valkyrie and the missing hamartia

This was the theatrical experience of tragedy as they taught it when I was a kid: it involved an emotional catharsis for the audience, which was set off by a character's reversal of fortune (or peripeteia), which in turn had been triggered by his own hamartia, or fatal flaw. Nowadays they're translating the Greek differently, I hear, and the hamartia can be something as simple as a mistake or an error in judgment, to which I say crap! utter rubbish. And I don't mean the translators are necessarily wrong, but that Aristotle was, if this is what he meant to say.

Valkyrie is a case in point. Why did it fail? One reviewer said the device of using British actors to play Nazis was too old and tired to carry a film anymore, but that's not it, not for me, anyway; I love it; I'll never get tired of that. That stiff upper lip thing slides right over into "Ve haf vaze ahf making you talk" wonderfully well, like Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man. "I ask you once more: is it safe?" Brrr! Chills me just thinking of it. (That said,-- sidebar here,-- it's one of the few genuinely Teutonic actors who has the most chillingly effective moment in Valkyrie: it's Thomas Kretschmann as the officer who must puzzle out what's going on and ultimately decide who triumphs, and the moment is the one in which he decides.)

It's a tough subject, the Valkyrie Plot, a moment so crucial in the German mythos that it in some ways defines the country. I understand the German reticence at Hollywood taking this hallowed story into its careless hands. A rough equivalent might be the Irish reaction if Roland Emmerich directed Hunger or the uproar in the Jewish community when Mel Gibson announced he wanted to film the story of the Maccabees (a film which I would give much to see and, alas, apparently never will).

The problem for me is this: sometimes I cannot surrender myself emotionally to a film. Usually the root of that failure lies in what might be called the Spielberg Hustle, in which a filmmaker uses every possible tactic to manipulate our emotional responses, employing elements not organic to the story or characters in doing it, and so abusing our trust and revealing an emptiness at the film's core where its heart ought to have been. Valkyrie, on the other hand, was a different matter: I mistrusted it because I knew the story, knew the vale of tears into which these people were headed, and I could not accompany them without withholding my heart. Afterwards I was disturbed by it: was the flaw in the film somewhere, which, from a technical standpoint, was very well done? or was it a flaw in me as a spectator? Have I become one of those yellow-bellied whingers who can only watch a movie with a happy ending? Surely not. After all, I know where Hamlet and King Kong are headed, and I throw myself full-force into the ring with those fellows with repeated zeal. Das Boot comes to mind: I know where they're bound, have since I saw it in the theatre, and yet I set off time and again in that claustrophobic little metal contraption and hope and laugh and fear and cry and emerge richer for it in the end. So why not Cruise's Stauffenberg on his ill-fated mission to assassinate the Fuehrer? What is it about Valkyrie that stopped me from committing?

I was cruising around the internet when I found the answer: it was on a website which outlined the basics of every known attempt on Hitler's life. In a passing remark, the webster wrote, "Stauffenberg believed that only he could accomplish it," and that set off the eureka moment in my mind. THAT was the fatal flaw which might have turned the pathos into tragedy. As the movie stands now, Stauffenberg's only mistake is in leaving the scene of the crime without verifying that Hitler is dead, a small error in judgment. If instead he'd been driven by the hubris of thinking only he could bring off this assassination, that it was a destiny of his and no one else should touch it, then there it is: the wound through which the gods enter. There's the flaw that makes him human and upon its back we can climb up to the heights of tragedy instead of wallowing in the mud of pathos, a state in which we are showed the horrors of life but given no exalting catharsis, no chance to come away from the cinema with that revitalizing awe which tragedy, when well done, inspires.

In an essay on tragedy, Edith Hamilton(*) writes, "Undeserved suffering is not in itself tragic. Death is not tragic in itself... It is not Hamlet's hesitation to kill his uncle that is tragic. It is his power to feel. Change all the circumstances of the drama and Hamlet in the grip of any calamity would be tragic, just as Polonius would never be, however awful the catastrophe. The suffering of a soul that can suffer greatly -- that and only that is tragedy." It's possible that Cruise gave us too much noble action figure and too little true feeling; it's possible that the fault was in the script and not any of his. It is also possible that the same political correctness which lambastes filmmakers when they try to examine Hitler as a human being instead of a mere monster (as in the initial outcry, later tempered by some, to 2002's underrated Max) may have stripped this particular Stauffenberg of the very humanness which might have raised him up onto the giddy heights from which tragic heroes gaze forlornly down at us.

* see Gilder et al. Theatre Arts Anthology, Theatre Arts Books, NY 1950