WHY DO YOU lead me to point things out that will only make you more angry and outraged than you already are? Here, from an interview with Art Spiegelman by the L. A. Weekly
L.A. Weekly: Did you know you'd get flack for depicting the Jews as mice, the Nazis as cats, and the Poles as pigs?
Spiegelman: By the time Maus was published, I'd been warned by my publishers that it would be a good idea to lay low somewhere without a telephone.
L.A. Weekly: But as you were drawing it, that didn't occur to you?
Spiegelman: I'm stupid. What do I know? And it turned out that the flak was rather mild. However, in the last decade there's been mostly a very understanding and supportive response, certainly within the community of the directly affected and afflicted. And a cry - a squeal, let's say - of outrage from the Polish community. That's where it's still a problematic book.
["A squeal." Yeah, anything for a laugh, right? Their objection to being so depicted doesn't matter because it's OK to target that group that way. Let's see what else doesn't bother him about this topic. ]
L.A. Weekly: Speaking of problematic, I wonder what you thought of Roberto Benigni's film Life is Beautiful?
Spiegelman: I think I would like Benigni a lot as a dinner companion. I have a reputation for being - at least since the New Yorker covers started coming out - a member of the shock troops
And yet I must say that I was shocked by the movie. I think Benigni overreached. I understand the movie has been very well received, and it makes me very confused about the planet. It's a bizarre film, done, obviously, with good intentions, which usually are paving stones for getting one place or another, sometimes an Oscar
You know Benigni said something fairly interesting in some interview I just read, that it was important to banalize the Holocaust. That was kind of a shocking statement. I would bet that people who hear about Maus from the outside assume that it's more of the same. If I heard about the idea of this - You know, somebody did this comic book. It's about the Holocaust. It uses animals. Oh, it's really amazing. I laughed, I cried" - I would shudder.
[Yet apparently that didn't alarm him.]
L.A. Weekley: Did Benigni elaborate on why we should banalize the Holocaust?
Spiegelman: So we could get on with our lives. I don't think this was sinister. I think it was part of those aforementioned paving stones of good intentions.
[Talk about the banality of evil normalized through pop culture and commercial "art." On that I can now rest my case. Given a brawl here in recent weeks I can't resist continuing on in the interview a little farther. ]
L.A. Weekley: Now that Shindler's List has lifted the lid on the Holocaust. . .
Spiegelman: [Laughs] That's one way of putting it. I vowed to stay silent about these things, and then every once in a while somebody just pushes the wrong button and I end up saying something. I got a lot of flak for my responses to Shindler's List. I got roped into a panel discussion, published by the Village Voice, in which I said that the only thing the film conjured up for me was six million emaciated Oscar Statuettes. . . .
From: Art Speigelman Conversations p. 193-194
"six million emaciated Oscar Statuettes." So much for the virtues of having a visual orientation. Yet all of this is to be forgotten for some reason. If you don't find the trouble with "banalizing the Holocaust" and the normalization of ethnic bigotry within a book held up as a monument against bigotry, you are an amoral idiot.
Yet, I would not remove the book from the school curriculum but I would object to it being seen as teaching history and I would especially object to it being taught but as literature without teaching what's wrong with it. And I didn't even get to things like his depiction of his father which I think is highly problematic because the whole thing deals in stereotypes. I don't think more than one percent of its audience could navigate their way out of him being seen as one, either.
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