•
Rating: There is a good and a bad and the cruel world in between. The good is always good and, being good, is destined to perish. The bad is tough and breaks everyone, but becomes good and, being good, perishes, but life goes on, the future is rosy, and the two survive the cruel world that becomes better.
The good one is a bohemian writer well inserted in his historical cultural context (how can an artist be inserted into the world he lives in?) who lets his conscience sleep until someone decides to touch him closely, to steal his woman, to kill (a guided suicide) a friend. The bad one, a Stasi captain, spies on him because some bigger bad guy has decided he must find some fault, some turmoil in the bohemian's life, but the bad guy has a soul and perishes along with the good in a sick world, but still on the road to recovery.
The little fable just told, the plot of 90% of the stories that are told to us devoid of any cultural and human depth end like this and "The Lives of Others" by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck does not aim to be smart or at least an alternative point of view to what we are taught, but simply not to make us think or rather accept passively what has been drilled into us by osmosis: now we are better, now the world is free, democracy, the good guys, and the cowboys always win.
The one writing to you has excellent teachers who teach him that there is nothing rosy in the future, so he will not get lost in a defense of the DDR and its barbarities. The writer does not care about a beautiful or better world or any educational purpose. The writer just detests this film and anyone who oversimplifies things that should be weighed properly and not subjected to the intellectual and humiliating drifts of everyone (including mine).
Let's suppose we are at the center of a triangle (the current reality) and consider that the three angles, the parts that shape the figure, the parts that bring it into being, are phone taps, fingerprints taken from the Roma, the "Bulgarian Edicts" (these are just a few variables related to Italy's free reality, but they can be hundreds, thousands, when referred to the world-system). Let's imagine we want to weigh the present, to calculate the area of our triangle. To do this, we will need a base and a height that will be provided by two aphorisms.
The first, our base, will be an aphorism by Rousseau, namely: at the base of democracy, there must be complete trust in man.
The second, our height, is the explanation Kubrick gave, in an interview, of A Clockwork Orange, namely: to what extent can a state push forward its attempt to maintain control without becoming a totalitarian state?
Benjamin Constant, politician and writer, French liberal, questioning liberty, arrived at dividing it into two types so characteristic that a division of society itself was necessary. Constant divided freedoms and democracies into the freedoms/democracies of the ancients and the freedoms/democracies of the moderns.
The democracy of the ancients expected less private freedom as a consequence of greater public freedom. The example of this democracy is the Greek polis, where all free citizens could participate in public affairs. The only requirement to participate was strict control of the individual's private life to understand if the individual was worthy of interfering in public affairs, in the lives of others.
The democracy of the moderns divides society into many microcosms and spheres of influence. One for each individual, and no individual should invade another's sphere. The task of the state, which has become representative, is the sole coercion aimed at restoring the original balance. Man leaves, in exchange for greater individual initiative, public affairs to professional politicians.
Well, "The Lives of Others" addresses its objective in a vulgarly trivial way, deciding what is good and what is evil, who is good and when they become good and who is bad. The division becomes so clear from the outset that it leaves the average viewer, the viewer devoid of the cultural means that society cunningly does not require, to believe that good is everything that is not the OST. But my question is this: are we sure that today any viewer of this film, any man from any part of the world, is truly free? Let's start from one point: freedom is an absolute value, not a relative one. You cannot be very or slightly free. You are either free, or you are not, and the only rational answer to my question is that anyone, except those in power (The only possible anarchy is that of power!), will never be completely free.
The topic that Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck decides to address if developed in depth (various examples of well-thought-out mental musings... "A Clockwork Orange", "Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom"... just to mention the first that come to mind), not so mannerist, not so superficial, could indeed be interesting and worthy of the best debates, but the nothingness that the German director decides to throw in our face should be taken for what it is: nothingness.
Before an interrogation, the General asks the Captain (the bad guy who becomes good and who perhaps in the sequel, if there ever is one, will win the lottery and marry the princess to fuel the American dream, the coal of our shitty, greasy, and democratic lives...) whose side he’s on and if he's still on the right side. Of this good/evil, black/white, life/death, I am tired. The innocent do not exist anywhere in the world, neither where the sun rises nor where it sets... now will someone go and tell the director?
Loading comments slowly
