COLUMN: The silence of the tin drums

From Michael Pereira's, "The Raw and the Cooked," Fall '97 From Michael Pereira's, "The Raw and the Cooked," Fall '97A man in the middle of America was lynched some weeks ago for renting a movie. Sounds strange, does it not? A man in the middle of America was hounded some weeks ago for renting a movie; or gentler yet: A man in the middle of America was hassled some weeks ago for renting a movie? It's hopeless -- nothing seems to work, no matter how we say it. The specter of censorship -- and its sidekick, ignorance -- will always show through the guise of euphemism. I'm thinking of a recent, barely publicized incident in Oklahoma City. A man rented a movie called The Tin Drum from the foreign section of a local video store. As he watched in the privacy of his home, a band of self-appointed morality troopers stormed his residence, stole the tape, destroyed it and brought the viewer to the attention of local authorities. So what is The Tin Drum that it could elicit such a strong moral backlash from normal-seeming citizens? We know some vicious atrocities of the Bosnian war were captured on video and later sold in black market bazaars for thousands of dollars. Can The Tin Drum be among those sordid snuff films, a sadistic and outrageous catalogue of the excesses of war? The assailants, after all, said the movie was "child pornography," and that the viewer, therefore, was a certifiable pervert. Of course, none of them had ever seen the film. Like most aggressive moralists, they based their dogma on hearsay and vague assumptions. In fact, the film is difficult and dreamlike, with surreal sections and black comic pathos that buttress its politics with an aesthetic sensibility. But The Tin Drum is by no means pornographic or propagandist. On the contrary, it is at once revolting and touching, ambiguous and yet one of the most scathing indictments of Nazi Germany ever to appear on screen. Director Volker Schlondorff derives his story from Gunter Grass' epic novel of the same name -- the novel credited with reinventing the German language from the rubble of Nazi argot. In the book, as well as the movie, young Oskar Matzerath willfully stunts his growth at the age of three as a revolt against history. His adventures bring him into contact with carnival freaks and Nazi commandants, precocious sexuality and bizarre scenarios which seem sadly believable next to the horrors of historical fact. Slimy eels tumble out of a horse's head fished from the Danube; Nazi rallies turn into slapstick farces; and through it all, Oskar's high-pitched scream tears through the fiction as if to remind the viewer: Yes, you are watching an absurdist fable of life under the Reich because when the world is turned up-side down, you can only begin to comprehend it from below. The film version of The Tin Drum won an Academy Award for best foreign film in 1979, as well as the Grand Prize as Cannes that same year. The stature of Grass' novel as the highest artistic achievement is incontrovertible. Taken together, the two Tin Drums represent one of the most successful efforts to penetrate that era of darkness. Yet almost 20 years after its screen incarnation, some seem to have forgotten the reminders so artfully adumbrated by Schlondorff and Grass. The incident in Oklahoma City signifies only the top of a frightening iceberg -- a resurgent mindset inimical to learning and fast at forgetting. Everyone witnessed Oklahoma City's first run-in with this ignorant new wave; he was recently issued his final orders. But McVeigh's sentence by no means put any closure on the issue; if anything, it only polarized camps, sending the angry and militant even further underground. Among the rubble and embers of the city's federal building, there still lurks a seething and volatile zeitgeist -- a vicious circle of misinformation that staunchly refuses to stare the facts in the face. The man who tried to watch The Tin Drum experienced that relentless will to censorship. Taken to its (il)logical conclusion, censorship concludes in complete cultural deadening: the absence of information and the presence of lies. Eventually, the suppressed side of the argument fades from memory, and all that's left is the immanence of suppression itself. This, among other things, is a lesson of The Tin Drum -- a lesson apparently still left to be learned by those who would have the movie banned. Whether they are called neo-Nazis or any other name that designates a group whose sole commandment is hate, their goal is essentially the same: conformity, uniformity, sameness, etc., etc. Those who would enforce ignorance fail to admit that the real pornography is in the censor. The willing execution of ideas is the first step on a downward staircase leading to country of permanent night.