Munich: Passion, Justice, and Vengeance

Speilberg is really his own worst enemy. Individual scenes he shots are sometimes marvelous, but the entirity of his films get burdened with his moralizing and Being Very Important.

Munich is, to my way of thinking, exactly that. I tried watching it a few years ago for enjoyment, found it awful, and turned it off less than an hour into it. Watching it for class I deconstructed what about it I found so inept.

This was the subject of an in-class presentation, so this paper is kind of a second draft of that, taking the considerations of what came up in the Q&A after my presentation.


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(2nd draft


ENG 290
October 1, 2009
Essay 1

Munich: Passion, Justice, and Vengeance


"Revenge is an act of passion; vengeance of justice.
Injuries are revenged; crimes are avenged."
―Samuel Johnson

In Steven Speilberg's film Munich (2005), we are presented with a situation that "seeks not to exonerate, but to complicate" (Dr. Lisa Pollard) the seething relationship between Israel and, via Black September, Palestine. By drawing comparison to, and deliberately blurring the ethical lines between, a terrorist conspiracy that murders Olympic athletes and the State of Israel bypassing their own laws in order to perpetrate assassination, Speilberg constructs a complicated scenario.

The initial part of the film displays for us intimate views of state-sanctioned killings—including the collateral damage of a dead child as well as injury to several uninvolved parties who happen to have had the misfortune of staying in a hotel room next to the intended target of the Israeli hit squad. Avner conducts these first killings out of duty to his country and homeland, but during one mission, Avner and his team come face-to-face with some PLO members. Avner passes himself off as a Palestini and during a conversation between him and the PLO leader, Ali, the first seeds are planted in Avner's mind that perhaps there is something more to be considered about his mission than protecting his homeland and his duty to his country. Blindly following orders can take him only so far, and that what is truly important in life is his own family.

Here is the structure for a tale that promises biting sharp commentary upon a knotted political issue—that of terrorism and assassination, revenge and vengeance; where the lines are drawn between these ephemeral and ever-changing ideologies. Yet, at the climax of the film, comes a questionable scene that threatens to unravel the tangled skein on which Speilberg weaves his mortality tale.

Having established at the beginning of the film that, like millions of others around the world, Avner watched the news of the massacre on television, it becomes a source of concern and question when Speilberg inserts a flashback to the murder of the Israeli athletes interpolated with Avner having sex with his wife.

There are two major possibilities concerning this scene and its placement in the film. If the flashback is meant to be a narrative perspective—that is, from the omniscient point-of-view of the narrator of the film—then it its placement at this juncture of the story seems less-than-ideal. Authorial intrusion of such a violent and powerful flashback in the midst of such a crucial and intimate scene is crass and invasive. It threatens to undermine one of the key elements Speilberg wishes to address in this story, that of ethical responsibility. The authorial theme here is one which raises the questions of does a nation or state have the right to exact eye-for-an-eye revenge?; who pays the cost of accountability—the people who sit in seats of power within a governmental body or the people who are being governed?; and what is the value of trading compassion for blood knowing it will only extract a response in kind, and continuing the vicious spiral of murder and terror? The character of Golda Mier herself calls these questions to the fore during an early scene when she rhetorically asks of her advisors, "Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own principles." She has considered these questions and draws her own answers to them. We wonder if Speilberg, in crafting his film to raise these questions, has concerned himself with what sort of answer his audience might conclude from his narrative. Seeking ethical answers isn't as crucial as drawing up the proper situation in which to even ask the questions. By inserting an authorial intrusion into the film at this point begs the question of why now and why frame it with this intimate scene of Avner and his wife?

The other possibility here is that the flashback is meant to be some sort of personal rumination on Avner's part. But if this is so, similar questions must be addressed, as well as the simple discordant fact that if the flashback is meant to be from Avner's viewpoint, it can only be seen to be a false memory. And by having Avner remember an event as his own that he took no direct part in is a misrepresentation that denies us as an audience the chance to be directly confronted with Avner's own person atrocity exhibit. His own killing of state-assigned targets—and especially the people who were collateral damage of his assassinations—has led him, and us, to a point of ethical turmoil and moral uncertainty. Instead of coming to this dire convoluted and intrinsically important point, we fall back upon a saccharin cliché of cinematic sorrow, the standard homogenized we-should-all-feel-bad-about-this, moment of pre-fabricated emotion where the Israeli athletes are murdered by Arabic terrorist in slow motion with heightened sound effects and a lingering shot of bound hands folded in prayer. This unnecessarily simplifies the entangled issue at the heart of, not only the narrative of the film Munich, but also of the actual tragedy that unfolds in the world around us each day.

Just as Avner’s wife covers his eyes to metaphorically hide his traumatic visions—regardless of whether or not they were his to remember—by placing this flashback scene in a spot which leaves its meaning and source ambiguous at best, Speilberg covers our eyes to the fertile complexities he has entreated us to consider. In the end, we are left with neither complication, nor exoneration, merely shallow platitudes in an ever-deepening dilemma of misery, contempt, and futile animosity.

If we accept as reasonable truth, as the epigram from lexicographer and moralist Samuel Johnson states at the beginning of this essay, that "injuries are revenged; crimes are avenged," then we can see that the killings depicted in Munich are examples of both vengeance and revenge. Given that, no matter which perspective was intended with the flashback scene placed where it is in the film, the question posed to us is who has acted with vengeance and who has sought to extract revenge? Any answer we conclude must certainly complicate the issue and never should those involved be exonerated.

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Works Cited

Munich. Dir. Steven Speilberg.

Perf. Eric Bana and Ayelet Zurer.

Universal, DreamWorks SKG, 2005. DVD.

Pollard, Dr. Lisa S.

"ENG 290—Terrorism in Literature."

UNCW, Wilmington. 27 Aug. 2009. Lecture.

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