I want to understand

[ridicully]

Lunch at Julia's today. As I didn't have to help with the painting, it was time to admire the colour. Nice green walls.
Afterwards I did my usual playing around at the computer to get it to do some things again it had suddenly refused to do. I'm not quite sure how I became the resident computer-guru, but with the general computer-illiteracy most vets (and vet-students) seem to possess, it only takes a little bit of knowledge to seem like a genius.
At least the thing does play DVDs again - and I started to download Service Pack 1 and security updates. ("No, you don't need to install all the updates windows wants to do, but if it says *important security update for IE* you should consider it."

While we were still hoping it would finish the download in a reasonable time, we decided to watch some video. Franka voted for Life is beautiful because she'd never seen it before.

This movie frustrates me to no end. Apart from my well-trained 'Mea culpa, mea culpa' reaction and the general 'oh fuck, things like this really happened' feeling, one character just drives me crazy.
It's the nazi-doctor, he makes me want to scream. I don't really care that he doesn't help the main characters. I've learned to deal with the fact that people can do things like this, can be husbands and wives, mothers and fathers who work in concentration camps, torture and kill other people and afterwards go home and complain about the unnecessarily cruel way their neighbour treats his dog.
While I can't really understand it, it's a sort of acceptance that humans can behave like this and may never see anything wrong with it.
But his behaviour, giving hope and destroying it - *without even realizing it* - is just too much for me. Maybe because I'm generally a very self-centered person myself, but I think this is worse than simply not caring or really thinking all Jews should die.
People have tried to convince me that maybe this is his way of dealing with something he can't really live with, that I don't know what his strange little ritual of exchanging riddles means for him, but that doesn't stop it from being more than frustrating for me.
I can somehow deal with people who die for what they think is right, people who close their eyes to everything, people who are selfish, people who try to gain when other people are suffering, people who renounce everything they hold dear so they can live, people who are cruel, even people who are indifferent.
I don't know why I can't deal with this. He just doesn't fit in my 'people who are selfish' slot.
I'm probably misunderstanding some important scene.

Comments

[flood.livejournal.com]

Actually, I agree with you. I could never understand what exactly it was about the doctor that made my stomach turn, but you've nailed it.

That's exactly it.

Thank you. I feel like I have more clarity.

[ridicully]

Glad I could help.

I hate it when something in a movie or book is bothering me, but I can't really tell why.