Waltz with Bashir

My first date with Y. was on a Friday afternoon, Rothschild Avenue: I saw people drinking coffee and smoking, a teenagers' band, bicycles, unicycles, art for sale -- an epiphany of "normal everyday Israel" -- everything Jerusalem could never be. At the cafe in the center of the boulevard with the high stools, he showed me where they drew the first scene of *Waltz with Bashir*" - the nightmare scene where the snarling dogs come overturning the stools.

I know I'm a very belated movie critic, as the movie came out over a year ago, but in my defense I'll say I got to watch it with Y., who is an animator, and even drew a shot of the inside of the tank, and could point out how one of the girls dancing in the discotheque was a portrait of an animator who worked on the movie, and the unshaven man slouching across the Beirut street in flip flops was a portrait of his teacher at Betzalel Art School. The inside scoop.

Today on the bus I kept seeing the Tel Aviv street scenes disassociate as if they were drawn in my mind, and then back again to real. The way the ululating women of Sabra and Shatila suddenly turn from cartoon characters into real and then the movie stops. I was imagining how they had to simulate ululation for the movie, how they gathered them in a room together and said, "Scream like you mean it." But of course, the soundtrack was real women who were encountering the horror, not animations.

Circling around the evening: South Tel Aviv. The darkly knowing look on the face of a middle aged prostitute wearing a pretty ruffled mini-dress as I walk down Chelnov Street. I'm lying on the bed waiting for the movie to start, reading Y.'s copy of Frankenstein, which he tells me his father used to read to him when he visited him in military jail (Sorry Y.: maybe you shouldn't date a writer...) where he had gotten for refusing to serve and then writing about it for the paper.

Of course the movie is deeply disappointing in the way that it refuses responsibility. The main character's journey to understand his war experiences results in a kind of negative apotheosis: he blocked it out because he thought he was responsible, but in fact, he was only lifting the light fixtures. He wasn't involved in the massacre. He was there that day, yes, but the Israeli soldiers didn't really know what was going on, not the simple foot soldiers, not our young men.

And Ari Folman's beautifully lyrical memory of bathing naked in the sepia sea and stepping out into the refugee camp on the day of the massacre, buttoning up his khaki uniform, remains unexplained. The therapist friend in the movie says, "The sea is your fears, what's blocking you." Very unsatisfying. Since when is "the sea," fears? My Jungian friends would never agree to that. The therapist friend also says "'the camps' were in you way before Sabra and Shatila. Your parents were in the camps, right?" Also seems too easy to me.

Y. says the sea is the sea of tears from so much "shooting and crying" - which is the Hebrew expression for a kind of bleeding heart Israeli liberalism that takes pity on the soldiers who must commit the atrocities, without any sense of the context or ultimately the responsibility they bear. My boyfriend who suffered through his army service twenty years later seems like the bastard son of these left wing filmmakers smoking joints in Amsterdam, talking about the war in Lebanon, feeling helpless. All they want to do is make art for art's sake, or sell falafel to gullible Dutch health nuts, or be left alone. Y. says this movie is a kind of luxury of mourning and regret. We didn't really ccommit the massacre, but still look how sorry and traumatized we are. Today the Israeli army does much worse things and nobody regrets them.

I think the sea is something mysterious that Ari Folman couldn't really touch with his theories and fake therapists, but he could touch with his drawings: some further mystery in the experience of life and death, of soldiers emerging like babies from the amniotic sea and going off to kill. I can't put it into words either.

And me? I turn from animation too into the real and back into an animated figure. Girlfriend into me again in all my familiar unworded flesh, like some naked creature bathing in the sea, and back again to a nice girlfriend. I'm angry at Ari Folman for not taking responsibility, for not being a good father, but I know I'm playing the same games circling through my own dreams while terrible things are happening just outside the door.