“Cultural Amnesia”

It is always dangerous to read too much into a photograph, especially when one is armed with the facts of how it all turned out. But it’s hard not to look at a picture taken by Benjamin Couprie, in 1933, at the seventh annual Solvay conference, without imposing some kind of narrative on the woman seated in the front row, second from the left. Flanked by Nobel Prize winning physicists James Chadwick and Louis de Broglie, Lise Meitner looks as though she is ready to absent herself not only from those assembled in the room, but from the picture itself, as though in anticipation of what the future held for her. Like a Polaroid in reverse, Meitner seems on the verge of vanishing.

Already in her mid-fifties when this picture was taken, so much of Meitner’s life and brilliant career—even up to this day in 1933, when she shared the platform with the most eminent practitioners in her field—was one of recognition withheld and titles rescinded (or belatedly bestowed.) For Meitner, the reasons for her being discriminated against on account of her gender would have been nothing new, despite being among the first generation of Viennese women to be educated beyond the age of 14; she was also one of the first women to study physics in Vienna, and the second to complete her doctoral thesis in theoretical physics. But in 1933, when Meitner and her long-time collaborator Otto Hahn headed up the Department of Chemistry at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, in Berlin, the prejudice was doubled on account of her race. Part of what Meitner would have encountered, which included the withdrawal of her professorship, is described by Clive James in the introduction to his book Cultural Amnesia:

“Even in Germany, where the Jews had full civil rights until Hitler repealed them, there was a de facto quota system in academic life which made it hard for people of Jewish background to be appointed to the faculty, no matter how well qualified they were. (The prejudice affected priorities even within the faculty: nuclear physics, for example, featured so many Jewish personnel mainly because it was considered a secondary field.)”

Thinking that her Austrian nationality would protect her, Meitner stayed in Berlin for a further five years, a decision she later referred to as “stupid” and “wrong”. Five months after her escape to Sweden via the Netherlands, Hahn published their simultaneous findings on nuclear “fission”: there was no mention of Meitner.

Eventually, recognition would be forthcoming; history would right the wrong. Albert Einstein referred to her as “our Marie Curie”, which is surely a more benign epitaph than “the Mother of the A Bomb”, especially as Meitner had been unequivocal in rejecting President Truman’s invitation to participate in the Manhattan Project: “I will have nothing to do with a bomb!” (She also rejected Hollywood’s advances.) For Meitner, science was a means for “people to reach selflessly for truth and objectivity; it teaches people to accept reality, with wonder and admiration, not to mention the deep awe and joy that the natural order of things brings to the true scientist.”

—MM

In his book ‘Cultural Amnesia’, Clive James writes that “the atmospherics of Michael Mann’s Heat affect the look of any movie made about crime: other directors, whether working out of the United States, Latin America, Europe or Hong Kong, either go with him, towards glamour, or go against him, towards grunge, but they always have his look in mind.” There’s more than a touch of Heat to David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom, especially in its depiction of an armed robbery unit that is as wild and lawless as its quarry. It also has that city-at-night feeling which Mann is so attuned to, though in this instance the city is Melbourne. But despite its cinematic influences (Goodfellas, Magnolia), Animal Kingdom is rooted in the real. Michôd has spoken in interviews of wanting to “make a film that unlike, say, a Quentin Tarantino or Guy Richie crime movie, took itself seriously, and was set within a big, dark, nasty world, which was nevertheless still quite poetic and beautiful.” In other words, Michôd goes for the glamour and the grunge.

From its stark opening (it begins with a bark) to its final confrontation (it ends with a bang), Animal Kingdom more than justifies its grand and arresting title. In its native land, it has been called “the Australian Godfather”, and one can see why: a terrific cast at the top of their game; a brilliant script which takes the sequence as its dramatic unit; a family drama in which the family’s youngest (and most innocent?) must make his way in the world. Where it differs from The Godfather is in its sense of scale and ambition. But then Michôd’s crime family is not as organised, nor as operatic, as Coppola’s: the Cody’s are not the Corleones, though what they lack in grandeur they more than make up for in their propensity for violence, betrayal, and incestuous feelings.

The film is loosely based on an actual incident in Melbourne’s recent history known as the Walsh Street Killings. But while Michôd uses this incident to ignite the film’s plot, he is after bigger game. Like the recent Winter’s Bone, Animal Kingdom is about survival. Its teenage protagonist, Josh, must negotiate the perilous terrain of family—or at least his family. His notorious uncles and grandmother, to whom he turns after the death of his mother, provide Josh with an unsentimental education: “We take it out on whoever turns up. That’s what we do.” It is left to Guy Pearce’s homicide detective, and the film’s moral centre, to guide Josh as best he can. It is Pearce who supplies us with the film’s metaphor of the “animal kingdom”, telling Josh:”You’ve survived because you’ve been protected by the strong, but they’re not strong anymore.”

In case we were in any doubt about Michôd’s intentions, the film is full of bracing scenes in which the strong and the cruel survive at the expense of the vulnerable. Time and again we see goodness expunged, innocence corrupted. Watch how Michôd fixes on the smooth and youthful complexion of a rookie cop, his good manners, and his by-the-book approach as he responds to the report of a stolen car. This is just one of several extraordinary sequences. Already you sense that Michôd is one of those “sprinkler on the lawn” directors who can summon dread from the sweetest of sights. And unlike Josh, the influences that have shaped him (Scorsese, Mann, P.T. Anderson) have been all to the good. Josh has been raised by wolves and acts accordingly.

—MM

LISE MEITNER: TRUE SCIENTIST

ANIMAL KINGDOM—the Glamour and the Grunge