American Masters: Art Spiegelman Disaster is My Muse

Art Spiegelman helped force the world to remember some of its darkest history, with his Pulitzer-Prize-winning graphic novel, Maus. Essentially, he adapted his parents’ tragic real-life experiences during the Holocaust, but he anthropomorphized the Jews as mice and the National Socialists as cats. Yet, this film has a weirdly selective relationship with recent history. It ends before the October 7^th terror attacks that are widely recognized as the largest mass-killing of Jews since the Holocaust. However, the filmmakers managed to find time to edit out Neil Gaiman’s appearance, which caused some consternation when the film screened at festivals, presumably due to assault allegations against the English author. Regardless, there is an inescapable feeling of prematureness to Molly Bernstein & Philip Dolin’s Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse, which airs tomorrow on PBS, as part of the current season of American Masters.

The first forty-five minutes or so of Disaster is quite strong, because it really focuses on the past, without attempting to score political points in the present. Spiegelman retraces his career, starting with an internship at Topps collector cards that led to a long-standing freelance relationship. He became one of the stars of the underground comix movement, along with his late friend, R. Crumb, whom we see attending a dinner party at Spiegelman’s.

For over a decade, Spiegelman worked on the two-volume Maus, continually interviewing and re-interviewing his father, since his mother had died under painful circumstances during his childhood. Spiegelman is the first to admit he was shocked by the reception, including best-seller lists and the Pulitzer Prize. Arguably, the timing was just right since publication of the two volumes in 1986 and 1991, releasing between Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) and Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), a period when mainstream readers really started educating themselves on the full implications of the Shoah.

The second half of Disaster largely focuses on Spiegelman coming to terms with his unexpected success and figuring out what to do next. Arguably, his lack of focus was detrimental to Bernstein & Dolin’s profile as well. Eventually, they present him as an impassioned warrior against censorship, but such terms are somewhat disingenuous. There are no laws against reading any books in Texas or Florida (the two states primarily mentioned). Certain school boards have, ill-advisedly, decided certain titles are not appropriate for young readers. The fact that Maus was one such title is foolish irony that discredits their entire judgement—yet, the fact remains school boards make these kind of decisions everyday, in one direction or another, because space and acquisition budgets are limited.

As a result, we hear Spiegelman repeatedly warn fascism is on the rise in America. However, Bernstein and Dolin never go back to him to ask how highly would he rank Jewish UCLA students finding themselves blocked from attending their classes unless they renounced Israel on his fascism scale. Would Jewish students at Cornell receiving death threats also qualify as a fascist development? Or does it bother him at all to see protesters displaying swastikas at a protest sponsored by the Democratic Socialists of America? Perhaps Spiegelman is correct, fascism is on the rise in America, but maybe New York City is ground zero rather than Texas.

The absence of such questions is especially glaring, in light of Gaiman’s removal. Indeed, it is rather ironic the second half of Disaster postures against censorship and then edits out Gaiman, even though he continues to deny all accusations. The early section is solid (especially the nice little history of Mad Magazine), but taken as a whole, Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse is too inconsistent and too stilted in its biases to recommend, when it airs tomorrow night (4/15) on most PBS networks.