Charlottesville Words

Did you see The Lives of Others when it was at the Vinegar Hill Theater? It’s a very good movie about East Germany before and just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the role of a Stasi officer in the life of an East German playwright. It seemed so realistic that after viewing it my friend and I wondered if it was based on a true story.

Apparently it is not a true story, but it is meant to be a true portrayal of the times. Timothy Garton Ash reviews the ways in which the movie is and is not true to the East Germany of his personal experience in the New York Review of Books this week. (The review gives away some important plot points; see the movie first if you can.)

Some highlights from the article — He notes some some German terms used in the film that would not have been current in East Germany at the time, and concludes:

But these objections are in an important sense beside the point. The point is that this is a movie. It uses the syntax and conventions of Hollywood to convey to the widest possible audience some part of the truth about life under the Stasi, and the larger truths that experience revealed about human nature. It mixes historical fact (several of the Stasi locations are real and most of the terminology and tradecraft is accurate) with the ingredients of a fast-paced thriller and love story.

These ingredients occasionally lift the story above its sources:

Watching the film for the first time, I was powerfully affected. Yet I was also moved to object, from my own experience: “No! It was not really like that. This is all too highly colored, romantic, even melodramatic; in reality, it was all much grayer, more tawdry and banal.”

In terms of its impact on an international audience:

Does anything essential get lost in this translation? The small inaccuracies and implausibilities are, on balance, justifiable artistic license, allowing a deeper truth to be conveyed. It does, however, lose something important: the sense of what Hannah Arendt famously called the banality of evil— and nowhere was evil more banal than in the net-curtained, plastic-wood cabins and caravans of the German Democratic Republic. Yet that is extraordinarily difficult to recreate, certainly for a wider audience, precisely because it was so banal, so unremittingly, mind-numbingly boring. (Or could a great screenwriter and director create a nonboring film about boredom? I lay down the challenge here.)

This week’s issue contains a second movie review, this one by Daniel Mendelsohn, of 300. After summarizing the incident on which 300 is based, Mendelsohn argues that the director has managed nearly as great an achievement as Ash proposes above: He has made a supremely boring film about one of the most exciting events in history. Bravo.

Mendelsohn’s essay is a model review. He steers his essay around the pass at Thermopylae to modern XBox games, through the origins of Greek theater to drama’s final curtain in the cineplexes showing 300. Well done.