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necessary to invent it.
    And so we have. A ceaseless battle between good and evil goes on, embodied by the stock comic book figures of good American (or good Russian) and bad Nazi. There are American films about the Second World War, Russian films about the Second World War, Polish films about the Second World War, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, and Czech films about the Second World War. In one of these—a Russian one, it appears—a man goes back to Germany to revisit the town where he first became a man. As a young soldier he invaded this town, fell in love there, and first knew the terrible dichotomy between love and war. His German Mädchen still awaits him, now become a stout blonde matron of forty, widowed by her good German burgher (formerly a captain in the SS).
    They whirl on the dance floor, and the bombed-out town regrows its bricks and beams as though they were shrubs and trees. Time stops. The couple freezes on the dance floor. Their youth and the Second World War are one. Man’s need to plunder and woman’s need to cling are embodied in this myth of the Second World War, and so on it goes, eternally played on the screens of our retinas. When will this war be over? The “good war,” the war of my parents’ generation, has an independent existence, independent of history itself. We keep it alive because it is needed, because we need a myth of good battling evil and triumphing. Our generation has no such myth. Our generation knows that when evil battles good, it’s often no contest—or a draw. Or else life is too complicated to be characterized in those terms. That’s the tragedy of our generation—we haven’t even got a myth of good battling evil. We are mythed out. Except for Shakespeare. And who reads Shakespeare anymore but actors and poets?
    Ah, little girls at private schools in New York read Shakespeare. My ten-year-old Antonia has already memorized a few sonnets, having inherited her mother’s memory for lines of verse. I cannot think of my daughter without pain—though I know she is well taken care of, physically if not emotionally. An only daughter is a needle in the heart, some fluent Irishman once said. And it is true. In the dreamlike, womblike screening room, I think of her and ache; she is with me always.
    Nor is my longing for my daughter diminished by the films themselves, for the other great myth enshrined in the films I see is the myth of childhood—childhood innocence, to be precise. In one Russian film, two adolescents keep traversing a frozen lake, looking for a sunken cathedral. When they find its golden onion dome, frozen in snow and ice, they remember childhood summers when they used to dive in this very lake, swim into the tower of this submerged cathedral, and pull on the bell cord underwater, creating an eerie symphony of underwater chimes. Through frame after frame, the girl holds one ear to the ice, listening for this summer symphony. (The girl is about Antonia’s age and indeed looks like her—copper hair, freckled nose, a little girl’s lanky yet pot-bellied body.) Again and again the filmmaker cuts to the boy, swimming like a merman underwater, pulling the bell cord. Childhood, like a bell, calls us back again and again. “Ding-dong bell,” says Shakespeare. Full fathom five thy childhood lies, of its bones are coral made.
    There are wonderful moments, wonderful images, in all these films, but in general the level is mediocre to low. So many have labored so long and so hard to produce films that don’t quite work. The colossal effort of it all! I know that making a film, even a bad one, is like orchestrating an entire world war. The script has to be written and rewritten, the money raised, the cast found, the locations scouted, and thousands of logistical arrangements fulfilled. Through it all, hundreds upon hundreds of egos have to be stroked (or bullied) lest the whole enterprise collapse. You have to