Hollywood made some healthy contributions to the "rogue cop" genre in the 1990s. One was Internal Affairs, in which Richard Gere, as a cop gone bad, was corrupt, porkily sexual, running rackets, and siring children like a Greek god. Gere's character had no conscience; his ethical sense was entirely displaced onto the person of the grim, obsessed Internal Affairs officer who was investigating him. The screenplay for Internal Affairs was written by Henry Bean, who then expanded his brief with Deep Cover, the story of a narcotics agent (played by Laurence Fishburne) who is taken over, werewolf-like, by his undercover identity. Split men, men swallowed by their own shadows: Bean clearly had an interest in the roles and counter-roles of a divided world, but who could have predicted that he would one day write and direct a film about a Jewish Nazi?
The Believer gives us Danny Balint, former yeshiva boy and current racist skinhead, swastika T-shirt and all. The film won prizes at Sundance but then had a cold year without distribution, allegedly because of the amount of specific, articulate anti-Semitism it contains. It finally popped up on Showtime and is now in the cinemas. So let's have a look.
The skinhead in his ideal form is an animal, which is his appeal. Thebristled, chronic stare, the aggressively perfected skull -- for Danny (played byRyan Gosling) these are antidotes to Jewish weakness and neurasthenia. As aschoolboy he argued bitterly with his religious teachers against Abraham'spreparedness to sacrifice Isaac, to lie down before God and thus inseminate theJewish people with victimhood for all time. "Modern life is a Jewish disease!"he rants, and leaps into the electrically violent life of the skinhead. In thefilm's first scene he follows a Jewish student onto a subway train and attacks him.The contrast between the mumbling, book-laden victim and the energized aggressor,static crackling around his head like a halo, is sharp and seductive. Beating theboy to the ground Danny screams, "Hit me! Just hit me! PLEASE!"
As a skinhead he is almost too good, too effective, too full of ideas -- hestands out from the pack. (Gosling's face is hard but delicate, lacking thegristle and blockage of the classic skinhead.) Of course he cannot escapehimself. Lecturing a reporter on the squalor of Jewish mysticism and Jewishsexuality, his style is pedagogic, musical, even rabbinical. "Deracinated!" heinsists. "Did you get that word?" The Believer channels implacably down this psychic fault line, the wound of a man who has become his own antimatter, sucking in light and broadcasting darkness. A possible resolution is suicide. When the reporter threatens to expose Danny's Jewishness, the neo-Nazi pulls out a gun and says "If you put that in the paper, I'll kill myself."
Danny's trajectory through the white-power movement finds him keeping some oddcompany. Theresa Russell is a mysterious actress -- I have seen her described as"reliably awful." Better, perhaps, to say that in The Believer, her strange, heavily sauced delivery, the arched eyebrows putting naughty quotes around everything, is not inappropriate to the character of Lina Moebius, fascist doyenne. Every scene Russell has ever been in has seemed about to lapse into sex, to come apart in sticky webs of erotic languor, which is an interesting quality to bring to a far-right discussion group, a roomful of plain, potbellied extremists, their trouser fronts straining in illicit joy as the buzz-cut young man at the back stands up and calls for the killing of Jews to begin. Lina's co-host and ideological playmate is Curtis Zampf (Billy Zane in a shaggy wig). "But it'll be like Germany all over again!" he blusters. "Isn't that what we want?" asks Danny (the buzz-cut young man) "Germany all over again -- except this time done right." Lina's daughter is Carla (Summer Phoenix), who, smoldering, stares darkly at Danny from across the room -- she likes to be hurt when they are making love.
The Believer is too intensely preoccupied to admit much in the way of wit or zesty one-liners, but there are some lighter moments. Out at a white-power retreat in the countryside, Danny sees two skinheads hunched over a board, moving pieces across a map. "Stalingrad?" he asks. "Gettysburg!" is the enthusiastic reply. "We're fighting it with World War I technology -- it's a fuckin'bloodbath!" Later, Danny takes the crew into a kosher deli for a bit of fun; the faces of his brother skins are clear and happy as he goads the waiter with his knowledge of kashrut. "Why can't you serve chicken with dairy? Do chickens give milk?" "It's my religion." "Religion is about the incomprehensible, not the idiotic! FUCK YOU!"
Nothing compromises, however, the awful, raging solitude at the film's core.Danny is alone with his situation. He has no foil, no one to take him on. Hisfellow goons are the usual pack of also-rans, lumpily various (a fat one, alittle one, a nasty one with big muscles) and easily manipulated. Friends andfamily from his other, Jewish life regard him with bemused weariness. The onlyeffective challenge to his system is mounted by slow, sullen Carla. "Why do youtalk about Jews so much?" she asks. "Hitler and Goebbels talked incessantly aboutJews!" he protests. "Is that why you became a Nazi," she asks, "to talkincessantly about Jews?" Carla seems stunned by life, somewhat incomplete, almostwithout will. She has no interaction with any other character: one could imagineher as Danny's private hallucination. What she is, in fact, is his soul -- injured,half-dormant, morbidly loyal, groping for truth or growth. In a kind of kinkyexperiment (or is it?) she asks Danny for Hebrew lessons and instruction inJewish law. "Know your enemy, right?" she says, gently drawing him out, elicitingfrom him the full complexity of his Jewishness.
The symptoms of faith chaotically reappear. Under his white T-shirt he wrapshimself in tzitzit. Vandalizing a synagogue with his urine-spraying buddies, he finds himself unable to desecrate the Torah -- all this even as he rises through the ranks of the Zampf-Moebius organization, becoming a spokesman and then a fundraiser. "We're going to build bridges to mainstream politics!" vows Curtis, improbably. "We'll have guest speakers! Chomsky! Stanley Crouch!"
A film this dense with ideas and argument risks becoming not a film at all but atext. The published screenplay of The Believer, for example, is a text. Daftly subtitled "Confronting Jewish Self-Hatred" (next week: Macbeth:Confronting Regicide), it comes freeze-dried with its own scholarly responses -- a series of appended essays, including one by a professor of rabbinism. Whether the publishers were too nervous to let the work stand alone or whether Bean thought it a genuinely good idea to swaddle his art in hermeneutic discourse -- midrash -- I don't know. It's an ironic fate, in any case, for a script whose main character fulminates punctually against the Jewish compulsion toward exegesis.
What saves the film from this swarm of commentary is the acting (Gosling andPhoenix are magnificent) and the brutal, essential purity of its central conflict.As a character Danny is faced classically, head-on, because -- freak of modernitythat he is -- he lives in the old world of Isaac Bashevis Singer, of The Slave and The Magician of Lublin. His relationship with Carla, his magnetic attraction to his own fate -- these are signs from the Singer universe, which is a place of testing but also a machine of revelation calibrated, with a precision that is either infinitely cruel or infinitely forgiving, to crack you right down to your center. To experience the fullness of this, both Singer and Bean suggest, is to achieve a kind of sainthood. Danny puts a bomb in the temple, timed to explode during a friend's premarital ceremony, and then insists on leading the ceremony himself. Alone at the altar, mouthing prayers, he waits for the blissful, upward drench of light that will release him. Having taken a Nietzschean hammer to his faith, having passed it through the white heat of its opposite, Danny finds he cannot duck the terms of his contract with God -- having been the only real skinhead in the film, he must now be the only real Jew.