My sister showed me Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg's "Lazy Sunday" rap on TiVo over break, and apparently it's sprouted into some kind of web phenomenon, producing weird commentaries like this one at the Slate (just in case you needed the short's humor condescendingly explained to you). The short itself doesn't quite justify the last few seasons of SNL, but it's funny.

I thought I had my classes all locked down for this quarter, until I woke up at 5 A.M. one night last week realizing that I had to graduate next year and that graduating means I might have to actually fulfill some of my major requirements. So it looks like, unfortunately, I might actually have to say adieu to Shakespeare's histories and comedies this quarter and say hello to the American Revolution class and possibly Chaucer. Also, relating to the need-to-graduate problem, I spent yesterday's delay at the airport retyping and revising my Fundamentals question, which is reaching new unexpected heights of unoriginality (but at least it's not pretentious). For a good laugh, ask me about it sometime, or better yet, don't; if anyone asks, I'm only an English major.

Kristen and Thomas and I finally saw Munich with a theater full of lots of old people and Jewish people and old Jewish people on New Years Eve. It was predictably amazing. I was having a hard time really forming any political arguments on it, critical or otherwise, and I guess that's because it does so well at making the story the individual story of Avner (or maybe, as I suggested before, it's still just a cop-out). Still, politics itself is a hard thing to represent in the movies, objectively or otherwise...movies do a much better job at being in the service of politics (Riefenstahl for one, Rob Reiner's The American President for another). So yes, it's very easy to extract a politics from Munich if you just try, and I think that the movie did end up portraying the conflict as I thought it would--as a neverending cycle of violence caused by the unwillingness of Israelis and Palestinians to talk. I still contend that it's a worldview that's very American and probably not at all suited to the reality of the problem itself.

Yet there's a scene in the movie that at first I thought was one of the clumsiest and now I think might be one of the best at fully confronting the politics of the situation straight on. It's the one where Avner and Co. get accidentally shacked up with the PLO and Avner ends up talking politics with a young radical PLO member. They both make their all-or-nothing claims in favor of their own homeland, and at first I thought the point of the scene was to make Avner question his own unrelenting faith in Israel (which might have brought up the double-standard question of why we don't get a depiction of the PLO member questioning his own faith in Palestinian liberation). But now I think it might've been more a question about the impossibility of dialogue, as contradictory as that may seem to Spielberg's project. The scene on paper is the kind of "what if?" situation where you bring two very committed Israelis and Palestinians together and make them talk through their problem--but as it's played out (by Tony Kushner), the dialogue is a failure. They don't concede any points to each other; in fact, their worldviews are so radically different that their arguments barely intersect. They're brick walls, the pair of them. Although you can argue that the meeting ultimately contributes to Avner's doubt about his mission, the meeting is just as impossibly frustrating and useless as any failed Middle-East peace talk.

However, the movie is firmly committed to depicting violence as cyclical, if not completely ineffective. The argument of the movie might be that even if we grant that a conflict like this might never be resolved by dialogue, there's still a common ground we might find in considering a universal calculus of violence. There are no easy murders in Munich and none that really seem all that justified. And I'll come out and say that I believe David Brooks's column to be just plain wrong about the lack of evil in the movie. If Brooks didn't get evil out of the depictions of the Olympic Village massacres, I don't know what more potent condemnations he was looking for. It's one thing to make terrorists appear human, it's another to solicite sympathy for terrorism--maybe that reveals a lot about my worldview, but I'm ready to stand by it. And it's completely unfair of Brooks to criticize Spielberg for choosing an event in this conflict where he wouldn't have to depict Islamic fundamentalist groups like Hamas. I can grant an argument made about the nature of evil in the film, but it's pompously dishonest to not be Frank Rich and write a Times article about a single movie and claim that it's not an important or relevant movie on which to start a dialogue.

I'm just really glad this movie was made.