"The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand had come out and taken yours."
I finally sat down and took the time to watch The History Boys today, and if the above quote (or gobbet, if you want, though Hector would have at me) doesn't tell you, it was just wonderful. Differed from the play quite a bit in places; most of the monologues are naturally gone, and parts of the dialogue, which admittedly made me a little sad - a few bits I really love were cut, like Scripps coming to the conclusion that God is "this massive case of unrequited love", that he should get real and that we don't owe him anything. But, either way, the essence was there, I laughed a lot and it hit all the right points. And I may or may not have shed a tear or two at the end, with Mrs. Lintott and the boys and the future laid out. Lockwood's fate especially came as a bit of a shock, even though afterwards I remembered Charlie having mentioned it.
The scene where the boys, Hector and Irwin discuss whether or not you can - or should, even - teach the Holocaust will definitely have a place on my 'Best scenes' list from now on. And I decided it needs to be shared with you. Mr. Bennett, Mr. Hytner, I mean no harm in reproducing this text.
Yes, I know, it's long, but read!
Akthar: It has origins, it has consequences. It's a subject like any other.
Scripps: Not like any other, surely. Not like any other at all.
Akthar: No, but it's a topic.
Hector: They go on school trips there nowadays, don't they? Auschwitz. Dachau. What's always concerned me, is where do they have their sandwiches, drink their coke?
Crowther: The visitors' centre. It's like anywhere else.
Hector: Yeah, but do they take pictures of each other there? Are they smiling? Do they hold hands? Nothing is appropriate.
*snip*
Hector: Why can't we simply just condemn the camps outright as an unprecedented horror?
Lockwood: There's no point, sir! Everybody will do that! "The camps an event unlike any other." "The evil unprecedented." Et cetera, et cetera.
Hector: No! Can't you see that even to say "et cetera" is...monstrous? "Et cetera" is what the Nazis would have said. The dead reduced to mere verbal abbreviation.
Lockwood: All right, not et cetera. But given that the death camps are generally thought of as unique, wouldn't another approach be to show what precedents there were? Put them, well, in proportion?
Scripps: Proportion?!
Dakin: Well, no, not proportion, then, but putting them in context.
Posner: But putting something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained. And if it can be explained, it can be explained away.
Rudge: "Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner."
Irwin: That's good, Posner.
Posner: It isn't good. I mean it, sir!
Dakin: But when we talk about putting them in context, it's only the same as the dissolution of the monasteries. After all, monasteries had been dissolved before Henry VIII, dozens of them.
Posner: Yes, but the difference is, I didn't lose any relatives in the dissolution of the monasteries!
Irwin: Good point.
Scripps: You keep saying, 'good point'. Not 'good point', sir, true! To you, the Holocaust is just another topic on which we may or may not get a question!
Irwin: No! No. But this is history. Distance yourselves. Our perspective on the past alters. And looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground - we don't see it. And because we don't see it, this means there is no period so remote as the recent past. And one of the historian's jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be.
I love those boys. They seem know the characters so well. Samuel Barnett is everything I imagined and hoped Posner would be.
"I'm a Jew, I'm small, I'm homosexual, and I live in Sheffied. I'm fucked."
:heart:
Oh, and by the way, Logan - I also got a DVD box with no less than five Almodóvar films. Hable Con Ella, Todo Sobre Mi Madre, Mala Educación, Carne Trémula and Átame. Yay!
Our Lord Of The Rings (extended versions) marathon was great. Although I really do hope we didn't burn out the DVD player...
And I want a kitty of my own.
