The Lives of Others

I have this poster on the wall of my classroom:

It's important to know. It's necessary to understand how things work. And then it's vital to act rightly in the face of the truth.

That's the message in The Lives of Others, a gripping film with one of the best final three words since Ironman. A Stasi officer in East Berlin, with eyes and ears on a playwright of dubious intent, decides to help the man just this one time. That sets off a foot-in-the-door type of psychological effect: Once we help a little, we tend to help a little more.

The director, von Donnersmarck, was only 11 and living in the relative safety of West Berlin in 1984, the Orwellian year when the film begins. Timothy Garton Ash (there be bold spoilers!) laments the details of the film: The Stasi weren't so well dressed. The students would have been in uniform. The entire thing looked too Western.... But that kind of truth is less important than the reality of the fear and desperation of the times - the general anxiety of day to day life when we can trust no one. It becomes all too clear the reality of the slippery slope we could face if we continue to allow C-51-type intrusions into our freedoms.

Within a fictional totalitarian regime, Alan Moore explained, "Artists use lies to tell the truth," and that line had a presence as I watched. This idea is crucial in the film when the artists' lives and livelihood are at stake as they embed statistics in poetic prose. But that very risk is what makes spreading the truth all the more important.

Garton Ash asks if high culture humanizes us, and he shares this bit of trivia:

"Maxim Gorky records Lenin saying that he can’t listen to Beethoven’s Appassionata because it makes him want to say sweet, silly things and pat the heads of little people, whereas in fact those little heads must be beaten, beaten mercilessly, to make the revolution. As a first-year film student, von Donnersmarck wondered “what if one could force a Lenin to hear the Appassionata,” and that was the original germ of his movie."

If anything can turn us from cruelty, it might be art. Films like this precariously transport us to a place of heightened empathy as we live through the character's dilemma. We become a little more moral, a little more courageous in the process.

What affected me most in this film, however, was the plot driven by one man of power unable to completely have the woman he desired. People must pay the price for his loss. This is an issue no less disquieting in our pseudo-enlightened times thirty years hence where men scorned still prove menacing whether on a real life date or during on-line encounters. Women can expect sexually aggressive threats from total strangers for politely rejecting advice. Stealing away with a woman to force her hand in marriage has been illegal since the 12th century, but I fear tactics have merely gotten more subtle in their execution.

Movies about Suicide

I saw The Skeleton Twins a while back, but just finished Before I Disappear. The former had some big names behind it (Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Luke Wilson), and it was good, but I absolutely loved the latter.

They're both about a brother and sister finding a way to connect and saving each other in the process. They both start with a suicide interrupted by an important phone call.

Wiig and Hader are excellent as estranged twins in this drama. They coincidentally try to kill themselves on the same day, then spend the film trying to recover. But I would have been okay with them living or dying. I wanted to know what happened to them, but I wasn't routing for them. It's nice that they lived though.

Before I Disappear started life as a 19 minute short by Shawn Christensen called Curfew, about a man trying to commit suicide until his estranged sister calls begging him to watch her daughter for her. Both films have the same actors, but they're a couple years older.

It's not just grittier in location choices and set-up, it's more real and raw. We're right with Richie as he makes all the questionable decisions he makes. By the end of the movie, I was completely invested in what might happen to him.

Of course it's not the case that people need an external reason to commit suicide, but when Richie attempted his life, I completely understood why he would go down that path. In The Skeleton Twins, I understood on an intellectual level only. They didn't let me in deeply enough for me to resign myself to their suffering. They seemed more self-absorbed than depressed. It's not, of course, that we can easily judge depression from the outside, but in a film like this, we need to feel it in the characters. It helps if we like them a bit better too. I love Wiig and Hader, but their characters were pretty thoughtless. Still, their on-screen chemistry made it enjoyable to watch.

I'd give Skeleton Twins a B and Before I Disappear an A.

Revolution

I saw and wrote about this movie two years ago, but it's being released to a wider audience now.

About ten years ago, Rob Stewart was making the film Sharkwater under his questionable conviction that, "If people knew shark populations were decreasing by 90%, they'd do something."

A question from the audience at a preview changed everything for him: "What's the point of stopping shark finning if fisheries will collapse by 2048?"

Stewart immersed himself in the larger issues with the ocean, until he got to the point of recognizing that, "The only thing we can do which will control ocean acidification is to stop burning fossil fuels." So then he got on the climate change activism path until he recognized, "We know what to do... it's down to political will," and that "We don't just have a climate problem; we have a human problem."  It took most of the film before he realized that all the planes he was taking to go around the world to talk about these issues and film animals might actually be adding to the problem.

All of the current problems are interrelated, and he didn't even touch on poverty and inequity.  We do have to fix them all, but we can jump in anywhere.  As we work we soon find the threads leading to the next issue.  It can be overwhelming, but we just have to stay afloat and keep on track to slow down our own fossil fuel use while we work together to motivate politicians and corporations (by whatever means possible) to change the system before it's too late.

The film has beautiful images that remind us of what we're going to lose if we don't get our act together. It makes it all the more devastating.

You can buy or rent the movie here.  For every movie sold, $1 will go to World Wildlife Fund.

Stewart also made a series of short educational videos.  Here is more information on...

Ocean Acidification:


Ocean Acidification World Issue Video from Rob Stewart on Vimeo.

Deforestation:



Deforestation World Issue Video from Rob Stewart on Vimeo.

Climate Change:


Climate Change World Issue Video from Rob Stewart on Vimeo.

Overfishing:


Overfishing World Issue Video from Rob Stewart on Vimeo.

Same the Humans:


Save the Humans World Issue Video from Rob Stewart on Vimeo.

Mad Max: Reality Road: an Even Darker Ride

It was so close.

First, the less important comparison:  It wasn't as gripping and shocking as the original Road Warrior, and my son called it before we went in: more explosions and less rapey.  People don't accept casual rape scenes in movies like they did in the 80s.  This is a good thing, but it does take away from developing a sense of horror and brutality in this lawless world.  There were many of the same bits of humour in it, and really cool cars, but no sharpened boomerangs. But what it really lacked was character development.  Furiosa's backstory was delivered in an awkward scene of overt explanation rather than a more subtle development throughout.  We don't get to know the other characters enough to care about them.  There was no scrappy little kid surviving by his wits.  And when one of the wives died, I wasn't remotely upset. I don't remember any of their names.  It lacked the unique depictions of the colourful secondary characters that added to the flavour of the original, and that in turn affected the film's ability to reach the same kind of tension. This Max reminded me more of Indiana Jones than the original Road Warrior, but my kids thought I was nuts on that one. But there was one excellent scene that made me glad to have caught it in 3D. Things blowed up real good!

But that's not the important comparison.  With a quick read of a few scientific journals, it could have been an authentic depiction of what we will likely face far too soon if we don't change the path we're on, and the movie could have been just that much more brutal because of it.  That they're fighting over water and searching for arable land instead of for oil (sort of), gets us part way there.

***spoiler alert***

A question occurred to me as I watched them suffering in the heat, using slaves to run pulley systems, and using fire for heat and light all within a contained city that turned out to be the best possible place to live:  What did they need oil for?  They didn't use it to generate electricity in any way that I could see.  And they made it clear there was no place to go to, so all that gasoline and ripping up the desert was for nought.  Oil seems to be a dead commodity in a post-apocalyptic world.  Just as well.

But one bit of reality was that whomever controls the water, controls the world.  That will be very true very soon.  Canada has lots of fresh water, but could we win against an American invasion?  Or will Harper erode our rights so much (which has already started) that the U.S. will feel the need to stage a coup and install a better leader for us under the guise of helping us reform a democratic system, and then take control of all our water while they're at it?

In the film, once the good guys win and kill the bad guy who was rationing water too stringently (and keeping slaves and many wives), they seem to decide to open the water for all without any rationing as if that's the nice thing to do.  But it's not.  It's as equally bad leadership as rationing too tightly.  Rationing will have to be a reality in their world where, like in Snowpiercer and The 100, there are too many people for too few resources.  Population control must be a top priority or they'll have to start culling people in ritual sacrifices. Or we will.

Just imagine, when the good guys made it out east and talked about going back and taking over the place, imagine that they had had one brief conversation about how they would run the place differently. And imagine if their ideas actually made sense! They could have excitedly talked about a fair means of delivering food and water, a choice of jobs on a rotation, a means to slow population growth...  and then we'd see the realization on their faces that no matter what they did, they would have to control childbearing. Men and women just couldn't be allowed to have every child they wanted. Saving women from the clutches of an evil-doer who controls their reproduction would have to be replaced by a different system of control rather than done away with completely. Figuring out how to do that without being hated by the masses is the really exciting bit.

The gang tries to find some green space that used to be Furiosa's home, but it's all dead now.  The soil is full of salt so nothing can grow.  One effect of climate change will likely be "the extension of salt-affected territories."  But something else that could have been included, that was slipped into Interstellar and discussed in The Sixth Extinction (which has already started), is that many of us will likely suffocate before we starve.  Here's part of my summary on the 3rd major extinction from Kolbert's book:

Ending the Permian period - 252 million years ago. This was the most devastating - called "the great dying." It was caused by an increase in carbon which acidified the oceans and, with the oxygen level dropping, most organisms probably suffocated. Reefs collapsed. It lasted maybe 100,000 years from start to finish, and eliminated 90% of all species on earth (104). The best explanation for this increased carbon is a massive burst of vulcanism in Siberia. "But this spectacular event probably released, on an annual basis, less carbon than our cars and factories and power plants" (123). This one is most similar to what we're currently experiencing, but these days we like to do things much, much faster.

It's not just water that would be a scarce resource, but oxygen would be too.  The main bad guy had the right idea with an oxygen mask, and they hunted people for oxygen rich blood bags, making oxygen their drug of choice, but they could also have made oxygen masks a necessity for survival outside the city. As the ocean acidifies (which is already happening), hydrogen sulfide is released into the atmosphere. It tends to sit low on the ground, so they might be fine in higher altitudes but need oxygen masks on in the lowlands. Just think of all the creative ways they could each design their masks!

And check out the effects of exposure to low levels of hydrogen sulfide: eye damage and degenerative nerve damage.  They could have had people riding through lower areas, and unmask a bad guy who suddenly has his eyes eaten away and falls into a fit of spasms!  It would also make the air more flammable, and there's so much special effects guys could do with that!  It was such a missed opportunity at edutainment.

The horrors of real life scientific predictions are rife with great ideas for apocalyptic films just waiting to be taken, and maybe a disclaimer at the end with sources would wake up a few more people to the reality we could be facing.  Except that it might ruin their happy ending.