Virtue and openness in "The Life of Others"

Saw Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's Das Leben der Anderen the other evening.

Das Leben der Anderen ("The Life of Others") is too secure, too polished a movie for me to criticise on the aesthetic level. It shows you, like a good play (perhaps one by its playwright hero), how a powerful storyline makes pretty much everything else subordinate to it - acting, images, words, music, and the rest. So for once I have to climb off my aesthetic hobbyhorse - it may not be the last time - and talk about the ethical content that in this film simply cannot be ignored. (I'll leave it to my German friends to answer the tricky question of whether that content was historically realistic.)

The plot turns on the points of intersection between politics and human morality, in particular the questions - how far should one go in supporting one's political beliefs, and when is it right to betray one's own side? One could merely say that immediate human or moral decisions end up dictating the answer to both questions, first for the characters and then for the nation as whole, when belief in the total political project of the GDR collapses and the joy and hopes of millions of individuals have free rein once more. The message of the film's last scene (Dreyman's personal dedication "in gratitude") does seem to be that such decisions and feelings are what count - not what you believe in or which side you are on. But to leave it at that would be too simple. It is a true, but relatively easy, point to make, to say that ideologues often lack a human side, that abstract political ideals are dangerous when they are followed with disregard for one's sympathetic instincts. And it is easy to make it in order to justify a lack of interest in politics.

This is not what "The Life of Others" does. Indeed its central characters, the Stasi agent Gerd Wiesler and the playwright Georg Dreyman on whom he spys, both have high political ideals, and distinguish themselves from the real villains of the piece - Wiesler's superior Grubitz and the Kulturminister Hempf - precisely because they have them. They are not supporting the system hypocritically for personal gain, whether sexual or careerist - they believe in what it ultimately stands for, while at the same time they desire to lead a human and morally good life. (This is signalled clearly by their common enjoyment of Brecht; a deeply humane poet but also a deeply political one, who himself returned out of American exile to the GDR after the Second World War out of loyalty to his communist ideals.) If the choice between altruism and selfishness on a personal level was the only basic one here, it would be impossible to understand the (political) motive behind the plot's nouement, Dreyman's conspiracy to publish an article on the East German suicide rate in the West German magazine Der Spiegel. The answer to the question, when is it right to betray one's own side? does not have to be - when politics matters less than people. It could just as easily be - when the people on one's "own side" are betraying their own political responsibilities. The scene between Dreyman and Hempf in the wings of the theatre (after the Wende) shows this: Dreyman despises Hempf because he has sacrificed the dignity of his political calling for mere lust. (His parting shot is, "Dass Leute wie Sie unser Land wirklich gefuehrt haben" - "[to think] that people like you actually governed our country".)

The courage that the characters need for the film's moral turning-points (Dreyman's volunteering to write the article; Wiesler's stealing of the typewriter to protect him) is partly reliant on political belief, on the belief that something more than oneself and one's immediate circle of friends might matter (that "the life of others" matters). This courage is a part of moral virtue - a part one needs in order to be able to make the ethically right choice. (Courage was indeed at the centre of virtue back in Homeric times, before the philosophical concept of "ethics" was even invented.) Yet it is not, I would argue, the only part. Many reviewers have commented on Dreyman's moral stature, compared to Wiesler, of which the spy steadily becomes conscious in a kind of slow redemption as he observes the former's everyday life. Dreyman really is the "good man", to whom the title of the piano sonata he is given by the theatre director Jerske refers. Why is he so obviously good?

Our and Wiesler's sensation of this (and perhaps it is worth stressing that word "sensation", to emphasise that ethics exists for us through feelings and not merely through reasoned judgements) cannot be because of the courage to act, which he will only manifest later. Early on, as it happens, Dreyman is upbraided by a more actively dissident friend at his party for fence-sitting; but although we feel his helplessness, this does not destroy our confidence in his virtue. What whispers to us the hints of this confidence, when we compare his life to Wiesler's, is its spontaneous quality, its openness. The first we see of him is a spontaneous kickabout in the street with a group of children as he returns home. Wiesler, by contrast, has an iron routine: even sex happens by appointment. It is paradoxically his surveillance of Dreyman, the central piece of malevolence in his politically-motivated career, that produces in him an openness to the extra-political dimension of life, above all to moral beauty. His courage to act is founded on that newly discovered openness, and is admirable, I think, chiefly because of it. Dreyman's own courage to act, to argue analogously, derives from his openness to the criticisms of his dissident friends, and even more from the emotional openness - the openness to pain - of his grief for one of them, Albert Jerske.

"Openness" here means a lot of things. It is much more than the colloquial meaning of being "frank" or "free and easy" with one's views, one's emotions, one's social or even sexual intercourse (as in an "open" relationship). One can be that, and be quite without the sensitivity and responsiveness which are closer to what I mean by openness. It could be called sympathy - but that only captures one side of it; sympathy implies a human bond, and would not include the moments of freedom - of release from bonds - in Dreyman's behaviour and demeanour. One could also call it innocence: Dreyman has this quality throughout the film.

I'm tempted in fact to expand it altogether beyond the realm of ethics, conceived as the study of right action (what in analytic philosophy is called "deontology", the study of duty), and see it as a fundamentally desirable relationship to the world in many spheres at once. The sphere of knowledge and reason, for instance: intellectually we should strive to be open, which means to doubt, to criticise (oneself above all), and to question (but in the sense of quest-ing or searching towards something even more than the polemic sense of a challenge to authority). Aesthetically, in terms of experience, openness is just as important; here it is a fascinated, self-renewing attention to the world, like that of the poet, that does not limit itself through pre-given concepts and priorities. And morally too, such prejudices (above all relating to definitions of identity or status) are habitually set aside by the genuinely open person in his or her dealings with others.

On a national note, I would like to think fondly that the English distrust of "causes" and ideology (I recall the astonishment of a Greek communist friend when I told him that in English "ideology" had for most people a negative meaning) is proof that the English are after all more open than our famous insularity and xenophobia suggest. The lack of party-feeling in the great English essayists, Browne, Addison, and Lamb, or the skeptical, empirical slant of our philosophical tradition (Hume), the universal sympathy of Shakespeare, and the innocent wonder at experience of Wordsworth - all of these (selective examples, of course) are in some fashion testament to a native understanding of the virtue of "openness". Keats even provided a definition of it in his famous idea of "negative capability". - At the same time, openness is of course by its very essence not something to be en-closed in national boundaries.

To return to the specific theme of morality, the inevitable concluding question for the arguments I have been pursuing must be: How can one reconcile the resolute courage to act morally (which I connected with beliefs, ideals, and active political engagement) with this strangely passive and doubtful quality of openness, which feels like a suspension and not a resolution? I've suggested that openness forms the basis for truly moral action, as otherwise one's acts have from the beginning only a limited and partisan significance. But for those acts to be decisive, won't some of the free potentiality of openness be renounced?

Given the difficulty of the question and the length of this entry, the most appropriate thing I can do is leave that question open; and hope that the courage to answer it will come to me at some later date.

Richard Linklater

Richard Linklater is one of my favourite filmmakers. I was reminded recently by a TV screening of his animated feature Waking Life of how original his subjects and style are, just as I was frustrated that the development of these has been interrupted again by a “mainstream” feature (Fast Food Nation, released a few weeks ago). So this piece is in praise of his genuinely independent films (or those of them I’ve seen).

The films of Richard Linklater fascinate me. In them I find peculiar tensions I have not found elsewhere. Between their obvious artfulness and what they lack in conventional craft (sutured narratives, purposeful dialogue, climax). More than this, the tension of subject with generic ambition: tragedies and epiphanies play out among students, drifters, the unemployed, people moreover who Linklater has taken no trouble to idealize or round out, but whose banalities and eccentricities are taken straight from the everyday. It would be interesting to compare him to Jim Jarmusch, on the face of it a similar director, whose self-conscious, indirect playfulness (watch Coffee and Cigarettes) conceals a very direct empathetic interest in his characters. (I’m thinking of Night on Earth especially.) Both elements are lacking in Linklater, whose indirectness is contemplative and not playful, and who is interested in human situations (the last day of school, the chance romantic encounter abroad), and ideas and possibilities, rather than characters as such. The camera waits for these to show themselves – in this Linklater remains the classic documentary director, the interviewer; but he knows how to nuance his presentation in the most subtle ways, and to give it forms resonant with historical meaning. Because of his politically activist, anti-establishment “agenda” (which comprises a philosophical justification of "slacking" quite in the tradition of Bertrand Russell's superb and cogent In Praise of Idleness) it wouldn’t naturally occur to one to look for such nuances, yet they are what I am most of all interested in here. (In this I'm taking a different tack from Ben Lewis, whose Channel 4 film a few years ago, "St. Richard of Austin", set out to unravel the messages and meanings he thought must underly Linklater's work. He more or less failed, which didn't stop the resulting documentary being very interesting - but does show the limits of that kind of interpretation.)

A potent set of meanings emerges from the unity of time which repeatedly characterises these films. Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, Tape, and Before Sunset all take place within 24 hours (or considerably less in the case of the last two). In the case of Tape, in some ways the most atypical of Linklater’s films, the other classical “unities” are obeyed too, and the effect is positively Greek in its concentration. It remains confined to a motel room and two characters arguing, with a third (the girl they are arguing about) arriving half-way through. The tension is carefully increased, the dialogue is guarded, the use of the single, eponymous prop a stroke of pure theatre. But the intention is not, as in classical theatre, to impress the weight of fateful reality on the audience, but to make them doubt what they are being shown and told. The perspectivist paradox of Kurosawa’s Rashomon (did a rape take place? whose account can be trusted?) is heightened by the realist implications of recorded media. Not only the audio tape of the crime, but the video on which the film itself is shot (using clumsy but “true” panning shots at numerous points in preference to untrustworthy edits) imply presence, objectivity, truth. Yet the whole, true story is withheld from us, leaving only the claims of the characters themselves.

Before Sunrise is also a classical, temporally unified tale about sex (and love), although otherwise utterly different from Tape. A fleeting student romance is given the pathos and dignity of Dido and Aeneas’ – not my reference but Linklater’s, signalled during the credit sequence by the overture to Purcell’s opera. (Linklater’s musical editing is superb. He opens from a black screen during the slow introduction onto a shot of the track speeding away underneath the train that carries the to-be-lovers to Vienna, coinciding with the fugal Allegro: the cut is utterly compelling.) Other eighteenth-century musical excerpts give the drama an antique gravity that its sequel lacked: the lovers dance on the street at dawn to a harpsichordist playing the twenty-fifth – the bleakest, the most grief-stricken – of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, and another Bach slow movement arches over the intensely moving final montage sequence, showing the places in Vienna the two have wandered through, talked in, made love in, in the cold light of morning (an old woman shuffling past the empty bottle and discarded wineglasses on the park lawn…).

Otherwise, unity of time is not interpreted as unity of story, but in a more open-ended, quasi-Romantic fashion. The time of the film is a frame, flung down arbitrarily over an area of life rather like one of those wire squares I remember throwing around on school biology field trips, to capture a finite segment of the local flora. Linklater’s flora is typically the oddball population of his home town, Austin, Texas, as in Slacker and Waking Life. The camera bounces pinball-style (pinball being another favourite Linklater image) from one conversation to another, neatly propelled (in Slacker) from dawn to dusk through the town by the serial encounters of its denizens, drinking, driving, (conspiracy-)theorizing. Conversations, especially speculative ones, are of central importance (as in the “philosophical” novels of Thomas Love Peacock). Linklater’s characters are extremely loquacious, and he loves to show the joy that springs from perpetuating interminable dialogues, free of all purpose and power. Talk is fascinating because it can take one anywhere, it is a continuous dérive or drift (the watchword of the Situationists, and the spirit of Godard, Rohmer, Eustache, Linklater’s French forebears), just like the movement of these characters or the camera that follows them. It is extravagant, pretentious, it fails to establish anything or “move the discussion on” (like a police officer!); but it is never mindless filling of empty space either, it knows very well the meaning of silence. It is after all, always referring to moments of silence and stillness – to dreams (Waking Life), to love (Before Sunset), to nature (the final scenes of Slacker and Dazed and Confused) – relating them with unconcealed excitement. (I find that very American, somehow! the excited refusal to concede ineffability to anything.) Sometimes, briefly, in the pauses between scenes of dialogue, those moments of stillness are echoed in the present tense – the camera lingers, refuses to cut, and makes one aware for just a second of the dumb mystery of the place we find ourselves in. In such moments too, the souls of the characters seem retrospectively to find their true weight, as Maeterlinck said in his great essay on silence (in Le trésor des humbles) “like gold and silver are weighed in water, and the words we utter have only their sense by grace of the silence in which they are bathed”. The achievement of Linklater’s style is that (as Maeterlinck also demanded) it bears this weight so lightly, in free, gentle, intimate rhythms, without resort to crushing dramatics or the apparatus of convention. I’m looking forward to the next film in which he will push this style on.