The Talkies / Streep Tease
Bayles, Martha
emergence of a small group of scholars, journalists and military specialists who have started to look afresh at the war. . . . For most of these scholars, their re-examination is not to prove...
...There was another child, a daughter, added fourfifths of the way through the novel, just in time for her own demise...
...For example, Sophie reveals her past to Stingo not once but several times, in increasing detail...
...Certainly Styron indulges himself...
...For most of these scholars, their re-examination is not to prove whether Vietnam was or was not a 'noble cause,' in President Reagan's phrase, but to find out what really happened and why...
...For example, "as opposed to the public caricature of him as a warmonger, Lyndon Johnson was actually reluctant to become more deeply involved in Vietnam," Butterfield noted...
...It contains so many ill-executed shifts back and forth between competing time frames, that when we learn the final truth about Sophie's Auschwitz experience, it seems more like an afterthought than a revelation...
...There is nothing wrong with relating events from the point of view of a detached observer -sometimes, when the events are particularly grim, this provides a needed distance...
...She responds in Polish, they smile at each other, and the camera pans backward through the rainglazed window of their Brooklyn rooming house...
...And Stingo keeps bringing us back to Brooklyn with sentences like this: "Sitting there in the wan light, both Sophie and I had, I think, a feeling that our nerve endings had been pulled out nearly to the snapping point by the slow accumulation of too much that was virtually unbearable...
...Only time, and a certain kind of silence, can begin to suggest the movement from hellish suffering to normality...
...than saving her own skin...
...And, "under the restrictions imposed by the Presidents, some American generals knew' almost from the start that they could not win the war...
...And, "while successive administrations did not understand that the Communists' appeal had its roots in progressive mental deterioration of Nathan, who tries to help her but ends up inducing her to commit suicide with him, are narrated by Stingo, a young Southerner who lives downstairs in their rooming house and bears a strong resemblance to William Styron...
...Sophie, the beautiful Polish Catholic survivor of Auschwitz, is sitting up in bed while Nathan, her handsome American Jewish lover, leafs through one of her books...
...The story of Sophie's experiences at Auschwitz, and of the Martha Bayles is film critic for The American Spectator...
...Her ruling passion, while imprisoned there, is supposed to have been her concern for her young son...
...and these are elements which Styron most emphatically does not know how to use...
...credited by, the "new findings" of the scholars...
...But Stingo is no Marlow, speaking in hushed, appalled tones about the heart of darkness...
...I think the real reason Wolfe gets a plug in this scene is because he is William Styron's favorite author, and the filmmakers wanted to indulge Styron-who, after all, wrote the best-selling novel Sophie's Choice...
...William C. Westmoreland claimed...
...And as for the "choice" of the title, we learn about that even later, when Sophie finally tells Stingo that upon arriving at Auschwitz she was forced to choose one of her children or allow them both to be gassed...
...In the process, they are challenging some of the most cherished beliefs of both the right and the left...
...Styron never comes right out and says that Sophie is attracted to Nazis, but the bulk of her story points in that direction: from her rejection by a domineering, Nazi-sympathizing father to her erotic nightmares at the camp...
...Needless to say, this sentence is well past the snapping point...
...He listed more leftist beliefs than rightist ones that are now being dis STREEP TEASE It is a tender scene...
...And, "the 1968 Tet offensive was a disastrous military defeat for the Communists, as Gen...
...He reads no Polish, but when she identifies the book as a translation, he enthusiastically recites the opening passage in the original English...
...But the effect of this timing, in such a loosely constructed novel, is ,to reduce the children to a couple of expedient stage props, tossed in to provide Sophie with a motive nobler...
...As a result, the United States was probably in a stronger position in Vietnam in 1972, just before the Paris peace accords, than at any previous point in the war...
...He is the sort of writer who takes on the heaviest themes, only to outweigh them with his own selfdramatization...
...On the contrary, the enormity of Auschwitz seems to bring out his garrulous side...
...He just rolls it all together into the same ball of soft, waxy verbiage...
...Slack are the sentences, and slack is the overall organization of this novel...
...Before telling us why she plans to offer herself to Hoess, Styron regales us with her stunning blonde beauty THE TALKIES 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1983...
...But possibility is not verisimilitude...
...But the novel does not even refer to the boy's existence until after a lengthy account of Sophie's attempted seduc the war-the cumulative weight of American firepower and spending in Vietnam dramatically undercut support for the Communists...
...I suppose this is Styron's way of building up suspense, but it diminishes our respect for Sophie by making her look like a broad who enjoys getting drunk and talking about Auschwitz...
...Those who have read Styron's other best-seller, The Confessions of Nat Turner, in which the rebel slave is portrayed as motivated by a secret passion for his white mistress, may detect a similar theme in Sophie's Choice-namely, the psychology of victims who become sexually involved with their oppressors...
...Read those two sentences again and you may conclude that some scholars are close to saying, roughly, that the United States had just about won the war, at which point it pulled out and lost...
...Styron provides a rationale for withholding such crucial facts: Sophie is so traumatized by guilt she has repressed the memory, Stingo is penetrating ever further into horror, and so forth...
...The literate filmgoer may think of several possibilities, but I doubt whether Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe will be high on the list...
...On and on he rattles about Sophie's great suffering, his own guilt and identity as a white Southerner, his burgeoning literary talent as he struggles to write his first novel, and his elaborately disastrous attempts to score with a succession of neurotic young virgins...
...centuries of Vietnamese xenophobia, many antiwar critics-like Frances FitzGerald in her best-selling Fire in the Lake-over-glamorized the Vietcong, the Southern insurgents, and underestimated the role that North Vietnam played in leading the war in the South...
...Of course it's possible that in 1946 such characters would be going into ecstasies over Wolfe's extravagantly dissipated prose...
...the problem of transitions is too great...
...Finally, "after Tet-though most Americans at home had given up on Few novelists have attempted to encompass such extremes within a single work...
...Yes, that's right...
...What book is this, which means so much to the war-ravaged heroine and Holocaust-obsessed hero of the film Sophie's Choice...
...O by Martha Bayles tion of the S$ camp commandant, Rudolf Hoess...
Vol. 16 • April 1983 • No. 4
