Dreher on “collaborating” with Communism

Rod Dreher has just seen the excellent, Oscar-winning The Lives of Others, and he makes a provocative observation:

What made “The Lives of Others” so astonishing was the complicated humanity of nearly all the characters. You could easily see how basically decent people could be compelled to collaborate by the secret police, who were experts at taking advantage of ordinary human weakness, and even ordinary human virtue, to compromise people. . . .

I drifted off to sleep last night thinking about this extraordinary film, and about how here we are almost 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and 15 years after the end of the Soviet Union, and we in the West have almost entirely ignored the communist legacy in our film and literature. I do not believe this is an accident. But I know it is a black mark against us. In a way, our own artists are collaborators, even though their collaboration costs them nothing, and gains them nothing. Anthony Lane did a Talk of the Town piece on the 1960s actress Julie Christie the other week. It ends like this:

Told that she should see “The Lives of Others,” the award-winning movie about East Germany, Christie paused, then re-plied, “I’m not sure I can bear to see a film they gave the Oscar to, that tells you what awful people Communists are.” And with that she laughed, unlocked her bike, and pedalled off into the sunshine.

Laughed, and pedalled off into the sunshine. Despicable woman. But, I’m thinking, probably representative.

I don’t know that I would go so far as to say “despicable”, based on an off-the-cuff remark like that. But, given a choice between the pro-Communist vibe of Pan’s Labyrinth and the anti-Communist vibe of The Lives of Others, yeah, I can’t say I was upset that the latter film won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and the other film didn’t. Though no doubt I am influenced by the fact that my relatives lived in the Soviet Bloc and not in Franco’s Spain.