Jews in My Closet

I spent most of Tuesday night in a kind of paranoid state. It started early on, around 4 or so, give or take an hour. I'd been awake for a couple of hours, and active, if active means I occasionally staggered from the couch to the kitchen in order to rummage through the pantry, snuffling and snorting through the Nutragrain bars and Lean Pockets like some kind of oversized, bearded gopher. I'd just eaten a couple Ritz crackers with some lobster spread, when I flipped on the tube and noticed that Casino was on AMC. "Well fiddle-de-dee!" thought I, "anything by good ol' Marty Scorsese should be just the thing to get me through an uneventful day!"

How wrong I was.

I started watching the movie about half an hour into its run time, and soon noticed two things; the first, that, although this was a Martin Scorsese movie, Robert De Niro was NOT Italian (he's a Jewish gambling handicapper! whoda thunk it?), and second, that the movie had been severely censored. This was understandable; if you're showing a movie where whacked-out Joe Pesci sticks a guys head in a vice, you have to do a bit of editing. That creates a lot of unintentional humor, though; watching Sharon Stone scream "Freak you Sammy! Freak you!" over and over, you can't help but giggle a bit.

The movie got to me, though. Beneath the gory sheen and coke-sprinkled glamour of the film's Las Vegas, there's a constant wire of paranoia. Everyone is out to steal and kill everything from everyone else. De Niro knows it; he gets a relatively conversational phone call from Pesci, and immediately takes off to another house with a shotgun and car. Pesci is thinking about killing him. He hasn't said it, but it's implied in the tone. In a way, the gangsters are like diplomats; they shroud their words with "howyadoins?" and "fuggedaboutits" until they have trust and respect.

Then they break out the baseball bats.

Aside from the internal nervousness, there's the knowledge that all the characters are being constantly watched by the FBI. This is accepted as an unalterable fact, and its a paranoia that they incorporate into their lives. Phones tapped? That's cool; I got bug sweepers. The movie's best scene perfectly illustrates this. De Niro is in a meeting with some investors on his swanky club home/golf course. Halfway through the meeting, there's a rumble, and a single engine plane coasts out of the sky and lands on the green, two agents hurriedly exiting. The FBI had been spying on De Niro for such a long time that they're plane had run out of gas.

Of course, all the paranoia eventually proves to be justified, as we all knew it was. This takes away from it's impact a bit. The worst paranoia is never shown; it is only suspect.I wasn't thinking about all this after the movie. I was still bored. I wanted to watch something else. My dad was upstairs watching Munich. I decided to join.

Not a good idea.

I started Munich relatively excited. I'd heard great things about it; it had Eric Bana as the most kick-ass Jew since Moses; and it was directed by Steven Spielberg. And for the first hour and a half, it was great. Lot's of action, intrigue, philosopohical soul searching, torsos hanging from ceiling fans. Good stuff.

And then it got paranoid.

The plot's pretty complex, and I don't want to go into much detail, but it basically entails this; after several bungled missions, and two dead agents, Bana starts thinking someones out to get him. The beauty of it is that, while everyone around him seems to start dying mysteriously, nothing ever happens to Bana. He's left to stew with his own darkening thoughts, disillusioned with the country and cause he thought he knew. This part is good.
But Spielberg hits you over the head with it. He wields the paranoia like he's using a shovel to butter a piece of toast. What starts off as an interesting thematic element soon bogs the whole film down. When Bana ripped up his room in a feverish attempt to find invisible bugs, I was ready for the movie to be over. By the time Bana was having visions of the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes by Black September whilst having sex with his wife, I wanted to punch Spielberg in the face.

That night, when I was going to bed, I almost checked the springs under my mattress for a bomb.

But I didn't. So its ok.

I'm afraid of Americans; I'm afraid of the world