Playing Chicken in Boston by Dan Walker

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Now that I have the news on again – I’m playing the video and sound through my iPod dock with a 7″ screen now — I figured I’d be patient with any reasonable news about the surviving bomber. Naturally, it arrived at the moment I fired up the cable box/iPod dock. Now the guy says it was all his brother’s idea.

This is exactly like the scene in “Schindler’s List” where a live (and implicitly stolen) chicken gets loose in front of a Nazi officer — chillingly played by robbed-of-an-Oscar Ralph Fiennes — as he walks by a group of camp workers.  After grabbing the chicken and asking who stole it without getting a response, the Nazi grabs a guard’s rifle and promptly shoots one of the group, who falls to the ground and is shot again in the head by another Nazi.  A young boy — and the youngest of the group — steps forward, the Nazi walks over to him, bends down to the boy’s level and says, “It was you.  You committed this crime.”  The boy, sobbing, replies, “No, Sir”.  The Nazi says, “But you know who, though”, to which the boy replies, “Yes”.  The Nazi then asks, “Who?”  Still crying, the boy points to the man who got shot and yells, “Him!”, promptly ending the
interrogation and, more directly, saving the lives of everyone in the group.  A side benefit was the Nazi was robbed of the sick pleasure of killing another person.*

I still remember the explosion of laughter, mostly coming from me, in the theatre. Spielberg was able to temper one of the movie’s most shockingly violent scenes with one line that wasn’t necessarily funny.  It’s only funny in context and because it comes from a child.  We needed that laugh at that point.

Whether it was a stolen chicken or not isn’t the point.  The point is the surviving bomber is doing exactly what the little boy did.

DPW

April 24, 2013

Check the scene out for yourself at * http://www.metacafe.com/watch/an-_kaeuJbJnh72m/schindlers_list_1993_stolen_chicken/

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