A Lesson in Moral Spectatorship

Abstract

1 Monday, 17 January 1994. A group of seventy students from Castlemont High School in Oakland, California take a field trip to view Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), the future Academy Award winning tale of a German businessman who comes to sympathize with the plight of Jews during World War II. The large student procession, including four adult chaperones, arrives late to the theater. A number of patrons, already standing in line, wait to enter. The management does not recall a phone conversation with a Castlemont teacher earlier in the week to prearrange seating and payment. Eventually the students are admitted, but the heavily attended show forces them to disperse throughout the 850-seat theater. As the movie begins, some students continue to converse with each other. They respond aloud to the diegetic action, jostling and teasing each other. A few audience members, frustrated, complain to ushers outside. Almost an hour into the movie, on screen, a few Nazis touring the grounds of a concentration camp pass by the site of a barracks-type building in the early stages of construction. One Jewish prisoner, an engineer, begins shouting to the workers that the structure is unsound and dangerous, and then flags down and reports this anxiously to the Nazi officer in charge. The officer listens attentively to the prisoner’s concerns, and then solemnly orders his guard to kill her. The guard drags the prisoner to her knees, and, in one perfunctory motion, draws his pistol and shoots her