Schindler's List and HBO
Last night I was flipping through the channels on my TV and I noticed that one of the HBOs was showing Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece about the plight of the Jews in Germany during the Holocaust. This isn’t the first time it’s been on HBO; it’s actually been in something of a constant rotation over the last few months. For some reason it just didn’t sit well with me and I started trying to noodle through why. Apologies for any rambling over the next couple hundred words.
I think in part it has to do with the aura that surrounded this film upon its release and its initial foray into television sets. Do you remember its initial screening on NBC? I do. It was presented “with limited commercial interruptions” (by Ford, I believe), and presented in its entirety, nudity and all. This was on a broadcast channel, mind you: It was a big deal. And it should be a big deal: It’s an intense film about the suffering of an entire race of people.
But here it is today, playing on a cycle on HBO alongside 12 Rounds, the latest entry from WWE star John Cena. This bothered me a little. Do the programmers at HBO see Schindler’s List as something that people want to jump in and out of, as they do with other HBO regulars? Remember when they were playing Anchorman on what felt like a loop? That’s a movie that you can pop in and out of. Office Space is the same way. But Schindler’s List? Really?
I posed the question on Twitter, and people seemed less bothered by it than I was. The Rightwing Film Geek wrote that “a movie is not its subject matter,” which I agree with to a certain extent, while Peter Suderman wrote that he doesn’t find it “much more sacred than, say, Fiddler on the Roof,” which I totally disagree with. But the basic point they were making is the same: Schindler’s List isn’t special and shouldn’t be treated as such.
I guess that’s fair. Still, it makes me feel a little weird to see it playing on HBO sandwiched in between the latest Reny Harlin picture and Alien Sex Files 3. I don’t think I’d feel the same way about Fiddler on the Roof.