A Week-Long Conversation in a Chat Room

A & S. Two people, two continents, two computer screens.

S: Just cleaned the kitchen floor on my hands and knees (sponge mops are very rare in Berlin, believe it or not; a strange detail rarely mentioned in travel guides), which is how I like to do it. Zen contemplation. About to go pick up Simonetta (she's rehearsing a new piece on the harp) and then we go to the German premier of Spielberg's Munich...we get invited to these things and most of the ones we attend are for throw-away flicks like that last Cameron Crowe cliché-riot. By the way, is it really that common a phenomenon, guys who make the transition from early-middle to middle-middle age while clutching the urns of their father's ashes? Is this a rite of passage I somehow missed? The funny thing about that premier was that Crowe and the star, Kirsten Dunst, attended it (in total salvage mode). So to get into the cinema we had to walk up a red carpet while paparazzi flashed away at us thinking, I'm sure, who the fuck? I was wearing the same musty pants and pullover I'd been wearing since the previous Friday. Simonetta was in a fur coat she got years ago from her mother. If we fail to go to these things they'll stop inviting us and what if something good comes, eventually? What if Fellini comes back from the dead? So, tonight we see Munich. They will confiscate our cell phones.

A: I'm curious what you think of it.

S: Okay, we saw it. Hmmm. Great cinematography, toothsome acting out of Geoffrey Rush. At nearly three hours long, it felt like two and a half…so there's that. But, like any 'serious' Hollywood film with guns in it, it wasn't much more than an action flick with light political and philosophical padding. Traditional suspense-machine template: tension…release, tension…release, comic relief, tension…release, etc. How seriously can I take it...or to what extent can I trust in its attempt at gritty realism...when no character in the film says anything genuinely nasty, overtly racist, or even really vulgar? I think I remember one double entendre about something being 'hard' near the beginning of the film and this was an army guy lecturing troops. Aren't there racist terms for Jews and Arabs? Of all the people in the world, wouldn't the characters in this film about the conflict in the Middle East be the most likely to use these racist terms the most often? Gee, everyone in this movie was so nice and polite you kinda wondered what all the gunplay was about. I think a little hatred on both sides would have improved the flick and made it at least resemble the story it was supposed to be telling, not to mention the planet the story is set on.

Spielberg keeps making these films (see Schindler's List) in which he tries to get heavy but shies away from dramatizing pure HATRED. How can you talk about the Holocaust without investigating pure hatred organized on a scale previously unknown on Earth? Hate on a schedule; hate with a timetable and factories: the Hate Industry. In Schindler's List Spielberg carefully replaced all the hatred with nuttiness...he prefers to show the really murderous Nazis as insane rather than consumed with hatred. But hatred is the big motor behind genocide. Ideology isn't much of a motivator compared to hatred. Hatred is just one of the human things that we don't put enough time into discussing because it's too close. It's easier to blame George Bush or Arafat or Sharon or David Irving or Hitler, for that matter, than it is to face the truth: the capacity for hatred in humans is greater than we care to admit. I find it interesting that passionate love is what we express in private, as individuals…while passionate hatred works best on a national scale. How can we delude ourselves into thinking, therefore, that the one is capable of balancing the other? There's your laughable failure of the Hippies in a nutshell. Hatred might even be what millions and millions do best together. Nations kill.

A: What is hatred?

S: "What is Truth?"