I Prefer Being Read To

Fascism, SS, Auschwitz, Nazism, Hitler are all words we have been groomed to revile and admonish. Presumably the greatest evil forces mankind has seen, the perpetrators have not been treated kindly by history. Apart from the judicial trials, each one of them undergoes moral trials every time there is a mention of such forces in quotidian conversations. Literature is dense with diatribes containing gory details of the inhumanities that went on in that hell-on-Earth. Quite justifiably so too. Gassing people to death, parading them nude to test for physical fitness, freezing them to their mortality are acts that do not deserve an empathetic understanding of those who committed them.
I am no different. I have been a part of those quotidian conversations, I have read the literature, I have been taught History at school.
The two hours therefore were a period of immense internal conflict: conflict between my emotions, conflict between my moralities, conflict between the right and the wrong. Yes, The Reader does not do wonders to convention. The taboos of a May December romance and that of Nazism shirk their identity in the movie. A 15 year old boy making love to a 36 year old woman between reading sessions comes across as just another love story between people just belonging to different backgrounds. The good-natured protagonists evoke sympathy in their innocent romance. Yes, I know some would disagree with the term ‘innocent’ when it involves rampant sexuality, but I shall use it nevertheless. The romance might have originated with licentiousness, but it culminated into a tacit understanding of each other’s love and dependence, the love often curing the other’s complexes. The scrupulous woman exposes her piety through her tears inside a church, through her rewarded diligence in her menial job, through her insanity towards cleanliness. The boy exhibits affection in his conversations, he’s besotted in his poetry, nonchalance in the societal rejection of his love, child-like in the affair.
The story through the first half carries the viewer with the lovers through a studio, a quaint village, through intimacy and arguments until the viewer gets accustomed to their bond and begins to laugh with the couple, cry with the couple, begins to connect with the couple. And just as things are getting under your skin, the track changes. It’s not only the boy who’s left confused, but so is the viewer. The woman, who you had for long been connecting with, who you had for so long getting carried to different landscapes with, is suddenly the villain. Do you hate her? Do you feel sympathy?
The story leaves no doubt as to what it expects you to do. If the Jews were persecuted at Auschwitz, it was a superior decision; she was only doing her job. Time and again, her helplessness in visible when the Jury fails to understand her predicament in trying to do her job. So if women were dispatched to be killed, it was only to make room for the new batches that kept pouring in without caring for accommodation. But room needed to be made. And her job was to make room. How could she possibly have altered the requirements of her as from above? That wasn’t her decision to make. She was only a guard. How could she let lose the Jews from a burning chapel, when she was responsible for them, to ensure they wouldn’t escape? She was a guard meant to keep prisoners under custody, not to add to the chaos. Yes, she was a guard who did her job. What would you have done?
She needed a job, she got one, and she didn’t know better than to do it well, as proved time and time again. So she did. How was she to judge what the ulterior scheme was? For her, they were prisoners, and prisoners are to be guarded, and treated the way is prescribed and killed the way is ordered. Why should she be punished for doing her job?
And who is to say whether she was the perpetrator or the victim herself? I guess that is the larger question the movie attempts to answer. To reduce it to a cliché, she was a victim of circumstance, she was a victim of deceit too, she was a victim of her own shame.
Somehow, the movie carries you through these questions, so that you annihilate your conventional grooming and hatred, and sympathise with the woman. She was one of the many who did wrong, but that happened because she was wronged too, and continued to be wronged even after.
Would it be a misnomer to call it a ‘wrong’? The movie raises the legal question too, for those who care to notice. Something we discussed right in the beginning of our Law course. The boy’s teacher, very momentously says, how society believes it is run by something called morals; but it isn’t. It is run by something called the law. And each must be judged against the law as prevailed at that time- not our law, just like not our morals.
I did not hate her for her mercilessness. I did not feel apologetic about her mechanics. I only felt bad about her shame.
This entire passage might seem extremely vague, but the loopholes will be filled once the story is visited. I was afraid of spoilers, thus had to knit it this way. But that doesn’t change the fact that it is one of the most introspective, mentally turbulent movies I have seen- not because the stories of the protagonists were troublesome, but because my own was.