COLUMN: Life, a rarely beautiful trip

From Binyamin Appelbaum's, "Carving Marble," Fall '99 From Binyamin Appelbaum's, "Carving Marble," Fall '99The movie swept triumphantly through the Academy Awards, picking up honors for Best Foreign Film and Best Actor. At this point, it has been seen by more Americans than any other foreign language film in history. In a way, I'm glad. I'm glad because if I hadn't, I might still believe that this was a touching film, a deeply meaningful film, a film about the Holocaust. I know better now. I know that it is none of these things and particularly not the last. Life is Beautiful is a musical comedy set against the backdrop of the Holocaust. The sets are immaculate, the humor is side-splitting and the theme, in the words of Roger Ebert, is this: "Life is Beautiful is? about the human spirit; about the necessary human conviction, or delusion, that things will be better for our children then they are right now." Co-opting an historical era for dramatic purposes is a time-honored tradition, and its proponents -- Hollywood, the film critics, mankind -- would all like to believe that the story of the indomitable human spirit can be told at any time, in any place: Spartacus, Les Miserables, Alive. The list is long and distinguished and the message is not subtle: Yes, forces exist that can crush the human body but none, none, that can crush the human spirit. For the longest time, popular culture skirted the Holocaust when it came to selecting backdrops for these endless retellings of the story of human triumph over the circumstances. You were allowed to have humans triumph in the wake of the Holocaust, or in the context of avoiding the Holocaust or even by dying in the Holocaust. But a movie about the triumph of the human spirit during the Holocaust was off-limits. The period was treated as an all-encompassing black hole, entirely devoid of the possibility of life. Benigni is not the first to step over this unspoken line. The Holocaust is rapidly becoming just another historical event with sufficient name recognition for the average audience-conscious producer to love. Some may say that this is a good or, at any rate, natural thing. We live, we love, we die and we move on. We bury past traumas and reunite in their wake. We do not let the horrors of the past diminish our enjoyment of the present. But the Holocaust is an era that has yet to assume a settled meaning in our collective consciousness. We are very much engaged in a battle over what it all means, even, or perhaps particularly, 50 years later. And as a movie about the triumph of illusions in the face of disaster, Life is Beautiful cannot avoid saying quite a bit, precisely because it is not about the Holocaust. It says that even those who lived through the Holocaust didn't have to live in it. That when reality becomes unbearable, we can escape into fantasy. That a child could have been shielded from the horrors of the concentration camp. That it might all have been a bad dream, ending in your mother's arms with an orange sun overhead and green grass underfoot. And we want, perhaps need, to believe it, because it validates escapism when we come face to face with the prospect of being a child in such a place. That manufactured reality ultimately casts us in the role of the child, and Benigni spins his illusions for our benefit, too: The Nazi (only one has a substantial speaking role) is a raving lunatic who sets up a secret meeting with the hero, in the work camp, for the purpose of posing a riddle that has been troubling him. The honorary Italian (the hero's non-Jewish wife) is an heroic co-sufferer, equally oppressed by the Nazis; and in the end, she lives and her Jewish husband does not. And the Jew is a clown, undaunted in the face of manifest evil, goosestepping off to certain death. Belissimo. Would that it were all true. Maybe life is beautiful. But know this. For six million people, life stopped in its tracks and went up in fiery ash. For millions of children and millions of mothers, there was no happy ending and no miraculous survival. This past Tuesday was Holocaust Remembrance Day. Please don't forget that for six million Jews, and countless others, la vita non era decisamente bello -- life was most decidedly not beautiful.