Public History, Private Perspectives

“On his deathbed Maurice Zelig tells his son that life is a meaningless nightmare of suffering and the only advice he gives him is to save string”

“My Mom always said life was like a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re going to get”

“She told Allan philosophically that it was what it was, and that in the future whatever would be would be”

By the middle of the 20^thCentury it was clear that history had gone very wrong. Two key, mid-century perspectives will suffice to show that this was understood:

For Adorno and Horkheimer, in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, the problem of history was the large scale perversion of enlightenment into instrumentality of the mind, of culture, of thought and feeling.  From a perspective that was a chronicle and a prophesy, they saw, recording with bitter irony this theft of enlightenment,  that “the fully illuminated earth radiates disaster triumphant”.

In the same dual mode of looking back and forward at the same time, and writing a decade or so earlier, Walter Benjamin imagined ‘The Angel of History’ as staring in horror at the catastrophes of historical progress:

“A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress”

The more I have thought about these disasters, these catastrophes, the more I’ve begun to think about them as a massive violation of the private; a universal explosion of privacy, of imagination; frequently, both literally and metaphorically, of the human body. 

This violation of the private was the work of ethically blind technocracy. A world tooled by weapons manufacturers, organised by bureaucrats, disciplined by force and obfuscated by hack journalism. A world of progress without morality that resulted in what Hannah Arendt mapped out in her account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Nuremberg as the ‘Banality of Evil’.

The violation of the private continues today. The very concept of a private space or time is less and less possible. Thanks to communications technology everything is public. The dynamic has reached another nadir within the social space of the internet.

And yet something new has emerged: alongside the continuing violation of the private there is a paradoxical erasure of the public. This is because the violation of the private is at the same time its elaboration!

Where totalitarian regimes from one end of the 20^th Century  to the next attacked the private through torture and confession, fabrication and erasure, the technocracy of social networking makes the private impossible by making it compulsory.  What is lost in this expansion is not only a truly private experience, but also, paradoxically, a truly public space.

If everything is a matter of taste then there is no chance for community. If the only perspective is the personal then there is a lot of darkness.

It is as if the terrors of the 20^th Century have been so traumatic as to cauterise sensation, stultify imagination and deaden curiosity. Where before the private had been forced into the public – the confessions of the Stalinist Purges, the insides of the millions of war dead splattered across every battle ground from the Somme to Sarajevo, the inescapable pornography of consumerism – now the public is forced from our minds. 

Public history is too painful to be witnessed in all its raw violence and so it’s repressed.

This repression is enacted by a moronic cacophony of private voices. This cacophony has emerged as a truly privileged and primary ontology – Facebook is more real now than reality itself – the simulacrum has sucked the life out of life itself.  I would love to know if this transference has crossed the limits of what Adorno, Horkheimer and Benjamin prophesied! What would they make of the internet?

I want to look at how this cacophony appears in film and writing.

Two notable examples of this ‘revenge’ of the private, this cacophony of idiocy and erasure of the public, are the film Forrest Gump (1994) and the bestselling novel, The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared (2012).

In contrast, Woody Allen’s movie, Zelig (1983) exposes the radical inadequacy of the private to account for the catastrophic public events of the 20^th Century.  

In both Forrest Gump and The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared public history becomes private irrelevance.

Of course, private stories are precious. These are the very narratives violated, raped by the disasters and catastrophes of the 20^th Century. However, it is in the way that these two works use private stories to supplant the public histories within which they unfold that something really dishonest happens.

History, public history is still there but it is pushed back and silenced by the banality of banal people and their banal stories. So instead of looking at the public histories of the 20th Century this mode of history as autobiography looks away, or rather looks inwards.

Allan, the 100-year old hero of The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared is a professional ingénue.

His father had gone off to Pre-Revolution Russia and ran afoul of the Bolsheviks. He was shot dead in a dispute over a patch of land that he innocently (of course) wanted for growing strawberries: “his father had died a martyr’s death in a hopeless battle with the leader of the Bolsheviks, Lenin.”

The way in which one of the massive events of the 20^th Century – the October Revolution - is reduced to all-too-innocent biography sets the tone for how history is mutilated throughout this novel.

To explain the racism of Professor Lundborg (the head of the mental institution to which Allan had been committed and in which he’d been sterilised for ‘eugenic and social reasons’ during the 1920s) he is astonishingly, and anachronistically, ‘right on’.  Allan’s characterisation is far too conveniently permissive in a woolly, worthy amnesty international kind of way.

“Allan asked Professor Lundborg what was so dangerous about being a Negro or a Jew. For once the Professor didn’t respond with silence, but bellowed that Karlsson should mind his own business….Professor Lundberg must have been frightened by a black man when he was a child, thought Allan.”

In place of an exploration of the actual ins and outs of the history of eugenics and racism in Sweden the novel serves up two badly drawn, insultingly stupid caricatures: the child-like patient speaking the plain unadorned truth and the angry, racist professor, easily exposed by that very childish ingenuousness.

His apoliticicism is seen as a virtue. He goes to the Spanish Civil War and ends up fighting on both sides. Blundering and innocent, Allan reflects on the issues:

“Allan was still unable to understand why everything always had to become the exact opposite of what it was. An unsuccessful military coup from the Right was followed by a general strike from the Left Then there was a general election. The  Left won and the Right got grumpy, or was it the other way around? Allan wasn’t really sure.”

Franco himself makes an appearance as a kindly “little man with medals” who helps the hero escape to America.

The stupidity continues as soon as he disembarks at New York: “The most senior immigration officer had a brother in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and as far as he knew, his brother was working on some kind of explosive device for the military”. 

Indeed.

Herein lies the cynical heart of this novel.  Karlsson’s multiple, fantastic contributions to the history of the 20^th Century reach their nadir in three separate episodes: firstly, he is responsible for helping the American Military develop the Atom Bomb.

Secondly, he ‘innocently’ passes on the technology to the Soviets.

At the end of the novel, the 100-year-old Karlsson decides he’ll give the secrets of nuclear weaponry to the Indonesians: “first of all Allan wanted to know about the mental state of the Indonesian president. The Government representative replied that President Yudhoyono was a very wise and responsible person. ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Allan. ‘In that case I’d be happy to help out’”

Allan Karlsson is dangerously naïve – indeed, he is faux-naiveté incarnate. An unsurprisingly venal  creation of a hack journalist turned bestselling novelist.

Forrest Gump’s account of history is the paradigm case of this faux naiveté .

Forrest Gump is untroubled by catastrophe and disaster. The depth and extent of his naiveté is ludicrous. He is idiotically credulous.

He is straight talking, honest and his own man. He is who he is, he says what he means and means what he says. He meets JFK and tells him “I need to pee”, meets LBJ and shows him his ‘buttocks’.

Endearing? Honest? 

No. 

This straight talking, straight-up, straight-laced clown is a suffocating lie.

Gump is the all-American idiot who never changes, never doubts, never fails. He sees, speaks and does no evil. And yet all of these characteristics are what make his perspective on history sickeningly dishonest and irresponsible.

Morally, all others fall short. He is devout and loyal, simple minded and literal. He is a pure and untroubled emanation of American Christian fundamentalism and military providentialism.  In simple language his is a voice that says God is showing us the way and we have the guns to get there if we get lost. 

He goes to the Vietnam War, becomes a war hero, and comes home to an America that is in revolt against itself.  Of course, everyone else but Gump is out of step. The war protesters, the Black Panthers, even his friends are all portrayed as violent, hysterical and faithless. Gump visits ‘Our nation’s capital’ and is oblivious to the hundreds of thousands of anti-war protesters and their concerns.

He meets up with his old commanding officer, now a disgruntled and cynical alcoholic cripple. Lieutenant Dan blasphemes in anger and frustration: “If I accept Jesus into my heart – I’ll get to walk beside him in the kingdom of heaven!....Well kiss my crippled ass, God wasn’t listening, what a crock of shit!” but Forrest replies: I’m going to heaven lieutenant Dan”

Zelig is one of Woody Allen’s lesser-known films. It too, like Forrest Gump  and The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared takes a look into the past through the eyes of a single, unremarkable man – Leonard Zelig.

Unlike Forrest Gump and Allan Karlsson, Leonard Zelighas no core identity. He changes, or rather is changed by every circumstance:

“With the doctors watching Zelig becomes a perfect psychiatrist. When two French men a brought in Zelig assumes their characters and speaks reasonable French. In the company of a Chinese person he begins to develop oriental features…He is confronted by two overweight men… as the men discuss their obesity an initially reticent Zelig joins in, swelling himself to a miraculous 250 lbs, next in the presence of two negro men, Zelig rapidly becomes one himself ”

Karlsson and Gump stay the same, no matter what; they are pure, simple, and morally superior to their circumstances. Zelig is so inferior to his circumstances that his parents blame him for being the victim of anti-Semitic bullying!

Like Gump and Karlsson, Zelig rubs shoulders with the great, the good and the downright evil of the 20^th Century.

Unlike Gump and Karlsson, however, Zelig is not morally superior.  On the contrary, Zelig is a deeply inadequate human being.  Under hypnosis he is revealed to be just another  tormented, cowering herd animal: he admits that he assumes the characteristics of others because he wants to be

“safe…safe…safe…I want to be like the others…I want to be liked”

Compare this with Gump’s vomit inducing distortion of the historical record when he picks up and returns a notebook dropped by one of the first black students who entered the University of Alabama. Zelig’s morality is non-existent.

Towards the end of the film, he goes to Germany in the 1930s and takes up with the Nazis: “There was also something in him that wanted immersion in the mass and anonymity,  and fascism offered Zelig that kind of opportunity”

Zelig’s lack of integrity – he is not his own man and he is devoid of a moral core -  is an accurate description of what it was like to be alive in the 20^th Century – the cowardice, the herd instinct, the complicity with historical catastrophe.  Zelig is part of the problem – indeed he is the problem – unlike Forrest Gump, who appears on the historical stage as an anachronistic sticking plaster over the wounds of the past, Zelig is himself a kind of open wound in the tissue of public life.  

He does not live a life that heals or teaches others how to live – on the contrary, he becomes an object of considerable moral opprobrium when he is taken to court in disgrace for crimes ranging from bigamy to painting a house in a disgusting colour to impersonating a surgeon and carrying out an appendix operation without proper training.

Zelig does not attempt to teach us anything. Unlike Gump and Karlsson, he is an example to be avoided rather than followed.

Zelig does not hide political events. He is the embodiment of the polis – he is an utterly public individual. The disaster and catastrophes of the 20^th Century are in plain sight through him and as him. Both Gump and Karlsson hide politics as personality. Their privacy is expanded to the point where historical truth disappears.

Zelig is a reductio ad absurdum of conformism. One doctor describes him as “the ultimate conformist” while the documentary voiceover sums him up as follows:

“Zelig’s own existence is a non-existence. Devoid of personality, his human qualities long since lost in the shuffle of life, he sits alone, quietly staring into space, a cipher, a non-person, a performing freak. He who wanted only to fit in, to belong, to go unseen by his enemies and be loved, neither fits in nor belongs”.

Even in his alienated mode, Zelig is a conformist.  He is tormented; riven by unconscious desires that cannot be accommodated in his society. Once again, Zelig, a farcical character, offers a perspective on history that for all its inadequacy is incomparably more authentic than those offered by Forrest Gump or Allan Karlsson.

His doctor, by mimicking his own mimicry, manages to get him to admit: “I’m nobody, I’m nothing”. His primary mode – imitation – thus revealed, Zelig is temporarily allowed to become his own man. 

For a brief moment in the film, Zelig becomes as ‘normal’ as Forrest Gump or Allan Karlsson.

It doesn’t last. There is no stasis for Zelig and this marks his most profound difference and superiority to Gump and Karlsson as ways of reading, as ways of looking at their public histories. I will return to this point presently.

It seems to me that Forrest Gump is a wounded response to historical disaster. He is a completely non-credible character because of his credulousness. He enacts nothing more than the revenge of the private upon the public.

Allan Karlsson does the same thing but with a degree of ambiguity that I would like to say is intentional on the part of the author but I really think the ambiguity is caused by his incompetence.

Karlsson is actually a murderer in the ordinary sense, and, let’s face it; he’s a mass murderer too. He is the man responsible for Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

In the end, the author shepherds this 100-year old killer away to a completely undeserved sanctuary in Bali where, it seems he’s about to carry out another act in the ‘enlightment’ project that Adorno and Horkheimer describe in Dialectic of Enlightenment. The fact that he does this in a plot weighted down with an elephant, a dog, a corrupt cop, an improbable  lifelong student, a wounded gang member and a woman called “The Beauty” is so much junk serves to irritate rather than endear.  The ambiguity arises because the question arises – with such good friends, such Bible Quoting good friends, how can Karlsson be allowed to go on with impunity? He can because this novelist is an incompetent fool.  

Zelig is not a response to historical catastrophe. He is utterly inadequate – he has no answers, no saccharine adventures with elephants and friends, no Shrimp Boat in the Gulf with Lieutenant Dan and Jenny as sidekicks.

He is historical catastrophe. He is a mess, a disaster. If Zelig has any hope it is in the sheer malleability of personality that its main character exemplifies. If everything and everyone are utterly provisional then it follows that the ways of thinking and feeling and acting that lead to the disasters and catastrophes of the 20^th Century are also provisional. It didn’t – and doesn’t – have to happen like that.

Zelig’s inadequacy is all that there is for real people. No-one is as naïve, pure, integrated or as good as Forrest Gump or Allan Karlsson – but this is why they are useless as models for living in history. 

Zelig may be a complete failure but so is everyone else and any history that cannot acknowledge that fact is blind to the actual demands of living in that history. Zelig, unlike Forrest Gump and Allan Karlsson, gives no answers.  However, he demonstrates - exaggerated to an absurd degree – the endless search for answers.

I suppose I find Zelig far more appealing because of the ways that Adorno, Horkheimer and Benjamin called on their readers to do just that; to read.

Zelig demonstrates a radical openness to what is other - he jettisons his own identity in order to listen to, to read, to understand those around him.

He demonstrates more than a suspended questioning, though; he goes beyond the mere act of self annihilation that marks the limit of a pure cipher.

He works through one contingent state into another: following psychoanalytic treatment he goes to the other extreme of outright opposition to everyone else. He gets into a fistfight with one doctor with who he's disagreed as to whether it was a 'nice day'.

Of course the dialectic doesn't stop there - he takes the logic to a further conclusion where it turns out that his very chameleon nature is what helps him escape from Nazi Germany.

He metamorphoses into a pilot and flies his getaway biplane upside down across the Atlantic.

“It shows exactly what you can do if you’re a total psychotic…..his sickness was at the root of his salvation…it was his very disorder that made a hero of him”

It is a hilarious conclusion to a hilarious film but the important point that Zelig has lived, learned, changed himself and  his place in public history contrasts sharply with the moronic and venal dead ends offered by Forrest Gump and Allan Karlsson.