Some Reactions to "The Lives of Others"

Though I missed the chance to see The Lives of Others with Ethan when he saw it on his recent trip here, I did get a chance to see it this past weekend, and I can't recommend it highly enough.  (This follows on the heels of seeing Mira Nair's The Namesake a couple weeks back, which is simply gorgeous and outstanding.) 

Here's a quick capsule summary from Slate's Dana Stevens:

The film opens in 1984 in East Berlin, where we see Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) a captain of the East German secret police, teaching a class in extreme interrogation techniques. These include sleep deprivation, the spouting of Orwellian paradoxes (if the prisoner believes the state capable of detaining him for no reason, that belief alone is enough to justify his arrest), and, in a creepy detail, the collection of the prisoner's seat cushion after the interview to be preserved as an odor sample for police dogs. The real intrigue begins when Wiesler is assigned to bug and monitor the apartment of a successful writer, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), and his girlfriend, a famous stage actress named Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). Georg is neither a subversive nor a party loyalist: He's a go-along-to-get-along guy, too comfortable with his success to question the regime closely, even as it closes in on his scruffier and more outspoken fellow artists. But Wiesler's superior, Col. Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), wants to further his career by impressing the party bigwig Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme), who is looking to get his swinish mitts on Christa-Maria by any means necessary. And Wiesler himself is a rigid ideologue, a socialist automaton who mistrusts all artists on principle—even if the meticulous care with which he runs his own surveillance operation hints at a thwarted creative desire.

The Lives of Others is a more politically charged movie than the Namesake, and one that raises fascinating questions about tensions among law, criminality, artistic purity and personal loyalty--thus I have a few more comments to add than I normally do in my genre of microscopic film reviews.  But these might only be of limited interest to those who have seen the movie, so I'll put them below the fold and invite others to weigh in on this with their own reactions in the comments.

The first half of the movie struck me initially as useful anti-communist cinematic propaganda, detailing and dramatizing the dangers of a surveillance state where the Stasi rules, where apparatchiks abuse state machinery for venal personal goals of lust and social currency.  Of course, that pro-Western vibe starts to deteriorate pretty rapidly the more one reflects upon the Bush Administration's penchant for sloppy or malfeasant surveillance operations of its own.  In this sense, the movie's early message -- Boo surveillance! -- is capable of appealing to liberal democrats' best instincts while also raising severe questions about the ways in which we have slipped (or leapt!) from those noble ambitions in our own efforts against terrorism.  Sure enough, the movie will hit home for those prawfs who readily admit that the Bush Administration has served to radicalize them, moving them from generic neoliberalism or moderate conservatism to full-throated skeptics of state power, verging on shades of crypto-anarchism.

As Wiesler's character -- a profile first in the banality of evil and then in courage -- develops through the arc of the film, the movie is transformed.  Wiesler's character microcosmically reflects a struggle of humans against "humanisms," the overfed archetypes that permeate the GDR's administration.  Ideological abstractions and commitments become wellsprings of cruelty.  Basic decency is the most subversive rebellion. 

When Wiesler's eroico resistance is made out, his career suffers, and he's relegated to steaming envelopes open until he walks off the job on the day the Berlin Wall falls down.  Wiesler only finds his own serenity after the surveilled writer, Georg Dreyman (played by Koch, a German Pierce Brosnan double,) discovers Wiesler's action in the course of post-unification Germany's open-file policy, and issues a subtle but no less monumental acknowledgement of gratitude.  The movie, which at first struck me as essentially political, stands, in the end, not for East or West, each of which is capable of its own (though differing) cruelties, but for a retrenchment from politics.  In this respect, it reflected what I take to be the ethos of literature generally: to paraphrase Irving Howe, "the notion that abstract ideas invariably contaminate [life] and should be kept at a safe distance from it." Am I mistaken with this reaction? I'm curious to hear your thoughts if you've seen the movie.