Planet Auschwitz: Holocaust Representation in Science Fiction and Horror Film and Television by Brian E. Crim

Abstract

Reviewed by: Planet Auschwitz: Holocaust Representation in Science Fiction and Horror Film and Television by Brian E. Crim Monica Black Brian E. Crim. Planet Auschwitz: Holocaust Representation in Science Fiction and Horror Film and Television. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020. 280 pp. In 1961, during the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the writer Yehiel Dinur, better known to much of the world as Ka-Tzetnik, testified, as he put it, from "the planet of Auschwitz." Dinur, who described himself to the court as "fall-out" from that planet, became so overwhelmed trying to relate his experiences that he collapsed on the stand. Brian E. Crim's new book begins by recounting that moment of unspeakable abjection, one that laid bare the gap between what survivors of the Holocaust knew and endured and any assurance that those who came after could comprehend it. In the most straightforward sense, Planet Auschwitz's subject matter is how science fiction and horror on screen have drawn on Holocaust imagery and themes and narratives to allow us, the viewers, to imagine unimaginable experiences. And yet the book offers much more than that. It is about moral knowledge and its limits, and the means at our disposal, such as they are, to confront those limits. Crim makes very clear that mystifying the Holocaust, or treating it as something by definition outside our comprehension, is not his aim. Rather, he wants to show how filmmakers, screenwriters, and producers have used the richly imaginative [End Page 425] genres of sci-fi and horror to explore a subject that, at its core, resists knowledge, even as we compile fact upon fact and book after book about the Nazi genocide. Knowledge of the Holocaust has been heavily mediated from the very beginning. As the camps were liberated, they were documented by the Allied armies on film, creating the first widely distributed visual record of the genocide. That visual record in turn "permanently altered notions of horror" (7). Horror directors use iconic Holocaust imagery—boxcars, a railway line, a storage room filled with toys and shoes—to evoke dread. And even some realist Holocaust films use horror framing to elicit the audience's empathy. In each of the book's six chapters, Crim shows how the Holocaust has—philosophically, ethically, visually, epistemologically, thematically, psychologically—altered horror and sci-fi, and how the images and ideas those genres have generated continually reshape our consciousness of the Holocaust in turn. This entangling of reality and film can be seen in the figure of the zombie. Zombie narratives created after the Second World War, Crim argues, were "undoubtedly inspired by liberation footage, photographic evidence produced in concert with war crimes trials" (33). He goes on to trace this interpenetration of history and film through the example of the AMC television show The Walking Dead, a series filled with scenes that intentionally evoke the Holocaust—dense woods and a railway junction called Terminus, where newcomers are stripped and then devoured. The zombie is also a metaphor, Crim shows, for history's insistent, remorseless presence, even as it remains only partly communicable. Chapter 2 looks at two films in tandem: Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker (1964) tells the story of a Holocaust survivor who struggles to connect with anyone in a society willfully and cruelly indifferent to his experiences. In HBO's The Leftovers, a huge portion of Earth's population has simply and suddenly disappeared. Both The Pawnbroker and The Leftovers allow audiences to reflect on what Alan Mintz called the "tremendum"—an "event of such awful transcendence that it cleaved history into a before and after" (57). While The Pawnbroker deals directly with the Holocaust's aftermath for its main character, The Leftovers is not "about" the Holocaust. And yet it is, Crim suggests—as an imaginative attempt to grapple psychologically with losses and absences that cannot be accounted for within standard frames of reference. One of Crim's most powerful themes concerns the inescapable knowledge that the Holocaust resulted, at least in part, from the modern state's vast war-making capacities, dehumanized science, and technocratic instrumentalism. That means that the world that made the Holocaust was not made by the Nazis...