Last night I got the chance to slip out and see Valkyrie, a movie whose commercials had led me to expect it to be sort of a light-hearted comedy. On that note, I was disappointed because it's a reasonably serious film (it even has Kenneth Branagh in it).
I am convinced that the Second World War (and the Holocaust, in particular) is the great moral and spiritual puzzle of the twentieth century and that, as a people, we have still not figured out what exactly we were meant to learn from all this. So we constantly make movies about it -- from the insultingly absurd upcoming The Boy In The Striped Pajamas to a number of genuine classics such as Saving Private Ryan -- in an apparent attempt to simplify these great dilemmas and make them, if not palatable, more human-sized. But World War II is enormous. It refuses to cooperate.
Valkyrie is set in the late days of the war. Tom Cruise plays a one-eyed Nazi colonel who has recognized the evil nature of the regime and is trying to organize a last-minute coup against Hitler before the Allies ride into town. (Apparently Tom Cruise resisted wearing an eye patch, saying he found it uncomfortable, but it was pointed out to him that the real Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg probably wasn't crazy about having to wear it either. The sacrifices we will make for our art!)
Watching Cruise strut about as the one-eyed colonel, it is impossible not to be reminded of Odin, the one-eyed Germanic god of war, justice, and wisdom. Symbolically, one-eyed people use half of their energy to look within, to seek wisdom from the inner planes.
The mythologies of the old gods such as Odin had been revived by the Nazis themselves. Himmler himself spent considerable time formally invoking them at Wewelsburg Castle in Buren -- and here, finally, was the embodiment of one in person. Unfortunately for Himmler and co., Odin was playing for the other team.
As we know from history, Cruise's ersatz Odin fails disastrously in his mission to assassinate Hitler. The bomb in his briefcase goes off, but almost no one is injured. Cruise's character spends the rest of the movie insisting that Hitler is dead, but observant moviegoers can spot the Fuhrer himself stumbling around on the lawn shortly after the blast, dazed but unhurt.
No deus ex machina here. The gods showed up late to World War II and, as it turns out, they are inept with modern explosives. History, it seems, was already passing them by.
Hitler survives for mere months before becoming a "burnt offering" himself, anointed with gasoline, as if to invoke the next cycle of terrible wars.
The great poet Homer had to put the Greek gods into his epics in order to make human actions and motivations comprehensible. Thousands of years later, our own souls remain a great, unassailable mystery.
(The Tarot is brilliant in part because it uses the gods to understand human motivations, rather than the other way around. It's only when blown up to drive-in-movie scale that we have any hope of understanding ourselves.)
