Art, Morality, and the Holocaust: The Aesthetic Riddle of Benigni's Life Is Beautiful

When Freud said that art can present "unsolved riddles to our understanding," he might have added that artworks, like people, can also elicit love and its opposites in ways that defy analysis.1 Such may have been the thoughts also of viewers of the Art Spiegelman cartoon in The New Yorker just before comedian-director Roberto Benigni's film Life Is Beautiful (La Vita E Bella), having already won dozens of international awards, swept the 1998 Academy Awards with prizes for Best Actor, Best Foreign Language Film, and Best Dramatic Musical Score. In the cartoon, a gaunt prisoner sits against a barbed-wire fence clutching an Oscar under the caption "Be a Part of History and the Most Successful Foreign Film of All Time." The image bespoke the wildly different nerves touched by Life Is Beautiful's story of an Italian Jew with a penchant for Chaplinesque play whose family is deported to a Nazi death camp. As the awards attest, millions of viewers worldwide were moved to laughter, tears, and effusive testimonials to the film's spiritual depth. (As one reviewer gushed, "It will restore your faith in movies!") Yet more than a few others, as Spiegelman's image also hinted, found the film appalling, with reactions ranging from complaints that its use of comedy turns the Holocaust into kitsch to the more extreme charge that the protagonist's death in the narrative works allegorically to justify the Holocaust.2 Whatever one's own take on Benigni's film, few artworks in recent times, high or low, have had such a Rorschach-like effect on international mass audiences, as is underscored by the fact that the line between Life Is Beautiful's admirers and critics straddles divisions between mature, historically aware adults and kitsch-addicted slackers, between Jews and non-Jews, and between those who possess and those who lack personal ties to the Holocaust. Given the truism that art's larger atmosphere of reception is in some sense part of what it is, one might well ask whether this singular reception contains a lesson for aesthetics. But what is the lesson? For starters, the Life Is Beautiful phenomenon offers a mirror of what art, and the perennially unfinished effort to say what it is and why it matters, have become at a time when traditional oppositions between high and mass art are blurred in practice and theory, when critics are showing renewed interest in traditional themes such as beauty and the art/morality relationship, and when our popular culture seems obsessed with just about anything, from the sublime to the ridiculous, pertaining to spiritual redemption. It is also a time, as Theodor Adorno noted, when mass pleasures possess conspicuously drug-like powers to reshape collective memory. If no sane person would endorse Adorno's hyperbolic dictum that poetry after Auschwitz is barbarism, it is easy enough to share some of his concern about the anaesthetizing powers of contemporary film and other cultural media, especially in light of current politically charged discussions of Holocaust denial, the "Holocaust industry," and related subjects.3 Such a constellation of themes promises a rude awakening for anyone who, like myself, set out to see Life Is Beautiful expecting a fairly innocent night at the movies. To get confessions out of the way, my own reaction to the film evolved, over what turned into many viewings and discussions with friends, students, and colleagues,4 from initial delight to an uneasy ambivalence that now seems to me exactly the right response to Benigni's film. Was this reaction, I wondered at first, due only to my own critical laziness, or did it point to something further in the film that was still eluding me and other critics?