The changing history in Life is Beautiful (and Rent)

Life is beautiful came at a time when the world was changing views on everything and I understand why it exists: to kill the guilt of Italians and the director himself.

Okay that sounded harsh but its true, you see the movie is cathartic in its own way, some people forget that Italy was one of the two cradles of fascism, and by the 90's there still were people who were antisemites in Italy and hailing Adolf Hitler and Mussolini as true heroes.

TO the film's credit it does show jews in a sympathetic way and it does frame them as the true heroes and it did change minds in Italy about their relationship to the holocaust...but a comedy? really???

Life is beautiful falls into the epic fail of horrible history revisionism like Rent or The Dreamers which both have similar problems but it takes it a step further into the mess because it is a comedy, and comedy doesn't age well and that it did.

You are probably thinking why should I care? there are movies like Saving Mr. Banks that change truthful facts and turn it around so that a film is watchable or more relatable...the thing about Saving Mr. Banks and movies like Life is Beautiful is that the ladder toys with suffering of a minority and its disrespectful to it, and its way worse than my nice words.

The main problem over this is that while it is humanizing to the Jews it's a movie that not even Disney and its pink lenses would make because it takes a great suffering as a joke as something that can be overcome with a happy disposition...and it isn't

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In the 80' and 90' the LGBT community and other minorities where suffering from AIDS and here comes a Jonathan Larson to help them with the problem...reject  the fucking system while it glosses over the fight that the LGBT community did for their lives; it frames gay people as spoiled brats and not fighters of  an oppressive system who was killing them with their inaction..this is Rent's biggest flaw

These two projects were made by people who were not in this minority groups, they are a revisionism of history made by white heterosexuals to make horrible things look less awful.

The problem of Life is beautiful to me was that it was the film that introduces me to WW2 and I thought that it was a joke, that the sufferings of millions were funny...later on I would discover that this wasn't the case; that millions of thousands of Jews, gypsies, Africans and LGBT people went to this places and died horribly. 

It's not funny when your suffering becomes a comedy! or that your fight for your own humanity is simply a backdrop for spoiled with kids holding on to art and not selling out.

There was a movie that I would, later on, discover based on a book that was called The Hiding Place, it tells the true story of Corrie Tem Boom, a woman who hid Jews from the Nazis and paid the heavy price of losing her entire family in Auschwitz; she, later on, became a Christian preacher and she gave the most curious sermon I have ever heard she overcame a concentration camp and her sister killer BUT NEVER BY COMEDY.  The other movies that I watched where the Pianist, The boy with Striped Pyjamas and Schindler´s list, before getting into Journalism and learning more and reading more; the more I learned the more cruel Life is beautiful became more insolent and heartless.

Fictional  movies like Cabaret are more truthful to what happens than to Life is beautiful, and the worse part of this movie as that it has a Christian undertone of a Father (God) that would do anything for his beloved son (Humans) even giving his life to save the child's, and that is not a bad message the problem is that is crafted around Jewish characters that don't believe in Jesus, is like adding them an insult more.

Its changing history so that the main white heterosexual audience doesn't feel guilty about the Holocaust or the AIDS epidemic which they should, most of the time these people were part of the problem; making it more palatable its good for sales but what about pain? real pain that these minority groups have to go every day?

X-Men Days of future past, X2 and First Class showed audiences how minority groups suffer from coming out to trying to hide your natural skin color, to the bitter holocaust allegory in the prolog of this movies. And those movies are highly sympathetic to those minorities.

The part when this became evident to me, even more, was when I meet a neo-nazi who watched the movie and said: "Jews had a great time in the concentration camps! we should open them again!" 

I have to make a full article to explain to people that a concentration camp is not fun and that suffering for us is not a joke.

You might not care but Like is Beautiful is changing the way we think about our history, just don't let it go to your head. 

A funny light hearted comedy will not make it feel any better