also creates a couple, but an unexpected one: the incestuous couple of the young, obviously neurotic, sexually inactive TV reporter (Tea Leoni) and her promiscuous father (Maximilian Schell), who has divorced her mother and just married a young woman of the same age as his daughter. It is clear that the film is effectively a drama about this unresolved proto-incestuous father—daughter relationship: the threatening comet obviously gives body to the self-destructive rage of the heroine, who is single, and has an obvious traumatic fixation on her father. Flabbergasted by her father’s remarriage, she is unable to come to terms with the fact that he has abandoned her for her peer. The President (played by Morgan Freeman, in a politically correct vein) who, in a broadcast to the nation, announces the looming catastrophe, acts as the ideal counterpoint to the obscene real father, as a caring paternal figure (without a noticeable wife!) who, significantly, gives her a privileged role at the press conference, allowing her to ask the first questions. The link of the comet with the dark, obscene underside of paternal authority is made clear through the way the heroine gets in touch with the President: in her investigation, she discovers an impending financial scandal (large illegal government spending) connected with “Elle”—her first idea, of course, is that the President himself is involved in a sex scandal, that “Elle” refers to his mistress; she then discovers the truth: “E.L.E” is a codename for the emergency measures to be taken when an accident that could lead to total extinction of life threatens the Earth, and the government was secretly spending funds building a gigantic underground shelter in which a million Americans would be able to survive the catastrophe.
The approaching comet is thus clearly a metaphoric substitute for paternal infidelity, for the libidinal catastrophe of a daughter facing the fact that her obscene father has chosen another young woman over her. The entire machinery of the global disaster is thus set in motion so that the father’s young wife will abandon him, and the father will return (not to his wife, the heroine’s mother, but . . .) to his daughter: the culmination of the film is the scene in which the heroine rejoins her father who, alone in his luxurious seaside house, awaits the impending wave. She finds him walking along the shoreline; they make peace with each other and embrace, silently awaiting the wave; when the wave approaches and is already casting its large shadow over them, she draws herself closer to her father, gently crying “Daddy!”, as if to search for protection in him, reconstituting the childhood scene of a small girl sheltered by the father’s loving embrace, and a second later they are both swept away by the gigantic wave. The heroine’s helplessness and vulnerability in this scene should not deceive us: she is the evil spirit who, in the underlying libidinal machinery of the film’s narrative, pulls the strings, and this scene of finding death in the protective father’s embrace is the realization of her ultimate wish . . . Here we are at the opposite extreme to The Forbidden Planet: in both cases we are dealing with the incestuous relationship between father and daughter, yet while in Forbidden Planet the destructive monster materializes the father’s incestuous death wish, in Deep Impact it materializes the daughter’s incestuous death wish. The scene on the waterfront with the gigantic wave sweeping away the embraced daughter and father is to be read against the background of the standard Hollywood motif (rendered famous in Fred Zinneman’s From Here to Eternity) of the couple making love on the beach, caressed by waves (Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr): here, the couple is truly an incestuous one, so the wave is enormous and destructive, not the sootheing ebb and flow of small beach wavelets.
Interestingly enough, the other big 1998 blockbuster variation on the theme of a gigantic comet threatening Earth, Armageddon, also focuses on the incestuous father—daughter relationship. Here, however, it is the father (Bruce Willis) who is excessively attached to his daughter: the comet’s destructive force gives body to his fury at her love affairs with other men of her own age. Significantly, the denouement is also more “positive,” not self-destructive: the father sacrifices himself in order to save Earth, that is, effectively—at the level of the underlying libidinal economy—erasing himself in order to bless the marriage of his daughter to her young lover.
. . . and out
Rather surprisingly, one often finds a version of the same family myth underlying even the off-Hollywood art films. Let us begin with Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2006), often favorably compared with Ulrich Becker’s Goodbye Lenin—the claim is that it provides the necessary corrective to Goodbye Lenin with its sentimental Ostalgie, by providing an insight into the manner in which Stasi terror penetrated every pore of private lives. Is, however, this really the case?
Upon a closer look, an almost inverted image appears: as is the case with many depictions of the harshness of the Communist regimes, The Lives of Others misses the true horror of the situation in its very attempt to portray it—how? First, the trigger for the events in the film is the corrupted minister of culture who wants to get rid of the top GDR playwright Georg Dreyman, so that he will be able to pursue unimpeded his affair with Dreyman’s partner, the actress Christa-Maria. In this way, the horror inscribed into the very formal structure of the system is relegated to an effect of a personal whim—the point lost is that, even without the minister’s personal corruption, with only dedicated and devoted bureaucrats, the system would be no less terrifying.
The writer from whom the minister wants to take the woman is idealized in the opposite manner: if he is such a good writer, both honest and sincerely dedicated to the Communist system, personally close to the top regime figures (we learn that Margot Honecker, the party leader’s wife, gave him a book by Solzhenitsyn which is strictly prohibited for ordinary people), how is it that he did not come into conflict with the regime much earlier? How is it that he was not considered at least a little bit problematic by the regime, with his excesses nonetheless tolerated because of his international fame, as was the case with all famous GDR authors from Bertolt Brecht to Heiner Müller and Christa Wolf? One cannot but recall here a witty formula regarding life under a harsh Communist regime: of three features—personal honesty, sincere support for the regime, intelligence—it was possible to combine only two, never all three. If one was honest and supportive, one was not very bright; if one was bright and supportive, one was not honest; if one was honest and bright, one was not supportive. The problem with Dreyman is that he does actually combine all three features.
Second, during a reception at the start of the film, a dissident directly and aggressively confronts the minister, without consequences—if such a thing was possible, was the regime really so terrible? Last, it is Christa-Maria who breaks down and betrays the husband, which later leads to her suicidal flight from the apartment, crushed under the wheels of a truck, whereas in the overwhelming majority of real cases of married couples when a spouse betrayed his partner and spied on her, it was the men who became “IM,” “informelle Mitarbeiter (informal collaborators)” of the Stasi.8
The most extraordinary Cold War love story was the one between Vera Lengsfeld and Knud Wollenberger who, in the now defunct German Democratic Republic, got married and had two children together. After the fall of the Wall, when Vera, a GDR dissident, gained access to her Stasi file, she learned that Knud, a Stasi informer codenamed Donald, had married and lived with her on the orders of his masters, so that he was able to report on her activities; upon learning this, she immediately divorced him and they have not spoken since. Afterwards, Knud sent her a letter explaining that he wanted to shield her and that his betrayal was, in fact, an act of love. Now that he is dying of a galloping form of Parkinson’s, Vera has announced that she has forgiven him . . . No wonder Hollywood is considering making a film with Meryl Streep as Vera.9 Betrayal as an act of love—the formula had already been proposed by John Le Carré in his masterpiece, A Perfect Spy.
The only way to account for the shift in The Lives of Others is to evoke a weird undercurrent of the story: in a blatant contradiction to the known facts, is the reason for this odd distortion of reality not the secret homosexual undercurrent in the film? It is clear that, in the course of his spying
