pivotal double feature: one day in september and munich

September 1972: Munich is hosting the Summer Olympics. The Germans have high stakes in keeping proceedings light and positive, as less than thirty years have elapsed since the Holocaust and Adolf Hitler's Berlin Olympics are still impressed on the world's memory. On the morning of September 5, eight Palestinian terrorists from an organization calling themselves "Black September" climb over a short wall into Munich's Olympic Village, kill two and capture nine other Israeli athletes, coaches and referees.

What follows is unmitigated horror by any but the most barbaric standards. And West Germany, hampered by post-WWII lack of a trained terror squad and a constitutional ban on German troops entering into Bavaria, stumbles through an 18-hour nightmare of fumblings, boners and missteps, culminating in conflagration and tragedy during a muddle of a rescue attempt.

I was eight years old and it was my first Olympic Games. It was also the first time the event was broadcast live, but I didn't know that. It was interesting: Mark Spitz and Olga Korbut and the America v Russia basketball travesty. The hostage crisis seemed unreal to my child's mind, like war footage randomly interspersed with the more readily understandable sports coverage. This was the moment when I first heard the word "Palestinian", and, more than any other, despite Vanessa Redgrave, despite Karen Armstrong and the abysmal and bloody complexities of the situation, it is the moment that will forever ensure that Americans of my generation always feel, in a pre-thinking and primordial way, that the Palestinians are the bad guys. A kid knows some things instinctively, on a one-situation-at-a-time basis: that men with moustaches are not sexy, for instance (sorry, Mark Spitz), that messing around with the clock during a basketball game is unfair and uncool (hand over the gold, U.S.S.R), and that the guys with machine guns who invade a place of peace and kill the unarmed are, unequivocally, the Bad Guys.

One Day in September is a brilliant documentary. Its official narrator is Michael Douglas, but the thing is so adroitly assembled from archival footage and new interviews (including one with the only terrorist involved to have escaped death both at the airport and in ensuing years at the hands of Israeli vengeance squads) that Douglas speaks maybe thirty sentences during the whole piece. The tragedy and horror of it are extreme, and the end, when the camera hesitates on old footage of the evil and triumphant smile on the young terrorist's face, leaves you hungry to know what happened next, if justice was served, if the horrors were avenged.

Enter Steven Spielberg. Munich, catapulted into the world amidst a roar of controversy, follows one of the Mossad death-squads launched specifically to track down and assassinate the instigators of the tragedy. Based on the ostensible memoir of one of these commandos (George Jonas' Vengeance), it's a tough story to tell, spread out across years and continents and therefore involving a whole ton of exposition. It's tough in other ways. The catalyst event was short and focused: a few days in Munich. The retribution, on the other hand, comes across as an unending and unendable thing, a continually ascending and increasingly bloody spiral, in which every man killed is replaced by another in need of killing, and every act of violence is a terrible act of faith in one's possibly faulty, possibly devious informants and commanders.

Eric Bana is downright poetic in his controlled intensity as a man on a journey from innocent patriotism and righteous outrage towards haunted obsession and justified paranoia. By film's end, I was wrung dry of my initial bloodthirst, no longer occupying any particular point along the spectrum of Palestinian v Israeli enthusiasm, feeling nothing but a sort of empathetic exhaustion for both factions in their frantic and neverending tarantella. Obviously Hollywood is no place to learn your history (ask ten people who the Pharoah of the Exodus was; all ten will say Ramesses II, better known as Yul Brynner) and you can place pretty safe money on a guess that no more than, say, a fourth of any historical movie is strictly "true", but Munich succeeds in one important venture: it lifts the proceedings up away from the Bush-y "yer either fer us er agin us" black and white of self-righteousness to examine it in differing slants of light.