Reader

Hi folks, another fucking GP essay from me again.

Nat suggested that I go watch “The Reader” because you get a lot of Kate Winslet fucking in that movie. Now I have watched a lot of art movies in my time, not as much as some people, but quite a few. For a long time I have watched movies so that I could learn more about art, learn more about life from them. Then I transcended even that and thought, the truest test of a movie is what your personal reactions are towards that movie. It shouldn’t even be about a critic telling you what is art. It is something that you must viscerally experience for yourself.

Now what is the point here? The bottom line is, having watched so many movies for the right reasons, I reserve the right to watch a movie for no other purpose than to watch Kate Winslet fucking.

I suppose I have to blog about it a bit more nowadays because these days I hardly ever watch movies anymore.

Most of the reviews will tell you that this is an above average movie, with one great performance (Winslet’s, and she won a handful of acting prizes for this one) and it was adapted from a great novel.

Movie reviews have to be gingerly written: they must answer the essential question: “is this movie worth watching?” without giving away the plot details. So this is not a review but rather something that talks about what the movie is all about. So for those of you who intend to watch the movie but haven’t done so yet you won’t need to be reading this.

For the rest of you, there’s this German guy, born after the war. He’s 16 and he meets this nice bust conductor – sorry I meant bus conductor, and she takes him home. He’s sick. Then he brings her flowers. They meet and fuck. Then while she’s his lover, she insists that he read to her. They are lovers for a while. One day, she is promoted to have an office job. She is ashamed to admit that she is illiterate, and then she leaves town, ending her affair with the teenager in the process.

Later on, he’s a law student and he attends a seminar. It’s about the war crimes, tribunal, and there, he sees Kate Winslet being charged for being a concentration camp guard. It is torture for him to watch, because he still loves her. She is the only person among the defendants to admit that a book that was written about her was true. There are not a lot of things that you do as a concentration camp guard that counts as murder. But there was one incident, which involves a death march. The concentration camp inmates are locked up in the church for a night. Then one night, during a bombing raid, the church is set on fire. The inmates are burnt to death, except for the mother and daughter who survive to write the book, and press charges against the concentration camp guards.

The rest of the defendants pin all the blame on her, and insist that a report that was written about the incident was written by her. She is identified as the leader of the guards and gets 20 years instead of the 4 given to all the other guards.

In the last part of the movie, while she is in jail, the lawyer (he’s a lawyer now) makes recordings of books, and mails them to her in jail. Through the recordings, and comparing them with the words on a book that she borrows from the library, she

The book was published in 1995, which was the 50th anniversary of VE day. (That’s “victory in Europe”). I think that people are still getting around what happened during that war.

In that war, we discovered 2 horrible new developments in the history of man. From the holocaust, we found out that 20th century technology has enabled us to commit murder on a scale that is simply awe-inspiring. The holocaust in which 11 million people died, was murder committed in a very systematic fashion. The second nasty surprise is nuclear weapons, which can kill on an ever larger scale than the holocaust. Why bother to kill 11 million people over 4 years when you only need 4 seconds nowadays?

So at that time, the Holocaust was presented as an utterly unique event in mankind. In part, this view was put forward by Zionists who saw this as an utterly unique way to establish the state of Israel. One of the stated purposes of a homeland for the Jewish people was that you needed a place to house all the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. Many Arabs were not that happy to be chased out of their own homeland, and the establishment of Israel in 1948 has caused a lot of unhappiness in that region ever since.

So much of this movie had been about how the Germans deal with the issue of guilt. You can contrast their attitude with the Japanese – we’re still waiting for them to get back to us and I think they’re smart enough to realize that if they can stall for time long enough for most of the war generation to be dead or dying, they never ever have to apologise because it’s all “overtaken by events”. I suppose that it’s German culture that people are very direct and forthright, so it was probably more possible that they would choose to examine these issues. But I digress.

This movie therefore is not entirely about Kate Winslet fucking, although I have to admit that it is a great selling point. It is about war guilt, and how the survivors deal with it. I read somewhere that a lot of people are outraged at the movie, because Kate Winslet is more concerned about her illiteracy rather than the fact that she killed a lot of people. This is the sort of movie which raises such controversial questions that nobody finds it remarkable that a 15 year old boy is fucking a 30 something woman.

But what of it? Would you be ashamed? We all are ashamed of something. Some deep dark secret. My parents are a little ashamed that they never got as much schooling as I did. I’m ashamed that I suck at Chinese. These are the sort of issues that are on-going rather than about what happened some time in the past. That’s the difference between her illiteracy and her being a concentration camp guard.

It’s true that Hannah is one of the more morally ambivalent people in the movie. On one hand she was a Nazi, although not a very high ranking one, and subsequently, not one who made a lot of decisions. She could just say that she was taking orders. Her testimony was a little more forthright than the rest of the defendants because she was possibly less able to understand the full implications of what the concentration camp was all about. People had to die, because “there were new ones coming in all the time”. So she was a classic taker of orders.

But you have to balance that against – here’s this nice woman who took a boy home because he was sick. If you wanted a black and white version of the concentration camp guard as the ultimate embodiment of evil, that would be extremely inconvenient.

Then in the trial it was mentioned that Kate Winslet would just pick a few of the more sickly people, and ask them to read to her. And then after that they typically ended up getting chosen for extermination. I supposed she really liked being read stories to. I would consider this to be a neutral thing – what does it matter since you’re always going to kill X number of people, whether those are the ones that you interact with on a more human level?

Another thing is that in the movie, the anti-Nazis were all painted in a fairly negative light. A classmate of the law student accused him of being soft and wondered why he was always staring at Kate Winslet. He did bring up a good point: so much of this happened every where, in every stratum of German society, because the Nazis were everywhere. And yet only Kate Winslet and her gang of camp guards were identified, and only then because some of the victims wrote a book.

As for the centerpiece of the charges against the camp guards – the locking the prisoners into a church while they burnt to death inside – the judge actually offers her a reason to say that she was scared of what the prisoners would do to her if she released them. But she just said that there would be chaos everywhere and she couldn’t let that happen. A more honest answer but her priorities look extremely lop-sided now.

It is very difficult to judge what people would have done in the heat of the moment. The person responsible for murder in this case is not Kate Winslet but the allied pilot who dropped the bomb. Clearly this is not a pre-meditated case of murder and it is not first degree murder. So Kate Winslet turns at the judge “What would you have done?” The judge does not answer. He is not there to answer questions. But it is a valid question, one that casts a shadow over the rest of the movie.

I suppose that a lot of Kate Winslet’s dumbness comes from her illiteracy. No doubt she’s great at fucking, but I would attribute a lot of her illogical behaviour to simply her being quite confused. I would guess she likes order, and likes wearing uniforms.

The lawyer was probably appalled that she would rather hide her illiteracy from other people than to reduce her sentence and deny that she was the author of a certain report. So there he almost wanted to come forward and say that he knows that she is illiterate and could not possibly have authored that report. But he steps back in the end and does nothing.

I always felt that this is a metaphor for what the rank and file of the Nazis were like. They were not especially evil people, rather they were just unable or unwilling to stand up to evil. They were moral cowards like him. He had plenty of other reasons not to reveal that she was illiterate. One was that she was ashamed of it. Another was that it was after all her own decision to make and she already made it. A third reasons is that he wanted to keep his affair with her a secret. Or he wasn’t prepared to face her again. Whatever it is, the parallels with the moral failure of being a Nazi is striking. This act of not interfering with her decision to condemn herself to 20 years in prison is one of the most important acts of the film, and influences a lot of things that take place later in the lawyer's life. Why is he a cold person? Why did he feel guilty and send her audio tapes of literature? Why did he feel very awkward about meeting her in person?

The other aspect of the movie was the secrets. The love affair was a secret. I know from first hand experience that when you keep secrets from people it really alienates you from them. There was so much about how, when the lawyer as a young boy got home after having lost his virginity 1 hour ago, he was looking at his family one by one, and he just couldn’t tell them anything. It probably made him very emotionally distant from his family, if he wasn't already that way. Was his family close? They were strict, to say the least. But they stuck together. He just wasn't able to form close relationships, which is why in the end he got divorced, and spends much of his older life going from 1 lover to another.

The scene where he finally meets Hannah is also very interesting. They finally meet in the prison canteen. Remember that the last time they met face to face they were still fucking each other. Now she's 60. The meeting is a little cold, and there is little joy left. He's talking about making arrangements for her.

She's fairly unrepentant about her actions during the war. She said one line which makes the movie quite controversial. “I have learnt that the dead are already dead”. She had also learnt how to read. Well good for her! I think in a way she never really understood what being a Nazi was all about. So many people don't think about it in terms of right and wrong. To her, she was just given instructions, and she was doing a job.

Later on, just before she is to be released, and when we're thinking, "how is she going to adapt to this new world?" She hangs herself. The book makes it clear that after reading about the Holocaust she starts to think more about, and is being tormented about her role in it. But it's more ambiguous in the movie. She says that she knows all about the dead. She has been both a prisoner and a guard. Is she a helpless person who stumbles through her life, and acquiesces to all the forces around her, or is she a moral agent?

There is a case to be made for her being a helpless person. She joined the prison guard because she was just looking for a job. She had an affair with the lawyer because she could tell he had a crush on her. She couldn't read and write, and she's shut away from most human civilisation as a result. (It is very difficult for anybody to understand what it's like to be illiterate. Most people think this is trivial but it's not.) She's not educated enough to make the same moral judgements that other people make when they are condemning her. She was the only prison guard to not understand, like the other prison guards on trial, that she should not have confessed to anything.

As for whether she was the ringleader of the guards, it is possible. She is a capable person, and it's not inconceivable that she was promoted to leader. But would they have made an illiterate person a leader? But I think we are meant to believe that the 200 who died in the church were locked in as the result of a collective decision.

The thing about the war, and the holocaust is to realise that while most people could have resisted evil, it is not easy for anybody at all. It was difficult enough getting by, and it would have taken great strength, courage, resources, wealth - everything - not to be a bad person in that war.

The other thing is that her stint as a guard took up maybe 1 or 2 years of her life. That's 1 or 2 years in an otherwise unremarkable and completely ordinary life. When you put somebody in jail, you are punishing a person. OK, she did evil things and they should be punished. But there are other reasons for putting people in jail that are not justified. You put a person in jail so that society can be safe from them. Hannah was a perfectly normal member of society in peacetime. There's no need to lock her away. OK, she fucks 15 year old boys, but 15 year old is not that young, 16 is legal in this country. The other rationale of prison is rehabilitation. Normal people leading normal lives don't need rehabilitation. There's very little reason for her to be in jail.

She was in jail, in lieu of all the other people who did equally horrible things, and went unpunished, because one of the victims wrote a book. It is OK to demand justice and the war crimes trials were good things. But they still distribute justice inequally, and we can still say that Hannah was unlucky.

Still, before she hangs herself, she bequeaths her life savings to the victim who wrote the book. It's for the lawyer to confront the victim who put her in jail.

The last scene is also very jarring. The lawyer takes the tin, and gives it to the Jewish daughter. And for a while it seems to her that he’s there to ask for absolution, and treats him with disdain. She has done well for herself, is ostentatiously wealthy, and has an apartment on Manhattan’s west side. For those who have never been to New York – it costs a shit load of money to live there. The hall is tastefully decorated with plenty of expensive art pieces. She’s done quite well for herself. Then she takes the attitude of a lot of former survivors of her generation, and refuses to forgive the Nazis. Very self-righteously, she lectures that “there is nothing good that comes out of being in a concentration camp. There is nothing that a concentration camp can teach you. It is not college.”

But later on, when she realizes that she is receiving the entire life savings of somebody who has just spent 20 years in jail, her attitude softens, and she finds that he’s not here to seek forgiveness. And after all, she put Kate Winslet in jail for 20 years. $7000 is just loose change to her, and she sets up a foundation to promote literacy. After all, she said it herself, and this is the moral of the story for “The Reader”: there is nothing that a concentration camp can teach you. It bears no resemblance to life elsewhere. There is no meaning to it. So stop being vindictive about the past and lay it to rest. Kate Winslet legacy to her also included a tin that contained the money, the sort of tin that the Jewish victim used to play with as a child. You could say that Kate Winslet, who took her normal life away from her is giving it back to her in that form of the tin. So the Jewish victim does the right thing and places the tin on the mantelpiece next to a picture of all her relatives who were exterminated in the Holocaust.

I think there are a lot of people who criticized this movie for “not realizing the gravity of Kate Winslet being a concentration camp guard”. They are missing the whole point of the story. The whole point is to chip away at the edifice and the “standard interpretation” of war guilt, and what to do with it when it’s over. The war didn’t last very long. The amount of time I’ve worked at my present job is equivalent to almost 2 Japanese occupations of Singapore. Kate Winslet worked as a concentration camp guard for not very long, and it’s not a large part of her life. We are surprised that she thinks that her lack of literacy is a larger problem but if we bother to put ourselves in her shoes we shouldn’t be.

Let's put it this way. If you threw me into jail, but gave me a pile of books to read - maybe I'm only saying this because I know nothing about jail - I wouldn't mind it at all. A monk's life, a bookworm's life, that was the life I led in America and in Singapore. There is almost no difference, it is normal. To be in there, but not be able to read - that would have been torture.

OK, so the contrast is artificial. One is a Nazi, who because of her role in the rank and file, rots in jail for 20 years. The other is a victim who has suffered greatly in her childhood, but has lived a great and fulfilling life thereafter. Who has lived the better life? Who has suffered more? The victim has done well, ironically from the publishing proceeds from selling her story. What does this tell you about real life, the life that goes on long after the war ends, where all the rules are different?

Some people have complained that the movie does not show any war scenes, and we only know about the war through what we already know elsewhere. This is an attempt to whitewash the past. But I think this is a refreshing point of view. We gain nothing by holding on to the past. In a way the past is inexorably separated from the present. Some people say that the past isn't over, it isn't even past. Fair enough, but on the other hand, why don't you want to get on with life?

My initial impression of the Jewish victim was repulsion, but now I feel that her attitude - I do not accept the money because that would mean absolution - is more or less correct. She allows him to set up a fund to promote literacy, although it is true that all Jews are literate.

The bad news, guys, is that the Holocaust is not a unique event in human history. We haven’t had a war on the scale of WWII since then but plenty of horrible things have taken place. We have had the Vietnam wars. The Congo wars. The Rwanda genocide. Cambodia. East Timor. It’s really ridiculous to call the Holocaust unique. It’s taking place over and over again. It’s a really unhealthy attitude to just call it incomprehensible, and then ban all attempts to analyse or comprehend the scale of what happened. This shut-the-fuck-up attitude is partly an attempt to put forward a standard interpretation of the Holocaust and not ever have it questioned. The Israelis have managed to get away with a disproportionate amount of violence against the Palestinians because many legitimate questions are swept away under the aegis of “do you dare question the sanctity of the Holocaust? Do you dare deny the centuries of Anti-Semitism?”

What I think is this: the real lessons of the Holocaust have not been learnt. The lessons that have been learnt are the wrong ones. We hold on to our stereotypical ideas about it - that it is a unique and unsurpassed event, that it is improper to rationalise and speak about it, improper to try and understand it. That is all wrong. That prevents us from learning the real lessons. It's not a one off that happened to Jewish people in the past. America, who has been most insistent about having the "proper" attitude towards the Holocaust had the power to prevent at least 1 of those mass murders from taking place, but it didn't. It took 50 years for there to be an international justice tribunal. They are - only now - trying the members of the Khmer Rouge for genocide. Now that is not a simple matter and it is a significant achievement, but there is so much more that could have been done.

What did the holocaust teach mankind about handling genocide before it happens? Not very much. What does it teach mankind about handling genocide after it happens? Not very much either. Japan still does not apologise. Turkey still denies that it mass murdered the Armenians. East Timor is still in a shitty state. There are still problems in Kosovo. Saddam Hussein still used chemical weapons on the Kurds.

Anyway I found a quote from the actual novel itself. It is worth reading:

"What should our second generation have done, what should it do with the knowledge of the horrors of the extermination of the Jews? We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable, we may not inquire because to make the horrors an object of inquiry is to make the horrors an object of discussion, even if the horrors themselves are not questioned, instead of accepting them as something in the face of which we can only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt. Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt? To what purpose?"

About Kate Winslet, I suppose this is the third movie that I’ve watched that features her fucking. The first was Titanic, the second was “Little Children”. If I watch “Revolutionary Road” then I suppose there will be a fourth. Winslet had a more impressive front during “Titanic”. Maybe I will watch Revolutionary Road.