroyed, after all! While greedy Hitler wants it all, and will destroy everything like a 2-year old if he can't have it, he really only wants certain parts of modern society. The non-Jewish parts. As does the film itself. There's a brief reference to the number of Torahs found and saved at the end of the film, and Clooney puts the smack down on a typically cold-as-ice Nazi in the film's closing moments. Mostly, however, this film is a celebration of some indomitable spirit of western culture--a sanitized, dehistoricized version of what Card would call social vitality. This leads me to my second criticism of MONUMENTS MEN. It fails to engage us on the subject of why art matters in the first place.


Anyone who has spent an afternoon wandering an art museum (particularly the modern art area with the Picassos and their demise that we're supposed to feel so troubled about in the film) is familiar with the following statements: "That's art?" "I could have made that" and the dreaded "I don't get it." For MONUMENTS MEN art is "the exact reason why we're fighting. For a culture, for a way of life." Yet the film never answers the crucial question of why art matters. It matters....because it matters! Now lets watch beautiful people run around for a bit. 

Is it so unreasonable to ask one art (film) to support and explain a bit why another art (painting/sculpture/architecture) matters? What do "we" (that troublesome, nebulous word in this film) risk if "we" lose our artistic heritage? I wanted this movie to sell me more on why art matters, to inspire me to see fine art as a viable part of my contemporary cultural identity. I wanted it to ask me to think how art makes an us out of a group of disparate individuals.

At the film's close, an older version of Frank Stokes looks at one particularly important statue from the movie with what we're to assume is his grandson. There's some awesome 70s hair, and an indication of Stokes' satisfaction with a job well done. It is another moment that fails to ask viewers to consider how or why art itself is worth saving as Stokes leads his grandson away suggesting ice cream. The final moment underscoring those ideas of social vitality (vs. the social death that characterizes genocide) is asking us to think about the power of ice cream to bring a family together, not art. I love ice cream, don't get me wrong. It's a foundational part of my childhood, in fact. However, it doesn't answer the question: why save this art? How does saving it, perhaps, save modern society itself? Do we get it, now? Maybe we should have just rescued the ice cream trucks and called it a day. Another artist happens to agree with me:

"Nazi lite." An inelegant way of dealing with such a complex story, one that should acknowledge the problems inherent in the very mission of the film itself: to save what "we" value, not the already tattered and torn European Jewish culture.

Cate Blanchette, by the way, is the best thing about this movie. Check out our "lone heroine" which isn't a problematic marketing tactic at all.

If you want more information on this topic you can look towards Lynn Nicholas' The Rape of Europa and the PBS documentary of the same name.  Also of interest, particularly in its examination of Herman Goering, is Edward Dolnick's The Forger's Spell, a book about how Europe (and the Nazis) were taken in by Vermeer forgeries.