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From Socialist Review, No. 186, May 1995, p. 24.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Death and the Maiden
Dir: Roman Polanski
It’s a reasonable assumption to make that Death and the Maiden will be a successful film. As a play it was widely acclaimed and its Chilean author Ariel Dorfman became a literary celebrity across the world – except in Chile itself.
What is strange about that is the fact that the play/film deals with an experience that is familiar to tens of thousands of Chileans. Its protagonist is a woman who was tortured after the military overthrow of the reformist government of Salvador Allende in September 1973. It is hard to imagine, let alone explain, the savagery with which the new military rulers took their revenge against socialists, trade unionists or anyone who had been active in the movements from below that grew up during the Allende period. Tens of thousands were tortured, murdered or disappeared.
For the next 17 years – until 1990 – Chile was governed by the same repressive regime headed by Augusto Pinochet. When an elected government finally returned to Chile, it was led by a man who had helped to engineer the 1973 coup.
The point of giving the background to Death and the Maiden is to emphasise that moral dilemmas cannot be discussed in the abstract. When the woman protagonist recognises her torturer, her reaction is to take revenge and extract from him the confession he tried to tear out of her. Her rage is entirely justified; she does not and cannot forgive. Her husband, a lawyer, counsels her to look at the great ethical and moral issues. Worse, he becomes an accomplice of the doctor/torturer. The key thing, he says, is reconciliation. Her emotion, in his view, is an obstacle to a greater moral purpose – forgiveness, which is a prelude to progress. Small wonder that in Chile these empty abstractions found no resonance.
The play ends as a mirror comes down from the ceiling to allow the audience to look at itself. It’s a clever theatrical device, but it has already taken the discussion away from the ground of history and into the realm of individual morality. It is not true that in some general sense we are all guilty for allowing it to happen; Chileans know that. Some did allow it to happen, some colluded in the torture – and some fought back, resisted, or at the very least hated what they saw.
Until 1973 Ariel Dorfman worked in Chile with a team of writers looking at the way in which popular culture shaped attitudes and values. But when he left Chile and went into exile, something curious happened. He continued to write in the US and became something of a spokesman for the Chilean exiles – in fact he became a sort of professional exile. He is an academic, speaks perfect English, is cultured and educated. His novels and writings took the issues of torture, repression and responsibility into an arena of abstractions, of dilemmas resolved in an unidentifiable setting. Widows, a novel, rehearses the confrontation between the torturer and the victim’s wife. But it is set in Greece – or somewhere in the region. His latest novel Konfidenz is written for a foreign audience, and set in Europe in 1939. But its occasional references to historical events can’t alter the fact that the dialogue is written in a kind of international speak. The result is that the words are just abstractions and all the moral dilemmas posed just experiments in word play.
Dorfman has provided his audience with a safe way to appear to address real moral questions without confronting the bitter and brutal experience that underlines such dilemmas. His credentials as an exile are impeccable and so the catharsis, the harmless and controlled release of emotion, is legitimate and it has no consequences. You don’t have to do anything, just glance at yourself briefly in a mirror and go out into the night. And if you did feel emotionally involved at first, you will emerge from Death and the Maiden reassured that all conflict can be reconciled. In the reality of 1995, Hollywood’s discovery of Death and the Maiden is deeply suspect. Its message – that reconciliation is the highest moral achievement – is not an abstract question; when the torturers go free, they provide a guarantee to persecutors everywhere that in the end the society will paper over their crimes for fear that the real responsibility of others will be exposed.
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Last updated: 3 November 2019