Legitimation

Art Spiegelman's Complete Maus (Vol. 1 and 2)

I tried to take more time reading this comic, but I ended up reading it pretty fast to get through it. Partially because I didn't have much time in my busy schedule, but also because I wasn't all that interested. The truth is that I'm pretty sick of hearing about the Holocaust, and if that makes me a bad person then so be it.

I did think this was a worthwhile read from a literary stand point, but about a day after finishing it I found the comic pretty much fading from my memory. The whole recount of the event of the Holocaust didn't have much of an impact on me, which is probably because I'm so familiar with it all now that it doesn't horrify me anymore. Kind of like how when I was young horror movies, hell even X-Files PREVIEWS, used to scare the crap out of me, but now I haven't been scared by a movie in I don't know how many years. You get conditioned after a while, which is sad but the truth.

The artwork wasn't anything special either. There were a lot of times where I had to pause and decide if I should read the text first or look at the visuals. And that took me out of the story, and so I don't think the novel as a whole was put together very well. I did love the artistic choice to represent people from different nationalities as their appropriate animal forms though (e.g. Jews as mice and Germans as cats). That I found to be very impactful.



Film
Barefoot Gen

I had never even heard of this movie before, but I'm glad I was able to make the time to watch it. This is a really strong story, and I guess it makes sense that it would be as it's an autobiography of Keiji Nakazawa - who survived the Hiroshima bombing.

I really think that this would be a good movie to show to students in class. I remember being slightly bored in like 7th grade when I had a trimester when my teacher taught us about the Holocaust and WWII. The film brings home some of the horrors from the event, but it also doesn't try and place the blame on America. In the end, I think that just makes the film even more powerful since it would be so easy to make a movie more "anti-American."