The Lives of Others

We watched The Lives of Others last weekend, and you should watch it this weekend if you haven't yet had the experience. It's that good. Set in East Germany in 1984 during the height of communist rule, its subject is a Stasi agent (The Stasi was the East German secret police) assigned to investigate an up-coming playwright and his actress lover. Though by all accounts the playwright is an avowed socialist, and though his works are ideologically correct, he comes under suspicion nonetheless. It's the nature of the regime - everyone is under suspicion. The Stasi surveillance of the couple's every movement is an Orwellian nightmare. Their comings and goings are tracked and logged - where they went, who they met with, what they did. Their friends and associates are investigated. Each room in their apartment is bugged, as is their telephone. If they use the toilet, or make love, the Stasi are across the street, listening in. It was commonly thought back in the 1980s that East Germany was the most relentlessly oppressive society on earth. The movie sets us deep into that society, and the oppressiveness is palpable. It's a claustrophobic world in which any idle comment or innocent joke could spell one's doom.

The movie portrays the Stasi's methods as so callously efficient as to be almost admirable. Halfway through the movie, the point is clear - there is no way out. In a society so wracked with fear, betrayal became a means of survival for many, and tragedy was often its consequence. Not to give the game away, I'll simply say that The Lives of Others is true to this reality. But out of the tragedy comes something more - redemption. The very act of making the movie is an attempt to look the evils of the East German past squarely in the face, to acknowledge it and come to terms with it. But The Lives of Others is also redemptive in the story it tells. In the end, it is a metaphor for the fall of totalitarianism, the survival of the human spirit, and the changing of the human heart. It's a great movie.