Political Tears at The Lives of Others

Lulucat woke me up way too early Saturday morning. We all went to bed early Friday night. No sex last night. And it had been a bit of an issue. Titi de Paris had gone to work in the provinces for the day: his train had left at 7 or so from the Gare Montparnasse – not, as the Fransh say, the door next door – and I was feeling ambivalent about our sexual ritual. So when Titi de Paris went into crisis because a slice of super-juicy pear had fallen to the floor after ricocheting off his shirt – Calvin Klein s’il vous plait, but still, just a teeny bit of an overreaction to such a little incident – I abandoned all hope of being entered into, but not without a little overreaction crisis of my own. None of this stopped us from getting to sleep, luckily. I only made it through ten or so pages of Hugo’s Notre Dame, shamefully ill chosen passages of which are on my syllabus for Tuesday, before fading off, and Titi de Paris shortly followed me to the restful netherworld.

The sun was not even totally up when Lulu started prancing over her sleeping daddies. With an occasional meow just to make sure we noticed. After an entirely unaccountable amount of time, I snapped into sitting posture with a “Goddammit Lulucat!” and jolted out of bed to go shove all the books on the little shelf of one of the nooks where she hides when the atmosphere is tense right on her cat ass. She took shelter in the dirty clothes hamper and I made tea. 8:30 am on a Saturday. Sitting at my computer reading useless things, miffed that Israel’s latest provocation in Jerusalem did not get so much as a headline in the NY Times, while the US accusation that Iraqi resistance arms were coming from Iran (yes, so, yet again, WWIII is here and being waged under our refined consumer noses), I ended up thinking that I might well need something smart to chew on as much as I needed dick. So though Titi de Paris, as we were hitting our early sack, had promised to offer his services in the afternoon of today, I ended up getting him out of bed at 10 not for sex, but so that we could go to market together much earlier than usual – Christelle, the fruit and vegetable vendor noticed, telling us we were “en avance” – and get our asses to the movies. We went to see Das Leben der Andere.

Good choice. (“Go, Wilma. Go, Wilma.”) Because this movie rocks.

Of course, my perspective might be a little skewed since, as the lengthy prologue to this little “critique” shows, I was particularly starved for something to chew on. But if you’re feeling a little bit the same, there’s plenty to work with in this movie. Not to mention that people, at least here in Paris but they have a certain tradition of being the people par excellence, seem really into it. The line for the showing after the one we went to stretched all the way down the canal. There is hope if only in that. When Titi emerged from the toilettes into the blissfully warm and sunny day in spite of predictions for rain, I couldn’t help but get all choked up again and say, “I could cry over this movie for hours.” I said that, and then I said, “She was so fucking beautiful!”

She is apparently Martina Gedeck, and she is hot shit in addition to being fucking beautiful. The photo still accompanying the web version of the NYTimes review of the film puts her rightly in the foreground, and comes from the turning point of the film, which also happens to be one of the film’s most beautiful scenes. When’s the last time you cried over a political thriller? Three times, I think (though I obviously wasn’t counting), I cried in this movie, and the waterworks started dripping in this scene.

The guy in the background of the still is Capt. Gerd Wiesler. Played by expressionless Ulrich Mühe, he’s a spy for the Stasi in Berlin in 1984. In one of the movie’s funnier scenes (when was the last time you laughed in a political thriller?), a little boy’s ball bounces into the elevator where Capt. Wiesler is waiting to ascend. The boy follows, and during their ascent, the little boy looks up to the man and says, “Is it true what my father says about you?” When Capt. Wiesler asks what his father says about him, the little boy dutifully repeats something like, “that you’re a spy for the nasty Stasi.” Capt. Wiesler, true to his position, immediately asks, “And what’s the name…” before hesitating and turning true to what becomes recognizable as his form, stopping himself from asking for the boy’s father’s name and asking instead for “the name of your ball.” The little boy takes him for a loony, tells him so, and Capt. Wiesler exits the elevator to deal with much more troublesome things.

Those troublesome things have to do with the assignment Wiesler’s taken up: spying on Georg Dreyman. Wiesler is pals with the head of the Ministry of Culture, but the film makes it clear that of the two, Wiesler has the better intuition, as well as a more driven sense of socialist ideals. Dreyman’s a playwright with his own driven sense of the very same ideals. As the film opens, we see Wiesler and the Minister of Culture watching the premiere of Dreyman’s play starring – guess who – that totally hot woman whose character’s name is Christa-Maria Sieland. She’s playing a worker in a factory, one who is apparently subject to sudden fevers of mystical vision concerning her fellow workers’ welfare. As the curtain comes down on the stage at the end of the play, we she her dancing with one of them. Wiesler is obviously as taken by her as we are, and begins to seethe about Dreyman’s arrogance to his Minister pal when he sees her go to Dreyman’s seat and begin to embrace him passionately. The Minister tries to calm the seething, telling his buddy that Dreyman is one of the good guys, and well protected by the regime, before going to the seat of one of his superiors and learning that this superior has it in for Dreyman and wants him taken care of.

All of the interests – sexual, political, and artistic – are set into play at the premiere, but the twists and turns of the plot are so complex, and so just, that all of the reviews of the film I’ve seen on the web give up on trying to summarize it. I’ll do the same, but I did want to try and render the moment that started my waterworks because I haven’t seen anyone discuss it yet, and because it quietly and brilliantly subverts the moral that AO Scott, for example, took away from the film: “people don’t change, and yet the world does.” People don’t change, perhaps, but that’s only when they are able to find a space where they can play who and how they are, whatever that is. This film represents a struggle for that space. (Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe died last week. It’s thanks to his writing that I know how to name this space this way. I still have plenty to read by him, but I actually never saw the man in person and now I know I never will. I’m looking forward to moments like now when I cross paths with his ghost).

(Spoiler alert: stop reading here, go see the movie, come back and read me and we’ll talk about it).

The film still reposted here shows Christa-Maria waiting on the cognac she’s just ordered in this sad bar to bolster her spirits enough to go let herself be sexually abused by the Party higher-up that we met in the first scene. At the apartment, Dreyman, in one of the many beautiful scenes of transformative recognition in the movie, has just told her that he knows about her forced affair with the guy, and that her talents are enough: she doesn’t have to go through with it. Wiesler is on something like his second or third double vodka, and he’s been listening to what’s been going on in Dreyman’s apartment for days – enough to be quite taken by them. His listening has made him vulnerable to the way they live, converse, and love. It has awakened as well a desire in him to protect the vulnerability that inheres in the way they live, converse, and love. And in this scene he acts on the desire to protect Christa-Maria’s vulnerability in the particular singularity that he has grown to cherish. The Times caption says that he’s there to spy on her. That’s not quite right. He was spying on her when someone on the street asked him what he was up to, and he took shelter from his listening in several vodkas at the bar. But his listening is not quite granted the reprieve he was seeking when she walks in for her cognac.

Wiesler doesn’t hesitate very long before going up to Christa-Maria, sitting down with her to tell her how much her public appreciates and needs her. Based on his knowledge of the domestic scene that’s just transpired, he tells her not about her talents, as Dreyman did, but about the fact that, when she is on stage, she is more the way she really is than the way she is being right now in the bar. And that her public, “Ihre Publicum,” needs her to keep being the way she is on stage. Christa-Maria tells Wiesler that he’s a “guter Mensch,” a good guy, referencing the Sonata given to Dreyman by a man who has committed suicide because he was banned from continuing his work as a director of plays. (This, incidentally, is the only disappointing aspect of the movie that I could come up with afterwards. Though Dreyman’s fingering of the sonata on the piano is musically compelling, the music as it is played by the strings seems to me a bit saccharine. As if it needed to be to make this film popular, for the people. If that’s the case, all the more power to the director and the composer, but it seems a somewhat sad sign of what the people want these days.) And Christa-Maria foregoes her rendez-vous and returns to Dreyman, where, in one of the next scenes, we see them chatting after sex in bed. Dreyman is in the midst of writing a piece on his friend’s suicide as paradigmatic of what has happened to East Germany’s socialist ideals. He’s slipping it across the border to West Germany’s Der Spiegel, and has so far, and for complicated reasons, kept it as a secret from Christa-Maria. He’s on the brink of telling her when she puts her finger over his mouth, insistently, trusting in whatever it is that he’s up to without feeling the need herself to know, knowing that if she needs to know it, she will, in good time.

There is a lot, of course, in this spy movie that has to do with secrets: when we keep them, when we tell them, and why. But ultimately, it demonstrates the necessity of trusting in the fact that people have them, need them, and that, with the right turn of history and necessity, they will know when and how to reveal those secrets, or at least to put them back into play. Christa-Maria’s tragic flaw is not to have trusted in that necessity that lives in the interstices even of a totalitarian state: forced to reveal the location of the typewriter on which Dreyman had written his article, she kills herself over her shame, though Wiesler has himself taken care of getting rid of the typewriter. That, this film suggests, is what art is: nothing more than making one’s self available for the play of the enigma that history has forced us to carry. There’s nothing romantic about it, however beautiful the actors playing the artists in this film may also be. Though the secrets we carry may be the result of certain kinds of torture, there is no torture required when the time of these secrets has come. Meanwhile, like Wiesler at the end of the film, we keep on delivering the mail, or like others of us, teaching our classes, or like others still, designing our software, or whatever else it is we do to pass the secret’s time. Meanwhile, too, the struggle for the space where these secrets can be set into play is rendered in its quiet but utter urgency. After tears shed at the menace of that space's absence, here’s to the awakening of that space.

Comments

[Poria]

Good post.