Timeless Europe - Village Magazine

6 0 December - January 2017

CULTURE

HE STORY goes that Steven Spielberg

first heard of the cartoon character

Tintin when French reviewers surmised

that his 1981 megahit, 'Raiders of the

Lost Ark', must have drawn deeply from

the adventures of the globetrotting boy reporter.

As a result, Spielberg became a fan of the stories

by the Belgian cartoonist Hergé, and thirty years

later he released 'The Adventures of Tintin'.

Spielberg’s adaptation came out in 2011. While

it cannot be described as a megahit, its box-office

take of around $375m was almost three times

what it cost to make. Contrast this with 'Raiders

of the Lost Ark', which cost only $18m to make,

but raked in $389m, a sum that reaches almost

$1bn when adjusted for inflation.

But a more striking contrast between these

movies becomes apparent when we adjust not for

inflation, but for changing attitudes to racial ste-

reotypes. The 'Indiana Jone's film and its sequels

are replete with extremely foreign foreigners,

heavily accented, exotically weird, and many of

them, particularly the dark-skinned ones, devi-

ous, atavistic and bloodthirsty. Spielberg’s 'The

Adventures of Tintin' avoids all of these by featur-

ing no more than a couple of spoken lines by

non-white characters, even though a large part of

the movie is set in Africa.

Readers of the Tintin books will know that this

is a very strange thing to do. Hergé’s books are in

many ways about the moments of contact

between our white western European hero and

people who, if they have any unifying character-

istic, are ethnically and racially unlike Tintin.

Indeed, there is barely a page in the 24 albums

where ethnic or racial difference is not present, in

more or less explicit forms.

Watching 'The Adventures of Tintin', then, is an

experience notable for a lack of frisson. This is

also due to the unaimed-for oddness achieved by

the 3D motion-capture animation, which plunges

every character into the depths of the uncanny

valley. But it is also due to the blandness of its

cast of characters. The original Tintin was always

endowed with a kind of inoffensive nullity, his

near-featureless face and uncontoured personal-

ity serving as a simple conduit to the really

interesting bits in the books - the quirky charac-

ters, the derring-do, the amazing locations and,

above all, the thrilling otherness of others.

Timeless

Europe

The stereotypes

about Europeans,

traced in Tintin books,

are changing

by Cormac Deane

Hergé’s books are about

the moments of contact

between our white western

European hero and people

who are characteristically

ethnically and racially

unlike Tintin

December - January 2017 6 1

The first Tintin cartoons appeared in the early

1930s. The rabidly anti-Communist Tintin in the

'Land of the Soviets' was quickly followed by the

explicitly, outrageously racist 'Tintin in the

Congo'. After these, Hergé’s racism became

slightly more nuanced and so, for instance, we

see sympathy for the fate of Native Americans at

the hands of the white men in 'Tintin in America',

while Tintin openly discusses Orientalist stereo-

types of China with his Chinese friend in 'The

Blue Lotus'. But of course these gestures provide

cover for the core anti-American and anti-Japa-

nese values that infuse these two stories.

It comes as no surprise, in this light, when we

learn that Hergé worked for Le Soir newspaper

while it was under Nazi control during the war

years, and it fits that 'The Shooting Star', which

came out in instalments during 1941-1942, has

anti-American and anti-Semitic elements.

Strange to observe, then, that Spielberg should

draw from this tainted well, and more so that he

should base 'The Adventures of Tintin' on books

that were published in these collaborationist

years: 'The Crab with the Golden Claws' (1941),

'The Secret of the Unicorn' (1943), and 'Red Rack-

ham's Treasure' (1944). Strange because of

Spielberg’s spirited attacks on Nazism in the

Indiana Jones films and of course in 'Schindler’s

List'. Admittedly, the anti-Semitic content of

these three books is minimal, but the film is nev-

ertheless a collaboration between Spielberg,

who made a hero of the non-collabo-

rating Oskar Schindler, and Hergé.

Collaboration is a two-way process

that requires shared language and

ideas, and meeting the other person

part way. The hero of 'Schindler’s List'

knows this, as we see him obliged to

work with the SS in order to pursue his

own goals (indeed, he was himself a

member of the Nazi Party). So, if Hergé

collaborated with the Nazis, then the

Nazis collaborated with him. That is,

since he was no strident ideologue, he

was merely inoffensive from the point

of view of the Nazis. Perhaps the seeds

of his later, more condescending-lib-

eral tendencies in relation to race were

already apparent at this time. Certainly

the bland, blameless version of Hergé

who managed to get himself removed

from the postwar blacklist of collabo

rators as early as May 1946 is the one

who is celebrated today. On the evi-

dence of the Hergé museum in

Louvain-la-Neuve and the attractive Tintin art

that adorns gables and trams in Brussels, the

narrative of Hergé as “a blunderer rather than a

traitor”, as he was found to be in a 1945 investi

gation, has become the established one.

The golden years of the Tintin books were still

to come, and although the racial stereotyping

and colonial fantasies continued apace, they

were generally more sensitively executed as time

went on. Unless, of course, you count the offen-

sive depictions of Germans and other Eastern

European fascist types, which abound. They also

abound, of course, in Hollywood, and Spielberg’s

output is of a piece with this. For Hergé as well as

Spielberg, Nazi-period Germans and their collab-

orators are grotesque characters, with the

expected array of German ethnic/racial features:

they are effete, vain, briskly cruel, maniacally

driven and (the great Teutonic sin) efficient.

These characteristics would have been per

fectly captured by the great Klaus Kinski, whom

Spielberg invited to play the Nazi interrogator

in 'Raiders of the Lost Ark'. But he turned it

down, commenting later in his memoir, "as

much as I'd like to do a movie with Spielberg,

the script is as moronically shitty as so many

other flicks of this ilk”. In the end, the role was

memorably played by the English television

actor Ronald Lacey – he’s the one whose palm

is permanently scarred when he plucks a red-

hot metal artefact from a fire.

With 'Bridge of Spies' in 2015, Spielberg

returned to what he has called “timeless

Europe”, that vaguely defined early- to mid-20th

century version of a Europe that still has one foot

firmly in the ethnic mosaic of the past, and the

other on the footpaths of Mitteleuropa metropo-

lises bustling with open-air markets, bourgeois

theatre-goers and public trams with wooden

floors. But 'Bridge of Spies' is set in the 1950s

and the German stereotypes are undergoing a

transformation. True, there are the usual uptight

leather-glove-wearing checkpoint guards who

yelp at our protagonists to produce their papers,

which they then examine minutely (where would

Hollywood be without this classic trope?). But on

the whole the screen-German personality has

changed after the war. Germans in the postwar

period are still as concerned with rules and pro

cedure as they always were, but now this

characteristic feels like a slightly endearing

national weakness. Nazism preyed on this, it

would seem, and now the real German persona

can step forward in all of its smooth, liberal, per-

fect-English-speaking greyness. From the James

Bond and Jason Bourne franchises to Homeland,

the modern German is reasonable, affable,

sober, vulnerable, and still at the heart of the

drama. Germany is too big to fail as a political,

cultural entity. This is even more the case with

the rejuvenation of anti-Russian sentiment in the

West and its movies, where the German bulwark

seems more necessary than ever.

It tells us a lot about the instability of contem

porary geopolitics that the declaration by the

German chancellor that she intends to rule for a

fourth consecutive term is greeted with relief in

western capitals. And there are other signs that

the postwar dispensation is drawing to a close:

for instance, since the Brexit vote in the summer,

there has been a sharp increase in enquiries

about taking up German citizenship by British

citizens whose Jewish forebears escaped the

Nazis; and, rather more obvious, the bookies are

offering 2/1 on France electing a fascist presi

dent in 2017.

One of the key moving forces in the establish

ment of what we now call the European Union,

the French statesman Jean Monnet, argued that

"Europe will be forged in crises, and will be the

sum of the solutions adopted for those crises”.

Frankly, a little bit of timelessness would be wel-

come right now.

Cormac Deane lectures in film and media at the

Institute of Art, Design and Technology.

Spielberg’s 'Bridge of Spies' in 2015, returned to

“timeless Europe”, that mid-20th century Europe

that still has one foot ﬁrmly in the ethnic mosaic

of the past, and the other on the footpaths of Mitteleuropa

metropolises bustling with bourgeois theatre-goers and

trams with wooden ﬂoors

Europeans