gradually pushes him to help Dreyman. After die Wende, Dreyman discovers what had gone on by gaining access to his files; following which he reciprocates in amorous terms, including tailing Wiesler who now works as a postman. The situation is thus effectively reversed: the observed victim is now the observer. In the film’s last scene, Wiesler goes to a bookstore (the legendary Karl-Marx-Buchhandlung on the Stalin Allee, of course), buys the writer’s new novel, Sonata for an Honest Man, and discovers that it is dedicated to him (designated by his Stasi codename). Thus, to indulge in a somewhat cruel irony, the finale of The Lives of Others recalls the famous ending of Casablanca: the proverbial “beginning of a beautiful friendship” between Dreyman and Wiesler, with the intrusive female obstacle conveniently disposed of—a true Christological gesture of sacrifice (no wonder her name is Christa-Maria!).
In contrast to this idyll, the very appearance of light-hearted nostalgic comedy in Goodbye Lenin is a façade which covers a much harsher underlying reality (signalled at the very beginning by the brutal intrusion of the Stasi into the family home after the husband escapes to the West). The lesson is thus much more desperate than that of The Lives of Others: no heroic resistance to the GDR regime was ultimately sustainable, the only way to survive was to escape into madness, to disconnect from reality.
This, of course, in no way implies that Goodbye Lenin is without faults of its own. A comparison with another recent political thriller can be of some help here: John Malkovich’s Dancer Upstairs. In both films, violence is framed by love: the love of a son for his mother (Goodbye Lenin), the love of a man for a woman (Dancer). In both cases, the function of love is stricto sensu ideological: it mystifies and thereby domesticates, renders tolerable, the confrontation with the Real of brutal, traumatic violence—the violence of the GDR regime, as well as of its collapse and the Western takeover; the violence of Sendero Luminoso’s ruthless revolutionary terror. While both Lenin and Dancer confront a recent “radical” political past, significantly, one was a big hit and the other a box-office failure.
Goodbye Lenin tells the story of a son whose mother, an honest GDR believer, has a heart attack on the confused night of the demonstrations which accompanied the forty-year anniversary celebrations in 1991; she survives, but the doctor warns the son that any traumatic experience could cause the mother’s death. With the help of a friend, the son thus stages for the mother, who is restricted to her apartment, the smooth continuation of the GDR: every evening, they play on the TV video-recorded fake GDR news, and so on. Towards the film’s end, the hero says that the game has gone too far—the fiction staged for the dying mother has become an alternative GDR, reinvented as it should have been . . . Therein resides the key political question, beyond the rather boring topic of Ostalgie (which is not a real longing for the GDR, but the enactment of a real parting from it, the acquiring of a distance, detraumatization): was this dream of an “alternative GDR” inherent in the GDR itself? When, in the final fictional TV report, the new GDR leader (the first GDR astronaut) decides to open the borders, allowing the West German citizens to escape consumer terrorism, racism, and the hopeless struggle to survive, it is clear that the need for such a utopian escape is real. To put it quite brutally, while Ostalgie is widely practiced in today’s Germany without causing ethical problems, one (for the time being, at least) cannot imagine publicly practicing a Nazi-nostalgia—“Goodbye Hitler” instead of “Goodbye Lenin.” Does this not bear witness to the fact that we are still aware of the emancipatory potential, distorted and thwarted as it was, in Communism but which was completely missing in fascism? The quasi-metaphysical epiphany towards the film’s end (when the mother, on her first walk outside the apartment, finds herself face-to-face with a statue of Lenin being transported by helicopter, whose outstretched hand seems to address/interpellate her directly) is thus to be taken more seriously than it may first appear.
The weak point of the film is that (like Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful) it sustains an ethics of protecting one’s illusions: it manipulates the threat of a second heart attack as the means to blackmail us into accepting the need to protect one’s fantasy as the highest ethical duty. Does the film here not endorse unexpectedly Leo Strauss’s thesis on the need for a “noble lie”? But is it really that the emancipatory potential of Communism is only a “noble lie” to be staged and sustained for naive believers, a lie which actually only masks the ruthless violence of Communist rule? The mother is the “subject supposed to believe” here: through her, others sustain their belief. (The irony is that it is usually the mother who is supposed to be the care-giver, protecting her children from cruel reality.) Is the mother in Goodbye Lenin not the one who makes the law on behalf of the (absent) father here? So—since, for Lacan, therein resides the genesis of male homosexuality—the true question is: why is the hero not gay, as he should have been?
In contrast to Goodbye Lenin, Dancer Upstairs sees no redemptive potential in the figure of Evil with which it is strangely fascinated; it should rather be read as yet another version of Conrad’s voyage into the “heart of darkness,” epitomized here by the excessive cruelty and ruthlessness of the Sendero Luminoso movement which, so we are told, showed no interest in conquering public opinion with ideological programs, but simply waged its murderous campaign. Rejas, the “honest liberal” police investigator and the film’s hero, is split between the corruption of those in power and the absolute Evil of the Revolution. This split is the one between form and content: Rejas supports the form of the existing democratic order. Although critical of its present content (the corrupt rapist president, and so on), he rejects the revolutionary “transgression” of the form, the “leap of faith” into the inhuman dimension.
However, the enigma that the film addresses is double: it is not primarily the enigma of the “radical Evil” of Sendero Luminoso terror, but the enigma of Rejas’s love-object: how is it possible for a cultivated and beautiful middle-class ballet dancer to be a “fanatical” member of Sendero Luminoso? Why does Yolanda totally reject Rejas at the end? How to account for the gap that separates this sensitive and beautiful woman from the fanatical and merciless revolutionary that explodes at the end? Therein resides what one is tempted to call the constitutive stupidity of the film (and of the novel on which it is based): publicized as an attempt to “understand” the Sendero Luminoso phenomenon, it is precisely a defense against such an understanding, an attempt to perpetuate the “enigma” it confronts. No wonder that, ultimately, Dancer Upstairs—which prides itself on being anti-Hollywood—relies on the basic Hollywood formula of the “production of the couple.”
The real Hollywood Left
If even the marginal non-Hollywood productions remain determined by the family motif, where, then, are we to find true exceptions to its rule?
In March 2005, the Vatican itself made a highly publicized statement, condemning in the strongest terms Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code as a book based on lies and which spread false teachings (for example, that Jesus had married Mary Magdalene and that they had descendants—the true identity of the Grail is Mary Magdalene’s vagina!), especially regretting the book’s popularity among the younger generation searching for spiritual guidance. The absurdity of this Vatican intervention, sustained by a barely concealed longing for the good old days when the infamous Index of prohibited books was still operative, should not blind us to the fact that, while the form is wrong (one almost suspects a conspiracy between the Vatican and the publisher to give a new boost to the sales of the book), the content is basically right: The Da Vinci Code does in fact propose a New Age reinterpretation of Christianity in terms of the balance of the masculine and feminine principles, that is, the basic idea of the novel is the reinscription of Christianity into a pagan sexualized ontology: the feminine principle is sacred, perfection resides in the harmonious coupling of the male and female principles . . . The paradox to be accepted here is that, in this case, every feminist should support the Church: it is only through the “monotheistic” suspension of the feminine signifier, of the polarity of the
