Literary Movie Review: Waltz with Bashir

The movie, Waltz with Bashir, was one of the most interesting movies I’ve seen, to be honest. It was interesting because of its format – the animation; to me it looked like a moving (and movie) comic book except without the emphasis on the comic (comedic) aspect. No, the emphasis was on finding a truth and dealing with it.

Finding a truth is one of the main universal themes I found in this film, set in the protagonist’s present and past (I am not sure the location, although I think it’s Israel and Lebanon). Throughout the film, Ari explicitly searches for the truth – what really went on at the massacre – and he tries to get at it through tid-bits from various sources. I think the fact that he goes about finding the truth this way shows that the truth is never in one entity. The truth is spread out among many and it is never easy to get. In fact, the fact that the truth is dissipated among many proves that the truth is universal or at least universal for those in the army. I think that the reason Ari couldn’t remember what happened at the massacre was because he, at a subconscious level, doesn’t want to remember it. As the cliché goes, the truth hurts sometimes – it hurts for him to have witness the mass killing of civilians and it hurts for those sufferers and those innocent people who were killed.

Another universal theme from the film is the way in which people deal with overwhelming violence. Throughout the film, there were many contraries. The music, for example, seemingly sounds happy and yet the words and the meaning the words make collectively can bend a person over, sick to the stomach and cringed in the face. Happy songs were of sad and brutal ideas, like the violence and bloodshed (the bleeding – the image of the blood being poured out of the bucket from the truck suddenly invaded my mind as I typed the word, “bleeding”) from war. These scenes made me think of how, in order to save some sanity for yourself, you would have to have some escape, some happiness, to dress up the violence in – kind of like the guy who saw the war through his camera. He didn’t see the war; he saw a movie or a series of pictures. Once we lose a grip on happiness, the idea of being safe while viewing a scary documentary, instead of being part of it, we lose ourselves, just like he did when he couldn’t stand seeing the horses with flies surrounding the dying eyes. I myself was glad to be watching the film as a film instead of taking part in Ari’s and Ari’s friend’s memories. Not only can we seek happiness through song, or through camera; we also seek happiness in the face of violence by pushing the violence out of our memories, like what Ari did. However, Ari accepted that there is that horrible truth, that horrible violence and sought to find it to end his guilt of living in denial. Does that mean that all who are happy when violence is staring at them are in denial? I think so. But who said denial is a bad thing?

At the end of the film, we see the real images of the massacre. No more happy songs with violent and bloody undertones. We see the stark truth, the stark reality. We hear crisply the cries of the women from their open mouths of despair. The rubble and the children under them.

The truth really does hurt.

I did some research about the film and as it turned out, the protagonist, Ari, was also the film-maker and he (film-maker) had experience in the Israel Defense Forces during the 1982 Lebanon War. He really knew how it must have felt to participate in it and this film was probably his reaction to his experience or perhaps the film is semi-autobiographical.