“Do Revenge” is Flawed–and Antisemitic

Netflix’s popular, steamy high school drama Elite is set in a madly upscale Spanish high school where almost everyone is impossibly beautiful or handsome, impeccably dressed in various versions of the school uniform, and engaged in plots and counter-plots to hassle a classmate for one reason or another. It’s total fantasy with almost zero actual classroom scenes.  Wild partying in lavish homes and clubs, heavy drinking, sex and striking attitudes take the place of education. Oh, and there’s a murder in that first season that triggers a police investigation reminiscent of Inside Man.

Watching the new Netflix movie Do Revenge, inspired by Strangers on the Train, you’ll see almost all of that plus hat tips to Clueless, Heathers, Cruel Intentions, and Mean Girls with less wit and a lot more viciousness masked as comedy.  No murder, though.

The two teenage girls at the center of the movie enacting vengeance on each other’s tormentors perform nasty criminal acts which I guess we’re supposed to find funny. And they do it to an upbeat soundtrack wearing colorful outfits when they’re not in uniform.  Even the scholarship girl who’s ashamed because her mother is a nurse and she doesn’t live in a mansion manages to look like a model in one scene after another.  Perfect clothes and jewelry, perfect hair, perfect makeup.

Adding to the overall unreality is the fact that as one Chicago film critic pointed out, most of the leads are in their mid-to-late twenties and they definitely look it. And there are some unbelievable plot twists that seem dreamed up by someone who was stoned at the time. 

But most egregiously, the writers update old anti-Semitic tropes: the movie’s villain is a Jew hater’s fever dream.  He’s vengeful, super-wealthy, politically connected, psychopathic, soulless, manipulative and bent on destruction just because it’s sport to him.  He’s even a sexual predator which is right out of the Nazi playbook.  His identification is teased before the end when he starts going totally off the rails and we now very clearly see that this monster has been wearing a Star of David. In case you missed it early on.  And even though it’s tiny, the camera keeps it central as he’s unmasked as a master manipulator and freaks out.

Oh, and before he does, he perversely uses a Yiddish word, kvell, the verb that expresses pride in something good, when he brags about all the misery he’s caused. 

That’s totally gratuitous, and the bond the two female leads form after having savaged each other profoundly just adds to the generally sour fantasy.  As they drive off at the end, maybe we’re meant to think of Romy and Michelle’s friendship, but they lack the charm and depth of those characters.

Do Revenge can be very funny in spots and has some good crisp dialogue, but as it got nastier by the minute, it felt as if the writers were more interested in indulging their bigotry and mining other people’s work than writing something truly original.   What’s sadder is that not one major film critic has noted the ugliness at the core of this film.

 

 

 

Marjorie Taylor Greene Has Company Distorting the Holocaust

Marjorie Taylor Greene is at it again, comparing mask mandates in the pandemic to being a Jew in Germany headed off to the gas chambers.  I wonder if her dismal understanding of the Holocaust is based on reading bad novels like Kate Breslin’s For Such a Time which features a bizarre romance between a Nazi and his Jewish prisoner.  Breslin’s attempts to root the book in the Holocaust are clumsy at best and her knowledge of Judaism and Jewish culture is way off.  The book’s editor also seems to have been AWOL.

Examples abound.  Why does she use the word Hakenkreuz rather than Swastika?  The latter word is one most readers would be familiar with.  Hakenkreuz is a feeble attempt to make the book feel historically accurate.  So is using Sturmabteilung rather than SA or Brownshirts.  Both of those are much more familiar to readers of historical novels or thrillers set in Nazi Germany–and more understandable.

Why field the obscure word Gänsebraten when “roast goose” would do just as well?  Surely anyone picking up this book will understand after the first few pages that it’s set in Germany.  Breslin doesn’t need to keep reminding us, as when she substitutes the word Kaffee for coffee over half a dozen times. But Kaffee isn’t italicized, which it should be since it’s in a foreign language.  Page after page, you feel she’s just overdoing it and the publisher is careless and clueless.

That’s unfortunate, given Breslin’s weak grasp of German and Germany’s history with Jews.  Breslin’s heroine is addressed as “Jude.”  That’s the masculine for Jew in German, not the feminine, which is Jüdin.  But more egregious than that, the Nazis had many terms of abuse for Jews, and simply calling her a Jew is not pejorative enough–given the period.

Breslin’s understanding of Jewish culture and religion is also grossly off-base.  In a glossary at the book’s end, she defines a yarmulke as a “prayer cap.”  No it isn’t.  It’s a skullcap that’s not just worn at prayers by observant Jews.  More incorrectly, she thinks a shtetl is a “small town or ghetto.”  That’s flat-out wrong.  It’s the Yiddish for a small Jewish or heavily Jewish village or town in Eastern Europe–not remotely the same thing as a ghetto.

If that inaccuracy isn’t enough, the glossary says that Jews in the Holocaust wore a “gold” star to identify “their Jewry.”  (MTG also thinks the stars are gold).

Breslin further makes a hash of history when she says that “Sarah” was “a term that Nazis used for Jewesses.”  That makes it sound like a synonym.  It wasn’t.  What she seems to be fumbling with is the legislation in 1938 which forced Jews with “non-Jewish” names to add “Sara” [sic] or “Israel” as middle names to their identity papers so that there could be no doubt they were Jewish.  She and her publisher also seem oblivious to the fact that the word “Jewess” isn’t just dated, it’s widely considered offensive.

All these errors come from an author who claims to love the Jewish people. As the Erasure song goes, “Who Needs Love Like That?”

Lev Raphael is the author of 27 books in many genres including Rosedale in Love, set in New York during The Gilded Age, which is also available as an audio book.