Valkyrie (2008)
United Artists
Upon its cinema release, Valkyrie was unfairly criticized as showing Nazism in a selective light. The film’s plot – a recreation of the persons, events before and after the plot to kill Hitler – was considered an apology for Nazism. The film was thus dismissed as a Tom Cruise vehicle that while possibly true to the historical details of the incident side-stepped the issue of Nazi atrocity.
Since Steven Spielberg made Schindler’s List, it has been essential in cinema to show the atrocities of the Nazi regime – even Roman Polanski in the The Pianist alludes to it. But director Bryan Singer had essayed the allure of Nazi atrocity in Apt Pupil and even inferred it in the beginning to his hit X-Men and here tackles a far more complex question – humanism vs. faith in the delineation of morality.
Valkyrie is an astonishing, gripping film. It is the first rational humanist analysis of Nazism and humanism and its deconstruction of World War Two mythology owes to a number of films which sought to examine firstly the good German soldier (James Coburn in Cross of Iron) and the conflicted Nazi humanist (Michael Caine in The Eagle Has Landed). Valkyrie takes the Nazi atrocities as off-screen reality and concentrates on the onscreen drama – that of men turning traitors in the effort to remove a monstrous demagogue from power and re-assert a humanist Germany – as a means of charting the humanist resurgence against atrocity permitted by religious, theist ordination.
"In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the temple the brood of vipes and adders... (m)y feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter. It points me to the man who was once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's Truth!, was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter." (Adolf Hitler: source [video pt. 2])
In this, Valkyrie is a dramatized secular humanist crisis of conscience – the lingering nature of faith in God when confronted by the absolute atrocity capable in His name. It is this conflict which subtly underpins the elaborate plot, balancing concerns such as political vs. military expediency and the mobilization of an attempted coup. Directed with energy and verve, Valkyrie recreates the plot to kill Hitler with an earnestness that makes the viewer almost hope that it can succeed. But, the film also knows that in historical truth, the plot failed, the traitors were executed and the Nazi atrocities continued until the Allied powers broke through to Berlin some 9 months later. It is in the invigorating thrill of the attempt and the failure of its humanist challenge to authority that Valkyrie makes its points about the need to separate humanism entirely from theism.
NAZI HUMANISM AS A GENRE Getting the Right Ending After All
an extract from Robert Cettl's book Film Tales: Movie Trivia in the Age of DVD (on sale now in print and soon in e-book)
Director Sam (The Wild Bunch) Peckinpah was in trouble towards the end of shooting on the film Cross of Iron. He had been offered the chance to direct the big-budget films of both King Kong (the remake) and Superman but had declined, choosing instead Cross of Iron as it would give him the chance to not only film a war movie, but one in which the Germans were the protagonists.
The producer, however, was financing the movie from his profits in soft core pornography and was out of his depth on a project of this magnitude. Time again filming was delayed whilst the drive for funding went into overtime. Star James Coburn once threatened to stop filming if word from his bank didn’t reach him that a pay-check had cleared. The film’s ending was supposed to be a poignant moment between the two main characters. It was to take three days of shooting. However, just prior to the start, the producers arrived to say they were finally out of money and gave Peckinpah instead a hokey script which he was supposed to film as the new ending. This reduced Peckinpah to tears whereupon star James Coburn shoved one of the producers and said the ending would be done Peckinpah’s way. It was, in only four hours of shooting time
The film begins with the oath that all German soldiers and officers must take to Hitler as a ruler before God. Evoking this oath immediately sets up the Nazi regime as essentially one of religious totalitarianism. Hitler to the Germans is God-given and obedience to God’s will enables the atrocities of Nazism, essentially founded on the equation between national Socialism and religious totalitarianism – at this point historically, Catholic Pope Pius XII had validated Hitler and the Church was on the side of the Nazis. The atrocities of Nazism that have obsessed film since Schindler’s List are reconfigured as the sublimation of humanity and individual will to a supreme deity – the direct result of theist belief. In configuring Nazism with religious faith, director Bryan Singer clearly allies religion and totalitarianism.
Having done so, Singer then introduces his hero: Nazi officer Tom Cruise narrates a letter in which he effectively renounces his loyalty to Hitler, religion and the totalitarianism it decrees. Cruise plays a humanist Nazi, a man determined that religious totalitarianism not allow the destruction of humanity. However, Cruise is also a man of faith in God. At one point in the film, after the plot to kill Hitler is put into motion, Cruise remarks that “only God can judge us now”. For Cruise thus, the humanist rebellion against religious totalitarianism is the fight to put forward a God independent of worldly authority (the equation of Church and State that Singer here configures Nazism as). Although a man of faith, he puts his belief in humanist assertion before his belief in God and hopes that God will judge his actions. He believes that God’s way is a humanist way.
Of the Nazi co-collaborators, Cruise is the most decisive, planting the bomb at Hitler’s meeting place and setting into motion a coup to defeat him, rallying humanist Germans to his cause. But, such is the thrall of religious totalitarian loyalty to Hitler that the officers pursue their duty – their obedience to the God-ordained Fuhrer – over their humanism.
The war in Valkyrie is re-configured as one between religious totalitarianism and a humanity which sets itself outside God and tries to reconcile itself with God. The brilliance of Valkyrie is to set this conflict in terms of the “good Nazi”, a character type essentially made the stuff of screen legend in Liam Neeson’s portrayal of Oscar Schindler in Schindler’s List – where again it was the triumph of a rationalist, secular humanist action that qualified human dignity.
The film’s ending clarifies all. The plot to kill Hitler was a humanist revolt against religious totalitarianism led by a man who wanted to equate humanism with his faith in God. But, the plot failed. Cruise’s fate is to die by firing squad as he praises a return to a “sacred Germany”. The God he believes in to his death has judged him and sentenced him to that death, just as the Fuhrer relays a message to the German people that he has taken his survival as a sign (from providence) that he is doing the right thing. Director Singer’s message here is unequivocal: theism and totalitarianism are inseperable – that is what “God” wants.
Thus, although director Singer praises Cruise’s humanism, he sees him in the end as a man lost to faith. In trying to equate humanism with theism, Cruise is sentenced to death by the God he believes in. In this way, it is religious totalitarianism which is the enemy of any incipient humanism and the man of faith will be betrayed by his belief in a God if he puts humanity above the totalitarianism of divinity. Director Singer’s in Valkyrie shows the heroic aspiration of a humanism that flounders and is defeated by the operations of theistic faith – the humanist God Cruise appeals to judge him, judges him with death. In the death of Cruise, is the death of theism as a concept having any bearing on a humanist, rationalist future. God, like the Nazis, is the enemy of humanism and theism a monstrous indignity upon human individual consciousness.
