Film-making at its Best

Rating: 10/10 (2 March 2008)

Filmmaker's Purpose.
This film expresses an array of complex characters and concepts, all which are historically intertwined and provocatively motivated by the belief in rebellion. It is the rebellion of those possessing a considerable measure of moral courage that fight against the corruptions of East Germany's secret police in order to establish freedom from tyranny. However, resistance is felt amongst both partiesthose who seek to collapse the socialist movement in East Berlin, and those who seek to maintain the socialist status quo. Each character in the film has something to rebel against. Their rebellion springs forth from a desire to foster progressive attitudes in an ever paranoid community.
Anti-socialist/writer, Georg Dreyman, rebels against the Stasi by publishing a series of suicide rates in the Spiegel report (West Germany). His purpose in doing so is to expose the consequences of what happens when a corrupted government unethically infiltrates the lives of others. Those whose lives are penetrated by the police are driven to madness and eventually suicide. Dreyman's hopes are that the reports will produce a disdainful image on the Stasi and thereby lead to their downfall as well as of the socialist state.
Interrogation agent Wiesler has an internal rebellion throughout the film. His feelings are torn between his loyalty to the state versus his loyalty to his conscience. On one hand, his moral obligation to the state consists of him secretly investigating the lives of anyone suspected of revolutionary ideas. It is his solemn duty to uphold the socialist status quo. On the other hand, however, he feels his life-long service to the state has turned him into some type of hidden monsterone that fears exposure and secretly lurks in the corners of paranoia. His rebellion to become innocent again takes him on a cathartic journey through which he slowly begins to throw off the shackles of conditioned imprisonment that the state has created in his mind.
Actress CMS, Dreyman's girlfriend, is confronted by a series of challenges that lead her to rebel both against her conscience as well as the powers that be. Her life is governed by her art. The art she creates for herself is acting. However, a façade is created in her mind by Minister Hempf that there are limits to her creative powers in how far she can climb in the business. Due to the Minister's high position in government affairs, he threatens her to believe that unless she gives her body to satiate his lusting desires, she will be blacklisted and unable to fulfill her dreams. At first, she rebels against her conscience as well as those who truly love her namely Dreymanand fulfills the wishes of the Minister. Later, after being verbally saved in a bar by agent Wiesler, she comes to her senses and decides that her talent is independently greater than the shallow intimidations of the Minster.
One aesthetical element that contributes to the filmmaker's purpose of rebellion is the directingin particular, the director's choice of choosing the title of the film. Deep implications are found behind thinking about what the lives of others means. The mere observation that the lives of others are being infiltrated and exposed in this community is representative of the paranoia that was still existent during the post-Cold War years. The prevailing and corrupt government was married to this paranoia in consequence of their potential thoughts of losing power over the state. As philosopher Thomas Hobbes once professed, "Human nature is innately predicated upon self-interest and desires for power." It was this desire for power that led those in control to rebel against the people in order to maintain the governing status quo.
Symptomatically speaking, humans have always needed something to rebel against in order for them to feel progressively challenged. We, by nature, are problem solvers. If there is not intense opposition attempting to thwart our goals, the definition and feeling of success is eradicated; for success is predicated upon overcoming that which provides severe pressure. As paraphrased in one of the last scenes of the film, the Minister declares to Dreyman after the wall comes down that "if there's nothing to believe in or rebel against, the people don't grow." It is through the challenges we face in life that propels us to rebel against the current state, whether literally or figuratively speaking, and through the process become new and refined creatures.