About a Girl

Throughout the course of Neutral Milk Hotel's 1998 masterpiece, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Jeff Mangum constantly laments the fact that he can not go back in time to save his true love, Anne Frank. In the young Ms. Frank, Mangum sees the ultimate in beauty, innocence, sex, and death, recurrent themes of the album. The back story is that Jeff read The Diary, then walked around for three days crying, and finally wrote some of the most achingly beautiful music ever. Then he had a nervous breakdown, never to be heard from again. Quite a story, and quite a record. But it appears that Mr. Mangum choose the wrong girl to obsess over (but hey, we've all been there).

The proper dream girl for obsession of the Nazi era is almost certainly Sophie Scholl, and a new film, Sophie Scholl: The Final Days is now playing in a US theater near you. The film documents the final six days of her life (also her brother Hans and comrade Christoph Probst). As the time span covered is so short, they do not really get into the history of the resistance group the Sophie is a part of, the White Rose Society. However, the basic idea becomes clear throughout the film: Sophie is a part of an anti-Nazi resistance group. But this group does not fight with bullets or pipe bombs. They fight with words and ideas.

This is certainly not an "action" film. Nor is it a love story, and contains nothing even approaching the standard "sex scene." Doesn't sound like the makings of a blockbuster, but that's a good thing. The only action comes at the beginning, and the very end. There is an element of suspense, but the conclusion is easily deduced from the title (and the history). The question is, How do we get there?

Most of the movie consists of dialogue, mostly between Sophie and her interrogator, Detective (?) Mohr. At first, the goal is simply to get Sophie to confess to her crime (her brother is being simultaneously questioned) of distributing leaflets, and trying to get her to "name names." But eventually the discussion turns to much more philosophical questions, and this is where it gets interesting. The show trial near the end also contains very interesting exchanges between the judge and the accused. I won't spoil any of the details of the conversations, because they are best revealed in context. The film also has, as you would expect, quite a few tear-jerker moments, and it was all this student could do to keep his eyes dry while learning the mundane details of menu costs.

While Anne Frank was killed for who she was (a Jew), Sophie Scholl was killed for what she believed. And not even really that, but rather for expressing what she believed. The Nazis were not idiots, and they distinctly knew that ideas are a dangerous weapon, and that the maintenence of a total state (or any state, for that matter) requires a combination of physical strength (guns) and an obedient population. Ideology and mythology are wonderful tools for keeping a population on your side. Sophie and her co-conspirators presented an obvious threat to that ideology, and this story of heroism is also quite a cautionary tale, for both sides, in fact.