They Had Plastic Cars

I finally saw The Lives of Others. The first 40 minutes or so are riveting. The film shows details of life under grim socialist control (I don't mean socialist control is ipso facto grim, but it's grim in this case) with what one assumes is vivid realism -- deadening facts about surveillance, interrogation, eavesdropping, blacklisting, even torture, all pile up in one monolithically grey slab. But the life of an artist still exists, with its warmth and drunken parties -- though the hero of the film, a writer, is quietly co-opted, compared to his friends.

Anyway, a little before halfway through the movie, the harsh Stasi guy who is head of the surveillance of the charismatic playwright [spoilers ahead], does a little thing to interfere with his team's own operation. Just a little thing that ensures the playwright catches the party head hitting on his (the writer's) girlfriend. I thought that was fabulous -- the Stasi guy was disillusioned about what he discovered was his unofficial goal -- not digging out a real enemy of the state, but helping his boss "score," so he subtly interfered.

But then the same guy gets very involved listening and watching this couple. What happens but that his bad old communist heart softens. Twinkly music! It's like Disney has taken over.

At this point I felt a part of myself check out. I was still involved with the couple's fate and the horrible arm-twisting dilemmas facing them. Also there's a great view into pre-Glasnost East Berlin (I've never even seen post-Glasnost West Berlin). But it started to feel sentimental and therefore unrealistic. The Stasi guy is emotionally stunted, therefore he lives in a stark spear of a building that itself embodies depersonalized characterlessness. The artist has a great, lyrically beautiful apartment in a beautiful street. Why not? you might say. It makes sense. The artist would know beauty and live somewhere beautiful. But it felt too programmatic. The Stasi guy was so friendless he couldn't withstand all the real humanity he was eavesdropping on (the writer and his actress girlfriend have a lot of sex). Instead of that making him harder, as you might expect, it melted him. It's not unbelievable to me that he'd feel sympathy or even try to subvert the operation. But the way it's filmed is distressingly Robin Williams-like. There's a sense that a really adult perspective has vanished while a very nice story takes over. Notwithstanding it ends very sadly.

When I walked outside onto drizzly Broadway at Columbus Circle, I felt that the awful secret of living under the capitalist system is how lonely we are. But no one is spying on that, no one is paying any attention.