“Goya’s Ghosts” is "Star Wars" without the sci-fi disguise. It will be too strong for some people because it is history -- heightened and interpreted by a different art context. Both are highly referential to the Twentieth Century wars and atrocities. How could they not be, since both Lucas and Forman have personal links to holocaust?
Forman, director of "Goya's Ghosts" says: “ . . . in my relatively short life I have lived through six or seven different social and cultural systems. First the Democratic Republic of Czechoslovakia, then the limited democracy before World War II, then the Nazi regime. After the Nazi regime there was a kind of democracy again for three years, then came the Stalinist regime, then the reformed Communist regime, and now I am living in a free country.”
And he says: "We create institutions, governments and schools to help us live, but every institution has a tendency, after a while, to behave not as if they should be serving you, but that you should be serving them.” He is not talking about Tea Party complaints over taxes or regulation of commerce -- he is talking about wholesale violent deadly repression of any ideas the regime does not like. He is talking about the craving for power and the ruthlessness that comes from it.
Just as Lucas used the space opera trope to explore the concepts, Forman turns to the history of Spain at a time when it was repeatedly scythed by powerful forces, first its own internal Catholic inquisition that tried to eliminate the last traces of previous Islamic domination and to enforce a paranoid suspicion of Judaism. In those times kings and queens could rise or fall through the influence of the Pope. Next came the French revolution that rolled the heads of all elites into the gutter -- the actual heads of state. Then Napoleon seized the chaos to establish an empire, until he finally fell victim to the British. These repeated waves of war washed over Goya, adaptable enough to portray kings and queens and confrontive enough to record the bloody brutality in all its ghastly flesh. Forman brilliantly uses the rich, vivid, and extremely dark style of Goya to frame each moment of narrative. There is a marvelous sequence showing the process of creating etchings beautiful in execution, ghoulish in subject.
The narrative itself rests on two characters, the rough equivalent of the mother of Luke Starwalker and Princess Leia, intuitively played by Natalie Portman, and a version of Darth Vader, almost but not quite sympathetically portrayed by Javiar Bardem. In the brilliantly unlikely encounter between these two characters -- both acting at inspired levels -- comes the hope of the new Empire. This ground has been covered over and over, but never like this before.
Artists of all kinds, not just movie directors, keep trying to understand this essential human problem: how to reconcile the individual with whatever form of government is trying to serve its own ends. Part of the reason they CAN do this so many times is that most people never quite realize what the artist is showing us.
Forman says: “. . .it's always the conflict within the individual and the institutions. Instead of underdogs, let's talk about dogs. If you corner a dog, he's ready to bite you. That's the reality. Otherwise he's a loveable, wonderful creature. If you corner him, he can behave abominably. And so does a human being. When an individual is cornered by society or an institution, well, he can behave abominably and I can't really hide it or glorify it. Neither. It's just a fact of life." In this version of the story older than the Old Testament, it is Lorenzo (Bardem) and Inez (Portman) who are cornered. Goya records.
It’s an old saying that if you want an excellent president, you must start by insisting on excellent dogcatchers. Having been a dogcatcher myself, this maxim has teeth for me. But my clearest examples come from school teaching. I walked in on the superintendent of Heart Butte talking to his principal about a list he kept of students he wanted to get rid of some way. He was upset that I’d come in the open door of his office just then and made me promise to keep it secret. Then he put me at the top of his list of teachers to get rid of. He did not have the power to kill us or torture us, but I do not think he had the moral stamina to have resisted the chance. He was motivated by love: he had a young wife he was trying to hold onto and thought money was the key, namely his very generous salary.
A slightly more benign example dates back forty years. This time I was present legitimately, supposedly to improve the image of the Browning schools. The superintendent and his assistant were sorting through the applicants for open teaching jobs. They weren’t looking at the transcripts or vitas. Rather, both men were studying the faces of the women: “This one looks like fun!” Power is always closely followed by sexual access. Both little administrative caucuses came to mind in the opening scene of "Goya's Ghosts" with the clerics of the Inquisition sitting around a table studying Goya's etchings.
As often happens, my movie last night echoed “Goya’s Ghosts” (2006) though “Imagining Argentina” (2003) does not have quite the force, majesty, or power of the Forman movie. Christopher Hampton, director of the latter, once ran athwart Forman when the two both did remakes of “Dangerous Liasons” at the same time. Nevertheless, the theme of “Imagining Argentina” was the same theme but without sympathy for the powerful, which also diminishes it. The approach in the latter movie is through South American mystic surrealism. A man directs a children’s theatre where he presents a version of the Orpheus myth. His wife, outspoken, is “disappeared.” Then his daughter. Unspeakable things happen to them, which is particularly disturbing since the wife is Emma Thompson. Her husband is able to see them clairvoyantly.
These serious and powerful challenges to the powers still surging over the planet, destroying people in the same ways as always (except maybe for armed drones), are seen by far too few people. Instead all the bored groundlings of the world stand around watching jewel heists and frat flatulence. How does anyone get their attention? Since Greek drama this has always been the challenge to the artists of the world whether they were painters, playwrights, movie directors, or dancers. It is an essentially religious question in the most compelling sense: what compels us to be good unless it is our individual care for each other. The true test of strength is the protection of the powerless.
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