CONSERVATIVE TASTES: He Wore a Yellow Stripe
Bowman, James
ENERALLY SPEAKING,theMotionPictureAcademy's voting for Best Foreign Language Film is as subject to the same considerations of political...
...The latter word is said not even to be in the dictionary, so the military brass doesn't recognize that there is such a thing...
...As far as we can tell, for him the C O N S E R V A T I V ET A S T E S He Wore a Yellow Stripe 6 2 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R A P R I L 2 0 0 7 Gby James Bowman onlyemotionsthatareengagedbythejobarefrustration and irritation about its effects on his domestic life...
...Could it be that Robert Hanssen courted dishonorashedidbecausehewantedtodemonstrate, if only to himself, that he didn't need anyone else's approval or support--that he too could be an army of one...
...They think of spying as beneaththedignityandhonorofanarmy man," we are told, as if this were self-evident nonsense...
...Not only does he deliberately decline to speculate on the reasons for Hanssen'streachery--adecisionthatisatleastdefensible for keeping the moral enormity of what he has done clearly before our eyes--but he also omits to supplyanyfeelingsthatmighthavehelpedtohumanize the traitor's pursuers...
...As Wiesler has already voiced his own suspicions, based on nothing but the policeman's natural suspicion of the intellectual,heisflatteredtogetthejob...
...We may never know the answer, but I find Gerd Wiesler's discovery in The Lives of Others of an unexpected connection with his fellow man more moving and more meaningful to our time than either Hanssen'sorGaryCooper'sofwhathasbynowbecomethe mereaffectationofautonomy...
...Why doesn't it...
...I wonder if the currentsofpatriotismnowrunsofeeblyinthe veinsofourculture-leaders,iftheyhavenotaltogether dried up, that they don't even know they are missing...
...Along with the two movies that will be the big attractions for most people, Sergeant York and The Fountainhead, are some fairly obscure outings by one of Tinseltown's great leadingmen.DallasandTheWreckoftheMaryDeare will repay viewing, but the most notable is perhaps Springfield Rifle, which sets the origins of American counter-espionageinthecontextoftheCivilWarand the great American romance with superior fire-power...
...As the light dawns for Wiesler, he grows more and more sympathetic to the subjectsofhisround-the-clocksurveillance--andmore andmoreattracted,likeeverybodyelse,toChrista-Maria.Canitbepossiblethatthemosthard-nosedandincorruptibleofStasiagentswillgrowaheartanddefyhis superiors, risking his own career and possibly his life, for the sake of a subversive writer and an actress...
...I have been reviewing another in the Warner Home Video series thatImentionedinthisspacelastmonth,thisonethe boxed set of Gary Cooper films...
...If so, it could explain a lot about how the spy and maybe even the mole could go on to become the hero that he did subsequently...
...In the end, he even declines the promotion to agent lest his wife (Caroline Dhavernas) should have to get used to the unsocial hours...
...heasks.Sotaken-for-grantedisthecorruptionin EastGermanythatitsprincipalbeneficiariesdon'teven see it as corruption anymore...
...There could have been no greater dishonor for a soldier of the period of the film's setting, but Major Kearney is really a man of the film's own period, 1952, and he takes it all in his stride, apparently never sufferingsomuchasapangforthelossofhonor.Theidea, Ithink,isthatheissoself-possessed,sosureofhisown virtues, that he really doesn't care what other people think of him...
...ENERALLY SPEAKING,theMotionPictureAcademy's voting for Best Foreign Language Film is as subject to the same considerations of political correctnessastherestoftheOscars.Andthat'splenty subject,aswasshownbythisyear'sDocumentary award to the awful Al Gore propaganda flick, An InconvenientTruth.But,unliketheBestPicture,theBest ForeignFilmisquiteoften--well,ifnotthebestatleast verygood.ThreeyearsagoitwastheQuebecoisdirector Denys Arcand's marvelous Barbarian Invasions, and now, once again, the Academy has hit a winner, The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) by the splendidlynamedGerman,FlorianHenckelvonDonnersmarck.Curiously,italsoresemblesTheBarbarian Invasions(availableonDVD)incastingaskepticaleye onthemythologiesoftheleft...
...heaskshisfriendand confidant, Col...
...The latter shrugs: "What is the Party but its members...
...Is this whatyoujoined[theStasi]for...
...Wiesler,anexpertincoerciveinterrogationtechniques, is a true believer in socialism and the East Germanstatewithoutquiterealizinghowrareaqualitybeliefhasbecomeevenamonghiscolleaguesinthe secret police--even among government ministers-let alone the general population...
...NEEDLESS TO SAY, this has not always been the case in Hollywood...
...To be sure, that part of it is dragged in by the ears...
...Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), who is also a professor...
...I feel like a whole army, sir...
...Being dishonored may thus have been seen as another and a higher kind of honor in the eyes of the immediate postwar generation...
...Odd,isn'tit,thatneitherMr.Raynorhisco-writers, Adam Mazer and William Rotko, should have seen what a dreadful anticlimaxthisis?Iknowit'satruestoryandthat therealEricO'NeillreallydidleavetheFBI to practice law and enjoy a quiet life, but the film could have simply ended with Hanssen's capture, or the moment afterwards when, as the latter is being taken away, he asks O'Neill to pray for him...
...Interestingly, in order to do this Major Kearney has to deceive all but one or two of his fellow officers and deliberatelysubmithimselftothehumiliationof being court-martialed for cowardice in thefaceoftheenemy,thendrummedoutofthearmy and ejected from the post with a yellow stripe painted down his back...
...Also setting the fashion for many a war movie to come, Cooper's character,MajorKearney,hastodefythe military establishment, to catch the spy who is tipping off the rebels in the Colorado territory as to the routes by which horsesfortheUnionarmiesbackeastare being herded by lightly manned Federal escorts...
...James BowmanisaresidentscholarattheEthicsand Public Policy Center and The American Spectator's movie and culture critic...
...His recent book is Honor: A History (Encounter Books).J A M E SB O W M A N A P R I L 2 0 0 7 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R 6 3 The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen...
...I wonder if there is not also a culture of corruption in Hollywood that is not so different as we might like to think from that which once prevailed between the Oder and the Elbe...
...says one of Gary's guys, thus unwittingly giving theU.S.Armyofthelater20thcenturyoneofthemost fatuous advertising slogans ever devised...
...For Eric O'Neill, catching Hanssen is just the job he's been given to do if he wants to make agent...
...Arguably, Les Invasions Barbares had the more difficulttask--thatoftakingahard-headedlookatthe sentimentalism of the academic left, and from within it.Rareindeedissuchadegreeofdetachmentandselfcriticism in the cozy, basically narcissistic view of the worldoftheWesternintellectual.ButTheLivesofOthers, set in East Germany in 1984, has what is to me the superiorcinematicvirtueofasatisfyinglyworked-out plot.GerdWiesler(UlrichMuhe),acaptainintheStasi,theEastGermansecretpolice,isassignedtomount a spying operation against a hitherto-trusted writer namedGeorgDreyman(SebastianKoch)whomagovernment minister named Hempf (Thomas Thieme) suspects of disloyalty to the regime...
...The movie takes its title from the breach-loading weaponthatwouldsoonmaketheMinieballobsolete and revolutionize warfare...
...Gradually, he comes to understand that Hempf is Dreyman's rival for the affections of the beautiful actress, Christa-Maria Sie-land (Martina Gedeck), and is simply looking for some excuse to push Dreyman out of the way...
...So accustomed have we all become to the Le Carrebrandofessentiallystateless,world-weary,and morallyambiguousspythatwehaveforgottenwhyhe spies--or counterspies--in the first place...
...It was in its failure to combine the heart with the head that I thought Billy Ray's otherwise powerful Breachfelldownabit.Thetruestoryofthecaptureof the notorious FBI mole, Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper), by the trainee agent Eric O'Neill (Ryan Phillippe) in 2001, has an excellent plot designed, as the best of them always will be, to produce heartpounding suspense even when we know in advance howitallcomesout.AndyetMr.Ray'sstoryis,onthe human level, emotionally barren...
...This is the big, human question on which the film depends, and what gives it its real emotional power, but the catand-mousegameoftheordinaryspy-thriller--between Dreyman and his friends on the one hand, Hempf, Grubitz, and the police state on the other, and Wiesler playing a double game in the middle--constantly engagesthemindaswell...
...But this fight between Gary's Union soldiers, armed with the eponymous Springfield rifles, and some Confederate irregulars armed with the oldmuzzleloadersatfirstseemstohavelittleornothing to do with the main subject of the film, which is the relatively new ideas of espionage and counter-espionage...
Vol. 40 • April 2007 • No. 3
