This document provides a detailed summary and analysis of the film Life Is Beautiful by Roberto Benigni. It discusses the film's plot, which uses comedy and tragedy to tell the story of an Italian Jewish father who tries to protect his son by convincing him that their time in a Nazi concentration camp is just a game. It also analyzes the hugely polarized reactions to the film, with some praising its ability to find beauty and humor in darkness while others criticize it for trivializing or denying the Holocaust. The author examines these criticisms and defenses in depth, ultimately arguing that the film reflects deeper questions and anxieties about the relationship between art and morality.

1. CASEY HASKINS
Art, Morality, and the Holocaust:
The Aesthetic Riddle of Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59:4 Fall 2001
When Freud said that art can present “unsolved
riddles to our understanding,” he might have
added that artworks, like people, can also elicit
love and its opposites in ways that defy analysis.1
Such may have been the thoughts also of viewers
of the Art Spiegelman cartoon in The New Yorker
just before comedian-director Roberto Benigni’s
film Life Is Beautiful (La Vita È Bella), having
already won dozens of international awards,
swept the 1998 Academy Awards with prizes for
Best Actor, Best Foreign Language Film, and
Best Dramatic Musical Score. In the cartoon, a
gaunt prisoner sits against a barbed-wire fence
clutching an Oscar under the caption “Be a Part
of History and the Most Successful Foreign Film
of All Time.” The image bespoke the wildly dif-
ferent nerves touched by Life Is Beautiful’s story
of an Italian Jew with a penchant for Chap-
linesque play whose family is deported to a Nazi
death camp. As the awards attest, millions of
viewers worldwide were moved to laughter,
tears, and effusive testimonials to the film’s spir-
itual depth. (As one reviewer gushed, “It will re-
store your faith in movies!”) Yet more than a few
others, as Spiegelman’s image also hinted, found
the film appalling, with reactions ranging from
complaints that its use of comedy turns the Holo-
caust into kitsch to the more extreme charge that
the protagonist’s death in the narrative works al-
legorically to justify the Holocaust.2 Whatever
one’s own take on Benigni’s film, few artworks
in recent times, high or low, have had such a Ror-
schach-like effect on international mass audi-
ences, as is underscored by the fact that the line
between Life Is Beautiful’s admirers and critics
straddles divisions between mature, historically
aware adults and kitsch-addicted slackers, be-
tween Jews and non-Jews, and between those
who possess and those who lack personal ties to
the Holocaust. Given the truism that art’s larger
atmosphere of reception is in some sense part of
what it is, one might well ask whether this singu-
lar reception contains a lesson for aesthetics. But
what is the lesson?
For starters, the Life Is Beautiful phenomenon
offers a mirror of what art, and the perennially
unfinished effort to say what it is and why it mat-
ters, have become at a time when traditional op-
positions between high and mass art are blurred
in practice and theory, when critics are showing
renewed interest in traditional themes such as
beauty and the art/morality relationship, and
when our popular culture seems obsessed with
just about anything, from the sublime to the ridic-
ulous, pertaining to spiritual redemption. It is
also a time, as Theodor Adorno noted, when mass
pleasures possess conspicuously drug-like pow-
ers to reshape collective memory. If no sane per-
son would endorse Adorno’s hyperbolic dictum
that poetry after Auschwitz is barbarism, it is
easy enough to share some of his concern about
the anaesthetizing powers of contemporary film
and other cultural media, especially in light of
current politically charged discussions of Holo-
caust denial, the “Holocaust industry,” and re-
lated subjects.3 Such a constellation of themes
promises a rude awakening for anyone who, like
myself, set out to see Life Is Beautiful expecting a
fairly innocent night at the movies. To get confes-
sions out of the way, my own reaction to the film
evolved, over what turned into many viewings
and discussions with friends, students, and col-
leagues,4 from initial delight to an uneasy ambiv-
alence that now seems to me exactly the right re-
sponse to Benigni’s film. Was this reaction, I
wondered at first, due only to my own critical la-
ziness, or did it point to something further in the
film that was still eluding me and other critics?

2. That question led to a more basic one to which all
conflicted critics must sooner or later return:
What is the work about? In particular, might there
be some aspect of Life Is Beautiful’s form or con-
tent not captured in the usual earnest discussions
of whether it violates principles of the ethics and
aesthetics of Holocaust representation?
Only then was I able to consider that an an-
swer to that question is implicit in Life Is Beauti-
ful’s very title, for in a sense the film’s deeper
subject just is ethics and aesthetics.5 This is to
say that beneath its surface of Chaplinesque
comedy and Holocaust tragedy lies a deeper alle-
gorical story about the human need for beauty,
humor, and art, and also about the ends to which
this need is perennially exploited by artists, in-
cluding, by extension, Benigni himself. But
rather than presume to settle the quarrel over Life
Is Beautiful’s merits as film or as art—as I said, it
is a Rorschach test for more than just ordinary
differences of taste—I want to suggest instead
that what occasions the quarrel harbors an unex-
pected and provocative philosophical complex-
ity. For whatever Benigni meant to express
through this film (and being the Catholic son of a
father who was interned in a Nazi camp, he
surely had a lot to express), what he also did was
make a film that is, in effect, about art and the
conditions of its criticism. This aesthetic re-
flexivity, together with Life Is Beautiful’s unusu-
ally charged reception, make it an unexpectedly
poignant expression of our cultural moment. For
it invites us to revisit an old riddle of Western
aesthetics that has never gone away, a riddle that
reasserts itself with a vengeance in these times of
hyper-entertainment and post-Holocaust cultural
politics: What, besides making life beautiful, is a
film (or any other work of art) supposed to do?
To some culture-theoretic sophisticates, this may
seem a fool’s question; but then, as a venerable
tradition reminds us, it is sometimes only the
fool who is willing to point out the gaps and foi-
bles of soberer thinking. And Life Is Beautiful—
a film about fools, if not also, as its critics claim,
by and for them—has an odd way of doing just
this, for reasons of a piece with some of our
deeper anxieties about art itself.
I
To begin to see why, note first of all that Life Is
Beautiful is not quite a “Holocaust comedy” in
the sense often associated with earlier films like
Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, Ernst Lubitsch’s
To Be or Not to Be and Mel Brooks’s The Pro-
ducers. Life Is Beautiful is a tragicomedy, struc-
tured around a tension between the first half of
the narrative, containing the main comic se-
quences, and the second “tragic” half, contain-
ing the concentration camp scenes. (That this se-
quencing is crucial to the film’s narrative form
was presumably more conspicuous to Benigni’s
original Italian viewers than to many interna-
tional audiences, given the Italian practice of di-
viding screenings into two temporal segments
divided by an intermission.6) This incongruity is
anticipated at the beginning by a voiceover tell-
ing us that the story to follow is a simple one in
which, “like a fable, there is sorrow, and like a
fable, it is full of wonder and happiness.” Then
comes the story, centering around the sacrifice
an Italian Jewish father, Guido (played by
Benigni), makes for his wife, Dora, and little
son, Giosue (Joshua), in a Nazi camp, as re-
counted by the adult Giosue, who turns out to be
the invisible speaker in the voiceover. The
story’s first half is animated by the exploits of
Guido, who as we discover possesses remark-
able talents for enchanting the lives of others,
even—as with Giosue, whom he later hides
from the camp guards and manages to convince
that life there is a delightful game—for redeem-
ing them from evil. At the end of a story that be-
gins with Guido’s antic courtship of Dora and
grows by turns darker as they and Giosue are de-
ported to a camp, Guido is killed by a Nazi
guard; then Dora and Giosue have an exuberant
reunion after the camp’s liberation by American
soldiers.
Analyzing this story’s reception would be a
short task if it amounted simply to noting differ-
ent viewers’tolerances for misrepresentations of
the Holocaust. But that would beg the question
of whether the film is a misrepresentation of the
Holocaust—a question whose answer is hardly
obvious once we note that Life Is Beautiful is
neither a documentary, nor otherwise a recon-
struction of actual events, but is rather a film
whose fictional story describes itself as being
like a fable. To avoid prejudicing the outcome of
our inquiry, suppose we rephrase the question
along more traditional philosophical lines: To
what degree is this work of art true to a deeper
reality that pervaded a particular time and place
374 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

3. (in this case, that of the Holocaust)? Benigni’s
nonphilosophical critics need not be expected to
deploy detailed answers to such a question; even
so, an implicit theme in much of Life Is Beauti-
ful’s criticism is that the reality to which any re-
sponsible Holocaust representation must answer
will be a moral reality no less than one of bare
sociohistorical fact. And this theme carries un-
mistakable echoes of the early Western philoso-
pher of art who was also, in some ways, the first
philosophical prophet of film. I mean Plato, who
in the Republic famously likened much human
experience to that of prisoners compelled to
watch moving images on a cave wall; he argued
also that a mimetic artifact’s value will necessar-
ily reflect how faithfully it represents some ante-
cedently existent reality, its “original.” It is not
hard to detect an echo of both Platonic themes in
these words of The New Yorker’s critic David
Denby, whose review appeared opposite the ear-
lier-mentioned Spiegelman cartoon:
Comedy and art, Benigni wants us to believe, not only
keep the human spirit aloft but save lives. “Life Is
Beautiful” is soothing and anodyne—a hopeful fable
of redemption. It is also one of the most unconvincing
and self-congratulatory movies ever made. . . .
Benigni wants the authority of the Holocaust but not
the actuality of the Holocaust. Surely he knows that a
young child entering Auschwitz would be immedi-
ately put to death, and that at every camp people were
beaten and humiliated at random. He shows us noth-
ing like that.
And again:
In the end, Benigni protects the audience as much as
Guido protects his son; we are all treated like chil-
dren . . .
And again:
The enormous worldwide success of Life Is Beautiful
suggests that the audience is exhausted by the Holo-
caust, that it is sick to death of the subject’s unending
ability to disturb. The audience’s mood is understand-
able, but artists are supposed to be made of sterner
stuff, and surely an artist cannot transcend what he
never encounters. . . . Life Is Beautiful is a benign
form of Holocaust denial. The audience comes away
feeling relieved and happy and rewards Benigni for
allowing it, at last, to escape.7
Denby’s remarks put the lie to naïve readings
of the film as being simply an uplifting fable of
redemption; but the question of whether it en-
gages in “Holocaust denial” is more compli-
cated than he would have us believe. Denby is
certainly right that Life Is Beautiful is not con-
vincing as a literal representation of the Holo-
caust. The camp scenes are about as evocative of
the real death camps as an episode of Hogan’s
Heroes: the characters are cartoon-like, and
there are no depictions in the film of the extreme
violence and dehumanization that were an
all-but-unrepresentably real part of life in the
death camps. (The closest the film comes in this
regard is the scene where Guido, carrying the
sleeping Giosue through the camp, encounters a
surreally sculptural heap of bodies.) And
Denby’s broader assessment of the larger con-
texts of Life Is Beautiful’s reception also hits the
mark in many ways. One can imagine many con-
temporary viewers, used to a cultural diet of
hyperreal, superficially cathartic spectacles,
having all too little awareness of what distin-
guishes a fabular film like Benigni’s from a
more serious documentary such as Alain
Resnais’s Night and Fog, Claude Lanzmann’s
Shoah, or James Moll’s The Last Days, if they
have in fact even seen such films or have much
independent knowledge of the realities they de-
scribe. To say that is still scarcely to begin a con-
sidered critique of how reality is reflected, re-
fracted, and manufactured by our postmodern
culture industry. But large-scale social critique
is one thing; the criticism of specific films and
other cultural products is another, and some
viewers may well wonder whether Denby’s ar-
gument conflates these projects in a way that
scapegoats Benigni’s film for ills of the cultural
system that are larger, more disturbing, and
hardly the work of any single artist. In this sense
one might argue that Denby, far from going too
far in taking Life Is Beautiful to task, does not go
far enough.
These observations draw further support from
the tension between Denby’s complaint that the
film misrepresents the Holocaust and the fact
that it conspicuously distances itself from literal
or “realistic” depictions of its historical setting.
The story is presented not from the deperson-
alized position of a documentary narrator, but
through the eyes of the adult Giosue remember-
ing his childhood, a fact that makes the main
Haskins The Aesthetic Riddle of Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful 375

4. story not an ordinary first-order narrative but a
second-order narrative, a “frame tale,” with its
own attendant logic. Giosue further separates
the story from literal depictions in describing it
as “like a fable.” There thus seems nothing
untoward about how the narrative preserves,
within the frame of Giosue’s recollection, the
simplified vision of a complex moral world that
little children have—a vision that, if the chil-
dren are lucky, their parents might let them re-
tain at least for a while. (Here the film invites
various psychoanalytic readings, such as that it
constitutes an adult’s meditation on the healthy
narcissistic satisfactions afforded him in child-
hood by loving and heroic parents—a vision of
self-formation, so far described, with which any
of us should find it easy enough, at least wish-
fully, to identify.) All of these facts, taken to-
gether, work against Denby’s claim that Benigni
treats his audience like children. As one irate re-
spondent to his New Yorker review noted, nor-
mal adult viewers are hardly likely to believe,
with the innocent Giosue, that the showers in
the camp are just showers, let alone that camp
life is a game; rather, “It’s Denby who is treat-
ing us all like children.” The operative word is
“all”: even granting that many of Benigni’s
viewers may bring to their experience of the
film a less-than-mature understanding of the
Holocaust, what of those who do have such an
understanding and who, in terms of cinematic
experience alone, were moved not only by Life
Is Beautiful but also by films like Shoah or The
Last Days or Night and Fog?8
What is most unsatisfactory about Denby’s
Holocaust-denial argument, in the end, is his
way of writing as if there were a clear touch-
stone for assessing the truth claims of Holocaust
representations, a criterion for determining
which accounts of the Holocaust do and do not
“deny” its reality. But is there? As another re-
spondent to Denby’s review, herself a self-de-
scribed Holocaust child survivor, noted:
Because the Holocaust happened to so many different
people, it also happened in as many different ways. It
is not one single historical event but millions of per-
sonal events. So anyone who says that it would never
have happened this way is wrong. The Holocaust hap-
pened every way imaginable. Benigni’s film told a
truth. Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” told a truth. Does
Denby know the truth better than Benigni does? He
writes that “a young child entering Auschwitz would
be immediately put to death.” I have a friend who is a
child survivor of Auschwitz: her mother was able to
hide her in a clinic within the camp.9
The writer adds, “All of the many ways to rep-
resent the Holocaust are true, and all of them fall
short.” The paradox to which she refers applies,
in familiar ways, to any effort to recapture a his-
torical moment,10 and it paves the way to a raft
of deeper questions about the conditions and
governing norms of Holocaust representations
that we can only briefly touch upon here. Such
questions are thoughtfully explored in Berel
Lang’s recent book Holocaust Representation:
Art Within the Limits of History and Ethics.11
For example: In what way, when confronted
with a phenomenon of the Holocaust’s historical
complexity, should we affirm ethical limits to
representations of that phenomenon? Should our
intuitions about fidelity in historical representa-
tion, which may otherwise tend to take on a
singularist normative cast, be best recast along
pluralist lines, as seems suggested by Denby’s
second respondent? Should works of art pur-
porting to represent such phenomena be gov-
erned by standards of fidelity that admit of a
procedural precision comparable to that which
we apply, say, to empirically falsifiable sen-
tences, or would procedurally looser ideals of fi-
delity—ideals that are more a matter of herme-
neutics than of epistemology—be appropriate?
Here, too, at this deeper metacritical level,
Benigni’s film presents us with a Rorschach test
to which advocates of strongly moralistic and
amorally aestheticizing views of art, or advo-
cates of singularist and pluralist models of rep-
resentation, or indeed Holocaust iconoclasts and
their more pictorially permissive counterparts,
will respond differently. Without presuming to
settle these debates here, it should not be hard
for us to agree that Life Is Beautiful’s status with
respect to many of their constitutive claims is at
best ambiguous. This ambiguity in turn hints at a
deeper complexity of form and content which it
behooves all of the film’s critics to confront, a
complexity very much of a piece with our per-
ennially unresolved question of what art itself is
and should be. And that, to come back to my
main theme, is a question that turns out, inter-
estingly, to be posed within Life Is Beautiful
itself.
376 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

5. II
It would be convenient if Life Is Beautiful’s
philosophical self-awareness came from the
mouths of the characters themselves, but that
would be stretching matters. The main character,
Guido, is clearly a man more of actions than
words, and the closest thing we get to philosoph-
ical speeches comes from two other characters.
One is Guido’s uncle, a refined older gentleman
who loves antiques and Petrarch and who pro-
claims to Guido and his sidekick Ferruccio that
“nothing is more necessary than the superflu-
ous.” The other is Ferruccio, an aspiring poet and
expert sleeper who credits the latter distinction
to the Schopenhauerean theory that “with will,
you can do anything: ‘I am what I want.’” This
may sound more like a manic version of William
James or Norman Vincent Peale than the arch-
pessimist of Western philosophy. In any case,
Guido takes in this mentor’s wisdom and tests
the theory, after Ferruccio drops off to sleep
again, by moving his fingers conjurer-fashion
and intoning in a Svengali-like voice, “Wake up,
wake up . . . ” only to be informed by a rudely
awakened Ferruccio that he succeeded not be-
cause of Schopenhauerean willpower but be-
cause he shouted in Ferruccio’s ear. This scene
echoes others throughout the film where Guido,
by design or otherwise, allows others to perceive
the world as being more agreeable or enchanting
than it is, and in thus perceiving it, to treat it so.
One thinks, for example, of the opening se-
quence, where Guido, gesticulating wildly as his
and Ferruccio’s brakeless auto careens down the
main street of a village, is cheered on by a group
of villagers who mistake his gesture for the fas-
cist salute of an expected dignitary; of numerous
scenes chronicling Guido’s courtship of Dora;
and finally of the camp sequences, where he
manages to maintain for Giosue the illusion that
life there is a game. Many of these scenes could
work as satires of the epistemologically opaque
scenarios invoked by various modern philo-
sophers, from Descartes to Gettier, in which
someone innocently mistakes some object or
gesture (such as Guido’s outstretched hand or a
Nazi guard’s utterances, as heard by a non-
German-speaking child) for another from which
it is perceptually indistinguishable. The classic
worry of such philosophers is at heart a worry
about the human condition: that many of our be-
liefs about the world might be based on legiti-
mate inferences but false. But in Guido’s hands
such epistemic anxieties are tranformed into the
spice of life. Here one can imagine him embrac-
ing at least some of the words of that other great
nineteenth-century German voluntarist and phi-
losopher of life-enhancing illusion, Friedrich
Nietzsche, who wrote in The Gay Science,
As an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bear-
able for us, and art furnishes us with eyes and hands
and above all the good conscience to be able to turn
ourselves into such a phenomenon. . . . We must occa-
sionally find pleasure in our folly, or we cannot con-
tinue to find pleasure in our wisdom. Precisely be-
cause we are at bottom grave and serious human
beings—really, more weights than human beings—
nothing does us as much good as a fool’s cap: we need
it in relation to ourselves—we need all exuberant,
floating, dancing, mocking, childish, and blissful art
lest we lose the freedom above things that our ideal
demands of us.12
In some ways Guido has more obviously in
common with the Little Tramp, Don Quixote, or
even Christ (see note 17) than with Nietzsche’s
self-aestheticizing übermensch. But two facts
about his character underscore the deeper ambi-
ance of post-romantic excess he exudes through-
out the story. Guido is, first of all, an artist/magi-
cian figure who understands as well as anyone
that human beings crave enchanting illusions
and sublime objects of various kinds—a core
mythic theme of Western philosophy of art
whose significance is the subject of endless rein-
terpretation from Plato through Nietzsche and
Adorno and that has played a particularly promi-
nent role in the last century’s debates about the
nature of cinema. One is reminded here of
Parker Tyler’s observation in his work of psy-
choanalytic film theory of the forties, Magic and
Myth in the Movies:
The true field of the movies is not art but myth, be-
tween which . . . there is a perhaps unsuspectedly
wide difference. Assuredly a myth is a fiction, and
this is its bare link with art, but a myth is specifically a
free, unharnessed fiction, a basic, prototypic pattern
capable of many variations and distortions, many be-
trayals and disguises, even though it remains imagi-
native truth. . . . Male comics of the screen [Tyler
means figures like Keaton and Chaplin, and, one
Haskins The Aesthetic Riddle of Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful 377

6. might add today, Benigni] may be considered sacred
medicine men or primitive priests, scapegoats who
transferred to themselves the inner fears of the soldier
striving to be brave and made cowardice and bravery
alike into a kind of joke. Consequently in relation to
my argument the myth is not, as a psycholgical or his-
torical nucleus of fact, necessarily to be judged as true
or false, illusory or real, according to its specific la-
bels, its historic status, its literal beliefs. Essentially
myths are not factual but symbolic. I assume that
movies are likewise.13
Tyler’s reference to comedy suggests a sec-
ond feature of Guido’s character that for most
viewers, even those troubled by other aspects of
the film, requires little argument: He is funny.14
Not just amusing, but deeply funny in the physi-
cal and transgressive way that is the stock-in-
trade of male comics of the screen. All of which
brings us to a dimension of Life Is Beautiful’s
comedy that tends to be missed by its positive
and negative critics alike and that constitutes a
main source of the film’s aesthetic reflexivity.
For humor, far from being simply an ingredient
of Benigni’s narrative, is also thematized within
it. Or put differently: Life Is Beautiful is reflex-
ive about humor’s different uses, about the dif-
ferent ways that humor, as a variety of aesthetic
experience, can reflect and abet an array of
moral, amoral, or immoral attitudes to life.
To illustrate, recall the point when we become
aware that one of Guido’s illusionistic talents is
a peculiar facility at riddles. (Example: “Snow
White and the seven dwarfs sit down for a bite.
How fast can you guess what she serves her
guests next? Seven seconds!”) In one of the
film’s more Chaplinesque sequences, Guido,
working as a waiter in his uncle’s hotel, engages
in riddling banter with a certain German cus-
tomer who becomes so absorbed in the riddles
that he loses interest in his food. Without miss-
ing a beat, Guido, noting that the kitchen has
closed, persuades an Italian customer who has
just arrived to order precisely the items on the
German’s untouched tray, which he then serves
with a flourish. The Italian, amazed of such effi-
ciency, lets slip that he is an inspector from the
ministry of education and will the next day be
making an inspection of the school where, as it
happens, Guido’s beloved Dora teaches. This
sets the stage for another round of antics as
Guido contrives to detain the official, whom he
then proceeds to impersonate at Dora’s school,
delivering a spirited, parodic speech in his un-
dershorts about the racial superiority of Italian
ears and belly buttons to a roomful of bemused
pupils and administrators. But the full signifi-
cance of the restaurant scene emerges only when
Guido and we learn, later, in the concentration
camp sequence, that the German, one Dr.
Lessing, is none other than the camp’s chief
medical officer. After a startled moment of rec-
ognition between the two men, Guido’s hopes
rise when Lessing indicates that he can arrange
for him to work as a waiter in the officer’s club.
Guido naturally hopes and half expects, as does
the audience, that Lessing will find a way of re-
moving him and his family to safety. But Guido
listens with puzzlement, turning to horror, as
Lessing continues, as if in a state of distraction
and without seeming to recognize Guido’s situa-
tion, to ply him with inane and unintentionally
reflexive riddles. (“‘When I walk, I make
poppo,’ so who am I, do you know? Fat and ugly
as can be, and all yellow—that’s me. Ask me
what I am, Jack—the answer’s cheep, cheep,
cheep!”)
Guido and Lessing are both jokers; but, as this
scene makes chillingly clear, they are very dif-
ferent types of joker. They are antitypes, repre-
senting mythically different visions of what
jokes and other aesthetic constructions are for,
different moral routes through which we use
such things to make life beautiful, or at least, in
Nietzsche’s sense, bearable. These men person-
ify the extremes of good and evil that inform the
film’s own mythic polarity between innocence
and knowledge of the Holocaust. And it is in
keeping with the fact that these are mythic polar-
ities that neither man possesses all the marks of
real-world normal adult psychology. What is
most unreal about Guido is his holy–foolish in-
nocence, evidenced by how long he takes to
grasp what the other adult inmates have long
known to be the true horror of their situation:
this is epitomized in the scene where he ear-
nestly chides Giosue for refusing to take a
“shower” with the other children. Guido comes
across as a child-adult whose efforts to convince
Giosue that it is all really a game betoken his
wish to protect his own child with illusions and
perhaps also a preference for such illusions
himself (understandably in the circumstances).
And then we come to the cultivated but inanely
378 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

7. riddle-obsessed Lessing. Benigni leaves us to
speculate as to why Lessing has this obsesssion.
Perhaps it is because he lacks moral affect alto-
gether, or perhaps he is burdened, as some real
Nazis in his job surely were, with guilt feelings
generating pathological extremes of denial, for
which riddles might in some personalities pro-
vide regressive wish-fulfilling escape. In con-
trast to Guido’s holy fool, Lessing is an almost
Kafkaesque caricature of the bourgeois apparat-
chik who seeks solace in autonomous artistic
creations while remaining indifferent to the
real-world suffering around him. Riddles, one
might say, are his l’art pour l’art.15 Speaking of
Kafka, note also the parallel in these scenes be-
tween Guido and the bureaucratically belea-
guered protagonist of The Trial, Joseph K.
Guido’s horrified discovery that Lessing is in
fact indifferent to his family’s plight recalls the
episode in The Trial where K is told a parable
about a “man from the country” who waits for
years to gain admission to a sublime entity
called The Law, guarded by an impassive Gate-
keeper. At story’s end the Gatekeeper whispers
in the ear of the protagonist, now on the point of
death, “This gate was designed for you, and I am
now going to shut it.” Lessing is Guido’s gate-
keeper; and Guido, with K and the man in the
parable, are all prototypical innocents who come
up against the absurd.16
But in the end Life Is Beautiful is most cer-
tainly not a Kafkaesque story, and here Denby’s
criticism, its particular problems apart, cannot
be ignored. Guido’s heroic sacrifice at film’s
end could only make sense in a world possess-
ing a basically benign moral order that even a
child like Giosue could begin to grasp, a world
ruled not by the Kafkaesque absurd but by vir-
tue, family values, and the possibility of moral
and spiritual redemption. To put this point in
larger perspective, we need only remind our-
selves how pervasive and promiscuous is the de-
sire for images of redemption in present-day
popular culture. Outside of overtly sacred texts
and endless tracts of pop-psych spirituality,
such images fill contemporary cinema in the
form, for example, of stories depicting virtuous
holy fool–like beings—such as Guido or Forrest
Gump or the giant telekinetically gifted prisoner
in The Green Mile—whose deeds benefit every-
one in their path. (Few viewers are likely to
miss the resonances between such characters
and Christ, the holy fool par excellence of West-
ern civilization—a fact suggesting a further
allegorical dimension of Benigni’s film that
might darken its reception by viewers who re-
main convinced that some aspects of the Holo-
caust are beyond redemption.17) Such images of
redemption are also delivered, at the same time,
by a familiar kind of cathartic horror story—the
kind that depicts ordinary, good people terror-
ized by a monster or pestilence, which is even-
tually after a struggle vanquished, leaving the
good townspeople, minus a few obligatory sac-
rificial victims and perhaps a martyr or two, to
return, humbled and purified, to life as usual. A
form of this soothing scenario can also be found
in Life Is Beautiful, although the number of
sacrificial victims is, to put it mildly, more than
a few. This fact about Benigni’s story takes on
added interest in light of Mark Edmundson’s
suggestion that it is no accident that the culture
that cannot get enough of films of uplifting
“light transcendence” such as Forrest Gump is
the same culture that devours horrific neo-
Gothic films like The Shining, Friday the 13th,
or Silence of the Lambs, as well as a seasonal
stream of television shows featuring vampires,
demons, millennial conspiracies, alien take-
overs, and the like.18 We may speculate that Life
Is Beautiful owes much of its success to its way
of drawing upon both kinds of plot, each in its
way but a variation on the ancient and seductive
theme of a world where good ritually trumps
evil or keeps it in abeyance. Such stories, if well
constructed, have the effect of leaving us not
unsettled or alienated (as modern knights of dis-
enchantment like Kafka or Brecht would have
it) but cathartically relieved if not also, as that
final scene of exuberant reunion between Dora
and Giosue leaves remarkable numbers of ma-
ture adult viewers, unabashedly weeping for
joy, happy enough to forget for the moment
about all the lives upon which the Holocaust
forced, to put it mildly, a less beautiful resolu-
tion.
III
But does all this not, then, clinch Denby’s case?
Has Benigni not defiled the most serious of sub-
jects with a story that is comic not only in its
local devices but also in its deeper vision of life?
Many may be tempted at this point to say yes;
Haskins The Aesthetic Riddle of Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful 379

8. but again the matter is not quite so simple if we
credit Benigni, reasonably, with an awareness
of, and a belief in his audience’s awareness of,
two traditional uses of comedy that Denby’s in
some ways clunkily American-sounding argu-
ment conveniently ignores. One is the long Ital-
ian tradition of using comedy in social and polit-
ical satire that evolved out of the commedia dell’
arte.19 Another is the rich tradition of Holocaust
humor, and specifically Jewish Holocaust
humor, some of whose most poignant examples
originated in the camps themselves. Of particu-
lar interest here is a subgenre of Holocaust jokes
that takes the seductiveness and/or utility of var-
ious kinds of Holocaust denial as a premise.
Here is one such joke that reportedly originated
in the camps:
Blumenthal meets Rosenstock, who was recently re-
leased from a concentration camp. Blumenthal in-
quires about the experience. “Thank you, very pleas-
ant,” Rosenstock says. “We rose at 9 and had a good
breakfast. Then we went hiking—we read a little,
played cards, and enjoyed a splendid lunch. After
lunch we slept a couple of hours. In the evening we
had a delightful dinner followed by chess.”
Blumenthal stares, then says: “That puzzles me. Yes-
terday I met Levy. He told me an entirely different
story.” “Yes,” says Rosenstock, “and he’s back there
again today.”20
Not all will find this sidesplitting, but it is a
joke nonetheless, and its dynamics are instruc-
tive.21 It exploits the incongruity of two beliefs
that together comprise a dark paradox that ap-
plies in different versions not only to camp in-
mates but also, as Lessing’s example suggests,
to their captors. For the inmates, this amounts to
the fact that to adequately confront the reality of
the camps one may need, paradoxically, to deny
that reality—to be in, as it were, a benign form
of Holocaust denial.
The dynamics of the above joke run through-
out Life Is Beautiful in other ways too, which re-
call the long history of inconclusive attempts by
philosophers, psychologists, and others to ex-
plain humor itself (a question no less forbidding
than that of what art is). For example, the film’s
tragicomic form, as described earlier, exempli-
fies a general principle of incongruity to which
innumerable jokes of all descriptions, along
with a wider range of aesthetic experiences, ap-
peal. Enshrined as the Incongruity Theory of
Humor (whose many advocates since the eigh-
teenth century included, among others,
Schopenhauer), this principle holds that we
laugh when we experience a certain discrepancy
between what a situation is and what we expect
it to be. Also exemplified is the Relief Theory of
Humor, which holds that our defenses against
admitting to consciousness various difficult
emotions and thoughts can yield to the right sort
of artful stimulus, allowing us to laugh at or be
otherwise aesthetically moved by situations,
themes, or images whose conjunction may be
otherwise unspeakable. Add to this catalogue,
for good measure, another more philosophically
inflected hypothesis that we might call the Tran-
scendent Theory of Humor. Its basic thought is
that humor, like art of the sublime and beautiful
varieties expounded by Idealist aesthetic theo-
ries, is often the only response we can muster to
a reality before which our ordinary representa-
tional strategies simply break down.22 And
whatever else one may think about Benigni, he
well understands, as does this film as a whole,
that there are no subjects, not even the Holo-
caust, that an otherwise mature adult cannot,
under the right conditions, find funny, and some
subjects, including the Holocaust, that many of
us, for better or worse, need to find funny. In-
deed, Life Is Beautiful is itself in some structural
respects like a large joke that—as with all jokes
and other objects occurring within aesthetic
frames—some get and others do not. For those
who do, Benigni’s achievement is to have told a
human story fueled by a controlled incongruity,
wherein a comic cinematic language is also
made to bear a tragic expressive burden, evoking
an experience possessing capacities to disturb
and entertain that resist reduction to its tragic
and comic components.
IV
But since this experience refers to a reality much
larger and graver than itself, should those of us
who were moved by Life Is Beautiful be overly
pleased at the fact? No, we should not, given the
vexed relation between its inner construction
and outer meanings, and so my account of this
peculiar film will end, as it began, on a note of
ambivalence that also has a deeper dialectical di-
mension. On the one hand, Life Is Beautiful is
not a “good film” or “good work of art” in the
sense of these phrases that presupposes at least a
380 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

9. tacit, good-enough harmony between the ethical
and aesthetic intuitions of many of its critics.23
But then the virtues of art, like those of life,
rarely come in perfect packages; in artworks as
in people, some valuable qualities have a way of
getting realized at the price of others. And this
suggests a more nuanced judgment of Life Is
Beautiful’s merits as art: namely that, precisely
because of its vexed artwork/world relationship,
it invites us to reflect, as it does itself, on art’s
nature and purposes.
But such talk of reflexivity may still put the
reader in mind of a familiar style of modernist
argument that raises another problem for the
evaluation of Benigni’s film. The arguments I
have in mind attribute a special aesthetic interest
or value to an artwork to the extent that it exhib-
its a certain reflexiveness in referring to itself or
to its subsuming style or genre, or to art as a
whole, or which is otherwise reflexive in that it
thematizes its audience’s experience in a way
that then becomes part of that experience. And
this style of argument from reflexivity, as we are
reminded by the last century’s debates about the
significance of aesthetic modernism, is prob-
lematic to the extent that it can obscure larger,
shifting patterns of historical meaning that most
critics today will probably agree are as integral
to any work as its so-called internal structures.
Here Denby’s Holocaust-denial argument gets
yet another foothold, for it again alerts us, as au-
dience members, to the dangers of effectively
mimicking, in different ways, both Guido’s
naiveté and Lessing’s chilling indifference re-
garding the larger historical meanings of a cine-
matic narrative that is perhaps all too well
crafted to deliver cathartic aesthetic pleasure.
But reflexivity in art is not in itself a bad
thing. In itself (like any other general property
of artworks), it is neither a good nor a bad thing,
and if we survey the wide spectrum of films and
other artworks that have been described as re-
flexive over the last century alone, we may rea-
sonably conclude that it is not a single thing. In-
deed, the sprawling discussion of this notion in
the critical literature on artistic modernism pro-
jects a spectrum of moral and political uses of
reflexivity on which virtually any object recog-
nized as art over the last couple of centuries (if
not since much earlier) might be plotted. Imag-
ine, on one end of this spectrum, the ideal type
of the modernist or postmodernist artwork al-
leged to be only about itself, or its subsuming
genre, or about art generally speaking, but
which appears indifferent to its social or politi-
cal conditions. (One thinks, for example, of the
blank postmodern irony and genre-reflexivity of
films such as Pulp Fiction, or of the earlier genre
of the “self-reflexive musical.”24) On the other
end falls the type of the modernist or post-
modernist work that employs reflexive devices
to interrogate or negate the dominant order.
(Well-known cinematic examples of this strat-
egy include works by directors of the 1960s and
1970s such as Godard, Bunuel, Resnais, and
Kubrick, to name a few.) The polarity just imag-
ined aligns itself in turn with the familiar mod-
ernist theme of “two avant-gardes,” one conser-
vatively apolitical and the other politically
engaged. In doing so, it illustrates how the the-
ory and practice of cinema and other arts in re-
cent times are informed by, in Robert Stam’s
phrase, a “politics of reflexivity,” which in mod-
ern times is, in the final analysis, just the politics
of art itself.25
It is within this context that we need finally to
place Life Is Beautiful’s aesthetic reflexivity,
along with the “riddle” it offers its viewers. We
might think of this riddle in a few different
ways. Most straightforwardly, it is expressible,
as I noted at the beginning, as the perennial
question of what art is and should be. Or we
might think of it as a dialectic about what art is
and should be whose two mythic poles have
been implicit in our discussion now for some
time. One pole of this dialectic is at least hinted
at by Denby’s Holocaust-denial argument,
which with a little imagination can be read as a
stepping stone to one of the two philosophical
visions of art that, more than any others, haunts
the ambivalent cultural reception of Benigni’s
film. This is the austere aesthetic vision of
Adorno, who held that the function of authentic
art in post-Holocaust times is to negate and tran-
scend a world made saccharine by addiction to
creature comforts and classical beauty. (A world
epitomized, one imagines Adorno adding, by
Holocaust blockbusters like Life Is Beautiful and
Schindler’s List.) On the other pole of this dia-
lectic lies, I suggest, the vision of Nietzsche,
who counters Adorno with the thought that in
the end everyone, prisoners in a death camp no
less than the rest of us, needs aesthetic ways of
affirming life, ways of making life beautiful,
which may or may not align themselves with our
moral principles, in order to survive. Other inter-
Haskins The Aesthetic Riddle of Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful 381

10. esting candidates for dialectical opposition to
Adorno might be proposed also (for example,
Kant);26 Nietzsche, however, speaks more force-
fully than any modern writer to the irre-
pressibility of the human drive to keep the ordi-
nary sufferings and indignities of everyday life,
not to mention the more sobering realities like
that of the Holocaust, at an aesthetic distance,
for better and for worse (a drive to which even
the austere Adorno, who eventually qualified his
hyperbolic dictum about the “barbarism” of
peotry after Auschwitz, was hardly immune27).
The debate over Benigni’s film is in its way a
meditation on both possibilities, which con-
dense a host of earlier quarrels about whether art
should please or instruct, whether it should be
playful or profound—quarrels that show no
signs of subsiding anytime soon.
Which brings us, finally, to a third way of
casting our aesthetic riddle, namely, as a
meta-aesthetic question whose full significance
warrants a discussion of its own: Why does our
philosophical thinking about art (as the compet-
ing visions of Adorno and Nietzsche, among
others, illustrate) so conspicuously fall short of
unity? One can pose this sort of question about
other domains of philosophical thinking too, for
example, morality, religion, and science. Nietz-
sche, a connoisseur of such matters, hints at
something like the disunity I have in mind when
he comments in The Gay Science:
Every art, every philosophy may be viewed as a rem-
edy and an aid in the service of growing and strug-
gling life; they always presuppose suffering and suf-
ferers. But there are two kinds of sufferers: firstly
those who suffer from the over-fullness of life—they
want a Dionysian art and likewise a tragic view of life,
a tragic insight—and then those who suffer from the
impoverishment of life and seek rest, stillness, calm
seas, redemption from themselves through art and
knowledge, or intoxication, convulsions, anesthesia,
and madness.28
One can only wonder what Nietzsche, not to
mention Adorno, would have thought about the
kinds of “suffering” that are and are not borne
by art’s mass audiences in this age of millennial
redemption anxieties, light catharses, and the
politics of Holocaust memory. In this context,
the quarrel over Life Is Beautiful is about how
cultural consumers today, especially those led
by affluence and its accompanying forms of
boredom and sensation seeking to prize
hyper-real spectacles as sources of beauty and
meaning in life, can know what real suffering is
or remember the less than beautiful or redemp-
tive forms it has taken in the past. The pervasive-
ness of this condition today warrants at least
some sympathy with the message of Holo-
caust-memory purists that we all have a duty to
remember (and to remember a good deal besides
the Holocaust). But even so, the question of
whether serious art in our time should always be
an accessory to that duty (as Adorno thought)
remains less clear. On this score, not only do our
aesthetic theories lack unity, but also so do our
critical tastes and our modernist and post-
modernist anxieties about whether our tastes are
true to their objects. Under such conditions, it
may be tempting to wonder how criticism is pos-
sible at all. But of course it is possible, and the
anxiety that criticism engenders is repaid in a
special way when the work one criticizes draws
attention to how this anxiety never exists in a
purely general form but always has a more con-
crete reference to the specific wishes, fears, and
historical beliefs of a particular cultural mo-
ment. Life Is Beautiful certainly does at least
this. And if so, then perhaps we should not fault
Benigni too much for playing on wishes about
life that a lot of us have in spite of ourselves and
that, as any adult ought to know, find full satis-
faction only in the movies.29
CASEY HASKINS
Philosophy Board of Study
State University of New York at Purchase
Purchase, New York 10577
INTERNET: casey.haskins@purchase.edu
1. Sigmund Freud, “The Moses of Michelangelo,” The
Standard Edition of the Collected Works of Sigmund Freud,
XIII, pp. 211–212.
2. For the latter interpretation, see Kobi Niv, Life Is Beau-
tiful but Not for Jews: Another View of the Film by Benigni
(Israel: N. B. Publishers, 2000). I thank Don Habibi for
drawing my attention to this volume, which received a
sharply critical review by Aviad Kleinberg in the Internet
edition of Israel’s Haaretz Daily Newspaper (Friday, No-
vember 24, 2000), http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/htmls/
kat14_4.htm.
3. See, for example, Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust
Industry (Verso, 1999); Tim Cole, The Selling of the Holo-
caust from Auschwitz to Schindler: How History Is Bought,
382 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

11. Packaged, and Sold (Routledge, 1999); Berel Lang, Holo-
caust Representation: Art Within the Limits of History and
Ethics (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Peter No-
vick, The Holocaust in American Life (Houghton Mifflin,
1999); and Barbie Zelizer, ed., Visual Culture and the Holo-
caust (Rutgers University Press, 2000).
4. One of my more memorable interlocutors was an older
student in one of my classes who was a mother of two rabbis.
One son, she said, loved Life Is Beautiful; the other could not
stand it. A good mother (and, I like to think, a good critic),
she managed some sympathy for both views.
5. Italians, as Maurizio Viano notes, typically use the idi-
omatic phrase la vita è bella in the presence of someone—
say a small child—who needs to be cheered up or reminded
that there are things in life to be enjoyed. Maurizio Viano,
“‘Life Is Beautiful’: Reception, Allegory, and Holocaust
Laughter,” Film Quarterly 53 (1999): 26–34.
6. See Viano, “‘Life Is Beautiful’: Reception, Allegory,
and Holocaust Laughter.” He adds that the first-comic-
then-tragic narrative structure also has the potential to dis-
orient audiences in a way that may not happen if the comic
and tragic elements are co-present throughout the narrative:
“There is quite a difference between thinking of a film as a
mixture of comedy and tragedy, the tragic-comic, or as a jux-
taposition of two symmetrical and mutually negating spaces.
The former is a healthy if occasionally disturbing mix, aim-
ing, as a rule, to either make comedy serious by bestowing
gravity on its lightness, or, conversely, to defuse the depres-
sion provoked by tragedy. The latter is uncanny and unset-
tling, potentially sickening and always disorienting, insofar
as spectators are forced into a schizoid experience. In a
sense, Life Is Beautiful successfully helps its viewers to
imagine what many Italian Jews must have felt, the eruption
of absurdity and the transformation of one reality into its op-
posite. This is how Life Is Beautiful is faithful to reality . . . ”
(p. 31). Well, maybe. This may be true of the experience of
some viewers, but I doubt that “schizoid” quite captures the
experience of viewers—including, we might imagine, some
Christian viewers—who felt a cathartic sense of closure in
the final scenes of the camp’s liberation by American sol-
diers and Giosue’s joyous reunion with his mother.
7. David Denby, “In the Eye of the Beholder,” The New
Yorker, March 15, 1999, pp. 96–99.
8. Some of these issues are also peculiarly reminiscent of
specific debates about the nature of film itself. Apart from
evoking the past century’s epic debate over the relationship
between film’s realistic and formalist tendencies, the above
reader’s response calls to mind the mixed fortunes of the fa-
bled “apparatus theory” movement of the 1970s, inaugu-
rated by Jean-Louis Baudry and others. Baudry, drawing on
psychoanalytic and Marxist premises, argued that the physi-
cal constraints of the filmgoing experience reduce the
filmgoer to a condition that is in different ways both like that
of an infant (given how the all-surrounding security and se-
ductive pleasure of the darkened screening room triggers re-
pressed longings for the mother’s breast) and of Plato’s cave
prisoners. Denby, to his credit, does not carry his critique of
Benigni to Baudryean deterministic lengths; but if the anal-
ogy between adult moviegoers and narcissistic infants (or
Platonic prisoners) is itself troubled, this provides reason for
wondering whether Denby’s Holocaust denial argument
could plausibly amount to much more than an empirical de-
scription of how Life Is Beautiful affects some but not all
viewers. See Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus: Metapsy-
chological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in
Cinema,” Communications 23 (1975).
9. Letter to the Editor from Eric McHenry, The New
Yorker, March 29, 1999.
10. Letter to the Editor from Kristine Keese, The New
Yorker, March 29, 1999.
11. See note 4.
12. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter
Kaufmann, sect. 107.
13. Parker Tyler, Preface to Magic and Myth of the
Movies, reprinted in Marshall Cohen, Leo Broudy, and Ger-
ald Mast, eds., Film Theory and Criticism, 4th ed. (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
14. Readers who do not share this judgment obviously are
welcome to assert that Guido, or Life Is Beautiful as a whole,
is not funny, or that they found the film not only unamusing
but also offensive. Without getting too ensnared in the se-
mantics and epistemology of taste, I will note that one can
mean different things in saying, “It’s not funny” about a film,
a character in a film, a joke, or anything else, and the differ-
ences are not always innocent. One might mean simply “I
don’t like it” or “I found it offensive,” or one might mean to
offer a premise to a stronger conclusion, such as “No decent
or sensitive person could possibly find this funny.” But the
problem is that lots of decent and sensitive people do find
Guido and Life Is Beautiful to be funny—a fact that provides
a perfectly respectable normative basis for my remark that
Guido is funny even while not forestalling further discussion
of whether the film is in good taste, is a good work of art, and
so on. A familiar analogy to this situation is the phenomenon
of the offensive joke. As Ted Cohen notes in Jokes: Philo-
sophical Thoughts on Laughing Matters (University of Chi-
cago Press, 1999), the problem with offensive jokes—he uses
the example of anti-Semitic jokes—“is compounded exactly
by the fact that they are funny. Face that fact. And then let us
talk about it” (p. 84). And so it is, mutatis mutandis, with Life
Is Beautiful, with the notable differences that we are talking
here not about a joke but about a complex film (a film whose
complexity resides partly in the fact that it is about the moral
and aesthetic significance of joking), and that it is not on any
sane construal anti-Semitic (but see note 2 above).
15. By interesting coincidence, Dr. Lessing is also the
namesake of the German Enlightenment thinker whose most
famous work in aesthetics, Laocoön, or the Bounds of Paint-
ing and Poesie (1766), was a defense of the autonomy of the
visual and literary arts. Lessing’s prime example was the fa-
mous Greek sculpture depicting a father (Laocoön) and sons
besieged by serpents, a motif not unrelated to the film’s fa-
ther-and-son subplot.
16. Frank Kafka, The Trial, trans. Willa Muir and Edwin
Muir (New York: Schocken Books, 1995). It is worth noting
that The Trial, though written before the war, is routinely
read as an absurdist parable about the abuse of European
Jews within various twentieth-century bureaucracies, epito-
mized in the Holocaust itself, and that in the novel—as in
Benigni’s film too, it seems—virtually everyone is in one
way or another in denial about the deeper meaning of their
situation.
17. Guido, more explicitly, bears the marks not only of
the holy fool but also of the hero, a figure who classically
ventures forth from the ordinary world into a realm of dan-
ger where he undergoes conflict and emerges triumphant
Haskins The Aesthetic Riddle of Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful 383

12. and a redeemer of others. At first, there may seem nothing
odd about this. Heroism is a concept without which much
human history, to belabor the obvious, would be unintelligi-
ble; but then the Holocaust is not exactly ordinary history. It
was an occurrence of mind-numbing—and for some purists,
unrepresentable—magnitude compounded of millions of in-
cidents possessing a horror exceeding the bounds of ordi-
nary moral imagination, an occurrence before which tradi-
tional mythic conceptions of redemption and heroism break
down in a way that should not sit well with any of us. And if
we interpret Guido’s actions allegorically, they are more
than casually suggestive of another hero (and holy-fool) fig-
ure needing, to put it mildly, no introduction to Benigni’s
Christian viewers and who could not have been far from the
thoughts of a Roman Catholic like himself: namely, Christ,
whose name reverberates with Western civilization’s domi-
nant myth (its divine comedy, we might say) of the
redeemability of human history tout court, and whose
self-sacrifice for the redemption of God’s children loosely
parallels Guido’s sacrifice for (and effective rebirth in) his
son. And this, needless to say, is a story about whose mythic
meaning believing Christians or Jews or, for that matter, fans
of Kafka, are not likely, in conscious and unconscious ways,
to be neutral.
18. On the idea of “light transcendence” and its relation to
popular horror stories of the sort described above, see Mark
Edmundson, Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomas-
ochism, and the Culture of Gothic (Harvard Univerity Press,
1997).
19. Benigni is hardly alone among dramatists of this lin-
eage whose work has met with intensely ambivalent critical
reception. One thinks immediately, for example, of the work
of the Nobel Prize–winning Italian playwright Dario Fo.
20. Collected in Steve Lipman, ed., Laughter in Hell: The
Use of Humor During the Holocaust (Northvale: Jason
Aronson, 1991), pp. 179–180. For further discussion of the
documentation of such phenomena in scholarship and in vid-
eotaped interviews of Shoah survivors, as well as of further
issues pertaining to humor and the Holocaust, see Sander L.
Gilman, “Is Life Beautiful? Can the Shoah Be Funny? Some
Thoughts on Recent and Older Films,” Critical Inquiry 26
(2000).
21. This joke exploits the incongruity of the beliefs, re-
spectively, that Levy is and is not in the camp. The resulting
paradox can be resolved by specifying further information
(e.g., by stipulating that the sense in which Levy is in or out
of the camp is purely psychological). The dark moral of the
joke, in any case, is that camp life is unbearable without dis-
tracting illusions.
22. Or, to put it another way, humor is an indirect mode of
representation that shares some structural features, on the
kind of Idealist analysis envisioned above, with traditional
ideas of beauty and the sublime.
23. This remark presupposes my further thoughts on the
moral basis of critical judgment, and, in particular, on the fa-
bled dialectic between autonomist and instrumentalist (or
moralist) views of criticism, subjects whose full discussion
is best pursued elsewhere. In brief, all critics have occasion
sometimes to make superlative judgments of the aesthetic
merits of films or other artworks, and it is also true that much
critical reflection and argument does not require us to appeal
expressly to moral considerations. But that does not mean
that our moral beliefs about the world and about morally de-
cent and indecent ways of representing it are not always still
present, in a dormant or dispositional state, ready to be trig-
gered into conscious assertion and argument when violated.
And if our moral beliefs are thus present, that suggests one
way in which we might at least try to reconcile two facts
about art-critical reflection that have historically pulled the
intuitions of autonomists and moralists in different direc-
tions. First, we often indeed do think and talk about art as if
we were aesthetic amoralists or “autonomists” (i.e., as if we
believed that moral considerations are irrelevant to judging
artworks as artworks, or aesthetically) in contexts where the
works in question do not cross our threshold of offensive-
ness. But second, every psychologically normal person will
sooner or later have some occasion to be offended by a cul-
tural object; and any object that crosses this threshold for
any of us confronts us in principle with a philosophical and
practical decision. We will be obliged either to go the aes-
thetic moralist route and, if we are otherwise disposed to re-
gard it as art, condemn it as less-than-perfect or bad art. Or,
if we are sufficiently wedded to autonomism as an a priori
hypothesis, we will be obliged to find some way of either
claiming that the object’s offensiveness is irrelevant to its
aesthetic merits (which some critics have ambitiously tried
to do, for example, with a film like Leni Riefenstahl’s Tri-
umph of the Will) or we will try to find some way of describ-
ing the object as a non-artwork. The morally nagging quality
of Life Is Beautiful, even and especially for critics who may
otherwise prefer to think autonomistically about films and
other cultural products, offers a provocative illustration of
how autonomists and moralists might approach a critical
task differently. For more on the autonomist-instrumentalist
dialectic, see my “Paradoxes of Autonomy; or, Why Won’t
the Problem of Artistic Justification Go Away?” The Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58 (2000).
24. Jane Feuer, “The Self-Reflexive Musical and the
Myth of Entertainment” (1977), reprinted in Film Theory
and Criticism, 4th ed., pp. 486 ff.
25. On the idea of two avant-gardes, see Renato Poggioli,
The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Harvard University Press,
1968). On the “politics of reflexivity,” see Robert Stam, Film
Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 151
ff.
26. I particularly think here of Kant’s thesis that beauty is
the “symbol of morality”—a thesis whose letter and intent is
compatible enough with Life Is Beautiful’s message that we
all need and deserve aesthetic enchantment even while it
also served to pave the way, in the history of aesthetics, for
Adorno’s apocalyptic vision of art’s duty to negate the se-
ductions of empirical sensuousness in a Holocaust-ravaged
world.
27. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B.
Ashton (New York: Seabury, 1973), p. 362, as reported in
Lang, Holocaust Representation, p. 70.
28. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1887), trans.
Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), Book
5, sect. 370.
29. I owe thanks to Nina Pelikan Straus, Don Habibi, and
an anonymous reader for The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism for their helpful comments on early drafts of this
paper.
384 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism