The Oscars: Zoller Seitz on Munich
In the run up to the Oscars, Rainy Day will be paying homage to the most important art form of our age: film. The greatest film critic of them all, Pauline Kael, summed up the therapeutic nature of the cinema experience thus: "in the darkness of the movies where nothing is asked of us and we are left alone, the liberation from duty and constraint allows us to develop our own aesthetic responses." Matt Zoller Seitz of the New York Press is a contender for Kael's crown and now he's got a blog. Here, he interprets a key scene from the final act of best-picture nominee "Munich":
I think the sex scene is the heart of the movie, the point where it (pardon the language) takes its clothes off and shows you what it really is. Avner truly loves his wife, truly loves having sex with his wife (an unironic expression of heterosexual domestic ardour, one that almost has a hearty peasant quality; only Spielberg would dare be so cornball, and so true to the feelings of men who married well). When he fucks his wife he feels safe. That this sacred moment would be invaded by images of Munich is at once appalling, sad, funny and true to the experience of anyone who has suffered violence or watched powerlessly as it was inflicted on someone else.How many millions of people have had sex after 9/11 in order to escape the memory of that horror, images the entire world saw and suffered through, only to have the images come flooding back into their heads, poisoning the very act whose tenderness was supposed to afford them refuge? Juxtaposed against Avner's congress with his wife, his soulmate, those images of brutality are like needles jabbing into his brain. To quote Pauline Kael's review of 'Casualties of War,' it's the ultimate violation. The final shot that reveals the Twin Towers is a secret decoder ring, the shot that tells us what we were really watching for two hours and forty minutes, and what we think about when we try not to think about 9/11.
Phillip Lopate says that "film criticism is an art in itself — the magnet for strong, elegant, eloquent, enjoyable writing" and these are exactly the qualities one finds in Matt Zoller Seitz's work.
