Modern Film Classics: “Goodbye Lenin!”

One of the best things they don’t tell you in German tourist guides are those small shops that sell Soviet-era goods. When the Berlin Wall fell, the flush of capitalism flooded East German shops, washing away goods from that era, including now-defunct brands like Spreewalt brand pickles, Moccafixgold hot chocolate, and Trabant automobiles. These were replaced by more familiar names such as General Mills, Starbucks and Audi. Nevertheless, there remains some fondness for the East German days by the older generation, a nostalgia referred to affectionately as “Ostalgie”. I thought about this while watching Wolfgang Becker’s raucous 2003 German dramedy Good Bye, Lenin!

We first meet the Kerner family in 1978. Young Alex (Daniel Brühl) dreams of becoming an astronaut (called “cosmonauts” back then) some day. His sister Ariane (Maria Simon) has the potential to become a great academic. Their father has gone missing, presumed to have taken up in the West with a woman of ill repute, according to their brittle mother, Christiane (Katrin Saß), who responds by becoming a leading educator in the East German Communist Party. A decade later, Alex and Ariane have become layabouts and Christiane is still going strong. On October 7, 1989, during an anti-government demonstration, Christiane sees Alex being taken by riot police and promptly suffers a heart attack. As she lays in a coma, she has no idea that Communism has collapsed, that the Berlin Wall fell, and that German reunification had been realized. Doctors warn Alex and Ariane that their mother is in such frail health that she cannot be excited or disturbed, and they wonder if she will ever wake up.

By the summer of 1990, Alex ekes out a living by installing satellite dishes and has struck up a relationship with the Russian nurse looking after her mother, Lara (Chulpan Khamatova). Ariane has quit university to work at Burger King and is now in a relationship with her free-wheeling coworker Rainer, who enjoys dancing to Indian trance music in the cramped family apartment when he’s not whiling away in his tanning bed. All seems to carry on well until one day, Christiane awakes. Alex, not wanting to disturb his mother or shock her by revealing the truth – that Communism and the system she had believed in so fiercely and unquestionably had evanesced, leaving her without a legacy for her life’s work – decides to bring Christiane back home into her old room in the apartment, filling the space with now-outdated Communist propaganda and shielding her from the truth about German reunification. The ruse becomes so elaborate that when she craves Spreewalt pickles, Alex finds out that grocery stores no longer sell them and he resorts to buying a Dutch brand that he then puts in old Spreewalt jars. Eventually, he recruits his zany coworker Denis (Florian Lukas) into filming fake newscasts for his mother to watch, confirming that all was alive and well in the DDR (German Democratic Republic). As Denis is an aspiring filmmaker, they stretch the truth by concocting stories on alleged political developments, and create an entirely new reality exclusively for Christiane, who has no idea what’s going on.

The film is structured like a juggling act, with Alex as the juggler adding not only more balls to his act, but also flaming torches, electric saws and knives, struggling to balance everything in the figurative air. They might have created a birthday party for the bedridden Christiane in her room, with “official greetings” from the Party and East German Youth singing songs of loyalty to the DDR, but they can’t conceal the unexpected Coca-Cola ad that is being installed at that exact moment in the building across the street. When Christiane suggests an outing to the family’s summer cottage, Ariane snipes at Alex’s elaborate ruse that he should set about redecorating all of Berlin if he expects to keep up appearances.

While I have just described possibly the zaniest film ever inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall, this is a film that is informative and has great insight on the immediate fallout. As the Communist system no longer existed, seniority amongst its ranks amounted to nothing, and high-ranking officials that Christiane knew have defected or been made unfit for useful employment, turning to drink and endless hours of television to fill the abrupt void foisted upon their lives. Capitalism resulted in a strange devaluation of the old system, and Becker understands that the new freedom was not for everyone. It reminds me of the old Simpsons episode where an ant colony is destroyed and the made-up subtitles read, as the ants go flying into space (this was on a spaceship), the ants squeak, “Freedom! Horrible, horrible freedom!”

Master Class: Lumet’s "Network"

Thirty-five years ago, a controversial film captured the zeitgeist. It was a heavily dialogue-driven indictment of a powerful new medium that was influencing people’s views of the world. It also had the word “network” in the title although, unlike The Social Network, it was about television. Directed by the late Sidney Lumet and written by the great Paddy Chayefsky, Network is one of the seminal films of the 1970s. It has been selected by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant", in addition to being named one of the American Film Institute’s Top 100 American films of all time. 

Network is about a fictional fourth-place television network called UBS that has been lagging far behind the major “big three” networks. Fox had not yet come into being at that time, but its antics and shocking, controversial choice of programs before it became household-friendly with American Idol and Glee closely echoed the fictional stunts on Network. One wonders if Rupert Murdoch intended this to happen or if it were merely delicious coincidence.

The "mad prophet of the airwaves"

The three central figures in Network include its news anchor, the aging and recently fired Howard Beale (Peter Finch, in an Oscar-winning performance of a lifetime), ambitious and ruthless UBS executive Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway, also in an Oscar-winning turn) and the former news division head Max Schumacher (William Holden). Howard suffers a vivid mental breakdown including a pronouncement that he will kill himself on the air, and another featuring a rant so monumental that it became a catchphrase when UBS rehires him and re-jigs its news hour around him. Everyone seems to ignore the fact that Howard is clearly mad and claims to be guided by what he believes to be the voice of God. No matter: he’s simply branded as “The Mad Prophet of the Airwaves”, and he’s a hit!

Diana, who is described as being “raised on Bugs Bunny”, pursues Max, the film’s conscience, and woos him away even though he has a wife and grown daughter. She’s so focused on business that while they make love, she is still busy talking about her business plan: the world’s first “homosexual soap opera, "The Dykes”.

Network is also noted for Beatrice Straight’s performance as Max’s scorned wife, on note as the shortest Oscar-winning role in history. It lasts barely six minutes in its entirety, most of which is contained in this one scene, but every last second of it remains overwhelmingly powerful.

The German Opera Project: Maiden Voyage

I made it through part one. How was my first experience?

My first question, if you recall from my first post, was: where were the Viking helmets?

When I first settled in to watch Das Rheingold (literally "Gold of the Rhine River") and couldn't spot any, I knew I was in for some trouble, or at least make peace with the fact that this is a postmodern interpretation that may be beyond me and require a brush-up of my contemporary literary theory lectures from college. Keep in mind that this is the controversial, much-discussed and now-legendary centennial production at the Bayreuth Opera House, which ran from 1976 to 1980.

German opera is like German food: it's heavy, it's rich in texture, it's altogether satisfying, but it is a large undertaking and chasing it with a light aperitif is required to wash it all down. A glass of red wine in a twilit room, as my Wagnerite friend K said, is perfect, and she was right.