Goodbye Lenin (2003)
Most of the time most people live with one eye propped open and another firmly shut. Which eye sees better? Letting the light in, knowing and seeing clearly, not ‘in a glass darkly’ but ‘face to face’ is one half of the challenge and the burden of living; the other half is wilful blindness, the practice of anaesthesia, the assumption of ignorance, wilfully forgetting until forgetting is no longer willed.
When should we open our eyes? When is it better to go back to bed and pull the blankets over our heads?
In either case can we dispense with illusions? I don’t think so. Don’t get me wrong, there are ways of seeing and knowing that obviously access the objective truth of things. I’m speaking really about stuff like tautology, mathematics, instrumental reason. Good useful stuff.
When it comes to human beings things are different. People are not knowable as x is x, as sum totals, as the objects of manipulation. Or rather, precisely because this kind of stupidity and evil happens all the time, what I mean is that human beings should not be knowable in these ways. That doesn’t stop people trying to find out.
What happens here is the return of fantasy, the endurance of mystery, the revival of faith and love. In other words people are not knowable without the mediation, or that should really be the substance, of illusion.
Once you allow the variables of illusion to disrupt expectations and truth concerning human beings things can get messy. Because if anything goes then who’s to say I’m wrong if in my fantasies about other people they frequently end up dead, abused or enslaved? What’s to stop me from putting these fantasies into practice?
The film Goodbye Lenin is set in a political system where choice was routinely taken out of the hands of its citizens. This did not mean that illusions were discarded. As in any political system the official illusions, the dominant narratives had heavy doses of illusion. I am tempted to say that the elite in East German/Soviet society were, comparatively more paranoid and less trustful of their own people than was the case in the contemporaneous west. I am tempted to think that the illusions that were current at that time and in that place – as opposed to those circulating in the west then - were primarily of the anaesthetic variety. I think that would be utterly naïve. What political system will encourage the dissemination of illusions that seek to guide its citizens to undermine, to destroy its own foundations? Or, if the answer to this question is: “Well, precisely those western societies that encouraged freedom of speech and of thought” you need look no further than Immanuel Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment” where he lauds the model of governance of Frederick the Great, summed up as “Argue as much as you want and about what you want, but obey!” to see that there are real limits to what can be done in ‘enlightened’ western democracies.
Say what you want, criticise what you want: no alarms go off as you cross the line from debate to incitement but it’s only a matter of time before you come up against the violence that protects the social order.
Or, even more pessimistically, what if even the most rigorous criticism of the dispensed illusions of any given social order is permitted precisely because it serves to reinforce that social order? If the end of dissent is nothing more than the strengthening of the object of that dissent does it make a difference if dissent is forbidden? Because, when all is said (not done) sticks and stones break your bones while names won't put anyone in the hospital.
What is worse – an illusion that seeks only to protect or an illusion that seeks to deceive, that masquerades as criticism but is really nothing more than elite-sanctioned catharsis for the proles? I suppose, when all is said; the latter. You can always change state-sanctioned catharsis into something else – illusions are not fixed as either anaesthetic or aesthetic!
Illusions - even, or really, especially, the total lies spouted by the most oppressive regimes - can be extremely powerful incubators of real change. In even the most oppressive circumstances, in especially the most oppressive circumstances, illusion is absolutely crucial in order to defend people, to defend privacy, in order to defend other illusions.
What better way to hide than to hide in plain sight?
A digression: Perhaps, this is why a film like The Interview (2014) is unlikely to succeed in the way that its makers want it to: to give a voice to the oppressed in North Korea. This film is too obviously a piece of Hollywood trash to hide as anything other than itself. But then again...
But I digress...
Goodbye Lenin is a film about a woman's movement from and through disillusionment to terror, followed by an almost complete loss of everything - husband, self-respect - and a long, determined struggle to rebuild her life using the very tools of her own oppression.
The film begins with a recognition of the oppressiveness of life in the GDR. The Stasi arrive to the family home to interrogate the mother about her husband’s trips to the west. However, the rest of the film leaves the question of the relative merits of life under either system open. Indeed a credible premise of the film is that the capitalist system that replaced the GDR was just as oppressive in its own way.
This film is set in the year before and after the fall of the Berlin wall from 1989-90. Alex tries to protect his mother, Christiane, from the possibly lethal stress of discovering that her beloved German Democratic Republic had failed by inventing a ‘virtual’ East Germany replete with fake food, newspapers and news reports. As he struggles to maintain this illusion the lie takes on a life of its own.
On one occasion his mother wanders out of their apartment into the street and sees billboards, a second hand car dealership and a statue of Lenin being winched away ignominiously by a helicopter. They get her back to bed, invent a fantasy news story with their film editing equipment about tens of thousands of West German refugees coming to East Germany to escape the failing capitalist system and so the lie goes on.
Slavoj Žižek criticises this movie because of how it uses the Mother’s weak heart as the threat that means the illusion has to be sustained; it is, he argues “the means to blackmail us into accepting the need to protect one’s fantasy as the highest ethical duty” (In Defence of Lost Causes p65).
I think he misses the point here; rather he misses two points. The first, weaker objection to this ‘blackmail’ argument is that the son’s highest ethical duty is to protect his mother; not the illusion.
Secondly, and more importantly, there is another, antecedent illusion at play in the film that points to the high cost of illusions. Late in the movie, the mother, perhaps realising that her days are numbered, reveals to her children an even bigger lie; a foundational myth for her family that has, over decades, maintained the integrity their unit after their father ‘abandoned’ them. It turns out that the children’s father had not, as the story had gone, defected to West Germany with another woman. The truth is he’d planned to defect with his wife and children but the plan never worked out because, she, fearing that her children might end up taken away for her by the authorities for attempting to leave the GDR never went and joined her husband.
When it came down to acting in defiance of the state in order to have a new life with her husband overseas, the private narrative of a husband and wife’s imagined defection to the west was not powerful enough to enable them to escape the gravitational pull of the GDR’s distinctly non-illusory narrative of absolute power over its citizens.
The knowledge that the state could, if it so wished, take everything from her – her children, her freedom, her life – is very real to the mother. There is no doubt. There is no illusion here.
How powerful was her love for her husband? She tells her children it “was the biggest mistake of my life. I know that now…my dear Robert, I’ve thought of you so often…What I would give to see you one more time”.
She deeply loved her husband and yet she was terrified into rejecting him. Žižek’s criticism that the protection of the mother’s illusion is the highest ethical value misses this point. The mother, following the loss of her husband, indeed, of the loss of her own self, becomes a model citizen of the GDR, actively engaging in a semi-official capacity in the social and political life of the state.
Yet, she has seen the truth. She has seen behind the mask to the brutality of the state apparatus that can do anything it wants to; to anyone it wants to. Her enthusiastic commitment to the official illusions of the state therefore appear in two modes: on the one had she is using these illusions to protect what remains of her family. She is also using them to enclose her private self, the self that had been terrified into submission, to hibernate until conditions allow her to reappear. She takes these illusions and uses them until they change and they change her.
So, in addition to protecting her children and preserving herself she has, by means of working to propagate the official state illusions of the GDR managed to undermine the very structure that had forced her to carry out the annihilation of her own and her husband’s story. She has internalised the anaesthetic illusions of the GDR’s ruling ideology to the point where she has released their latent emancipatory content – she rediscovers the potential of communism that was distorted and abused by the state that took its name in vain.
This rebirth of the mother at the vanguard of history is neatly symbolised in that bizarre sequence where she gets out of bed for the first time and walks the streets amazed by the changes that have taken place. She is ‘selected’ by Lenin when his statue, as it is being craned away on a helicopter, hovers past her, its hand outstretched, beseeching/inviting at her.
She has beaten the GDR by re-membering its official ideology. The criticism is sharpened by the fact that this moment is way past the point in history where the GDR had just been dis-membered.
The moment when she is reunited with her husband does not take place on screen; they’re given their due moment in privacy – the very privacy that had been taken from them – she has therefore succeeded in preserving herself through a courageous and sustained struggle through impossible choices and complicity in the system that had initially enslaved and terrified her.
Another digression, this time, one that makes me wonder why Slavoj Žižek 'half' read this film:
The resonances with Hegel’s dialectic of the master and slave from the Phenomenology of Spirit are very clear. The mother has, like the slave, been enslaved by her capitulation in a ‘struggle to the death’ where she preserves her commitment to her life, her children. Later, it is through terror – where she undergoes the loss of her previous self – as Hegel puts it she “has trembled in every fibre in [her] being, and everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations”. The work she undertakes is, as is the case for Hegel’s ‘bondsman’, in combination with the absolute fear she has undergone to abandon her husband, the thing that eventually sets her free. Through her work she has preserved herself and her children, surviving to be reunified with her husband at the end.
Finally, as I mentioned above, there is an added dimension in Goodbye Lenin of criticism, not only of the Communist regime, but also of the new order that replaces it. In the first place, the illusion of a ‘better life in the west’ is, at the moment she is terrified into rejecting her husband and spinning a defamatory lie about him to his children, of no bloody use at all.
It is as if she knew, even then, before she had ‘converted’ herself into an ideologue of the Communist system, that these illusions were seriously questionable.
Capitalism is just not a credible alternative to communism; its illusions are, if anything even more offensive than those of the GDR. Capitalism promises everything and delivers nothing.
The communism of the GDR promised very little – did it deliver much less than capitalism?
No comments:
Post a Comment