The show’s pilot begins with nerdy teens discussing Darth Vader’s psychology and goes on to craft a Spider–Man-like origin story for the protagonist, comic-book store employee Jonah (Logan Lerman), killing his surrogate parent and setting him on a path toward complicated moral dilemmas. This subversive view meshes with the genre aesthetics of the first season, which featured fake grindhouse trailers and tourist ads for Nazi relocation in the American heartland that break the fourth wall to say this “ fucked-up shit ” really happened (albeit in a much different manner ). Magilow, co-author of “ Holocaust Representations in History: An Introduction,” identified in revenge films like “ Inglorious Basterds” as “an aspiration to break free of the constraints of filmic representations of Holocaust victimhood have placed on Jewish identity.” Promoting season two, Weil called it “a show about catharsis, about Jewish empowerment, and about wish fulfillment for Jewish kids like me who grew up wanting to reclaim power.” Weil is describing an impetus that Daniel H. Weil seems to have heard the institutional complaints, shifted gears and steered clear of Shoah shock value - even if his comments to the press belie the growth he’s made. The new “Hunters” is a very different enterprise from the sophomoric, tonally queasy first entry. My expectations were low, but the show seemed to anticipate a critic like me, transforming itself into a commentary about the politics of the Holocaust revenge plot and what creator David Weil called, in a letter defending his work to the Auschwitz museum, “symbolic reality.” I should have seen the twist coming, or at least recognized the actor playing the woman in white (Jewish star Jennifer Jason Leigh, a highlight as always). Worse, it was fuel for deniers and minimizers.Īnd then, the script flipped to reveal the real fate of the town’s Jews, the store’s original owners and (spoilers) the genial proprietor’s peepers. ![]() It was precisely the kind of revisionism that angered the show’s critics. I couldn’t believe that this show, which the Auschwitz Memorial Museum blasted for fabricating a gory game of “human chess” at the camp, would begin its second season by suggesting that 1,000 Austrian Jews escaped the Holocaust by pretending to be Christians. I began drafting an email to the USC Shoah Foundation for comment. ![]() But they just disappeared … Perhaps they put on a cross, took their mezuzahs down and became Christians. “There were orders for them to be deported July 22nd, 1942. “Before the war this town was home to 1,000 Jews,” the woman explains. The owner denies being Jewish, but she doesn’t buy it. She’s spotted a faded outline of a removed mezuzah on the doorpost. It’s 1972, but she is pulling from a 1940s playbook, interrogating the proprietor, first about his store and finally, his ethnicity. ![]() A woman all in white, with a frosty, vaguely European accent, enters a candy shop in the fictional alpine town of Van Glooten during a butter sculpture contest. The story, which in its valedictory season follows the same multi-ethnic squad of Nazi killers as they track down Hitler, picks up with a familiar setup. “Hunters” season two opens in Austria and, even before it showed a pair of severed eyeballs affixed to a butter sculpture as a Yiddish version of Kelis’ “Milkshake” plays, the show sent my stomach lurching.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |