The Lives of Others – A lesson in character transformation
Screenwriter Florian Henckel had allegedly heard a quote attributed to Lenin about Beethoven’s Appassionata, “If I keep listening to it, I won’t finish the revolution.” This line makes its way into dialogue between the Playwright protagonist and his Actress girlfriend, while discussing the crimes of the Stasi (E. Germany’s Secret Police).
And thus began his journey of writing the screenplay of TLO, a film about repression in the former GDR where a Playwright (Hero) is put under the scanner for potential subversive tendencies by a Stasi agent (Baldie).
Here is what Lenin actually said as recorded by Maxim Gorky, “I know the Appassionata inside out and yet I am willing to listen to it every day. It is wonderful, ethereal music. On hearing it I proudly, maybe somewhat naively, think: See! people are able to produce such marvels!” He then winked, laughed and added sadly: “I’m often unable to listen to music, it gets on my nerves, I would like to stroke my fellow beings and whisper sweet nothings in their ears for being able to produce such beautiful things in spite of the abominable hell they are living in.”
Any screenwriter that is willing to “tweak” and completely change a line from history to make for more compelling dialogue is aces in my book. When I knew that a German film had won the Best Foreign Oscar in 2007, I automatically assumed it was yet another Nazis-are-bad movie. I refuse to watch Holocaust movies.
I saw the film’s one-sheet (that’s poster for you non-filmi folks), and saw Baldie with headphones, and another image of a couple making out, and found out that it was about surveillance in the former East Germany. It immediately called to mind Coppola’s The Conversation (1974, right after the first Godfather), about a surveillance expert played by Gene Hackman (who has been bald since the tender age of 9). Coppola’s film dealt with a surveillance expert paranoid about his privacy, and the soul-crushing loneliness of his existence. It was also the film that introduced the title of Sound Design to Hollywood, and won Walter Murch his Academy Award.
Of course, The Conversation itself was inspired by Antonioni’s Blow Up. Coppola had the idea to fuse the concept of Blowup (surveillance vs participation, and perception vs reality) with the world of audio surveillance. This theme has now become sort of dated with all the POV digicam movies we have been seeing, the most recent additions being Cloverfield and Diary of the Dead.
TLO on the other hand asks what it means to sell out for an artist, but does so in the guise of a physics lesson.
Physics lesson ALERT
Any writer that tries to explore some of the paradoxes in quantum physics, most notably the EPR paradox of Entanglement by making a movie about surveillance of artists is royal spades in my hand.
“Quantum Entanglement prompts some of the more philosophically oriented discussions concerning quantum theory. The correlations predicted by quantum mechanics, and observed in experiment, reject the principle of local realism, which is that information about the state of a system should only be mediated by interactions in its immediate surroundings and that the state of a system exists and is well-defined before any measurement.” – Source, Wiki.
It means that the properties of a system, in this case the subversiveness of our Playwright, exist independent of methods used to measure, in this case Baldie’s surveillance. As the plot progresses you wonder how things would have turned out if Baldie had not interfered and had merely performed his duty as observer.
END Physics lesson.
The film starts with an interrogation scene where a hardened agent (Baldie) breaks down a citizen without force and obtains a confession that he helped his friend defect to the West. This scene also doubles as a “How to interrogate” lesson by cross-cutting to the lecture that the agent is giving new recruits.
I was immediately impressed by the writing. Very economical and the scene establishes our antagonist Baldie as ruthless, driven by ideology, and damn good at his job. Most screenwriters spend their first 10-20 pages setting up the world, the character etc. etc., before the plot kicks in. Learn from Henckel.
You owe nothing.
The interrogation scene by itself would have been like an establishment scene. Coupled with the lecture, less so but it still feels a bit like that. What does the writer do? Before the scene can end, he has the agent’s friend and superior stop by the classroom and invite him to a play, kicking off the plot.
At the play, Baldie recommends monitoring the Playwright although everyone finds him non-subversive and trusts that he is a believer of party ideology. Baldie leads the surveillance and the plot really kicks into gear.
When Baldie rigs the flat, the neighbor watches and is threatened by the Stasi against saying anything to the playwright. This scene shows the utter power of the Stasi and how citizens cowered. A lesser writer would have been happy to let the scene and the introduction of this minor character stand as is. But Henckel brings the neighbor back in a scene later, that really drives home the point.
The transformation happens in little bits. The antagonist reads a book, listens to a piece of music, has a disagreement with his boss about why they are doing this. It’s not really about ideology which Baldie truly believes, but about a Minister trying to settle scores with a political rival.
The ideology has taken its toll on Baldie as witnessed in the hooker scene, when he begs her to stay a little longer. He just wants to cuddle. I feel much the same way right now. I am buzzed, sitting at my favorite bar after an exhausting game of ping pong (i was district champion in 1993) and just want to cuddle. For once, sex is not on my mind. Wait, who’s that girl that just walked in…
On to less interesting things. So, the movie is like awesome and stuff. Henckel does a good job of showing the transformation. Watch it and you’ll know.
You have to read my post till the end to get some valuable insights.
Brief segue.
What are you doing with your life? What are we going to do about the population problem that confronts not just us, but the whole world. We are inching towards 7 billion. Every tot u squeeze out is a carbon footprint that will leave its impression on my ma for the rest of the tot’s lifetime. That’s like 70 or 80 years. That’s like totally too long (I speak like an American teenager from the 80s when I’m buzzed).
Why must we have kids? Are you so full of yourself that you want to see someone bearing a passing semblance to you (if the kid is actually yours) run around, shitting on my ma? Who is more vain? Men for wanting to have kids without going through the pain, or women for going through the pain that is child birth. Why can’t you folks that like kids just adopt already? Would it make you a lesser parent? Shame on you!
There is no greater joy than adoption. Imagine, someone will worship you for the rest of their lives, until they run off to find their “real” parents (The mother that was forced to leave them in the first place) and are disappointed and will like radically love u even more. But you can sleep well at night knowing that you have done one good thing in this world. Loved a child that was abandoned by everyone else.
How about really doing something about The Lives of Others?
So, the movie is like good and stuff. For a movie about surveillance, it had weak or uncharacteristic sound design (watch The Conversation). Also, it was like totally long. The guy shot his load and still stayed. I mean OMG. He was still there. He should have left after the actress died, and Baldie is opening envelopes when he finds out the wall has fallen. The last 10 minutes of the movie were unnecessary, and betrayed the economy of the earlier writing. Especially the exposition about how hero finds out about Baldie. We all saw it, so it didn’t have to be there.
You have to leave quickly after the emotional climax which happened after the actress’ death. Don’t stick around till your partner turns on the light and wants to talk.
Yay ADOPTION.
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Sweet analysis but I guess we agree to disagree. :d
Good to know…Dabba does have a heart.
But what are you doing in a bar with a laptop?
Last week I saw a guy chatting with someone on his laptop while at the BAR. I told the bartender what a sad thing that is. I see laptops everywhere…. But BAR is too much!
Nice article…
Alcohol loosened your analytical ass!
@ mithun –
that’s what we’ll do for the time being
@ mainak –
i was there at 4 in ther afternoon. it’s a jazz dive that has pool and pingpong. I played a few games, got drunk and then wrote. I write in bars cos i hate coffee shops. too many people writing and being productive and shit.
my evening got rather interesting after i posted my article and shut down my comp.
The film is coming to Bangalore tomorrow. So I thought I will do some homework. It was a good read, delightfully long and well elaborated.
As usual Dabba I enjoyed reading your analysis..though while watching the last 10 minutes I too felt the same about it being unnecessary until Baldie’s last dialogue to the shopkeeper..the last 10 minutes then made it more complete,for me the film was baldie’s story,not the playwright’s.
psh, the ending was the best part, when he saw the book dedicated to him. “Especially the exposition about how hero finds out about Baldie. We all saw it, so it didn’t have to be there.” We knew it but we never would of known he found out about him if we didn’t see the ending <.<
what drugs do you write on, dabba? tell me, is it to mask your incompetence at writing reviews on works of art that lie beyond your poor powers of comprehension?