Cinematic Portraits of Evil: Christian de Chalonge’s Docteur Petiot and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Delicatessen By Esther Rowlands

Cinematic Portraits of Evil: Christian de Chalonge’s Docteur Peti ...

Chapter 1:

Representing Atrocity

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need for personal survival, and he warns against the imprudent and oversimplified use of the term ‘torture’:

The term torturers alludes to our ex-guardians, the SS, and is in my mind inappropriate: it brings to mind twisted individuals, ill-born sadists afflicted by an original flaw. Instead, they were made of our same cloth, they were average human beings, averagely intelligent, averagely wicked: save for exceptions, they were not monsters, they had our faces, but they had been reared badly. They were, for the greater part, diligent followers and functionaries: some fanatically convinced of the Nazi doctrine, many indifferent, or fearful of punishment, or desirous of a good career, or too obedient. All of them had been subjected to the terrifying miseducation provided for and imposed by the schools created in accordance with the wishes of Hitler and his collaborators and then completed by the SS drill. Many had joined this militia because of the prestige it conferred, because of its omnipotence or even just to escape family problems. Some, very few in truth, had changes of heart, requested transfers to the front lines, gave cautious help to prisoners or chose suicide. ¹⁷

The only true portrait of evil in Levi's eyes is the regime itself and its imposition on everyday human lives. The real disease was to be found in the machine-like existence of a totalitarian state which enslaved and strangled the masses.

It is in this light that two films of the 1990s—Delicatessen (1990) and Docteur Petiot (1990)—lend themselves to study. It will be argued that these films function as historical, political and philosophical discourses due to the particular portrait of evil that they consciously seek to paint, and that the coherence and depth of this portrait arises primarily from a rejection