Thank you Tom Hanson for insisting that I put The Lives of Others at the top of my Netflix queue. As in the past Germany has lived in something of denial about life in East Germany until just under a couple of decades ago. As with Nazism and the Holocaust they don’t like to talk about it too much, particularly as many of the people who were responsible for injustice against their fellow citizens have blended in well during the integration with the west and are now businesspeople, political leaders, and otherwise legal and apparently guilt impervious neighbors with people whom they spied on, informed on, and had arrested. I guess the idea is that in such an extreme system it was difficult to survive without making serious compromises of humanity, and this movie is one of very few German pop-culture attempts thus far to deal with the issues in any meaningful manner.
The premise revolves around a quote the filmmaker attributes to Lenin about not being able to listen to Mozart lest he lose the resolve to fight the revolution. The lead is a Stasi agent assigned to conduct audio surveillance on a prominent artistic couple. He is a purist, a true state loyalist, and suspects the couple of something even before his superior orders him onto the case. His confidence in the righteousness of his cause are almost immediately undermined when he learns of corrupt motivations behind the investigation, and further undermined as the music, art, and integrity of the people whom he is spying on begin to move him. The film doesn’t try too hard to shore up the plot with plausibility, though it makes some reasonable efforts.
The officer is played by the late Ulrich Muhe (with an umlaut) who had in real life resided in East Germany where his ex-wife reportedly informed on him (she has vehemently denied this despite official records which seem to make it clear). The story only makes the film itself more compelling.
Before he died, William F. Buckley saw the film and said it was the best he’d ever seen. Ironically, criticism that the movie soft pedals the oppression in the GDR comes from a source on the left. Slavoj Zizek (I don’t know how to do the little umlaut-like things above the letters) made the following points in a review for In These Times:
Like so many other films depicting the harshness of Communist regimes, The Lives of Others misses their true horror. How so? First, what sets the film’s plot in motion is the corrupt minister of culture, who wants to get rid of the top German Democratic Republic (GDR) playwright, Georg Dreyman, so he can pursue unimpeded an affair with Dreyman’s partner, the actress Christa-Maria. In this way, the horror that was inscribed into the very structure of the East German system is relegated to a mere personal whim. What’s lost is that the system would be no less terrifying without the minister’s personal corruption, even if it were run by only dedicated and “honest” bureaucrats.
It’s a point well made. The lead character, before his conversion, is more scary to me than the corruption. The true-believers are the most dangerous to basic liberty. But this isn’t a docudrama. It’s a story about the versatility of humanity even when we as a species construct situations which threaten to wipe it out. And it doesn’t oversell the concept. The conversion is not sudden, and it’s not dramatic. The ending is perfect.
….
I just watched Religulous, and while I find Bill Maher’s take and approach hilarious, it’s really not informative. He interviews an assortment of nutcases, morons, and con-men to make his points. It would have been more informative, though perhaps not as entertaining, for him to have interviewed serious theologians with his questions.
On the DVD itself I strongly recommend the outtakes in the special features section. There you’ll find fragments of an interview with David Icke, someone who has received some attention around here.
….
In 1997 my wife signed us up for cable. I didn’t watch much of it, but one night I was “channel surfing” and came across some haunting urban cinematography with an equally haunting Celtic score. It immediately grabbed my attention, and within moments I was drawn into the story. I think I saw maybe three episodes, then life took me away from it, and I came back a couple of months later but it was gone. It was entitled EZ Streets, and now a few of the episodes are available on a DVD entitled Brilliant but Canceled: EZ Streets (Brilliant but Canceled is a series of DVDs with, well, what it says it is).
This was a well written, excellently acted, and brilliantly filmed series which aired in 1996, but the pinheads on CBS underestimated the audience and messed things up much the same way Firefly was messed up (episodes shown sparsely, and out of order – in fact they aired just about the same number of episodes as Firefly). It takes place in a decaying fictional city across the river from Canada (think Detroit, where it was probably filmed) and takes a multi-layered noir approach to television crime drama, with very blurred distinctions between good and evil. You’ve got a brooding cop played by Ken Olin perpetually trying to solve the mystery of his partner’s death. Joe Pantoliano plays his likable criminal adversary who weaves a dance through dark comic relief, genuine brotherly loyalty, and creepy malevolence. Caught in the middle is a morally conflicted ex-felon trying to find some footing on some very slippery ground. Their stories are backed by a very strong supporting cast with numerous fascinating characters. Like Firefly, anytime the story seems to drift towards anything remotely cliche, you’re yanked onto new terrain with a backdrop of barren subject photography of neighborhoods in disrepair and a Celtic music score which includes artists like Loreena McKennitt to let you know that a streak of romance laces an atmosphere of despair. It was too far ahead of its time.
….
I commented before on what I had characterized as “improvements” to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. After rereading the story (to my children) and having viewed the newest film version from front to back, I’ve changed my mind. I’d previously complimented the film for altering the White Queen character, but really, they didn’t have any business doing that.
Let me start from the beginning. CS Lewis wrote the story. He was a Christian with socially conservative politics. As a young man he’d been an atheist and I think had some liberal if not socialist politics, and had been a feminist to a certain degree. His conversion led him to rethink his feminism and he concluded that feminism is a rebellion against God and his order. The Bible makes very clear that men have authority over women so he argued, and it’s in the nature of the “mystery” of the sexes that men should have decisional authority even if they are “equal” in intellectual and other respects. If you have any doubt read his novel Perelandara where emissaries from God and Satan visit a planet which has not yet fallen, both appealing to Perelandara’s “Eve” to go their way. A good portion of the arguments made the the Devil’s emissary were those made by feminists. God’s emissary argued the virtues of female submissiveness. When Eve gets confused, God’s emissary kills Satan’s emissary. That’s the story. Sorry if I’ve spoiled it.
In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Lewis depicted the Queen as cowardly and scheming in the very traditional female sense. That was his vision. You may not like it. I didn’t like it even as a kid. But that was his character. It was his story.
It was also in his story where Father Christmas delivers the gifts to the children and instructs the girls to stay out of the fighting. When one of the girls protests that she could be brave, F.C. responds, “that is not the point, war in which women fight is an ugly thing” or something like that. In the more PC movie version he simply tells her that war isn’t pretty, missing Lewis’ point and altering the message.
So, to make the story more palatable to me (and if you read my old comments on the film, you’ll see that it is indeed more palatable to me) and others likely to watch it, they stipped CS Lewis of his intention to offend me and make me think about it. He does so even more in Voyage of the Dawn Treader where cosmopolitan values are seen as more fashion than substance, and cultural simplicity (ie. what the average middle class white kids are into) are indicative of virtue and humility. I imagine that will be whitewashed from the upcoming film as well.
My point is, I don’t think they had the right to do that. I didn’t like it when feminism was stripped from Watchmen. I certainly don’t like the fact that none of the several version of War of the Worlds have been stripped of HG Wells’ original point, which was to present a parable in opposition to colonialism. I didn’t like it when the political allegories were removed from Wizard of Oz. I have a much different view of the world than CS Lewis, but his stories were his expressions. He has been deprived of his voice. It’s plagiarism as far as I’m concerned. They took something and appropriated it to their own uses without regard to its vitality.
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March 30, 2009 at 12:24 am
Anonymous
What’s the difference? A person who has spent years studying magic is more credible than someone who believes in magic without doing research?
March 30, 2009 at 8:14 am
milt
I didn’t like it when the political allegories were removed from Wizard of Oz.
What political allegories were those? Was the Tin Man, an allegory for the aging, rusting, military establishment of late 19th century America and a clarion for TR’s Great White Fleet? Was the Cowardly Lion, just another Republican shot at the Democrats? The Scarecrow, simply a straw man for an emerging pesticide industry lobby? Dorothy and Glinda, latter day fashion feministas? Toto, a harbinger of socialism?
You must be referring to the Michael Jackson/ Diana Ross version.
March 30, 2009 at 8:47 am
Tom Hanson
Glad you finally saw The Lives of Others and that you enjoyed it. The documentary I saw last week called Arguing the World is less “compelling” since it consists chiefly of interviews, but its story is just as important. The four American Jews profiled in the film lived through the Depression, WW2, McCarthyism, and the Vietnam era, and they each evolved in a different manner from their Trotskyite past,(Irving Howe stayed socialist, Irving Kristol became a Reaganite, Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer ended up in the muddled middle).The film evokes a time when men of ideas played a prominent role in our society — one would be hard-pressed to name even a handful of thinkers who measure up to Howe and Bell. Noam Chomsky? Hardly — in fact, I recently saw Rebel Without a Pause, a documentary on Noam in which I learned that he cheered on Joe McCarthy during the televised Army/McCarthy hearings. His reason? He thought the Army was the more dangerous of the two. Subtle reasoning, huh? Chomsky’s books resemble screeds more than argumentation — perfect for the political sensibilities of the MTV generation.
March 30, 2009 at 10:17 am
Cristina
“The Lives of Others” was one of my very favorite films the year it was released, and continues to haunt me. It VERY deservedly won the Best Foreign Language Oscar that year, and considering that it was up against “Pan’s Labyrinth” (which I also adored), that’s saying something.
March 30, 2009 at 11:47 am
Eric Kirk
What political allegories were those? Was the Tin Man, an allegory for the aging, rusting, military establishment of late 19th century America and a clarion for TR’s Great White Fleet? Was the Cowardly Lion, just another Republican shot at the Democrats? The Scarecrow, simply a straw man for an emerging pesticide industry lobby? Dorothy and Glinda, latter day fashion feministas? Toto, a harbinger of socialism?
When Frank Baum was pressed about the political metaphors in his stories, he responded that his stories were written “for the pleasure of children.” But his characters and images correlate very tightly with the populist/gold-silver debate of the 1890s. By all accounts Baum was a Republican and politically liberal on most issues (very good on suffrage, not so good on policies re Native Americans), though somewhat sympathetic to populism in his muckraking. He supported McKinley, but the cowardly lion image is believed to be in reference to W.J. Bryan, his roar being bigger than his bite.
Oz being the abbreviation for “ounce” and representing gold, it was presented as a false hope. In the original story the slippers taking Dorothy home were silver, not ruby. But I think this was more about exploiting technicolor than any political watering down.
Dorothy was the “everyman” with common sense and a deep notion of justice. The Tin Man looking for a heart was the alienated industrial worker – his need for the oil representing Rockefeller’s monopoly. The scarecrow looking for a brain was the farmer limited by his political ignorance. The Wicked Witch of the East was the banking system. The Wicked Witch of the West was the railroad companies. The tornado was revolution and upheaval. The flying monkeys were the Pinkertons, or possibly politicians as per the editorial cartoons of the time. They may also have been the Chinese working for the railroads.
The green city was of course money, the yellow brick road again the false promise of the gold standard.
McKinley had been referred to as a wizard, but his impotence in the story would seem to suggest that if Baum had intended for that connection, his support form him might be like the liberal support for Kerry in 2004, basically “he’s all we’ve got.”
What’s interesting is that fundamentalists have sometimes called for the story’s banning in school districts for two reasons. One is that it has a good witch, and children shouldn’t be taught there’s any such thing as a good witch. Secondly, the ultimate lesson of the story is to look within for virtue – the wizard tells each of the characters they’ve already got the virtues they’re looking for. Looking for virtue within instead of from Jesus Christ is “secular humanism.”
March 30, 2009 at 11:49 am
Eric Kirk
Tom, there were radicals who were sanguine about McCarthy. Anything which generates the “objective conditions” for revolution by stimulating the inherent contradictions within the system which will bring it down.
Cristina – I didn’t realize it came out the same year. Makes me feel better about Pan’s Labrynthe not winning the award. I’m not sure which I’d choose.
March 30, 2009 at 11:57 am
Eric Kirk
What’s the difference? A person who has spent years studying magic is more credible than someone who believes in magic without doing research?
I don’t know. I guess it depends on what you mean by “magic.” Probably if what you’re referring to as “magic” being the argument that the materialist understanding of the universe is inadequate and that there are realms of reality not explained by science or bound by the physical laws, I would say yes, someone who has thought about it and researched it is more credible than someone who believes purely for emotional or other subjective reasons. Actually, it’s not so much about the credibility as the ability to make the argument, and there are plenty of rational arguments for the existence of God or something which transcends the material universe. One might even argue that your absolutism on the subject is ethnocentric in that it promotes western materialism as holding a monopoly on the truth.
March 30, 2009 at 2:17 pm
milt
Yes, yes. All the relevant political goings on of Baum’s age became the subject of the allegories claims in Rockoff’s work of 1964 – 64 years after The Wizard of Oz was written. That is your source material. Now, you’d think that more people would have been aware of these allegories when Baum wrote it and thus those clearly obvious, to them, allegories would have gotten greater coverage then, not 64 years later. There is no evidence of any contemporary allegorical coverage.
I’ve also heard that playing Led Zepplin’s Stairway to Heaven backwards reveals satanic messages.
March 30, 2009 at 2:34 pm
Eric Kirk
The idea that he was using political imagery in a children’s book may not have occurred to anyone at the time, but it was actually a high school history teacher and his class which started researching the images in the editorial cartoons of the time. It may have been Baum’s private joke, which is why he’s so cryptic in his response to the inquiry, which by the way did come at the time so somebody was thinking about it. And by the way, he was more explicit about his allegories in his adult works.
But you’re right. All we have is eerie parallels between his story images and the political cartoons of the time in which he was writing it. There’s no firm evidence of his intent.
March 30, 2009 at 3:02 pm
milt
One, of many problems with those allegories that Bradley A. Hansen, in the Indiana U Journal of Economic Education, article I tried to link,(it’s a pdf), points out is that at the end of the WoO, and even his later works, all the good characters become Kings and Rulers in Kingdoms that don’t use money. That would certainly not fit in with either the gold, or silver standard ,at all, now would it?
But getting back to your original statement which seemed an odd one to me:
I didn’t like it when the political allegories were removed from Wizard of Oz.
How the hell could Warner Brothers have been able to leave all those 1900 vintage allegories of McKinley, Bryan, women’s suffrage, Populism, or not Populism, etc as you have cited, and made it understandable to a 1939 movie audience not familiar with those past allegories? They had to do it, Eric, even if it was at the risk of upsetting you 20-30 years later. Don’t you understand? You’re a strange man.
March 30, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Eric Kirk
Well, good point Milt. And strange is as strange does.
One quibble though. I’m pretty sure it was MGM and not Warner Bros. Warner Brothers didn’t put out stuff like that at the time. They were into more gritty realism, particularly before the Hays Code.
March 30, 2009 at 4:14 pm
neo-fabian
I certainly don’t like the fact that none of the several version of War of the Worlds have been stripped of HG Wells’ original point, which was to present a parable in opposition to colonialism.
Wasn’t the term “imperialism” by the time it was written?
March 30, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Eric Kirk
What is a “neo-fabian?” I’m intrigued by the concept.
Anyway, I don’t know whether Wells used the term “colonialism” or “imperialism.” While the latter term goes back several centuries, the concept as used by Lenin in his pamphlet written just before his revolution was supposed to describe a situation in which economic power trumped political power in the exportation of capital, whereas colonialism involved direct political control. I’ve forgotten the difference between imperialism and “neo-colonialism.”
Anyway, I think the use of the word “imperialism” was brought into vogue by Lenin and Wells having cast his lot with the Fabians, and thus the social democratic side of the split, and despite his socialism disliked Marx (even Karl Kautsky considered himself a Marxist). He probably wouldn’t have been influenced by the pamphlet nor be likely to adopt the terminology. But I don’t know anything about his choice of words on the matter. I’m just speculating.
March 30, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Anonymous
“You’ve got a brooding cop played by Ken Olin perpetually trying to solve the mystery of his partner’s death. ”
Is he a brooding wimp like he was in thirty something?
March 30, 2009 at 6:55 pm
suzy blah blah
Looking for virtue within instead of from Jesus Christ is “secular humanism.”
LOL! except that jesus christ IS within d:)ncha gn;) … and i dont mean within the bible or within the church.
within –after yuo get over the rainbow –keep going.
March 30, 2009 at 8:22 pm
milt
One quibble though. I’m pretty sure it was MGM and not Warner Bros.
Yeah, that’s what I thought too, but somewhere along that gold standard brick road, WB must have bought the release rights because that’s what’s plastered all over my DVD copy.
Something to look forward to with Chrysler and GM.
March 31, 2009 at 10:52 am
Anonymous
“I commented before on what I had characterized as “improvements” to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. After rereading the story (to my children) and having viewed the newest film version from front to back, I’ve changed my mind. I’d previously complimented the film for altering the White Queen character, but really, they didn’t have any business doing that.”
That is funny Eric! You like the movie better than the book and you are complaining about it. Milt is right. You are a strange man.
April 2, 2009 at 9:34 am
Anonymous
EZ streets just got replayed on Bravo recently. I saw a couple of episodes. Unlike Firefly however it doesn’t have a cult following to keep it alive. No geek appeal.