The Lives of Others - movie review

One of the mini-seminars I'm taking this semester at the Renaissance Society on the campus of Sacramento State is a movie review class. Unfortunately, it isn't well organized so we really don't talk about the "movie of the week" either before or after seeing it in class. Makes it harder to know whether or not I'm supposed to like it and for what reasons. On the positive side, whoever is doing the choosing of the movies is doing a great job of find some that are very thought provoking.

This last Friday's offering was "The Lives of Others". The title comes from the theme of the film which revolves around the German Democratic Republic (GDR) otherwise known in the west as East Germany starting in the year 1984 when the GDR was still a very buttoned down society. The government maintained a corps of 200,000 informers to spy and report on their neighbors, friends, even family members so that the state could always know everything there was to know about "the lives of others". Thus, if a student should ask the wrong question in class or even ask the right question at the wrong time, that student's future career choices may be limited. When thinking of secret police and totalitarian states we tend to think of Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union but this film shows how a much "gentler" state can still be ruthlessly totalitarian.

Only when one of the characters sees that the system can be used for personal, non-state security, reasons does the system begin to unravel for this man. Torture of the most mild kinds is still torture and the movie seems to indicate that we all have a breaking point. While the movie does have it's very dark moments, it moves us through Glastnost and the falling of the Berlin wall so there is a sort of happy ending.

The scariest part of the movie for me was how easily it would be for the U.S. to slip into a GDR type of system given our current Department of Homeland Security, the unprecedented level of domestic spying, and recent reductions in the guarantee of habeas corpus and restrictions on torture. Anybody living in the U.S., citizen or not, is now subject to the same possibility of complete security oversight just by being declared an enemy combatant.