On escapism and Three Colors: Red
This is about a beautiful movie and ugly times
We’re back!
Housekeeping notes: On Monday, paid subscribers will get the penultimate ET Watch Home, a monthly essay about a different Czech New Wave essay. This month’s movie is actually Slovak: I’ll be writing about The Shop on Main Street (1965).
Paid subscribers to this newsletter also get the premium version of The Political Cycle, a weekly podcast I co-host on politics in the US, UK, India—and the wider world.
With that! Onto news, views, and Jews.
THE NEWS
This week on the podcast, Rohan and I talked through some of the differences and similarities between America now and India back when it was facing Modi 2.0, and how Americans can prepare ourselves for what’s coming.
This was a smart if depressing piece on the state of journalism today.
Also Trump sent threatening legal letters to the New York Times and Penguin Random House.
From Politico: “Anti-abortion groups on Tuesday unveiled their “Make America Pro-Life Again Roadmap,” an effort to chip away at federal and state access, including in nearly a dozen states that enshrined protections through ballot measures over the last two years…conservative groups plan next year to file lawsuits targeting federal regulation of abortion pills and push legislation in Congress and in at least 15 states they believe can circumvent constitutional amendments and court rulings protecting the procedure.”
MY VIEWS ON…
…escapism and Three Colors: Red
I don’t really have a mini-essay for you this week. I’m sorry. I spent what I had on essays on pieces that I thought I’d be able to include in my “news” roundup but that are, in fact, not up yet. I will hopefully share them next week.
I watched Three Colors: Red last night. I’d seen it before. If you haven’t, it’s the last in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors trilogy. The trilogy takes the three colors from the French flag and pairs them with liberté, egalité, and fraternité as themes to loosely explore.
Red is the last one. Basically this young woman in Geneva hits a dog with her car and then tries to alert its owner, a retired judge who eavesdrops on his neighbors’ telephone calls. Their story intersects with that of a young lawyer and his girlfriend, who are in love, or are they.
I’m not explaining it very well, but anyway. I chose to rewatch it because it’s visually very beautiful — the red in the film is quite striking — and because the movie is so interested with how connected we are to one another. I watched an interview with Kieślowski where he said he put in scene after scene to remind the viewer that they’d seen some of what was happening before. You won’t catch all of it, he said, but you’re bound to catch some of it. You’ve been on that road. You’ve seen that cafe. You were there with another character, and now you’re here with this one. The stories themselves are about how we intersect and interact. The musical theme of the movie is the bolero, which is perfect. It keeps building on itself, there this whole time and new.
I watched the movie because I was sad and I wanted to feel better and less alienated. The movie did not change anything happening in the country or the world. It did not make the pieces I worked on this week less depressing, or get them up in time for me to include them to send out in this newsletter. It did not change the news yesterday, and it did not keep me from waking up to bad news today. But for the 100 or so minutes that I was watching the movie, I won’t lie, I felt better.
I don’t want to write this to encourage you to give in to escapism. I think that’s bad, actually. I don’t think canceling your newspaper subscription will help, and in fact I think it will hurt. I guess I just wanted to say that for 100 minutes I remembered that we are alone but also connected to one another, and that people manage to make things that are beautiful.
AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
I liked this Dov Waxman piece in Haaretz on why American Jews didn’t vote for Trump.
From Haaretz: “Jewish students in Vienna prevented Austria's far-right parliamentary speaker from laying a wreath in commemoration of the 86th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom at a Holocaust memorial, claiming his presence desecrated the memory of the victims.
Yet another from Haaretz: “Jewish artists and academics in Germany have come out strongly against a new government resolution aimed at combating antisemitism, with some warning that it may lead to a surreal situation where Jewish and Israeli human rights groups are deemed antisemitic by the German state.”
Finally, here’s a last piece from Haaretz on Israel’s new pick to be ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, “a right-wing writer affiliated with Kohelet Forum, supports West Bank annexation and was once active in Kahane's Jewish Defense League.”
From JTA: “When they promoted this Sunday’s pro-Israel rally in Washington D.C., the organizers knew they wouldn’t be able to match the turnout of last November’s March for Israel, which brought hundreds of thousands to Washington just over a month after Oct. 7…But as the rally began in the afternoon, it became clear that the bar had still been set far too high. In the end, perhaps 2,000 people showed up.”
If you’d like to read a statement from the Progressive Israel Network about why their groups sat out this year’s rally, you can read that here.
From Jewish Insider: “Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) proposed incorporating the Antisemitism Awareness Act into the National Defense Authorization Act as part of negotiations with top congressional leaders, potentially putting the bill on a fast-track to passage…The Antisemitism Awareness Act would codify the Trump-era executive order that antisemitism, as defined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, is a form of discrimination prohibited on campuses and instructing the Department of Education to use the IHRA definition in assessing claims of antisemitic discrimination on campuses.” You can read my thoughts on why this is a bad idea generally and particularly who is coming into office in a few months here.
Arno Rosenfeld spoke to Jews in Amsterdam about the attack on Israeli soccer fans.
-ET
Image from American Cinemathique