Everybody’s History

Writers William Faulkner and James Baldwin both suggest the past is never past; we carry history in us. People’s stories show how this is so. One recent PBS chronicle explores an actor’s complex mixed roots history. Three movies that zoom in on war, religious misogyny, and a conflict between friends are among the many films competing for a single “Best Picture” 2022 Academy Award.

Doesn’t competition for something underly everything?

Synopses and spoilers follow.

“All’s Quiet on the Western Front,” based on Erich Maria Remarques’ novel, follows protagonist Paul Baumer, an optimistic, naïve student turned soldier. Paul’s enthusiasm quickly dissipates when he is assigned to collecting dead soldiers’ ID tags amid mud and blood in a German trench in France. Paul lives through battles, respite, and more death to eventually wait with fellow soldiers for the armistice to start on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1919. Instead, fifteen minutes before that 11th hour, Paul’s commander, citing the German suffering that will follow the Treaty of Versailles, orders Paul and his fellows to attack French troops who are themselves waiting for peace nearby. Like automatons, Paul and his fellow soldiers march forward. WWI history suggests that both sides launched last minute attacks on each other.

While most WWI German soldiers fought for turf from trenches, soldiers stationed with Germany’s Ottoman allies were present while the Turkish government attacked the Armenians. For centuries, the Ottoman Muslim majority marginalized Armenians for being infidels (Christians,) being educated, and for prospering. Adolph Hitler, preparing for his lebensraum aggression, would scapegoat German Jews for similar reasons. Hitler is said to have remarked that no one would care about German Jews because no one remembered the “annihilation of the Armenians.”

Diaspora stories often play as survival stories. Survival stories involve more.

In PBS’s “Finding Your Roots,” Henry Louis Gates often asks his guests how they feel about discovering some heroic, ignoble, or tragic stories in their ancestries. In a recent “Finding Your Roots,” actor Joe Manganiello learned how his Armenian Greatgrandmother Rose survived the slaughter that befell her family. Then, Rose was picked up by relief workers and taken to a camp where she became pregnant by a German soldier. Rose’s child is Joe Manganiello’s grandmother. Manganiello seemed stunned at how he resembles his German great-grandfather, a soldier who returned to his hometown after the war. Further, Joe Manganiello’s paternal DNA revealed the hidden roots of Joe’s father’s strained relationship with his father.

In both war and even peace, women are particularly vulnerable to ethnic, religious, and cultural judgments linked to paternity. Women get pregnant. Women bear children.

“Women Talking,” is a film based on Miriam Toew’s novel inspired by rapes in a

Mennonite community from 2005-2009. The attackers drugged women with bovine tranquilizer. In the film, one attacker implicates others in the ongoing assaults that religious elders had long attributed to demonic activity and wild female imaginations. The women have two days before the men return home from jail to decide whether to just forgive the men, to stay and fight, or to leave.

The women can neither read nor write so they warily agree to trust the community’s schoolteacher, August, to record their deliberations. August is the returned son of a mother banished for non-conformity. The community despite needing August to teach the boys how to read, write, and do math, marginalizes August as a “failed farmer” and “two-bit teacher.”

August offers to marry Ona who, pregnant from rape, is called out as a “whore” who should keep quiet. Ona speaks anyway. Drugged like the other victims, Ona can’t be sure who attacked her and knows that if she stays, the community will take and place her child with another family, maybe even with her attacker’s family. In their representative-democratic discussions, the women consider life in the world and the afterlife. Ona suggests that mandated forgiveness might not be true forgiveness. Ona believes in love.

Salome’s tiny daughter was raped, and Salome believes she herself will commit murder if she stays in the community. Salome’s adolescent son does not wish to leave.

The fictional “The Banshees of Inisherin” takes place on an island off Ireland’s west coast where folk musician Colm abruptly rejects his friend and neighbor Padraic. Hurt, confused, and wanting to repair the rift, Padraic repeatedly asks Colm to tell him what’s wrong. Eventually, Colm tells Padraic that he, Colm will amputate his own fingers, one at a time, any time Padraic tries to talk to him.

The film depicts Colm in the Confessional, confessing “impure thoughts” while bristling when his priest suggests Colm’s silence toward Padraic might be wrong. Outside the “box,” when Colm’s bloody masochistic offering harms Padraic’s beloved pet, Padraic’s hurt grows into anger.

Life is an assemblage of stories about people who couldn’t see or believe what was happening to them. Post-traumatic stress is everywhere. Feelings stored in individual and collective bodies are stronger than facts.

Movies help us see.