Daily Dialogue — April 18, 2017

GIOSUÉ: What game is this?
GUIDO: That’s it! It’s that game where- It’s the game- We’re all players. It’s all organized. The game is the men are over here, the women are over there. Then there’s the soldiers. They give us our schedule. It’s hard, you know. It’s not easy. If somebody makes a mistake, they get sent right home. That means you have to be very careful. But if you win, you get first prize!
GIOSUÉ: What’s the prize?
GUIDO: First prize!
UNCLE: It’s a tank.
GIOSUÉ: I already have one.
GUIDO: This one’s a real tank! Brand new!
GIOSUÉ: Real?
GUIDO: Yes! I didn’t want to tell you.

— Life is Beautiful (1997), story and screenplay written by Vincenzo Cerami and Roberto Benigni

The Daily Dialogue theme for this week: Lying. Today’s recommendation by Gisela Wehrl.

Trivia: Roberto Benigni says the title comes from a quote by Leon Trotsky. In exile in Mexico, knowing he was about to be killed by Joseph Stalin’s assassins, he saw his wife in the garden and wrote that, in spite of everything, “life is beautiful”.

Dialogue On Dialogue: Commentary by Gisela: “Guido’s lie is the plot of the 2nd part of the movie and the central idea of the movie (or as found in a summary at imdb.com: “In an attempt to hold his family together and help his son survive the horrors of a Jewish Concentration Camp, Guido imagines that the Holocaust is a game and that the grand prize for winning is a tank.“)

Guido’s lie touches two moral question. One could be summarized by the title of Sander L. Gilman’s article “If Life Beautiful? Can the Shoah Be Funny?“ (which can be found here) The other is, if lying is legitimated, if it serves a higher purpose. Philosopher Kant claims that lying is always wrong, no matter what. Guido tries to keep the awful truth away from his son, the idea with the game comes out of the blue and we see him as he built this lie within this dialogue by improvisation.”