Siperb kafkaian monstrous tale

Rating: 10/10 (11 April 2010)

It is in many ways a great film. It questions the "heritage" of the Second World War and the horror the American soldiers discovered in the camps, in this case here Dachau. It is also more than clear on the passage of some of the researchers of Nazi Germany to the US to continue their research in peace, including if necessary with human experiments when dealing with medical research. It is unluckily well-known that prisons and orphanages were places of hellish torturing and violence in the name of research or reform. That's the first level of the film. The second level is: what can society do with the few human beings who are so bad that they can't be reformed? Various solutions are available: lobotomizing them to turn them into docile pets, pharmaceuticalizing their cases so that they become chemical zombies, or manipulating their minds to make them convinced of what they have done and of the necessary punishment called treatment they are receiving. The film goes even as far as imagining the production of human killing tools that could be used in wars. Surgery, drugs or mental manipulation, that's the choices envisaged here. The three of them are all just fully wrong. But the film is a lot more disquieting than that if we deal with the simple fact that the decision of a psychiatrist to classify you as anything psychic or psychological is absolutely irreversible and everything you may say or do to prove you are not will be turned into the evidence that you are and will be used against you. In other words the lady always protests too much. That's the Kafka aspect of the tale. But the film is even better than all that because Scorsese in his personal style builds a story in which we do not know at all at the end if the two cops were really what they pretended to be at the beginning and thus were kidnapped by the doctors to make sure nothing will seep out of their concentration camp, or if it is the doctors who are right at the end and that the two cops are what these doctors pretend, one is a killer and the other his doctor and that the whole tale was a medical procedure to reach treatment. At the end there is only one choice left: to live as a monster or to die in dignity. But what is dignity in such an environment? We are happily doubting everything at the end, which may create a feeling of frustration in the audience.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID