THX -1138--the German version and very tedious

Rating: 3/10 (27 September 2007)

Remember Total Recall? The sci-fi movie about people who get memory implants? Looks like that just happened to the viewers of The Lives of Others (LOO) , who are now convinced they know all about the GDR.  It was always cloudy.  Everybody wore either a uniform or tasteful clothes in muted shades of gray, blue, or brown.  The streets were empty.  Only two kinds of people lived theredissident artists and police spies.  There was a major shortage of women.  Everyone spoke in a flat, lifeless way (flat and lifeless--in Berlin??).  Nobody ever wore red or put on ugly flowered polyester shirts, nor did they raise kids, go to bars, shop for cold cuts, play miniature golf, or listen to Elvis Presley.
Of course, as soon as you think about this, you realize that the movie is not about a real country at all, but about one of those abstract, generic totalitarian dystopias1984 (Winston and Julia ratting on each other), Minority Report, bits of Star Wars (the slimy toad-monster molesting Princess Leah) and above all, THX 1138, with gray hairless people grimly marching along gray sunless corridors while security forces keep flawless records on everybody. In other words, LOO creates a montage of spliced, recycled images from sci-fi movies to implant a generic image of "the totalitarian state" in our minds as our "memory" of the GDR.
If we accused the director of playing games with these images, he would probably respond disingenuously that he made a movie about a state of mind and not a historical documentary. Funny though how many people (to judge from the reviews) believe that now they know something about the GDR. Well, what's wrong with a false memory, as long as it's anti-communist?
And on the subject of falsehoods, take a look at a little sleight of hand the director tries to pull:: 1) The protagonist is understandably unhappy about the suicide of his friend. 2) The GDR did stop publishing suicide statistics (actually even earlier than 1977, as is discussed in a 1972 Radio Free Europe research report that you can see online). 3) Before the GDR stopped publishing the figures, it had a very high rate, probably the second highest in Europe after Hungary. So far, so good, but now keep your eyes open as the rabbit is pulled out of the hat! So it logically follows that the communist regime caused the high suicide rate-- right? Wait a minute! This conclusion is a logical non sequitur and a misrepresentation of historical facts. The regions comprising the GDR (especially Saxony, Prussia, and Mecklenburg, with Brandenburg not far behind) already had some of the highest suicide rates in Europe as early as the period from the 1860s to the 1880s, when these data were first systematically made available. The rate in Saxony (think Dresden and Chemnitz) was consistently the highest in Europe throughout this period. But these historical and sociological facts might inconveniently interfere with the simple anti-communist message.
Don't worry, I am not about to undertake the Herculean task of defending the GDRand indeed there was a lot not to like. But if you really want to know something about it, not just wallow in feel-good anti-Communism, see Goodbye, Lenin, an infinitely better movie than LOO. Two negative perspectives, but both of them more serious than LOO, are Jan Schutte's Abschied/Farewell: Brecht's Last Summer and Peter Kahane's The Architects, about a group of young urban planners. And try some GDR movies, many of which had a more critical and humorous edge than you might expect, such as Egon Gunther's Der Dritte, a comedy about a slatternly, feisty single mom and bus cleaner. Yes, ordinary working people actually existed, rode on buses, drank beer, ate cold cuts, went to jobs, raised kids, enjoyed sex, and stood up to their bosses (the chronic labor shortage allowed workers to be far less subservient at the workplace than the "free" and pathetically insecure American employee has to be). The subject of the relative autonomy and equality of women is way to big to get intoChrista-Maria's limp victim-hood was not typicalyou can check this out in Christel Lane's article on women in the GDR in Sociology, Volume 17, no. 4, November,1989.
Bottom line on LOO: Don't believe everything you see; and you will see disappointingly little of the very attractive Sebastian Koch, whose talents are wasted in a glum and sexless part..