Remember

In the first shot of Atom Egoyan’s Remember, Zev awakens to a memory of his dead wife. In the last scene he awakens to a completely suppressed reality. He is not the Jewish survivor we (and he) think he is but himself a Nazi concentration camp killer.
     The closing scene redefines the revenge plot. Instead of a Jew avenging his family, the Nazi hiding behind a Jewish identity kills his evil comrade and then himself — doubly completing the mission assigned him by a dying Jew, Max. Here the hunter as well as the hunted exposes his suppressed identity. Zev proves a “wolf” in sheep’s clothing, pretending to be his erstwhile prey.

For the bulk of the film Zev personifies the struggle never to forget the horrors of the Holocaust and to sustain the commitment to bring evil to justice and to honour the memory of the dead. As his memory drifts in and out, Zev needs his friend Max’s letter of detailed instruction to keep him on track. Ironically, a sweet little American blonde (total it Aryan) little girl reads the letter aloud to him, to recover his purpose. The pathos of an old man losing his wife, then his memory, supports the larger theme of historical remembrance.  

With the conclusion, the theme shifts from the importance of remembering the Holocaust to the importance of remembering one’s own identity, one’s own responsibility for that horror. Ultimately the film’s subject goes beyond the loss of memory, as portrayed in Zev’s dementia, to the willful forgetting of the past, especially one’s own. The title, which we don’t get until the end, enjoins us to remember what we are as well as the enormity of what has happened. More broadly, we all have to remember the evil of which we may well prove capable. The dark side of human nature is not just in others.

Once we’ve seen the twist we can find its earlier preparation. Zev plays Wagner more comfortably than he plays the Jewish-born Mendelssohn. He admits to loving Wagner. “How can you hate music?” he asks. Well, for starters, when that music has been used to orchestrate the genocide of your people, you might. A Jew would feel that. The posh 1945 New York wedding pictures also don’t fit an Auschwitz survivor’s story.

Zev also shows a surprising efficiency with his Glock, killing an attacking dog and then dispatching the modern Nazi — a state trooper, aptly enough — with two effective shots, one to the heart, one to the head. These reflexes confirm the later conversion of avenging Jew to hidden Nazi. Zev’s reflex fear of German shepherds may cohere with his Jewish pose, but it’s also true to the old man’s fragility and the fear that makes him hate shouting and piss his pants on the trooper’s couch. Any old man fears danger, regardless of race, religion, colour or creed. 

As exposing the truth is healthy, the cab that brings Zev to his climactic exposure is Merck — the German (of course) pharmaceutical company. If the ultimate revelations traumatize the two Nazi officers’ unsuspecting American families, they still get off more lightly than their respective fathers’ Auschwitz victims. Max, immobile and constantly on his oxygen, proves the master planner and angel of justice. It turns out he recognized Zev as the brutal Nazi and exploited his dementia to send him and his old mate to justice. 

The trooper reminds us that antisemitism remains a powerful force in the world, in North America and certainly across Europe. A Nazi-fetishizing and Jew-hating rural cop points to the institutionalized bigotry even in Obama’s ("post-racial", right) America. Egoyan, of course, is not Jewish. But he is an Armenian acutely aware of the massacre of his people and its deliberate obscuring over time and by the aggressors’ twisting of history. The historic tragedy that the Jews and Armenians have shared lies at the heart of Remember. We all need to both remember the history and reject the lies that would replace it. 

***

This intricate plot allows for an alternative reading. Perhaps Zev is not demented. Max has the film’s last line: “He knew exactly what he was doing.” Max may evade his own responsibility here, but perhaps he speaks true. Our first thought is that Max played Zev. But what if Zev played Max?

Zev’s truest moments of disorientation are when he wakes up, calling for his wife Ruth. The name evokes “Whither thou goest I will go,” the epitome of familial fidelity. 

Otherwise his lapses and confusions may be pretended. His snapping at the boy on the train may set up his story of innocent dementia. It does lead to the boy’s father finding his limo. Zev’s dependence upon Max’s letter may prepare for his defence:  “I was only following orders”? Writing “Read the letter” on his arm parallels his earlier ploy, tattooing his concentration camp number. When’s he’s angered by the waitress spilling coffee on that letter he may be disturbed by the undermining of that alibi. He shows full command of his senses when he returns to his room and rewrites the erased sentences. 

Zev may have led on Max to encourage him to find the suspect Nazi, to do the research and to prepare and to fund his adventure. His old camp mate — and co-conspirator in the plan to pass themselves off as Jewish survivors— was expecting him to find him. 

When Zev kills himself, it’s not out of guilt but because his son has surprisingly arrived at the scene. Zev does not want to live shamed in his family’s view. and stripped of his false Jewish identity. This reading replaces Zev’s helplessness with agency, strips him of our sympathy, and in its demonstration of cunning and heartlessness provides a chilling characterization of evil. Max’s last line curtails the nursing home residents’ sympathy for the dead — but maybe not deluded — Nazi.

Clearly this film demands a second viewing.

                                                                        ***

Now, here comes a tangent.  A broader reading of the film reflects on the alacrity with which the Nazi mythology is currently being revived, especially anent Israel. 

PM Netanyahu recently provoked global outrage — even among Jewish historians — for stating that the Palestinian leader persuaded Hitler to exterminate the Jews rather than relocate them to Madagascar. In the usual rush to condemn Netanyahu, commentators obscured his essential point: that for almost 100 years the Palestinians have been determined to annihilate the Jews. 

Hence their rejection of any statehood that would require peaceful coexistence with the Jewish state. That’s what prevents the two-state solution, not Israel’s intransigence. The Palestinians are constitutionally pledged to annihilate the Jews (Hamas) or they promise (the “moderate” Abbas) a Judenrein Palestine, which includes the present Israel. Such an existential threat might explain some intransigence. 

The current rash of murderous attacks on Jewish civilians is also rooted in that hatred, not prompted by the so-called ‘occupation,’ the settlements, or any other elements of Israeli policy, as her critics claim. As the UN flies the Palestinians’ flag, governments blame Israelis and Palestinians equally for Palestinian murders and Israeli responses. The press slants against Israel, reporting her deeds but not their provocations. The UN declares historically Jewish historic sites Muslim (even after the Palestinians firebombed Jacob’s tomb). The Palestinians claim Jerusalem as their holy city despite its never being mentioned in the Koran, Mohammed never having visited there and their traditional praying with their backs to the city. Now the mufti has claimed the Jews never had a temple on Temple Mount, that there has been a mosque there from the time of Adam. This is the tragedy of people believing their own delusions and fabricating a “history” to serve their purpose. Egoyan reminds us to remember.