mashdownbabylon: A Different Kind of Closet

A Different Kind of Closet

In Walk on Water’s closing scene, we find Eyal walking up to a crib to care for a crying baby, in a house, which, as the camera traces his movements, is one he now shares on a kibbutz with Pia, his new German wife. Axel, however, is never very far away. Sitting down at his laptop with a cup of hot tea after pacifying his newborn child, blanket draped over his shoulders, a domesticated Eyal composes an email to Axel, in which he tells his brother-in-law of a fantasy he had about the two of them defying gravity by walking together across the Sea of Galilee.

Obviously, whatever feelings Eyal held for Axel have not only not gone away, but, more significantly have become a subject of acknowledgement, perhaps even dialogue, between the two men. As welcome as the remarkable changes the former Mossad agent has made to his life appear to certainly be, he is still clearly closeted. Settling down with the blonde haired and blue-eyed granddaughter of a Nazi on a kibbutz may represent a dramatic step forward. Nevertheless, it is Eyal’s unrequited desire for Pia’s brother that represents a yearning for something even greater.

Ideologically speaking, Walk on Water is anything but simple. Could Eyal’s inability to fully come out be a sexual metaphor for a future peace between Palestinians and Israelis that’s correspondingly incomplete? A two state as opposed to a one state solution, where Jews may have made their peace with Europe but not, quite fully, with the Palestinians? Fox is appropriately unclear, as his message should be. Nevertheless, sexual liberation, of the kind that Walk on Water embraces, has profound political corollaries that lie far beyond the liberation of desire.

-From IvU, Chapter 7

August 27, 2007 in Current Affairs, Family, Film, Israel, Middle East, Work | Permalink