Watching "The Lives of Others"

I saw "The Lives of Others" over the weekend, and would highly recommend it to those interested in a disturbingly good vignette of East German life under the Stazi. In particular, it portrays the all-consuming anxiety (and absurdity) associated with intellectual life in pre-1989 Eastern Europe. Although most cinema offers the audience a modicum of guilty, voyeuristic pleasure, this film turns up the pathos by allowing the viewer to watch the watchers. It doesn't surprise me that it won the Oscar for best foreign language film a few years back.

As westerners, it's nigh impossible for us to imagine (or empathize with) the acute mental stress that besieged those who dwelt in the wall's shadow, but this film will certainly join the canon of work dedicated to facilitating a bona fide attempt. The film's protagonist, Georg Dreyman, evinces many of the crises of conscience (and psychoses) described by Nobel Prize-winning author Czeslaw Milosz in his essential work The Captive Mind. In the following passage, Milosz describes his notion of "aesthetic ketman" or a certain form of psychological resistance to the will of authority:

"Aesthetic ketman is born of the disparity between man's longings and the sense-satisfactions the "New Faith" (Revolutionary Marxism) offers. A man of taste cannot approve the results of official pressure in the realm of culture no matter how much he applauds the latest verses, how many flattering reviews he writes of current art expositions, nor how studiously he pretends that the gloomy new buildings coincide with his personal preferences in architecture. He changes completely within the four walls of his home. There one finds (if he is a well-situated intellectual) reproductions of works of art officially condemned as bourgeois, records of modern music, and a rich collection of ancient authors in various languages. The luxury of splendid isolation is pardoned him so long as his creative work is effective propaganda. To protect his position and his apartment (which he has by the grace of the State), the intellectual is prepared to make any sacrifice or compromise; for the value of privacy in a society that affords little if any isolation is greater than saying "my home is my castle" can lead to one to surmise." (pg. 65)

The film deals with the intricate destruction of this "splendid isolation". Here is the trailer: