Montalbán/Golem/MyraHindley

Today I finished Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s The Buenos Aires Quintet. Not surprisingly, a mixture of resolution and continuing loose ends characterizes the end of the novel. Muriel is reunited with her parents, but Montalbán spends very little time depicting the reunion or giving us a sense of whether these characters have a future as a family. The Captain is defeated but not killed; instead, he goes into exile in Paraguay and could easily come back in the future. So what has changed? As the minister Güelmes puts it, the country has returned to democratic normality, but all that means is that “corruption and state violence are in the hands of civilians, not the military.” Continuity, then, rather than change. Güelmes again: “Sometimes the state needs to remember it has a monopoly on violence.” Against this background, Carvalho returns to Spain, not defeated precisely, but surely irrelevant. Even though Don Vito will continue to run ‘Partners In Crime,’ their private detective agency, in Carvalho’s absence, Montalbán makes it clear that the detective is little more than charming anomaly in a world where state violence of one kind or another is the only game in town. File under coincidence: yesterday’s New York Times includes the obituary of Juan Gelman, an Argentine poet who not only resisted the military dictatorship, but whose life circumstances uncannily mirror some of the circumstances depicted in Montalbán’s book. Food for thought.

I also read the next fifty pages of The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction. In this section of the book, Baer discusses a wide range of materials, including the films Der Golem (Paul Wegener, 1920) and Le Golem (Julien Duvivier, 1936), two stories called “The Golem,” by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1982) and Elie Wiesel (1983) and Barbara Sherwood’s 2002 novel The Book Of Splendor. Baer’s emphasis throughout is on the various intertextual adaptations these texts make to the Golem legend, and the purpose of such changes, but there are weaknesses in her discussion. Some are minor (such as a tendency to spend far too long on plot summary) and others are more serious, such as her rather simplistic preference for ‘faithful’ adaptations. This preference leads her to ultimately dismiss Wegener and Duvivier’s films as anti-semitic (or, as she puts it, “intertextuality gone awry”) while saying virtually nothing about their considerable technical achievements. Because she approves of Singer, Wiesel, and Sherwood, Baer’s account of these sources is more interesting, but still hews much too closely to the fundamentally uninteresting question of whether these sources are ‘accurate’ treatments of the Golem.

I’m doing the research for a piece on the Moors Murders at the moment and so I’m subjecting myself to a slew of ‘true crime documentaries’ on the case, even though they’re practically unwatchable. A typical example of the genre is Martina Cole's documentary about Myra Hindley, which is part of her series on female murderers ‘imaginatively’ titled ‘Lady Killers.’ Ironically, Cole begins the documentary by quoting from Compulsion,  Meyer Levin’s famous fictionalization of the Leopold and Loeb case, specifically the passage where Levin defends himself from the charge of sensationalism and explains the rationale for going back once again to such a notorious case. One can see why Cole would find this passage appealing but whereas one could conceivably find Levin innocent of the charge of sensationalism, Cole would be guilty as charged. Although this documentary of Hindley professes, like every other example of the genre, to want to get to the bottom of the mystery of its subject, what it in fact does is simply rehash the same old facts about a case that everyone already knows by heart. The cultural work of these repetitions interests me, but so do the other standard features of studies of Hindley on display here: the claim that she was worse than Brady; the claim that she personifies pure evil; and above all, the endless reiteration of the fact that she remains the most reviled woman in Britain (even after her death in 2002) with no serious consideration of why this is so and absolutely no self-awareness that this film and others like it merely contribute to the ritual reestablishment of that revulsion. It should not be possible to make a film about Hindley that is boring and predictable and perhaps only in this respect should Cole be congratulated: she has achieved the seemingly impossible.