SHTISEL Season 3: The Last Shot

 Ruchami Dies

Clearly the Israeli TV series Shtisel has surpassed the medium’s normal insights and quality. But the ambiguous last shot of Season 3 opens a deeper possibility. This drama plunges us into classical tragedy. 

Comfy viewers and the sponsors don’t like that. “Calm of mind, all passion spent” doesn’t sell much. So for their peace the writers suggest Ruchami survives her delivery. 

But for the attentive viewer, Ruchami dies. By not making her death undeniably explicit, the writers permit viewers to read her alive. But the three seasons of evidence firmly lead to her death. 

The last scene opens on an ominous long shot through curtains to hospital staff and family around Ruchami’s bed. When the family celebrates little Hannahleh’s arrival the shot is jarringly bright. Ruchami looks too hearty. The unreal “feel” is confirmed when she smiles at us. In real life we don’t smile and wink at someone in a different-reality audience out there. Her breaking the Fourth Wall shatters the realism. The last shot is not Ruchami’s “real life.”

Confirming that break, the music connects the hospital scene to the preceding, where the dead Shtisels visit the living. There is no music in the “realistic” start to that scene, the three men talking. The music starts on the I.B. Singer quotation and continues over the Ruchami scene. The music gives Ruchami the “reality” of the visiting dead.

The Singer quote simply confirms what the writers have established from the outset: the dead stay with us, watching, helping, even visiting for a chat. Ruchami’s posthumous visit follows those by mothers Malka, Dvora and Libbi. Here motherhood doesn’t end at death. Dvora hands Akiva some challah. 

Where most stories start by defining the physical setting this drama’s very first scene was Akiva’s dream of Dvora in the deli deep-freeze. The first episode of Season 3 has a wholly realistic vision of dead Libbi’s visit.  

The miracle of Ruchami’s blessed afterlife — which requires her death —gives this drama an emotional climax rare, if not unprecedented, on TV. As Giti’s “little Ruchami” replaces her mother, Ruchami’s death is a triumph. In both her pregnancies the doctors insist on terminating the baby to save the mother’s life, as the Torah requires. They overrule her the first time. At the baby’s burial, Ruchami rejects Hanina’s comforting with “I’m in that box.” This is her Death-in-Life.

The second time she forgoes surrogacy out of respect for Hanina’s religious concern. Accepting the odds against her survival, she prepares to die. She tapes “letters to my beloved little girl I will never give birth to.”  When she sleeps through Hanina’s playing her tapes she seems to be speaking from the dead. She promises her unborn daughter she will always be with her, watching her, if but from “another room.” That starts with the last shot. This is her Life-in-Death.

To deny this death is to diminish her heroism and tragedic dignity. Also — to ignore the entire drama’s faith in our alternative levels of spiritual existence.

But as the Facebook chatlines demonstrate, viewers prefer the cliche happy ending. That depends on a miracle, which an earlier scene warns us off. When Lippe begs God to take his life to save Ruchami’s he stumbles into a celestial glow. His miracle has been granted? Nope, it’s the headlights of the obstructed truck. So much for miracles. Lippe doesn’t get to sacrifice himself for his daughter; Ruchami does. Why? As the Bible continually reports, sacrifices have to be perfect. Also male, but Ruchami is a modern heroine. 

So resistant are viewers to this deepening that the Shtisel Official chatline on Facebook refused to run my proposed alternative reading . The director expelled me when I challenged her claim to have “from the writers” the assurance that Ruchami is alive! She didn’t. 

My Ruchami ending has another advantage. Call it my Lekovid Covid Clause. The drama was written, produced and aired during the pandemic. A crucial issue is the refusal of the orthodox of several faiths to accept the restrictions imposed by secular authorities for the public good. There have been protests, riots, closures — and many deaths and much more suffering as a result. That even beyond the offending communities. In this climate, basing a happy ending on prayer, on divine intervention, on the expectation of a miracle — is sadly dangerous. Giving Ruchami the heroic death she undertook is the most responsible as well as the happiest ending.   

I've written episode-by-episode analyses of the themes and structure of SHTISEL. The first two seasons are covered in READING SHTISEL. AFTER SHTISEL studies Season 3 and also the writers' intervening TV drama, AUTONOMIES. Both are available at lulu.com.  

Policeman (2011)

  As we know from Synonyms and The Kindergarten Teacher, Nadav Lapid takes a harsh, cold view of contemporary Israel. Here the title connotes a single force for law and order. But the landscape is rather a fragmentation of the state. Its member groups, the family, even the individual, are at war with each other — and within themselves.

There are four main groups of Israelis here. At the top is the fat, spoiled business class, complacent in its power. When the rebels interrupt the wedding to take hostages, that power briefly seems threatened. It’s reasserted by the legal slaughter at the end.

     Central figure Yaron leads the anti-terrorist special police unit. As he massages his pregnant wife he seems remarkably sensitive. But he’s ready to betray her with the inviting young waitress, at least until she reveals she’s under 16. His virtue is pragmatic. 

    His unit reeks of rampant masculine. There’s a trace of sabra idealism when the men cycle out to admire the desert beauty. But they are constantly physical, as in Yaron’s arrival at their party. The men slap and hug each other, relishing physical exchange. The party climaxes in a mass wrestle. It’s like they’re playing rugby without a ball. The skirmish is for its own sake, the exercise of the physical, that old devil “manliness.”

But even that unity is cracked. Yaron and the unit are under investigation for the wounding and killing of four civilians in an attack on a Most Wanted terrorist. As one comrade has cancer the unit has decided he should assume full responsibility for the transgression. Under their cold warmth he agrees. Even as Yaron massages his wife, she urges him to betray his friend to save himself. So even the feminine, the wife bearing a daughter, offers no check on macho unscrupulousness. 

The police unit represents Israeli law and order, bent upon enforcing its traditional values. But in that earlier raid we hear about and in the climactic one we see, it is unprincipled brutality. The force exceeds the human need. Having forgotten its ideals, this unit is like the rugby game without a ball. The violence has lost its purpose.

At the opposite extreme, a gang of idle Israeli punks blithely destroy a parked car, heedless of the woman owner’s witness. This is the police unit’s destructive violence without the ideals that initially motivated the nation and their security forces. This is “pure” nihilism, destruction without purpose. There is no suggestion these are terrorists or even Arab. This is violence purely for its own sake, leaving rubble without a cause.    

Between these outlaws and the cops fall the rebellious idealists. And they do.

This group is ideological, cultured, privileged. Shira is there not just because she loves the charismatic leader, Nathanael, but because she is passionate about returning Israel to its faded values. She’s a poet. 

Another is an excellent violinist. But their idealism is soon undercut. There is egotism, not camaraderie, in the violinist’s humiliation of the beggar. So much for their egalitarian ideals. 

Shira is naive when she calls on the police to recognize their kinship in even their oppression. They feel too much swagger to identify. She undercuts her own position when she turns on the voluntary hostage bride: "You are not a woman, but a bride. You have no face- you've got make up. You have no breasts, but perfectly fitted bra. You have no body - you have this dress. And this dress is exactly in the size of your personality.” So much for her call to a common oppression. In fact, the bride has proved arguably the film’s most courageous figure when she insists on staying with her father as hostage, begging for his release. 

In reverse, a rebel’s father joins his son on the doomed mission. There’s no mother here, only the masculine. Himself a veteran of idealistic campaigns, the father initially locks up his son, to save him. When the lad threatens suicide the father relents, but goes with him to the fatal demonstration. Both are lost in the final sweep. Like the “family” police unit, the wedding family, and even Yaron’s ostensible fidelity, Israel’s fragmentation seeps down even to the family unit.

Of course, these young idealists don’t have a chance against the heavily armed and armoured police unit. The question is: Does Israel?

Perhaps the last shot presents some hope. Yaron looks down on the dying Shira and seems to pause to think. How we think he reacts probably reveals us more than him. Does he see her as his lost idealistic self? Does she remind him that Israel’s enemies are the genocidal terrorists, not Israeli Jews of however alien class? Does he see the daughter his wife is carrying? Or, more cynically, another lost waitress? Will he change or continue?  

I respect and admire Lapid as a filmmaker. I object to his focus on Police Israel, exposng its institutionalized violence, but framing out the conditions that have caused it. Nowhere does Lapid acknowledge the state’s existential threat both from its neighbours and its fifth column citizenry. Lapid exposes Israel’s military focus but omits the dangers that require it. This judges Israel and not its genocidal enemies. Just this imbalance won Lapid’s Synonyms the Golden Bear at Berlin. Blaming Israel out of context is the popular thing to do. It’s easy.