Schindler's List on its didactic simplifications that it can only show morality as always absolute and homogeneous. In the rarefied universe of the movie, there is no hint of the “gray zone” about which Primo Levi wrote with such lucidity, no awareness of the agonizing choices and ethically intolerable alternatives that Jews were compelled by their tormentors to confront moment by moment as part of staying alive in the camps. Desperate with hunger and fear or not, the Jews in Spielberg's account have to continue to help one another at every turn and without exception, because, in a film whose representation of good and evil is so simplistic, only by being completely pure can they function as appropriate objects of our sympathy.

But life finds it extraordinarily hard not to be on the side of whatever pulses with energy; and the passivity of the film's Jews and the increasing sentimentalization of Schindler have the curious effect of making Amon Goeth the most compelling figure in Schindler's List. Ralph Fiennes plays Goeth brilliantly (just as Liam Neeson plays Schindler himself, and Ben Kingsley plays Itzhak Stern), and what we might call the viewer's affective identification, the focus of his fascination and attention, is directed toward Goeth in much the same way as it fixes on Iago whenever he enters a scene in Othello. Moral lessons need moral density in order to move one at all, and it is the absence of that density that vitiates Spielberg's film in spite of, perhaps even as a direct result of, its zealous efforts to construct a morally unequivocal story.

It would be easy to put together a detailed catalogue of the film's most embarrassing moments, including lengthy set pieces like Schindler's virtual apotheosis as a modern Christ figure in his sermon to the awestruck Jews looking up at him from the Brinnlitz factory floor (a direct crib from every Hollywood sand-and-sandals epic, from The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur to Jesus Christ Superstar), or the clumsy literalization of George Steiner's meditations on Nazism in the scene of an SS officer sitting down to play “either Mozart or Bach” in a room “cleansed” of its Jews only moments earlier during the savage annihilation of the Kraków ghetto. But such a catalogue would be curiously beside the point, if only because many of the film's passionate advocates have already noticed—and quickly excused—each of the lapses it contains. Virtually every laudatory discussion I have come across has been careful to register some criticism of the very scenes I have just mentioned, but without permitting that acknowledgment to temper its overall praise beyond the briefest of hesitations. For me, one of the most disturbing of all the film's effects is this readiness to suspend critical judgment, with its implicit premise that any work that aims to make accessible to a large audience even a portion of so crucial a story ought to be exempt from careful evaluation because of that intention.

Part of the general reluctance to think critically about Schindler's List arises, I suspect, because in the face of suffering on as great a scale as the Holocaust, there is a general freezing up of normal intellectual discriminations. Yet these moments of confrontation with the monstrous require more, not less, clarity and demand a greater measure, rather than an abdication, of the ability to concentrate on fundamental distinctions. If there is an elitist position in this whole discussion, I believe it is represented by those who recognize the film's evasions and simplifications but are willing to overlook them because of their hope that it will teach people about the Holocaust who otherwise would never take an interest in it. It is this kind of condescension, the conviction that while “we” may read Primo Levi or see Claude Lanzmann's Shoah for our knowledge of the Holocaust, “they” could never be expected to do so, that seems to me deeply arrogant. Hence, when as intelligent a reviewer as Bryan Cheyette celebrates Schindler's List in the Times Literary Supplement because it is “the best film on this subject within its particular set of conventions,” the hollowness of such praise is especially demoralizing. “Its particular set of conventions” is precisely what makes it impossible for Schindler's List to succeed in any more than the most trivial of ways, and by now the triviality of those conventions has rippled outward from the film to debase the terms within which the Holocaust itself is discussed.

For the moment at least, the most audible public discourse on the fate of European Jewry under the Nazis is being framed by the context of Spielberg's movie. The worrisome question is how long this moment will last. There is a cultural version, as well as an economic one, of “Gresham's law”: “bad money drives out good,” and in the ways a society takes up and defines the issues that engage its attention, the success of an appealingly facile articulation can set to the side, or even silence altogether, more complex and troubling expressions. This is also why to speak about a “Schindler's List Effect” is by now perhaps more useful than to concentrate exclusively on the film. Among the most vertiginous of these effects is the way the Holocaust is currently at risk of being presented, if only in people's first exposure to the subject, chiefly as the factual “basis” for Steven Spielberg's movie. The Mallarméan boast that “everything in the world exists in order to end in a book” has reached an abject incarnation in the more contemporary notion that only what has been presented on screen can continue to have significance today, that for us either “everything in the world exists in order to end up in a popular movie” or it will lose its hold on our interest altogether. Aided in this by both Democratic and Republican political leaders, as well as by an eager contingent of high school teachers, Steven Spielberg has encouraged free, and often even mandatory, showings of his movie for students in ethnically mixed school districts throughout the country, because, in the filmmaker's words, “this is a story about tolerance and remembrance, and it is for everyone. … [It] represents racial hatred everywhere in the world.” At present, there appears to be widespread official support for the assumption that screening a film about the horrors inflicted on European Jews will improve relations between African-Americans and Jews in this country, especially in urban high schools and universities.

Spielberg has insisted repeatedly that his movie is as pertinent to the Bosnian Muslims or African-Americans as it is to Jews. In an inconsequential sense, he is right, because in spite of all its scrupulous specificity in the matter of local props, settings, and details, Schindler's List is so conventional and formulaic at its imaginative core that it actually engages no real historical catastrophe—and hence excludes none either. This eagerness to interpret the Holocaust as a parable of universal suffering—when its very essence was a deliberate, systematic, and, if such a word can be permitted in this context, “principled” denial of even minimal humanity to those it condemned to genocidal extermination—bespeaks a characteristic American urge to find a redemptive meaning in every event. This is why, then, Spielberg decided to concentrate on a small group of Jews who survived and on the good German who aided them, rather than on all the millions who did not live and the millions of Germans and German sympathizers who did nothing to help.

Beyond the transparent grotesqueness of trying to extract an uplifting meaning from the Holocaust, the attempt to use it as a sort of emotional and moral object lesson to foster racial tolerance has been derisively challenged by many of those to whom these lessons are specifically directed. Although Castlemont High School in Oakland received the widest coverage in the national media, it is not the only school in which a showing of Schindler's List clearly did not lead to any rapprochement in its student body. Instead, it helped trigger a bitter controversy, as different ethnic groups competed over whose history had been more traumatic. After more than sixty Castlemont students who had been taken for a required viewing of Schindler's List (on Martin Luther King Day!) were ejected from the movie theater because they continued to talk and laugh throughout some especially brutal scenes, the predictable but still disheartening accusations of black anti-Semitism versus Jewish ignorance about the suffering of African-Americans reverberated throughout both groups.

The whole notion that whatever hostility and misunderstanding exists between two ethnic groups living in the United States today could be diffused by showing that one of them had, in another time and country, suffered catastrophic persecution, appears both psychologically and historically naïve, willfully so. In spite of such pious wishes, there is no reason whatsoever to assume that the sight of Jews being brutalized by the Nazis will do anything to change the ways in which American Jews are viewed today. Such a project testifies to only two things: the longing for quick and painless solutions to complicated social problems, and a radical confusion between the box-office success of a movie and its capacity to make people re-evaluate their prejudices.

Predictably enough, when Spielberg himself visited Castlemont High, he enthusiastically endorsed a new program instituted as a result of the controversy that followed the initial screening of Schindler's List. The title of the new course is “The Human Holocaust: The African-American Experience.” Clearly, in a culture as wedded as ours to the notion that victimhood endows one with special claims and rights, the scramble to attain that designation for one's own interest group is as heated as any other race for legitimacy and power. But victimhood, as this conflict over ownership of the term holocaust makes clear, is not a fixed category, and there is something depressing in the clamor of competing voices to prove whose distress has been more persistent and devastating, and whose claims to compensatory rectification are therefore more worthy. But because any sense of identity as constituted primarily by victimization is an extraordinarily problematic basis for either an individual or a group to build upon, what we need to do is question the centrality of the category itself, not simply apply it with more ecumenical generosity.

At the level of its explicit didacticism, Schindler's List is deeply complicit with the sentimentalization of victimhood as a guarantor of inner nobility, while at the level of the affective identification that it triggers, the film is equally complicit with the fascination exercised upon our imagination by the spectacle of absolute evil and power. Yet there is no dialectic, no inner struggle between these two contradictory impulses in the film: they coexist effortlessly because each is represented entirely within the most familiar moviemaking conventions. Spielberg's real talent has been to use the Holocaust as a plausible backdrop so that he can invoke both of these conventions simultaneously for their emotional charge while seeming to offer us something morally probing and original.

In my local video store, there is now a shelf of films about both the Holocaust in particular and World War II in general. Its label reads, simply: “Videos in the Category of Schindler's List.” A small manifestation, no doubt, but one that seems to me an accurate gauge of the “Schindler's List Effect.” Spielberg's movie does not merely, in Claude Lanzmann's devastating phrase, “fabricate archives,” it is already beginning to affect the way our culture understands, historically orders, and teaches how the Holocaust should be remembered—and effects like these require a sharp-eyed and unembarrassed resistance.