A Century of Mel Brooks

I’m writing from a lounge in Nottinghamshire, England, which of course is making me think of all the culture and literature that emerged from the mythology of this place. Specifically, I’m thinking of how much I don’t like Mel Brooks’s Robin Hood: Men in Tights.

No disrespect to the auteur, though. Like many of us, I grew up on Mel Brooks, who celebrates his 100th birthday this week. It’s just that I think what they say about Mel is like what they say about Mad Magazine: your favorite era tends to be when you first discovered him. Older fans tend to think the later stuff is crap and younger aficionados find it a little hard to relate to what their elders considered funny.

As a child of the late 1970s and 1980s (History of the World Part One was the first R-rated movie I ever saw in the movie theater), my favorite Mel has always been High Anxiety (1978), his Hitchcock homage. In that farce, Mel himself takes his first star-turn in the lead role as Dr. Richard Thorndyke, the new director of The Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous. When we were kids, my brother and I could recite every line – and sometimes, on long car rides, that’s exactly what we’d do.

“You’re the cocker’s daughter?” Busted eardrums. Nurse Diesel. And: no one who’s appreciated Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) will ever be able to take it seriously after seeing Mel suffer a similar, but different, avian assault in High Anxiety.

 As one of only 28 people in history who are EGOT winners, Mel Brooks certainly has left his mark on American culture.  He’s also embraced by the Jewish community as one of our own—he was even the subject of an enjoyable biography by Jeremy Dauber in the excellent Yale Jewish Lives series. So we might ask, why does Mel Brooks belong in the pantheon of great 20th century Jews? (As for the 21st century—thank G-d we still have him, but it seems like a bit of a victory lap.)

Born Melvin Kaminsky, Mel’s early c.v. follows a classic Jewish 20th century arc: born to Russian Jewish immigrants in a tenement in Brooklyn, he fell in love with theater and movies and was determined to make a career in show business. He fought the Nazis in Europe during World War II, then returned home to start a comedy career in that safe haven for post-war Jews, the borscht belt in the Catskills. Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, Get Smart, and the movies followed in the 1960s.

It seems to me that Mel Brooks’s comedy was always that easy sort of “Our Crowd” humor: if you know, you know. These are familiar characters, accents, and punchlines; it was warm and comfortable to be with people who were so recognizable. I don’t think his humor ever displayed a deep knowledge about Judaism—just about Jewish-Americanism.

Take a look at History of the World Part One—or even, G-d help us, Robin Hood: Men in Tights or Spaceballs:  the belly laughs and slapstick and knowing winks to Jewish points-of-reference are all there, but they’re of the most obvious kinds. Bris jokes. Jewish American princesses. Shlemiels and shlimazels. The easiest and most obvious touchstones for belly laughs.

But there’s more going on beneath the surface.

Mel always maintained that his humor was a weapon against the antisemites. This becomes clear in Dauber’s biography and Mel’s somewhat less useful memoir, All About Me! (2021). Considering that Mel was on the ground in Europe with the U.S. army during World War II, he internalized the ghastly meaning of Jew-hatred. But instead of becoming self-righteous, or a social activist, he weaponized his humor.

His comedy wasn’t the pointed political humor that emerged in the 60s and 70s—think Mort Sahl, the Smothers Brothers, and ultimately Richard Pryor. Instead, he turned Nazis into buffoons. We’re not afraid of you, his humor maintained; no—I’m laughing at you and your idiotic hate.

Obviously, the culmination of this is The Producers (1967), where the Nazis are a bunch of goose-stepping, effeminate, and utterly ridiculous morons. It’s before my time, but it definitely belongs in the time capsule of the American Jewish experience.

I have two reflections about The Producers that I want to share.

The first is a story that was told to me by an old friend, a generation older than me. (I’ll leave her anonymous, because she told me this story 30 years ago, and I haven’t doublechecked my recollection with her.) She told me this story about seeing the movie in the cinema when it first came out.

She told me: first remember what the Holocaust meant in the mid-1960s. It was still an open, festering wound. Twenty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the massacre of one-third of the Jews in the world was incomprehensible. And there were survivors—not the precious few elders telling their stories that we have today, but even people who were still young in 1967 who had been through the camps and were trying to navigate life in America after the Shoah.

People weren’t talking about the Shoah yet. Elie Wiesel’s Night was still new; there were very few other Holocaust memoirs available. There was a stunned, silent PTSD in the Jewish world.

So she and her friends went to see the new movie The Producers on Christmas Eve in New York. There were only Jewish people in the audience. And the movie commences. Kenneth Mars plays the deranged ex-Nazi Franz Liebkind who has written a musical “love letter” to Hitler. Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder mount the play on Broadway, knowing that it’s the worst thing ever written. And there’s its centerpiece, “Springtime for Hitler.”

My friend described what it was like to be in that movie theater. Silence, shocked silence. Were we allowed to laugh at these things in 1967? The wounds were so fresh…

And then, at some point, a lone person in the audience starts laughing. Loudly. And it has a ripple effect. There is a great emotional release, and suddenly the whole theater is full of riotous laughter for the rest of the show. She told me that she’s never, before or since, experienced that kind of catharsis at the movies.

That’s what Mel Brooks means by “dancing on Hitler’s grave” – and I think he’d be immortal for that alone.

But I have one postscript to that story.

Because not long ago I rewatched The Producers for the first time in many years.

And I have to admit… it made me uncomfortable in the middle of the 2020s. The Shoah-humor didn’t land quite so easily; lisping Nazis didn’t seem as funny as they used to.

I think this represents a change in Jewish self-awareness. After October 7, after the Tree of Life terrorist attacks, after the constant drumbeat of antisemitic and antizionist assaults against us… Is it possible that we feel a little less secure in our place in the world? That the things at which we laughed at from a place of security a few years ago suddenly seem not so funny upon considering our vulnerabilities?  

I’m all in favor of using humor to deflate the haters. This is an old Jewish tradition going back to the Book of Esther. But humor has a way of reverberating back upon ourselves, revealing things about our collective psyche that is hidden beneath the surface.

How can it be that The Producers was a cathartic release for an audience in the 1960s—and half a century later, it suddenly makes us feel very vulnerable about a world in which the ground feels like it’s shifting beneath us?

Perhaps Dr. Richard Thorndyke (of the Institute for the Very, Very Nervous) would have a deeper analysis to share. In the meantime, a very happy birthday to Mel Brooks. May he live to 120—and beyond.

Happy 80th Birthday in the Next World, Jerry Garcia: Three Jewish Things I Learned from the Grateful Dead

August 1 marks Jerry Garcia’s 80th birthday, and that milestone is provoking a whole lot of recognition across the cultural map: on musical fronts where it most certainly belongs, and a few other places where it probably doesn’t (like Garcia Bobblehead Day at Fenway).

Garcia made a big impact on my life, so even though he died in 1995, this occasion prompts some reflection.

First and foremost: It needs to be said upfront that when the Grateful Dead came to town, it was the best party around. On a good night—and not every night was a good night, G-d knows—the Dead were the greatest rock and roll band in the world, I’d stake my ears on it.

It’s important to make that point before jumping off the deep end, because for decades people have sought to overinflate the Dead’s significance in ways that are, often as not, kind of embarrassing. This essay is, no doubt, part of that trend. Sanctimony has always been the Achilles heel of this band and its fans, and all those liberal arts courses on “Philosophy and the Dead” and “The Sociology of the Dead” don’t help.

I do think popular culture, including rock, is worth studying, and I do think the Dead were an extraordinary cultural phenomenon. But let’s remember that Garcia often had the glimmer in his eye of a holy fool, implying: “Look, don’t take this too seriously, I’m in it for the laughs as much as anyone.” In other words: Don’t forget, it was primarily about fun.

Yet there were a whole lot of reasons why people latched on to the Dead and puffed up their importance. In part it was holding on to a countercultural vision that kicked back at the corporatization of things that once had been fun.

For a while, a very realistic middle class suburban alternative to the norm was to get in a car and follow the Dead around for a few weeks. It was a great way to visit other parts of the country, make new friends, semi-randomly run into old friends, and feel like you were part of something against that ran against the grain of the conformist American cultural product, even as the scene expanded to gigantic proportions. And—again, on the good nights—you got to hear fun, musically sophisticated, and occasionally risky performances.

Still, a lot of the Grateful Dead nostalgia among boomers and Gen-Xers is as much about themselves as it is about Jerry and the Dead. I remember where I was on August 9, 1995, when Garcia died: somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. I had spent the summer in Israel and was traveling back to the States for my cousin Stacy’s wedding. And my brother Andy met me at the airport with the words, “Garcia died.” Like lots of people, I cried that day. Now, I’m not one to weep for dead celebrities, but in retrospect I realize that the tears were for something much more than a guitar player whom I never met: His death sealed a chapter of my youth that was inevitably coming to an end anyhow. (And, it should be said, some of those tears were also for an artist who touched me more than just about any other.)

While I do want to write about the music, it’s worth pointing out that the Grateful Dead were a significant cultural zeitgeist during their thirty years of existence. The band morphed out of a California scene around Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, and the Merry Pranksters, who, just as the psychedelic ‘60s really got going, had a great time traveling around the country on their Day-Glo bus scaring the children and shaking up Middle America. Kesey’s bona fides rested on his great novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Cassady was intimate with Jack Kerouac and the Beats in the 1950s. Therefore, from their inception the Dead were operating in a literary-cultural milieu as much they were creating cutting-edge electric music. They and their fellow travelers were the inheritors of the Beats and other cultural nonconformists in postwar America, which, it turns out, actually is a big deal.

Musically, the Dead pioneered high improvisation in rock music (along with a few others, like their East Coast nemesis the Velvet Underground and Cream in London), and committed to it a lot longer than anyone of their generation. There are moments in the Dead’s ’73-’74 incarnation that make me think of what John Coltrane’s group would have sounded like if they played electric guitars instead of traditional jazz instruments. Those are the moments I love most—along with the outright avant garde cacophony that they also were able to conjure.

They also brought on Robert Hunter as their non-performing lyricist, which shows a certain commitment to making the words as significant as the music. It worked; they created some songwriting masterpieces (like this one) that deserve recognition beyond the Cult of the Dead.

Hunter wasn’t Jewish and his writing, masterly as it is, doesn’t have the touchstones of the Bible or semitic spirituality the way, say, Dylan’s does. Finding Jewish meaning in the lyrics depends on the interpretative skills of the listener. But I want to emphasize that I learned some Jewish lessons from the Grateful Dead experience—as opposed to exegesis of, say, “Eyes of the World” or “New Speedway Boogie.”

Here are three of those lessons:

(1) The value of spiritual transcendence.  Mickey Hart—the Jewish member of the Dead—has a great quote describing his band:  “We’re in the transportation business.” He was right: there was an invigorating energy at Dead shows for people who used music and dance as a meditative tool to leave their body behind. (Dead crowds also drew their share of religious nonconformists and outright cults.)

Where does that sense of transcendence exist in the Jewish world today? Let’s be honest: it is extremely rare in the world of mainstream synagogues, whether they’re Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, or whatever. Most of those places are far too staid for worshippers to really shed their bodies for spiritual points unknown. And—let’s be real—the formal structures of Jewish prayer aren’t super-conducive to that kind of transcendence anyhow. (In a typical prayer service, there’s too much to do—voluminous prayers to recite, Torah to read, etc.—for real meditative flights of fancy to happen).  

Hasidim are better at ecstasy. But if you’re like me, their conservatism and exclusion of women from the ritual mean their shuls can’t be my permanent spiritual home, even though I enjoy visiting. So there aren’t a lot of options.

But we need that transcendence, and the failure of many western-mode shuls to cultivate it is a big part of the reason so many of those shuls are empty, especially for young people. For many young Jews, Dead shows provided a crucial spiritual option in a time and place (late 20th Century America) where opportunities were few.

It occurs to me that the absence of ecstasy is one of the primary problems of 21st century liberal synagogues and churches.

(2) Joy is the essence of life—but you gotta earn it. Dead fans did exhilaration pretty well—spinning, leaping, smiling and sharing with one another. But it always seemed to me that there was something lurking behind or beyond the image of a stoned hippie girl spinning in a circle. There was a phantom in the shadows, something dark and vaguely dangerous—after all, why do you think they called themselves the Dead??

Maybe it was all the loss that the band themselves suffered. There was some special sort of conviction—a knowing—when Garcia would step up and sing a ballad like “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” or “Black Peter” (“All of my friends come to see me last night / I was laying in my bed and dying”). Sometimes “Dark Star” would extend dissonantly out to some pretty dark and ominous seashores of the unconscious for 20 or 30 minutes… before the tide would roll back in and resolve itself with the country bounce of “Sugar Magnolia” (“Heads all empty and I don’t care”). Sugar Magnolia was pretty joyful, but often you had to earn your dancing by having made it through to the other side.

I think this is a spiritual truth that Judaism embraces, too. The Baal Shem Tov famously said, מצווה גדולה להיות בשמחה תמיד / “It is a great Mitzvah to be perpetually in a state of simcha,” but it is banal to think that simcha means “put on a happy face.” Long ago, Danny Siegel taught me that simcha can’t just mean “happy”—after all, it is a simcha to be involved in the Mitzvah of comforting mourners or burying the dead. So where is the simcha in that?

He proposed translating שמחה/simcha as “life force”; the essence of existence and being and why we were created. Therefore, anytime we are involved in a Mitzvah/primary Jewish action, we potentially connect to the Source of Being—and that is joyful, if not exactly happy.

Jewish history is filled with too much heartbreak and suffering to say, “just be happy.” But having come through the dark, bitterness, and hurt—the joy of being connected to Life is that much sweeter and more profound. You need a Dark to stick a Light into it. Death don’t have no mercy, indeed.

(3) Jewish living primarily takes place in community. אַל תִּפְרֹשׁ מִן הַצִּבּוּר said the great sage Hillel; “Do not separate yourself from the community” (Pirkei Avot 2:4). Sure, there are times when a spiritual being needs to be alone. Rebbe Nachman of Bratzlav emphasized that each of his disciples needed to spend time every day in the practice of התבודדות, solitude and reflection.

But much of Judaism takes place only in a collective. Most famously, a minimum quorum of 10 adults is needed for the practice of many rituals and prayers. It’s as if to say that the fullest glorification of G-d can only take place in a spiritual partnership with one another.

The GD experience was hugely social as well. Sure, anyone can put on a pair of headphones and bliss out. But the touring and concert-going experience was almost always a group effort. I shared some of those sojourns with some of the best friends I’ll ever have, even if today they are far-flung across the country. But I’ll never forget Spring Breaks, piled into my pal Maurice’s ridiculous Country Squire station wagon, heading off for Atlanta, or Albany, or Ontario. Few Deadheads traveled to see shows by themselves.

So thanks for all this, Jerry. Even though we never met, you made a difference in my life (and so many others’). Happy birthday in the Olam Ha-ba.

Russian Doll and Repairing the Past

Is it ever possible to do tikkun—an act of spiritual rectification—for the sins of previous generations?

That’s the religious question at the heart of the new season of Russian Doll, easily one of the best things on television and a show that has vaulted into my personal TV Hall of Fame.

Russian Doll is a wonder on many levels. It is one of those shows that makes you work; you can’t zone out our you’ll quickly lose track of the show’s jolting narrative momentum. The first season tackled cycles of death and rebirth while making observations about human compassion and empathy. The new 7-episode season uses the hoary vehicle of time-travel in a fresh and startling way to explore the fabric of reality, mental illness, and the questions of what gets passed from generation to generation and whether we can ever repair the past.  

It's also worth pointing out that Russian Doll is entirely the work of women writers. At its heart is Natasha Lyonne, who stars as Nadia Vulvukov, a brilliant and damaged Jewish woman with a New Yawk drawl broader than the Bowery. Lyonne is the show’s lead actor, producer, writer, and occasional director; she co-created the show with Amy Poehler and Leslye Headland. In addition to Lyonne, all the other leads in the series are also women: Nadia’s ultra-hipster friend Maxine, her surrogate mother Ruth, her schizophrenic mother Nora, and her grandmother Vera. The men in the show are present but incidental, like in Chapter One of the Book of Ruth. 

Natasha Lyonne as Nadia in “Russian Doll”

Russian Doll is one of two great current shows that are exploring cosmic religious questions, both on Netflix. But while Midnight Mass, which I also loved, is thoroughly Catholic, Russian Doll’s spiritual vocabulary is unabashedly Jewish (from an intellectual and knowledgeable-but-secular frame of reference).

Frankly, it’s astounding that something this intelligent, unexpected, and challenging could even make its way onto TV. Perhaps this is one positive result of the overkill of streaming platforms that are available today; there is room amidst the cacophony for programs that are niche, high-quality, and philosophically reflective.

Anyhow, in Season Two, Nadia wanders between timelines that locate her on the cusp of her 40th birthday in 2022; meeting her pregnant, schizophrenic mother in 1982 New York; and incarnating as her own grandmother in Nazi-occupied Budapest in 1944. Ostensibly she’s searching to restore lost gold kruggerands that represent her family’s legacy that was initially stolen by the Nazis, and later lost by the soulful but deeply damaged Nora. But at the heart of her disjointed sojourn is the question—can we do tikkun for the sins of previous generations?

It strikes me that this is a very Jewish question. Before you say of course not; latter generations can’t be responsible for their elders’ failures, consider:

1.     The tradition of saying the Kaddish for a dead relative for eleven months after their death. Kaddish isn’t simply a “memorial prayer” recited by a mourner. Rabbi Maurice Lamm called Kaddish “an epilogue to a human life as, historically, it served as an epilogue to Torah study… Kaddish confirms a parent’s life of goodness on one hand, or effects repentance for a parent’s life of sin on the other.”[1] A medieval midrash (Tanna De-bei Eliyahu Zuta, Chapter 17) asserts that when a child recites certain Jewish prayers, it redeems the soul of the dead or at least eases their suffering.

Why eleven months, rather than a full year? Because the Talmud also asserts that a full year is the duration of the punishment of the wicked in Gehinnom (hell). We presume that our parents and loved ones do not fall into that category; like every other human being, each of them is a complex mixture of righteousness and shortcomings. Therefore, Kaddish is recited for almost a year, but not quite.

2.     “Dayenu” at the Seder: This year, I learned a tradition from the Haggadah commentary of Rabbi Nachman Cohen. Rabbi Cohen suggests a startling insight about the 15 stanzas of Dayenu: Each verse marks a moment in the Exodus story (the spitting of the Sea, being fed with manna, Shabbat, etc.) when the Israelites in the Torah kvetched and revolted. By singing “Dayenu,” we are essentially recalling this litany of revolt—and offering an act of repair for those mistakes.

3.     There’s an old cycle of folk tales or ballads that transcends many cultures, including Judaism.[2] Essentially, a traveler encounters an unburied corpse somewhere on the road (in Hebrew, a מת מצוה / met mitzvah), and in an act of compassion, arranges or pays for the burial. Later in the journey, the sojourner experiences a life-threatening crisis, and is miraculously saved through the intervention of the soul of the dead person for whom he cared. Folklorists call this motif—wait for it—the Grateful Dead.[3]

Yes, each of these examples belongs to the realm of superstition, or at least non-rational dimensions of faith. Still, they point to bigger existential questions about life and death and the relationship between those two realms. After all, many of us have taken on the job of executing the estate of a loved one—which often includes taking responsibility for “unfinished business” that the dead couldn’t quite complete in their lifetime. This, our tradition asserts, is a Mitzvah and a holy task.

Psychotherapy, too, is predicated on the idea that simply saying “children can’t be responsible for the sins of their parents” is far easier said than done. A huge proportion of therapy is about disentangling one’s self from the dysfunctional patterns of previous generations.

“Easier said than done” can also be said of Nadia’s trippy tribulations through Russian Doll. Natasha Lyonne is playing with old yet continually relevant philosophical and religious themes. She’s doing it through a lens that is thoroughly New York, more than a little psychedelic, and infused with the ghosts of the Shoah. Russian Doll is also wickedly funny as it addresses, with subtlety and wit, some truly profound existential ideas.  

[1] Rabbi Maurice Lamm, The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning (Jonathan David Publishers, 2000, p.152).

[2] See Howard Schwartz, Miriam’s Tambourine (Oxford University Press, 1986, pp.262-264 and citations on 379).

[3] Phil Lesh tells the story that in November 1965, Jerry Garcia picked up an old  Britannica World Language Dictionary—band historian Dennis McNally claims it was a different dictionary—and, at random, came across the entry “grateful dead” describing this folkloric motif. (Phil Lesh, Searching for the Sound, 2005, pp.61-62.)

Mr. Rogers' Moment

When I was young, I admired clever people.
Now that I am old, I admire kind people.
—Abraham Joshua Heschel

Mr. Rogers is having a moment: a new movie starring Tom Hanks; a recent book about his life and legacy; and a 2018 documentary about his life about which (it was the law) every liberal pastor and rabbi in the world had to give a sermon.

The new movie, in which Hanks amazingly transforms himself into the legendary children’s TV host, is sweet and critic-proof. I mean, it’s the cinematic equivalent of a Mitch Albom book: it’s not exactly great art, but picking apart something so well intentioned would be churlish and harsh. After all, it’s about kindness, decency of the spirit, forgiveness, and giving people the benefit of the doubt.

And during these sick and unkind times, you have to be pretty jaded not to appreciate such a message. It’s worth remembering the famous quote attributed to Henry James:

Three things in life are important.
The first is to be kind.
The second is to be kind.
And the third is to be kind.

The real secret is that kindness itself is a radical and countercultural gesture. What could be more against the grain of today’s cultural moment than to affirm a stranger’s self-worth, and to receive one another with honest affection despite our differences?

It’s curious that one of the persistent themes in the recent works about Fred Rogers is that “he wasn’t perfect” and “he wasn’t a saint.” It’s repeated so many times that it made me wonder why. Who thought that a gentle and mentoring children’s TV host was a saint? Why is it not enough to be a thoroughly decent and kind human being—and just to leave it at that?

Why is there an expectation that people who do good need to morally perfect? In Jewish terminology, is it not enough to be a Tzaddik—must one also be a Tzaddik Gamur?

That’s a particular pathology that seems to be relevant to our own Mr. Rogers-less age and the world of cancel culture. There’s a cynicism in our society that has been building up for years, that assumes that there is a dark underbelly waiting to be exposed in every do-gooder.

Somebody performs remarkable feats on the athletic field? They’re probably abusing PEDs. A political leader advocates for justice and decency? Surely they’re hypocritical and corrupt. A prominent and compassionate clergyperson? Probably a secret pedophile. And all the well-publicized disgraces of certain athletes, politicians, and religious figures have solidified this point of view in many people’s minds—each scandal is an affirmation that one day all of them will be exposed for what they really are. That’s a secondary part of their tragedy (the primary tragedy must always be their victims).

To be sure, there are real predators and manipulators out there. But it’s tragic to traffic in a culture of cynicism that assumes that everyone’s motives are suspect; that solipsism and self-promotion are at the core of most people’s behavior; that decency is probably a cover for horrible impulses that pervade unwoke culture.

That cynicism seems to me an outgrowth of expecting that a hero has to be perfect, and always in hero-mode; otherwise that person is no hero whatsoever.  Which seems a shame, because if you get rid of all the imperfect heroes, you aren’t going to be left with any heroes at all.

Everyone has their tremors and their doubts. Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi told a story about a time, as a young Hasid, when he went to visit his rebbe for counsel. When he arrived, he was denied admittance and told to come back tomorrow. Returning the next day, he was received with the graciousness that he was used to. Forgive me about yesterday, the rebbe explained; “The one you wanted to see yesterday was not here. Today he is.” He didn’t cease being a rebbe because he had an off day.

The new Mr. Rogers movie ends on a fantastic note (so to speak). To understand it, you have to know that Tom Hanks’s Fred Rogers wears the same slight, gentle smile throughout the entire film. Earlier in the film, Mr. Rogers is asked if he ever feels frustrated or angry. Of course I do, he replies. So how does he handle these feelings? He responds: by going swimming, or “banging all the low keys on a piano at the same time.”

In the final shot, the day’s filming has wrapped, and Fred Rogers sits alone at a piano, playing Schumann. Suddenly he stops and unexpectedly slams his fists down on the low keys of the piano.

Then he resumes playing the light, classical melody that had been interrupted.

It’s a great, ambiguous moment. There’s no warning that he was experiencing a particular crisis or having an unusually difficult day. What gave him that moment of anguish? It’s one moment in the film where we get a glimpse that there exist some troubled, churning currents underneath his placid demeanor, and the film doesn’t choose to specify what’s stirring them at that moment.

It doesn’t matter. What matters is the measure of goodness and decency that he brought into the world. So a hero is troubled occasionally by self-doubt. So he is, in fact, un-saintly and complicated. Perhaps that’s the only kind of hero we’ve ever experienced, and we should be grateful enough for that.