The Reader

When I woke up on Friday morning I was in a particularly foul mood. It probably had a lot to do with what I was reading the night before, in my Brookline book. I had thought I could absorb what was in it, that the worst of it all was over, but sometimes I lose track of the narrative---the real narrative---of all the pieces put together, and I temporarily despair that I will ever glimpse any form of wholeness again.

Hoping to distract myself, I flipped on the tube to watch the local Boston news. There was a report about a female schoolteacher who was being charged for having an affair with one of her students, between the time he was thirteen and the time was sixteen. The people being interviewed were expressing their moral outrage about it all. How terrible it was for the parents of the boy. The damage she has caused him...

Damage? I snorted. It just ain't the same as if the reverse situation, the older male teacher and the young female student. Everyone knows this, yet we've all got to pretend that it's the same. We can't say that the two situations are different, because that would be to admit that men and women are different in a way that our culture is not prepared to address. Who knows where such a question could lead?

Yes, I suppose you could argue the boy has been damaged. He might now be too experienced with women, and he'll wind up knocking up one of his many girlfriends in college, instead of bumbling through in an inexperienced fashion as he might have otherwise. Yes, it could, in the end, really screw up his life.

Yet there was everyone on t.v., morally posturing in their outrage about it all. It was a far more disgusting spectacle to me than the crime itself, because it revealed something ugly inside the people on t.v., as if they were regurgitating their own slimy souls with their comments.

I thought about this all again later in the evening when I was sitting watching the first few moments of The Reader at the Regal-Anchutz-Bennet Solomon Pond Cinema. It was my second visit back there in a week.

The set-up of the movie involves the start of an affair between a 36-year-old woman (Kate Winslet) and a 15-year-old schoolboy. The affair takes place in 1958 in postwar West Germany. Later this episode will be used in the context of a larger story.

What immediately struck me as funny was that the movie seemed to make absolutely no moral judgment about the sexual encounters between the two characters. It wasn't at all the point of the movie. The narrative would be reserved for other judgments. Instead it was presented in terms of a coming-of-age experience for the boy, one that would later haunt him, but for reasons having nothing to do with sexual aspect of the affair.

Here we all were in theater, a bunch of fine Massachusetts folk watching the movie, the same audience for that telecast earlier today. The relativeness of the moral outrage seemed beautifully ironic.

The Reader is told through several layers of narrative, happening at different times in the life of the male protagonist, over the course of the years between 1958 and 1995 (by which time he has grown up to become Ralph Fiennes). The main story (the one that begins in 1958) involves the act of one character reading stories to another, an activity that will take on deeper meaning later in the movie.

Thus we have a narrative about narrative, and thus a movie about movies (that tell stories). When this situation arises, I tend to play close attention to what the subtext of the movie involving the narrative process itself.

On a literal level, the narrative is about the process of Germans discovering the truth about the Holocaust, and about coping with the guilt over it, both on a personal and societal level.

For most of the movie, I enjoyed where it was going (using its multi-layered style of narrative). But in the end, it all seemed to break apart. The threads of the narrative were supposedly tied together, but it felt emotionally incomplete and unsatisfying. Was that the point of the movie, that I should feel this way at the end?

I don't think it was. I don't think the movie was that self-aware.

The basic problem that stood out in glaring fashion was this was a Holocaust movie. We have come to the point in our culture that when you make a movie about the Holocaust, you must absolutely say certain things about it. You must make certain specific judgments about it and the people involved in it. There is absolutely no wiggle room at all.

The movie put itself in this constraint right from the beginning. We are not allowed to see too deeply into the souls of certain characters, nor develop sympathy for them beyond the surface, because that would violate the code. No matter how valid this may be in real life, in movie terms it now creates great difficulties in telling an interesting story. We know in advance exactly where will be led. There can be no emotional surprises.

All the layers of storytelling in the movie thus became like a mathematical equation that cannot be solved, because it contains too many constraints. It is example of how far we've come, deep into post-postmodernity. The downfall of classical cinema was due in part to the over-prescribed restrictions on narrative. Certain things had to happen, given x, y, and z in the story. In some cases this meant characters having to go to jail, when you wouldn't otherwise want them to. I call this the Classical Prison. This is one of the main reasons that postmodernity felt initially like a breath of fresh air. like freedom and escape.

But the lack of structure ultimately led to the gutter, the Postmodern Sewer as I call it. Yet it is mistake to think that we don't have rules now. We have plenty of rules in narrative, just different ones from the classical era. The problem is that we think we have no rules. In a sense, we are back in prison again, just one constructed in an ad hoc fashion from the rules of the sewer.

The restriction on Holocaust narrative are part of this new code. We don't even have to see the Holocaust portrayed in a movie, in order to know how to feel about it. The Reader was a prime example of this. The movie seemed to be saying, "remember the Holocaust, as you have seen it in all the other movies about it, and summon those feelings again for the story you are seeing."

In a way, I can sympathize with the plight of those who make these movies, based on the idea that "to forget the Holocaust is to let the Nazis win." This has become translated into "to stop making movies about the Holocaust is to let the Nazis win." The hardness of this prescription seemed perfectly reflected in the encounter at the end of the movie between Fiennes' grown-up character and a Holocaust survivor in New York.

Its a prescription for tired out movies, with unsatisfying emotional endings, which is how The Reader felt (despite an incredibly strong performance from Winslet). In a way, it feels like we are back in 1958, in the waning days of the era of classical cinema, when M-G-M was running on fumes. There is, from my point of view, an incredible dearth of historical movies that come out lately. Can we ever breathe free again, and turn our narrative attention elsewhere, without letting the Nazis win?