Adam Resurrected (2008)

It’s impossible to write about Inglorious Basterds without thinking about an even more powerful Holocaust-themed film: Adam Resurrected (2008).

Adam Resurrected played at the Quad Cinema, near Union Square, for one paltry week. (http://www.quadcinema.com) It played to a crowd that was decidedly different from the patrons of small town Saugerties’ Orpheum. Unfortunately, it played to only a small crowd for a short, short time, in spite of the fact that the film stars renowned actors Jeff Goldblum and Willem Defoe.

To hear Jeff Goldblum discuss his role as Adam Stein, a one-time circus clown and cabaret clairvoyant who was forced to live as a dog (literally) for nearly two years, and who became the personal pet of a Nazi officer, click on the link to Youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9h5B0v6MFk

In book form, Adam Resurrected was hailed as “one of the most powerful works of Holocaust fiction ever written” and as “the crowning achievement of one of Israel's literary masters.” In film form, most of this tale takes place in an Israeli psychiatric asylum, but the backstory is retold through grueling flashbacks that haunt Adam until the film’s end.

The film is masterfully done, but it is anything but escapist entertainment. In Saugerties, I saw campers run in from the rain and into the theater, to escape a brewing storm by buying tickets to Inglorious Basterds. One surely cannot hide from a thunderstorm, either in nature or in the imagination, by seeking refuge at the Quad’s screening of Adam Resurrected.

In the film, Adam (Jeff Goldblum) was spared the gas chamber so that he could entertain thousands of other Jews as they marched to their deaths. A Nazi commander, played by Defoe, spots Adam as he is dropped off with other human cargo, before they are pushed into showers and gas chambers and sent to their demise. Defoe’s Nazi character remembers Adam as the man who both saved his life—but who also publicly humiliated him--when Adam performed his cabaret act. He reminds the hapless Adam that he was once "the funniest man in Berlin."

Defoe sat in the audience, contemplating suicide, until Adam made him laugh and abated his depression. But first, Adam shared his perceptions about Defoe’s imminent mental instability with everyone else in attendance. Adam provokes a round of laughter from impressed onlookers, as well as a round of applause—all at Defoe’s expense.

Now it is Defoe’s turn to save and humiliate Adam simultaneously. He plucks Adam from the crowd, and makes him play his violin in public. Then he throws him a bone, and tells him to roll over and bark and perform as if he were a dog. In one of Adam’s flashbacks, we see dancing bears from the Berlin circus. These performing bears foreshadow the fate that awaits Adam in his attempt to survive the Nazi onslaught.

Adam’s life in the Israeli mental hospital for Holocaust survivors revolves around these recollections. When he seduces the head nurse, he includes canine scenes as part of the foreplay. When he learns that a feral child who barks and bites like a dog had been admitted to the same institution, he initially protests, because he has been promised that no dogs are allowed on premises, lest he be reminded of his worst recollections. Then he befriends the speechless young boy, and painstakingly turns him into a functioning human being once again—even after the trained professionals and psychiatrists of the institutions have failed at this same task.

In this film (and in the world that it depicts), the boundaries between sanity and madness are irrevocably blurred. Other films about world war also play upon the theme of what it means to be “sane in an insane society.” The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and King of Hearts (1966) concern themselves with The Great War (WWI) rather than with WWII. Caligari only alludes to the madness of war, and reminds us that authorities (such as Dr. Caligari) turned mindless beings like Cesar into killing machines, all for their own glory. (See Movies & the Modern Psyche at http://www.greenwood.com for more details.)

King of Hearts is far more literal than Caligari, and far, far, far lighter-spirited. Alan Bates plays a French army private who is sent to a small French town to defuse a bomb planted by Germans. Chased by Germans before completing his mission, he seeks refuge in a local insane asylum. Not knowing that everyone else has fled the town, he sees only asylum inmates and so he assumes that they are typical townspeople. It turns out that the psychiatric patients did not panic like ordinary citizens and have remained in town and have now taken it over. The inmates, in turn, believe Alan Bates to be the King of Hearts. They welcome him warmly. This allusion to the Queen of Hearts of Alice in Wonderland is striking.

When given the opportunity to evacuate, Bates decides that the world of the mentally unwell is better than the real world of war. He sheds his clothes, and knocks on the door, and gains admission to the same hospital that he was expected to evacuate. In a war-torn world, who can decide between sanity and insanity? Surely not the war-mongers themselves. King of Hearts expressed the Laingian anti-psychiatry sentiment and counterculture spirit of the sixties, in a humorous and emotionally-acceptable form.

Adam Resurrected, on the other hand, reminds us of the literal perversity that took place during the Shoah, when the Third Reich twisted every human ideal to its nth degree. It is a disturbing film, one with a completely different intent than the comedic King of Hearts. Even though its star, Adam, was a clown and comedian who was once the toast of the Berlin cabaret scene, this film is one of the most unfunny films yet produced. To day that it is darkly disturbing is an understatement.

The tongue-in-cheek irony used by Tarantino has no place in Adam Resurrected. This film should be seen by many people. However, as of today, there is little chance that it will be the box office success that Basterds became. It is much easier to fantasize that the Basterds actually won the war, and stopped Hitler in his tracks, than to contemplate the depth of despair that shrouded even the survivors of the same era.