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There's a heated discussion over at Cinemarati Blog about one of the most controversial (for lack of a better word) sex scenes of 2005 -- in Steven Spielberg's Oscar-nominated "Munich." The scene, in which Avner (Eric Bana) has flashbacks to the Black September killings of Israeli Olympic athletes at the Munich airport while having sex with his wife strikes me as a horrific/absurd/touching concept -- just the sort of thing you'd expect from the imagination of screenwriter Tony Kushner ("Angels in America"). In tone (pushing sex and violence beyond emotional control to the point where they intersect in an act that dares to be ridiculous and pathetic) there's never been anything quite like it in a Spielberg movie.
But it does reminds me of the contrastingly sweet inter-cutting of images from "The Quiet Man" with Elliott at school in "E.T. -- The Extra-Terrestrial." The key difference is that in that film the cross-cutting created momentum, one action flowing into another across distance. In "Munich," Avner's troubling memory/fantasy flashes (which he struggles to keep walled-off from the sex he and his wife are having in their own bed) cut against the rhythms of the scene (and the sex act). What we see is a man trying to outrun the past and live in the current moment, to fully reunite with his loving wife and their young child. But these traumatic images from another time and place won't stay back there. They keep thrusting themselves into his consciousness, upsetting the balance he's seeking in the present and disrupting his hopes for a future.
Cinemarati contributor Matt Zoller Seitz offers a fine, in-depth appreciation of what's going on in this scene, and how it accomplishes what it does. A few excerpts:
The horror of Munich is imprinted on Avner’s imagination, and his joining the Mossad counterrorist mission is partly motivated by his desire to master that image, to defeat or counter it, to neutralize it or dismantle it. He can’t do it. The image persists no matter how many people he is responsible for helping to kill. Munich is a stain on his memory, a stain on his conscious mind, a stain period, and it won’t scrub out no matter how many terrorists and terrorist sympathizers he rubs out.Nice, and appropriate, evocation of Shakespeare's "Macbeth," that bleak Scottish tale of killers haunted by their deeds. Lady Macbeth was driven insane by indelible images of blood on her hands:
Out, damned spot!...
Here's the smell of the blood still: all the
perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little
hand. Oh, oh, oh!
And the nightmarish memories and premonitions of Macbeth himself:
What hands are here? ha! they pluck out mine eyes.
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.
Back to Seitz's beautifully written analysis:
I think this is what Spielberg is getting at in that sex scene. I understand why some would interpret it as jejune — how many times have pretentious know-nothing film school kids intercut a sex scene with a killing for no other reason than to shock and impress? — but Spielberg rethinks and reinvigorates this familiar strategy by connecting it to the theme of violence as emotional stain. By wreathing Avner’s home life in his usual nimbus of holy light — a valid strategy for this movie — Spielberg establishes Avner’s warmth, as expressed through love for his family, as the thing being violated, jeopardized, stained by the Munich massacre and by his decision to participate in a campaign to destroy the killers. Avner becomes numb and unfocused as the film goes on, and the film becomes numb and unfocused with him. As Philadelphia Weekly critic Sean Burns observed, the movie seems to disintegrate as you’re watching it, by design! The f--king thing comes apart like a sand castle, practically just collapses right there onscreen. Avner’s withdrawal, his distrust, his depression, his melancholy are all reflected in Spielberg’s gradual rhythmic and chromatic shifts, his entropic visualization of how Avner’s “noble” mission spills beyond its compartmentalized boundaries and poisons everything else in his life, everything that every meant anything to him. it’s as if the movie itself is suffering a depressive breakdown.Seitz also maintains his own excellent blog, The House Next Door.
[...] One can interpret this [film] straightforwardly as a statement on Munich and its aftermath, but I think it’s much more rewarding, and more true to Spielberg’s agenda, to interpret it through the prism of 9/11 and Iraq. In “Munich,” a traumatic public massacre staged for maximum media impact stains the imaginations of all who see it, and fills them with such grief, anger and confusion and such feelings of helplessness that they are willing to, in the words of the film’s Golda Meir, negotiate compromises with their values. It’s the stain that did it, that image of the man on the balcony with a ski mask and a gun. Translate that image into the burning Twin Towers and you’ve got popular culture’s most potent, simple and relevant statement yet on how America got where it is right now. [And the creation of such images, and the emotional complex of fear, anguish, rage, disorientation and impotence they inspire in those who are exposed to them, is by definition the very nature and purpose of terrorism as a mass-traumatizing tactic. -- je]
Circling back around to the sex and violence scene, I never saw it as a film school stunt or an example of Spielberg retreating into cliche because he doesn’t know what he wants to say, only that he wants to say something important. On the contrary, 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 ardor, 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 f--ks 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.
