Read for the Hint: Revolutionary What?

Reading the metaphor: Der Vorleser (The Reader)


It is usually incompetently silly to argue against an established film critic, when oneself is not. It is equally silly to get mad at the IMDB rating of any film, especially when one can cast but one vote and understands the absurdity of (internet) democracy. Yet after reading a New Yorker critic trashing The Reader which I completely enjoy, and after finding out that The Revolutionary Road by which I am completely appalled sits comfortably on a 7.8-out-of-10 rating, just like The Reader; I could not but undertake the doubly-silly task to argue against the critic and the IMDB and ask: Why is it that the imbecile blindness of the Revolutionary Road gets embraced on IMDB, while the metaphoric insight and brilliancy of The Reader escape critical attention of The New Yorker?

Let us start with "the critical attention" first. In regard to The Reader (2008) as this year's Oscar pick, Mr. David Denby says, the "preening importance" of Bernard Schlink's novel The Reader (Der Vorleser) is "not justified by what's onscreen". Moreover, "Schlink's intelligent book has been frozen in marmoreal stillness and hoisted onto a pedestal. His resonant reflections on postwar German guilt have been dropped... the movie goes dead." And by concurring with another film critic, Mr. Denby labels The Reader as "shaky and sentimental".

I haven't read the Schlink book, either English or German; but isn't it the standard practice to separate the film adaptation from the novel or the screen play? Is it not the case that even if the adaptation is incorrigibly worthless, the critic ought to constrain him/herself from privileging "the original" as the sole yardstick for aesthetic judgement? Then comes Mr. Denby's point about The Reader being "frozen" and "dead". If an artwork as intricately layered as The Reader still counts as "dead", then one could not possibly defend a work like Revolutionary Road with no substantial development whatsoever. In The Reader, we have a woman with eros and secrets, a former SS guard who fights to conceal her illiteracy, who spends a life-time trying to read into and out of her Nazi past. In short, The Reader is capable of developments. Even the startling nudity and sexual intimacy, far from going stagnant (unlike for example, Lust, Caution), legitimize themselves as the political and metaphorical layers of the film unfold. Last but not least, the most serious charge laid against the film is the most incomprehensible: how on earth is the "resonant reflections on postwar German guilt... dropped"? Is the reflection of guilt not in the title? Is it not in the symbolic scenes of reading aloud (vorlesen) and listening? Is it not screaming out in the metaphor of "illiteracy"? And do you not read it in the last words of Hanna Schimitz and in the ceremonious delivery of the tea can amid the New York sirens and the reconciliatory silence? The obsession of "die Verganenheitsbewaetigung" (the German word for "coming to terms with the past") deposits itself beautifully in the struggle to make sense of what one reads and is read aloud to. The hint is explicit, so pick it up.

The exact reason constitutes my objection to the Revolutionary Road. The sign of stupidity - not just the stupidity of the hubris American middle-class living in the suburbs, but also the stupidity of the story which fails to register such stupidity - is explicit. It is in fact so explicit that it would be really stupid not to acknowledge it. The adulteries are dull; the bourgeois cowardice is insipid. We see Madame Bovary (indeed, both Emma and April yearn for Paris) in the American suburbs; we see Desperate Housewife in the 1950s. Don't get me wrong: there could be something genuinely moving about the disappointments in life and the nowhere-ness of the bourgeois life; what is at stake here is the film's timidness to stick with the real despair it discovers in passing. In the scene where April Wheeler convinces her husband to move to Paris, she spells out the great conspiracy underlying their existential crisis: the pretense of their superiority does not validate their gloominess but rather prevents them from recognizing their own mundaneness, and hence from getting real about their journey to the west, in search of happiness via hard and solid work. To translate April's self-critique into Marxist analysis: one needs to get real about the true boredom of the bourgeois as a historical phenomenon in order to appreciate and seize the proletariat moment of revolutionary impulse. Yes, that is what "revolution" means. And yes, April has actually laid the cards out. It is in fact April's fleeting moment of honesty that lends the romanticization of Paris wee bit of credibility. What is amazingly embarrassing is how soon the ephemeral clarity gets deluded and never picked up again throughout the rest of the story, which becomes virtually a gendered sequel to the castrating Little Children. As soon as April gushes to Frank, "You are the most beautiful thing in the world" and hence you deserve better, we know that there is not going to be anything revolutionary on the revolutionary road.

However, the last scene redeems the "dead" and "frozen" Revolutionary Road. In the last shot of Mr. Givings, the husband of the real estate manager, the father of the lunatic and level-headed mathematician, while his wife denounces the Wheelers for their "superiority" to justify her own, he tunes her out! Well done, old pa! Who hasn't heard enough of the bourgeois boredom syndrome? Get real and please, just pick up the hint.