“WE LIKE LISTENING”: The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum or, in its American titles, A Girl in Love or Never Read the Comments! SPOILERS, obviously.

Katharina Blum lives in West Germany, and it’s Carnival so everyone is loosened-up and in costume. She is generally considered quite prudish, but goes to a party and ends up taking a young man home. He’s a terrorist of some unspecified Red hue.

The next morning the cops invade her home. The moment in which the lady cop balances herself by putting her hand on Katharina’s naked buttock is especially harsh, almost defining the word “objectification”; and I’ll also call your gendered attention to the moment which provokes it, when a male cop is startled by accidental gunfire and he responds to his embarrassment by yelling at Katharina to put on clothes instead of her robe. She is interrogated. Over the course of the next however-many days, she is interrogated (they note that she pays for her own coffee) and newspaper reporters collude in the destruction of her reputation. Her divorce, her parentage, her aunt’s life are all dragged through the mud. The press explicitly works hand-in-glove with the government. (“Front-page story” appears to be an Englishism, as Schadenfreude is a Germanicism.)

Katharina’s life has its shaming elements, as whose life doesn’t?, and those elements are deployed for political gain. This isn’t subtle; the “reporters” blatantly lie, and Katharina is excoriated for preferring money to virtue by people who are quite obviously choosing cash over kindness. This is a morality tale about the cruelties inherent in our reality-TV morality tales.

I’m also struck, of course, by how opportunistic we are in our uses of culturally-sanctioned hatred. Katharina’s accusers rely on misogyny for exactly the same reason that Sarah Palin’s and Hillary Clinton’s accusers so often rely on it (and Paris Hilton’s or Snooki’s, really, while we’re here–this isn’t about politics so much as it is about publicly-acceptable scapegoatesses): because they can. Play by my rules and I won’t call in the referee.

There’s so much else to talk about: There’s the role of photography in shaping our notion of “truth”; there’s the vomit in the toilet of the first cell to which Katharina is led and her pathetic feminine attempt to clean it up. (I think this is somewhat echoed in her insistence in cleaning and caring for her mother’s body after death. There’s the same association of femininity with vulnerability and shame, and yet also with care and cleaning.) There’s Katharina’s aunt’s reliance on the guest/host relationship in the face of the overwhelming twentieth-century state-vs.-individual bulldozing. There’s Katharina’s driving, “mostly when it rains and when I’m alone”; the interrogator’s viciously dry invocation of scarcity economics (“Perhaps we can learn how to own an apartment”). Surrealism: The stain on the door (echoes of Barton Fink) which Katharina opens to find spies putting on their costumes of sheiks and whores. Carnival gives all kinds of opportunities, to all kinds of maskers. An undeclared life: her unexplained miles on the meter. The ladies’ room as the place where alliances might be formed. This is a really intensely-observed movie.

Power is so attentive to the cruelties of detail. Detail gives us our facial features, our humanity, and it’s so often the small brutal detail by which we attempt to remove that humanity from others. Power creates its own narratives the same way everyone else does, through the thousand little choices of where to turn the light and where to throw a shadow by which a person is made into a persona. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum is as much an indictment of art as anything in Shakespeare. And then there’s the anonymous letter-writer, telling her, “Learn to pray again.” Absolutely horrible, and absolutely what would happen.

The smash-cut from “We live in a free country!” to the tabloid Joan-Jett-reformatory photos of Katharina is pretty classic. Libertarians often argue that culture will take over from government in sanctioning wrong behavior. I wonder how many of them really want the punishments of internet culture, from which there is no escape. (I know the counterarguments, of which the strongest is that the culture which shapes the non-legal punishments inevitably shapes the legal—government is in no way an escape hatch from the problems of culture, and in many ways compounds those problems, especially due to civil servants’ elite status relative to the people they regulate. But I wish more libertarians argued that the government is like a market with guns, whereas corporations are merely markets vying for guns. Or, in other words, Tim Carney for President in 2014!)

“You’re divorced. You have no ties.” This is spoken by an interrogator, and is patently false, as it is always false. Divorce is not rewind. Most obviously when there are children; but even when there are not, divorce is never control-Z.

The absolute betrayal on her face, the iron control and the broken trust, is just shattering when she realizes that the priests only let her come to their sanctuary in order to make her conciliate her ex-husband. Again she’s forced to recognize that everyone wants to use her new vulnerability to their own ends.

And then the final scene, a speech in favor of the freedom of the press, is over-the-top villainous. All my sympathies are engaged, and yet I can’t help but think, Do you really WANT to cut off the branch you’re perched on? I don’t know, I suppose you could argue that the greatest virtue of unshakable freedom of the press (which has happened where, ever?) is that other artists can point out the destructive effects of the press without calling for censorship.