James Marsh, The King, 2006; Edward Norton, Down in the Valley, 2006

Down in the Valley stars Edward Norton as Harlan, folksy innocent roiling with secret malice -- the same kind of role that made Norton famous 11 years ago in Primal Fear -- and Evan Rachel Wood as Tobe, a teenage girl that the older Harlan, a wannabe cowboy, falls in love with, seduces, stalks, shoots, and flees from. Norton can almost carry the movie with his Jimmy Stewart charm, made all the more effective by our knowledge that menace lies ahead, but the plot was that of a clever 17-year-old's imagination. That's better than the plots conceived of by stupid adults, but Valley is still a pale imitation of James Marsh’s The King, starring William Hurt as Pastor David Sandow, a Texas exurban preacher, and Gael Bernal as his bastard son, Elvis Valderaz, returned to haunt the father he never knew. I make the comparison because James’ wife, Anne-Mette, told me that Down in the Valley, released shortly after The King, drove the latter film out of theaters. Apparently, there isn't room in this town for two independent films about angry youths with patricide on the mind. In both movies, a strangely blank prodigal son sets up shop in a fleabag motel and then seduces a too-young girl. In both cases, the seduction is meant to hurt the prodigal son's father, not the girl. Both movies result in surprisingly extreme violence.

And for whatever it’s worth, both movies feature a white horse. In The King, the white horse is, I think, a subconscious echo of Michael Lesy’s 1973 book Wisconsin Death Trip -- a movie of which Marsh also made -- and thus a more evocative but less easily translatable symbol. In Valley, the white horse on which Harlan rides is plain ol’ inverted irony. Beware a man in the modern age who rides a white horse, for he is surely wicked.

Valley is a pastiche of such symbolism, so leaden that it dishonors the sources to which it alludes. Norton quickdraws in the mirror, a la De Niro in Taxi Driver (Bernal practices rifle drill in the mirror, but he has an audience in his girl, and so the scene becomes something new), and teaches a wan little boy spunk by kidnapping him, a la Kevin Costner’s superior A Perfect World. Yes -- Down in the Valley makes a Kevin Costner movie look smart. In the end, David Morse, as the girl’s father, hunts Norton down, gets shot, keeps coming, and kills the son-of-a-bitch, a la every Charles Bronson movie ever made. Morse even wears black. Get it? He wears black, but he's the good guy. Father really does know best. That’s the message.

It’s the father who gets it in the end of The King -- even though he’s accepted his bastard son, confessed to his church, and, really, been everything a Christian preacher is supposed to be. But violence still visits him, and despite his repentance, he is no more innocent of the violence than the bastard son who perpetrates it. Norton’s character becomes more obvious and ridiculous as we learn his motives -- he’s secretly Jewish rebelling against his hasidic father by playing cowboy -- whereas Bernal’s character becomes more blank and yet more subtly drawn. What we thought we understood, we realize, we don’t. And we only see how wrong we are –- how hard it is to understand the past, to recognize sin, to interpret a white horse -- around the same time William Hurt does, as his life is burning down around him.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, The Lives of Others, 2007

Imagine if The Lives of Others, Germany's contender for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, was set not in Berlin, 1984, but Berlin, 1944. We have before us three moving pieces: an artist pure-of-heart, a government official who is pure ambition and evil, and a man trapped in between -- a bureaucrat with an artists's soul. The artist scorns the Nazi regime, but his art ruffles no feathers, and so he is allowed to prosper. The evil government official, though, is out to get him, due not to personal animus but to a contrived plotline that we can ignore. What matters is that the State hates Art. But our middleman -- our Nazi-with-a-soul -- is charged with actually bringing the artist down. This he is well-qualified to do, since he has done it so many times, and so well, that he moonlights as a professor of torture and interrogation.

This time, though, something's different. The Soulful Nazi, surveilling the artist -- who has powerful friends, and thus cannot be simply rounded up -- is gradually won over by the artist's art. In the critical scene, a single tear falls from the Good Nazi's eye. (Spoilers ahead.) So, he covers for the artist; the artist creates a heroic indictment of the regime; and, after the regime crashes down, presumably laid low by his art, creates his masterwork, dedicated to the Soulful Nazi who saved him. The artist calls it, "Sonata for A Good Man," and it is such that the very fact of its existence -- we never know for sure what it consists of -- is enough to move we, the film audience to tears.

There, in a nutshell, is the story of this smarmy exercise in self-exculpation. If the thought of a Nazi killer -- or a redeemed Stasi fiend, as is the Good Man of The Lives of Others -- moved to shed a single tear does not move you to tears, you are perhaps afflicted by what many Germans used to call, in the late 1940s, the "Spirit of Morgenthau." Morgenthau was Truman's Jewish Secretary of the Treasury, and the most vocal advocate of a complete dismantling of Germany's war machine and full reparations for Germany's victims. In both instances, his arguments lost. Germany, as subsequent generations of genuine artists and activists managed to reveal, preferred to forget the past, to re-set the clock at "stunde null," zero hour.

The Lives of Others manages to do so again for East Germany, even as it devotes a couple of heavy-handed hours to the brutalities of life in the GDR. Or, rather, to the brutalities of the regime personified -- and thus limited to -- two repugnant personalities, a stupid, vulgar Communist Party bigshot and a conniving Stasi agent whose sadism is expressed mainly by the fact that he has a very ugly moustache. The CP bigshot is as corrupt as the artist, a playwright, is dedicated to "Art" (which shall hereafter be capitalized in recognition to its overpowering importance). Whereas the playwright, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) is a beautiful man, the CP big is revolting, never more so than he drops trou to reveal his massive ass in tightey-whiteys, moving in like the backside of Jaws as he assaults Dreyman's actress-lover. CP Big's henchman is not as ugly, but his bulging middle and cautiously leering ways let us now that he will be just as soon as he gets enough power.

To say this is a caricature is to belabor the obvious, but it is also to risk being accused of sympathy for the devil. In this case, I have none; indeed, I'd much prefer a movie that dealt more painfully with East Germany's surveillance regime than this does simplistic tear jerker.

To be fair, my eyes watered. How could they not? There is a tragic death, and quiet heroism, and the sort of "moral ambiguity" designed to make liberals feel brave for acknowledging nuance. This last comes in the form of Dreyman's girlfriend, who, when threatened with being denied the chance to ever act again, informs on Dreyman. What's ambiguous about that? He protected her; she betrayed him rather than give up the spotlight; and both are screwed by the Stasi. Well, leave it at that, and it really might be morally ambiguous. But we're expected to take seriously the notion that her need to perform -- to practice her Art -- was of at least near-equal value with the life of her lover. For this, the film -- and its Good Men -- forgive her.

But heroism is reserved for the Good Stasi. Dreyman plays "Sonata for a Good Man" in remembrance of a theater comrade driven to suicide by the Stasi. The Good Stasi, Weisler, listens in on his surveillance equipment, sheds his tear, and then is stabbed in the heart with remorse when Dreyman quotes Lenin on the subject of Beethoven's "Appassionata": "If I keep listening to it, I won't finish the revolution." (Revolution=bad; Art=good. Let them eat sonatas.) In case viewers deficient in sentimentalism fail to grasp the point, the next scene shows Weisler confronted with a cute little boy who inadvertently reveals that his father doesn't like Stasi men. Weisler, in an amazing act of moral courage, does not gobble the child up, and that is how we know he is the sonata's Good Man.

Fast forward (as the film does over and over, "two years later," "four years later," etc.) to unified Germany. Dreyman discovers that Weisler saved him (the clue, worthy of the board game Clue, is a red fingerprint) and sets out to thank the man. In unified Germany, Dreyman is doing well, his plays finally performed properly (that is, with the actresses in glam evening gowns instead of factory drone dresses) for the right audiences -- rich ones, that is. Weisler, however, is even poorer than he was in the GDR, a sickly-looking mailman in the East Berlin slums. Dreyman decides that the best thing he can do for this wretched soul is not to thank him personally, but to transform his story into a bestselling novel -- under Dreyman's name, of course. But that, for Weisler, is enough -- the last words of the movie are Weisler buying the book and declaring "It's for me."

Let's sum up the heavy-handed morals of this "morally ambiguous" tale: If, like Dreyman's girlfriend, you rat out your lover for your Art, you're a tragic hero. If, like Weisler, after years of terrorizing innocents, you are moved to tears by Art, you're a tragic hero. And if, like Dreyman, you turn your story of suffering into a bestselling tale through which an entire nation, uncomfortable with its past, can blame it on a few ugly men and declare everyone else their victims, then you, too, are a tragic hero. The author, not authoritarianism, will reign supreme, if only we keep our faith in Art. Dana Stevens, reviewing The Lives of Others in Slate echoes the widespread critical love affair with this movie when he writes that it "ultimately becomes an ode to the transformative power of Art." (Capitalization mine.) It's an ode to something, alright, but it sure isn't art.

Hollywood makes this kind off movie, too, only instead of Art, we have Heart. Our Good Stasi and playwright rolled into one is a boxer named Rocky, a private named Ryan, a runt named Rudy, and even a German, Schindler and his list. If anything, Hollywood's sentimental escapism is better than that of The Lives of Other People; most of us are mature enough to recognize that Rocky is a fantasy. And not even Rocky was as heavy-handed as the director of Other People's Lives so unsure that we'll get the message of the music that he tells us the song is called "Sonata for a Good Man."

It's hard for me to grasp how this film played in Germany, where it's about what people among the audience did and didn't do not so many years ago. But in the U.S., where the film's surveillance state theme tickles the scaredy-bone of the kind of upper-middle viewer who goes to Art houses (I'm one of them), the raves are more disturbing. They reveal a mixture of moral self-pity and moral self-regard, a sense that we are all caught in a terrible system not of our making, subject to the whims of powerful Bad Men, whom we resist by going to the cinema, there to be transformed by Art.

Were such an aesthetic cliche trotted out to redeem Germany's upper middle-class 60 years ago, it would have been denounced as horrendous. That it is being used -- not in Germany, but here -- to assuage upper middle-class anxieties about political impotence, in a country and time where real resistance (and real art) is actually possible is, like the CP fatcat humping away at the morally vacant actress in The Lives of Others,, stupid, vulgar, and vain to the point of obscenity.

Werner Herzog, Three Films, Two Profiles, and a Manifesto; Les Blank, Burden of Dreams, 1982

I had been saving an old New Yorker with an article about a pair of archaeologists who're attempting to settle the question of whether the Donner Party actually cannibalized itself, but when I opened it up my eye was drawn first to Daniel Zalewski's profile of Werner Herzog. I had just read Tom Bissell's essay on Herzog in the December Harper's and thus inspired, rented The White Diamond, which Herzog claims is his best, as well as Burden of Dreams, Les Blank's making-of doc about Fitzcarraldo.

I first saw Fitzcarraldo as a kid, in the little art house theater on the hill above Albany. It's one of my father's favorite films -- I think he had already seen it, but he wanted us to see it, too. This was 1982; I was 10. Even then I could see that the movie represented something my father wanted my sister and I to know about him. Back then he was stern, preoccupied, work-obsessed; a teeth-grinder. Our mother was light-handed, adventurous, and given to convening wild, absurd dinner parties, the greatest of which crescendoed in a spitting-for-distance contest. My mother's boyfriend of the moment, a muscle-bound children's book author named Michael, took first place by surprising everyone with a giant pink goober that sailed across the room (newspaper had been laid down) like a tropical bird. His secret, he revealed, was a bottle of pepto-bismol he'd found in the back of our medicine cabinet. Ancient, and probably once my father's.

My father did not participate in spitting contests, but he did take us to Fitzcarraldo, the story of an Irishman on the Amazon, played by Klaus Kinski, who dreams of bringing opera to the jungle and to that end decides he must haul a steamship over a mountain in order to make a killing in the rubber trade -- money which he will use to bring Caruso to the wilderness. My father admired such flamboyant, poetic gestures, and wanted us to know he admired them. He was not trying to tell us that he was Fitzcarraldo, only that even as one buckles down to the work of life, one must remember the sound of opera in the jungle.

Maybe so. But in Fitzcarraldo, particulary as interpreted through Burden of Dreams, Herzog seems less interested in the sound of opera than in the sound of the jungle itself. He hears the screech and the scream, the terror-filled howls he says the trees would make if they had mouths. Herzog clearly admires lunatics and dreamers who defy nature -- Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, Timothy Treadwell of Grizzly Man, the balloonist who builds The White Diamond so that he can peer more closely at the jungle's canopy -- but the common denominator of such films is not the flamboyant gesture, but the monstrosity of nature.

This became clear to me reading Zalewski's profile, which centers on Herzog's production of Rescue Dawn, a feature re-make of a documentary he made years ago called Little Dieter Wants to Fly. "Dieter" was an American pilot who was shot down in Vietnam and who then escaped through the jungle. In Rescue Dawn, Christian Bale playes Dieter and Steve Zahn plays his wounded buddy. Herzog spends a day dragging them through the jungle, looking for just the right spot to film an epiphany: "Bale and Zahn, after clambering up a steep hill, get their first glimpse of a wider view. The vista below them, partially obscured by branches, is an Edenic blanket of green, but the effect is deflating: this prison cannot be escaped."

Rescue Dawn has focussed the attention of Herzog's popular press interpreters on Herzog's ambivalent relationship to fact, as conventionally defined. Herzog, for instance, refuses to distinguish between his fictional films and his documentaries. Why then, both Zalewski and Bissell ask, remake Dieter? What greater truth can he achieve in this fictional telling? In the documentary, Herzog films Dieter opening and closing a door in his California home as he explains that the freedom to do so could only be appreciated by a former prisoner. Perhaps; but, it turns out, this was not Dieter's sentiment, but Herzog's idea. Herzog insists that Dieter's willingness to perform the idea is proof of their collaboration -- Dieter would not have done so, Herzog argues, had he not felt that the gesture illustrated some essential truth.

Leaving aside the matter of how a talented storyteller with an enormous ego and a regular joe on the other side of the camera "collaborate," I still pause on Herzog's definition of documentary. One might argue -- though I'm not sure I would -- that documentary is defined by the tension between "truth" and facts. Facts don't necessarily add up to truth, so documentarians must sift through them, identifying patterns, discovering connections, and, yes, constructing arguments. Truth is an argument that the documentarian finds irrefutable.

Herzog doesn't go in for such shaky definitions. To him, in White Diamond and these two profiles, Truth is Truth. He seems confused and annoyed by further questioning on the matter. He seems, in fact, to be rather dimwitted on the subject. Perhaps the apparent artlessness of his films is not a ruse? Perhaps he is an idiot savant?

Or maybe he is a trickster, who knows that the question of truth, seemingly as central to his films as the grand, operatic gesture of Fitzcarraldo, is really a cover for other pursuits -- just as the operatic gesture may be a cover for his exploration of the inherent terror of nature. I see evidence of this possibility in Grizzly Man, and the angry reactions of the few people I've met who hated Herzog's appropriation of the late "Grizzly Man" Timothy Treadwell's footage from his many summers spent living amongst the grizzlies of Alaska. What bothers these people the most, beyond what they perceive as the exploitation of Treadwell -- viewed as either a mentally ill person or a pure soul, either way entitled to protection from public eyes -- is the certainty with which Herzog interprets Treadwell's story in his voiceover. Herzog declares Treadwell naive, blind, in a sense, to the blank "murderousness" in the grizzly bears' eyes. Herzog's detractors may or may not agree with this diagnosis, but they loathe Herzog's assertion of it as fact.

Such sentiments reveal a faith in facts, a belief that they add up to truth. Herzog holds no such convictions. He is more interested in authority. Not the echoes of fascist authoritarianism with which he grew up in Bavaria, but his own authority, his own discovery of truth, his own right and ability to tell a story unbound by qualifications and disclaimers. That is, his chance to respond to the randomness of nature by becoming a force within it, asserting narrative authority not based on facts but on his own literally wild vision -- the facts of a jungle vista as a prison, of murder in a bear's eyes, of the trees slashed by Fitzcarraldo in his attempt to haul his steamboat over a mountain screaming in vengeful fury Fitzcarraldo can't hear because his head is full of Caruso. Like Fitzcarraldo, and, to a lesser extent, the balloonist of White Diamond and Timothy Treadwell, Herzog is a narcissist. But whereas his characters seek to escape into interior visions, Herzog wants to project his outward. That is his operatic gesture, and that is commentary on truth. It sounds awful so-phrased, but as an argument, I find it more compelling and honest than the handwringing of responsible documentary, or even the seemingly artless poetics of cinema verite.

A year ago, I invited the filmmaker James Marsh to come speak to my class about two of his recent films, a feature called The King and a documentary, after a fashion, called Wisconsin Death Trip, inspired by my college mentor Michael Lesy's book of the same name. James brought with him a manifesto by Herzog, "Lessons of Darkness," worth reproducing in full.

1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.

2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. "For me," he says, "there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail."
Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.

3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.

4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.

5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.

6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.

7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.

8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: "You can´t legislate stupidity."

9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.

10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn´t call, doesn´t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don´t you listen to the Song of Life.

11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.

12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.

David O. Russell, Three Kings, 1999; Alfonso Cuarón, Children of Men, 2006; Chava Rosenfarb, Tree of Life, 1972

When I first saw David O. Russell's Three Kings -- the first feature film about the Gulf War --seven years ago, I cried like a five-year-old watching Bambi. This, I knew, was an odd reaction for a heist flick starring George Clooney, Markey Mark, and Ice Cube. But it was more than the sum of its parts, a portrait of the aftermath of a war in a country the U.S. had crushed and, we thought back then, forgotten. My favorite film reviewer, Stuart Klawans, had this to say in The Nation:

"Movies... function as wish fulfillments. In the Rambo movies, when Stallone visited himself upon Vietnam, the wish could be summed up as, "This time we win." In Three Kings, a somewhat more elevated desire is put into play: "This time we don't behave like complete shits." Even in this particular no man's land, the magical thinking of movies makes room for sentiment, so that our four Americans at last act for motives beyond dumb self-interest. The true test of the movie lies in how it goes on to realize this wish."

Three Kings did so with comedy made brutal by its own madcap form and a surreal confusion epitomized by Marky Mark calling home on one of Saddam's cell phones, evidently not wholly certain which country he's in and what has happened there. And then there's the torture scene, featuring a U.S.-trained member of the Republican Guard and Wahlberg's character, played as Melville's Pip lost in an ocean of deceptions and "realpolitik" and raw suffering that he can't comprehend. Given what we now know about U.S. torture, the scene plays as quaint, but at the time it was terrifying.

I caught the movie in Montreal, where I was staying in a empty, dimly-lit and underheated mansion, a "bed-and-breakfast" I'd checked into while I spent a week interviewing Chava Rosenfarb, the last of the great Yiddish writers, for a profile in a Jewish magazine called Pakn Treger. Chava's house was even darker and colder, and she spoke mainly of lies and betrayal -- her own and those of her lovers, the choices they'd made to survive not just the liquidation of the Lodz Ghetto and Dachau, but also the decades since. Chava, as a young woman, had been political, but the camps had cured her of the notion that politics can avert the horrors that wash over the world like waves, regular and predictable. Never again? Chava's answer, I suspect, would be along the lines of "Probably tomorrow." Still, she wondered: Could something have been done? Could she -- 16 and powerless, a girl in a ghetto -- have done something differently? Should she have fought and died?

My questions, as I watched Three Kings, were considerably more trival, to say the least. In 1990, as a freshman at Hampshire College, I'd thrown myself into the anti-war movement. I took part and helped organize marches, some of them enormous. I was arrested twice and knocked around -- while cuffed, no less -- by Amherst cops in a small police riot that followed the self-immolation of a war protestor named Greg Levey on the town common. By the end of the school year, though, it was all over. The huge numbers we'd put in the street were no more persuasive to Bush the First than the millions who rallied against the current episode of the war -- the largest protest in history, I've heard -- were to Bush the Second. The following winter, I spent six weeks traveling with my sister, an Arabic scholar, through North Africa. Everywhere we went, Arabs wanted us to know that they loved America, but hated Bush. "Me, too," I assured them.

"Then why did you not do something?" they asked.

That was the question that came to me in the dark as I watched Three Kings and and thought about the absurdity of "Never again." One needn't look to Cambodia, or East Timor, or Rwanda, or the Congo in the years since the Holocaust to know how empty that phrase is; one need only turn on the TV, right now. The first Gulf War killed tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians. Whether the current war has led to the death of some 60,000 Iraqis (the very low estimate) or 600,000 (the one claimed by nonpartisan academic researchers), the scale of needless death makes a mockery of semantic debates over the terms such as "civil war" and "genocide." The proper question in response to such mass killing, undertaken in part with one's own tax dollars is not "How many corpses does it take to equal genocide?"; it's "Why did you not do something?"

I asked myself that question once again last night as I sat in the dark watching Alfonso Cuarón's new movie, Children of Men, a dystopic thriller set in the near future, when, apparently, some kind of virus has made all of humanity infertile. Most of the world has descended into chaos. "Britain alone soldiers on," blares the announcements on the train as our hero, Theo (Clive Owen), a former radical long since disillusioned, rides home from his bureaucratic job. He's playing hooky to visit an old friend in the country, far from the madding crowd. Jaspar (Michael Caine) is a very old hippie, still radical and still ridiculous, baked and corny and yet the only seemingly fully sentient human left in a world divided between fascism -- Theo's brother, British Minister of Culture, who lives in a sterile white box petting the world's art treasures, looted by the last government still standing -- and the feral. This latter category is represented by the Fishers, a radical militia dedicated to opening Britain's borders to refugees. Theo's ex-wife, Julian (Julianne Moore) is the leader of the Fishers, and she manages to appeal to Theo's buried emotions for her, if not the cause, to enlist his help in moving one such refugee to the coast. The refugee, Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), turns out to be worth the trouble: she's pregnant. Julian wants to get her to a ship off the coast where scientists beyond the government's control can find out how Kee, a young African prostitute, has managed to avoid humanity's curse. But the rest of the Fishers want to keep the baby in Britain as a symbol -- a martyr, if necessary -- for their cause, and so they murder Julian. Theo takes over the rescue.

The set-up is one-third of the film. The chase that follows takes us through to the end. Along the way, Cuarón slowly reveals a response to the current worldwide "War on Terror" that's all the more effective for not being a one-to-one analogy. The fascist British government, for instance, is obsessed with the dangers of immigrants, but it's not fighting a foreign war. "Homeland Security" runs the show, and the posters warning civilians to report "suspicious activity" are dead ringers for those in the subways and on the busstop shelters here in New York, but the fight is not the same, nor is it meant to be. The Fishers at first reminded me of the Weathermen, radicals blinded by adventure and fury; it was late in the film before I recognized them as the Moktada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, absent Islamic fervor.

But the most chilling connection was not meant to be subtle. (Spoiler ahead.) When Theo and Kee, along with a midwife named Miriam, end up in a Homeland Security prison camp, one of the first sights they witness is a man in a pointy black hood, his body covered by a poncho, his arms out as if crucified. This direct quote of Abu Ghraib is disconcerting, but heavy-handed; it's meant, I think, only to signal you to be alert to what's coming. In an effort to distract the guard from Kee's labor pains, Miriam begins praying loudly as they're transported on a bus. A dog handler drags her off. In one long shot -- as if twisting over our shoulders as the bus moves on without her -- we see another black hood shoved over her head.

The full house I saw the movie with gasped out loud. A liberal crowd, no doubt, probably 90% opposed to the war, fully aware of the routinization of torture and brutality in the name of freedom these past years. But still, we gasped. The offhandedness of the hooding, the sudden disappearence of Miriam (we never find out what happened to her), the forward motion of the bus, the plot that moves on without her, and, no doubt, the fact that Miriam is a white woman, a British citizen, a new-agey, sweetly ridiculous soul, a harmless creature, "like us," the mostly-white American middle class. We gasped. This, you could almost hear us all thinking aloud, this is what we're doing in Iraq. And then, for me and many others, I suspect, the question: "Why did I not do something?"

The question is in the past tense because what movies such as Three Kings and Children of Men make unbearably clear is that the damage is done. It's too late too prevent the horror, too late to avoid regret. Whether one believes we're three years into this war, or, as I do, 16, the time is long past when any honest person could maintain that the United States -- and by that I mean not just the current government, but those of us who through passivity and tax dollars and ignorance have empowered it -- is just a little off track, that in Nixon's immortal phrase, "mistakes were made," that Ford-style "healing" is possible. "Why did I not do something?" Many of us did: marched and wrote letters and wrote articles and joined organizations and campaigned for candidates and started blogs with which to spread the word. Not good enough. That's just a plain, empirical fact. All of it -- not good enough.

Was there anything we could have done that would have been good enough? At the end of Children of Men (spoiler ahead), Theo and Kee sit in a rowboat off shore, waiting in the fog for rescue by a militant Greenpeace-type outfit with a ship called Tomorrow. They hear a rumble. The ship? Then, roaring low through the fog come three fighter jets, and suddenly the shore glows orange, as the government's big guns suppress a Fallujah-like uprising in the prison camp with massive firepower. The thunder and the boom and the orange blossoms reminded me of Red Dawn, the 1984 war pic in which a high school football team takes to the hills as a rebel force resisting the Soviet takeover of America. They fight bravely and with cleverness, but there's only so much they can do, and they begin to lose heart. Then, one day, U.S. fighter jets from the "free states" blast overhead and light the horizon up orange. The crowd in the theater, circa 1984, cheered. Twelve-years-old and uncertain whether "communists" were actually human, unaware that Red Dawn was Rambo by another name -- which is to say, a post-Vietnam fantasy in which the "good guys" win -- I cheered, too. Hooray for American firepower!

Nearly a quarter of a century later, the theater crowd for Children of Men watched the bombing run with less joy, to say the least. (Big spoiler -- sort of.) The film ends with Kee and her baby alone in the rowboat -- Theo has slumped over, presumably dead -- as the Tomorrow sails forth from the fog. Screen goes black, then the title, white sans serif on black: CHILDREN OF MEN. Audience gasps again. No closure. Just massive firepower, technically that of the "good guys," erasing a small population, and a fishing boat for the survivors. Thin redemption, indeed. Or, perhaps: Not Good Enough.

What would be good enough? I'm not sure, but I suspect we must abandon our pieties before we'll find out. Not just the democracy-spreading delusions of the neocons, but liberal newsspeak as well, blather about "time tables" and "redeploying," "with honor," no less, a term of profound obscenity given the blood we've all helped spill. So: Step one: Let's lose our illusions. This is a process most of us must repeat over and over, and it's what good art -- especially good populist art -- is for. I am speaking here of movies like Three Kings and Children of Men, and books like Chava Rosenbarb's epic realist trilogy of life in the Lodz Ghetto, Tree of Life, an undeservedly obscure masterpiece first published in two Yiddish volumes in 1972, later brought out in one unwieldy doorstop by an Australian publisher, and over the last two years released in three volumes by the University of Wisconsin Press.

Here's Chava talking about her "influences" with a Canadian radio interviewer:

The ghetto was the soil on which I really grew, I really became what I am now in a certain sense, as far as creativity is concerned, because the ghetto and the atmosphere of the ghetto and the experiences of the ghetto and human relationships in the ghetto, where you can't hide and pretend that you are somebody else, that you are noble and smart and whatnot - the person was completely naked with their soul. And that's how I learned, by observation and by being myself, immersed in that snakepit. What I saw, what I learned there gave me my outlook on the human condition, on how people are, on life in general.

(From Lodz Ghetto Album, by Henryk Ross)