THE LIVES OF OTHERS is one of the finest movies ever made. It's an inside look at the East German Ministry for State Security -- the Stasi -- and its domestic spies and informants. Freedom of conscience, artistic freedom, religious freedom, simple freedom to live daily life as one chooses -- these were enemies of the state, to be identified quickly and rooted out mercilessly.
Ed Driscoll says the movie is remarkably timely. He is right. During the pandemic panic, a man who tossed a football to his kids in an otherwise empty park became an enemy of the people, subject to being identified and rooted out public shaming, even arrest.
Mr. Driscoll wrote before the recent protests and riots elevated Black Lives Matter to the new cause du jour. Now the game is to identify, scold, and hurt white people who show insufficient enthusiasm for confessing guilt for the death of a man they did not kill. "You criticized rioters for burning black-owned businesses! You cannot teach in our university!"
You can read the whole thing here: Ed Driscoll, "Pandemic Paranoia Makes 'The Lives of Others' a Remark ably Timely Movie," pjmedia.com, May 25, 2020 (emphasis added, abridged).
The essay ends with speculation why Western intellectuals and artists failed to make movies about communism equal, in art or intelligence, to The Lives of Others.
The Lives of Others has remarkable tension all the way through its 137 minute running time, perhaps because we’ve seen all the elements before in a variety of movies ranging from the James Bond series to Richard Burton’s The Spy Who Came In From the Cold: The shadowy concrete buildings and pools of light from streetlamps illuminating otherwise menacing-looking streets, the spies and their tradecraft, the surveillance state, the attempts to flee the Berlin Wall, etc. So why aren’t there more films about life behind the Iron Curtain? In 2007, when The Lives of Others played America’s art-house circuit, John Podhoretz theorized in the Weekly Standard:
I think there may be another reason for the reluctance of the makers of pop culture worldwide to reckon with communism, and that is shame. The ideological struggle against leftist totalitarianism was something that did not arouse the interest or enthusiasm of cultural elites in the West during the Cold War. Far from it; from the 1960s onward, the default position of the doyens of popular culture was a presumption in favor of the Communist struggle, as personified by Mao, the Viet Cong, Castro, the Sandinistas, El Salvador’s guerrillas, and the so-called African liberation movements.
This was not a reasoned, or thought-through, view. It was little more than fashion. And rarely, if ever, has history rendered a more devastating verdict on the wrongheadedness of fashionable Western groupthink than it did when the walls and statues came down, and Lenin was removed from his unholy pedestal.
They got it wrong. And though they may not know it, they are ashamed of it and do not wish to be reminded of it. Perhaps that’s why it took a 33-year-old to make this masterpiece–a 33-year-old who was too young during the Cold War to have joined any camp in any meaningful way. [Director] Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck found a great story to tell with a great setting and he told it with peerless skill while bearing none of the scars of past ideological battles.
. . . .
In his Weekly Standard review, John Podhoretz wrote that as directorial debuts go, The Lives of Others is on par with Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, and while they’re obviously very different films in terms of content and style – he’s not wrong. No less than William F. Buckley, a year before his death at age 82, wrote in 2007 that von Donnersmarck’s film is "the best movie I ever saw . . . . The tension mounts to heart-stopping pitch and I felt the impulse to rush out into the street and drag passersby in to watch the story unfold.”
Freedom Versus Security
The Lives of Others is a remarkably timely movie right now, for multiple reasons. We’ve seen several blue enclaves in America, such as Los Angeles, Manhattan, and Houston attempt to set up snitch lines to turn in businesses reopening ahead of the Coronavirus lockdown schedule. . . .
The details of Obama’s spying on the incoming Trump administration (aka "Obamagate") are beginning to trickle out, likely accelerating in quantity as November approaches, an extension of Obama's spying on reporters. . . .
Politics runs alongside two poles: freedom and security. For most of America’s history, the former was its government’s goal. Under FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s, “This shift from a government aimed at protecting Freedom to one designed to provide Security is the single most important thing that happened in 20th Century America,” conservative blogger and book reviewer Orrin Judd wrote in 2000. And more security means more laws – and the potential for more to be arrested.
. . . . Today's Germans are determined to seek security in socialism, not realizing they could be about to make the same mistakes as their 20th century predecessors.
In the last line of his essay, Mr. Driscoll speaks metaphorically. By today's Germans, he means radical American leftists who are using the pandemic shutdown and the BLM protests and riots as reasons to do more spying and informing.
I disagree with Mr. Driscoll's final point. Progressives, Democratic Socialists, and their military arm, Antifa, do know what they are doing. They intend to do it. They don't see spying, informing, and enforcing the diktats of the thought police as mistakes. They see them as necessary, and quite delightful, tools of revolution and power.
