Thoughts on the Reader
Kenneth Taylor

14 February 2009
Thanks to everybody who made ourFirst Annual Dionysus Awards Showsuch a success. It was a lot of fun. We got lots of great input from our listeners. If you haven't heard the show, be sure to check it out. We're trying to get it picked up as pre-Oscar special by stations throughout the public radio system. Wish us luck with that.

无论如何，我想我要继续讨论一部电影——《朗读者》。大卫·汤姆森——他原本是我们的嘉宾，但在最后一刻不得不取消了——在我们准备展览时建议我们考虑花整整一个小时来讨论这部电影——我猜是因为他认为2008年的其他电影在深度和复杂性上都无法与《读者》相提并论。我不敢肯定我是同意的，无论如何，我们没有接受这个建议。但我确实觉得这部电影非常有趣，也极具挑战性。所以我想我应该在这篇博文里再思考一下，作为我们这一集的后续内容。

I know that some people seem to find this film morally reprehensible. Manhola Dargis,writing about the Reader for the New York Times, concludes his review with the following:

Although the commercial imperatives that drive a movie like this one are understandable — the novel was a best seller and an Oprah’s Book Club selection, for starters — you have to wonder who, exactly, wants or perhaps needs to see another movie about the Holocaust that embalms its horrors with artfully spilled tears and asks us to pity a death-camp guard. You could argue that the film isn’t really about the Holocaust, but about the generation that grew up in its shadow, which is what the book insists. But the film is neither about the Holocaust nor about those Germans who grappled with its legacy: it’s about making the audience feel good about a historical catastrophe that grows fainter with each new tasteful interpolation.

My reactions to this movie are completely at odds with this. In my view, the movie raises a number of profound moral questions and though it doesn't decisively answer those questions -- what movie could -- it does explore -- in a way movies seldom do (though novels more often do) -- the space of possible answers to the questions it raises. Let me explain what I mean. Obviously Hanna, aka, Kate Winslett, is the moral center of this movie. By the way, about Hanna, Dargis says the following:

In the novel and the film — which monumentalizes every trembling lip and fluttering eyelash, turning human gestures into Kodak moments — Michael’s pain turns him not just into Hanna’s victim, but also a kind of survivor.Outrageously, Hanna is a victim too, because she took the guard job only to hide her illiteracy, as if illiteracy were an excuse for barbarism.

Dargis is surely right that both Michael and Hanna are represented as victims -- he of her; and she of something more diffuse and less pointed. I suppose she is partly represented as a "victim" of the German attempt to understand and come to grips with the past. She is also, I suppose, partly represented as the "victim" of the Nazi system in which she was a participant. But I don't think it's at all right to say that the film "excuses" Hanna's participation in the barbarism of the Holocaust because of her illiteracy. The movie does nothing of the sort. It is true that the movie doesn't take the morally "easy" way out ofsimplycondemning Hanna's act. Certainly, that would be the more superficially morally satisfying thing to do -- to offer (again) the simple, unambiguous, untroubled judgment that the Nazi's, and all who aided them, were purely and simply evil barbarians.
Why would that be the "easy" way out, you ask? Well, my answer goes back to a claim made a few years ago,on a show we did about evil, by our guest, Peter Van Inwagen. He argued, as I recall, that the psychology of evil is incomprehensible to us, that true evil is alien and "other." I think something like that thought lies behind Dargis's reaction to this movie. I say that because if you think that the Nazi's were purely and simply evil barbarians, there is nothing much to be said or done about them except to note and condemn their barbarism. Certainly, no "explaining" or "excusing" is necessary. If we are in a position to unambiguously condemn, then there's not much self-reflection called for in thinking about the Nazi's. They were evil. We are not. They performed acts of unspeakable barbarism. We did not. That was them. This is us. We are different.

但我认为，这部电影拒绝了这种头脑简单的画面，它试图代表战后成年的德国人表明，在那些经历了战争、参与了纳粹暴行的人与那些战后才成年、因此没有参与那些暴行的人之间，提供这样一种纯粹的道德隔离，是一种幻觉。这部电影从几个方面说明了这一点。首先也是最重要的一点是，汉娜的内心有些不透明，但在很多方面都很普通。汉娜的非凡之处在于，她几乎在任何方面都不出众。特别是，她不是范·因瓦根笔下的异类，特别有能力做出那些她之后的人无法做出的难以形容的行为。毫无疑问，汉娜是一个烦恼和受伤的人，有事情要隐瞒。但她也不止于此。她能带来快乐、激情和一种爱。

You could, I suppose, look upon her as a sexual predator. If Michael were a Michelle and Hanna a Hermann, we'd no doubt see Hermann as a child molester. Curiously, I find that I am not quite prepared to say that Hanna molests the young Michael -- who is, after all, only 14, if I've got my math right -- when they begin their affair. But it's very clear that the affair with her leaves a scar on his psyche.

The fact that Hanna is in many ways an unremarkable person -- neither heroic, nor particularly virtuous, but also not possessed with an utterly alien and incomprehensible psyche of the sort that Van Inwagen suggested is the hallmark of true evil -- is by my lights what gives the movie true moral force. Hanna was put to a certain moral test. She failed because she lacked whatever inner psychic resources it would have required to pass the moral test. But I think that one of the deepest points made by the movie is that many of who were fortunate enough not to be put the test differed from Hanna in no morally significant respect. She and many in her generation were put to a moral test to which those in the succeeding generation were not subject.

That doesn't mean that Hanna gets a free pass. She is not excused. Her atrocities are not explained away -- despite what Dargis says. I think the movie makes that point forcefully and clearly. But at the same time, in recognizing that Hanna is just an ordinary person with an unremarkable psyche, the movie also raises a very deep puzzle about what exactly we are condemning when we condemn her. Of course, we condemn her acts. But we'd like to condemn more than her acts. We'd like also to condemn the inner psyche that produced the acts. That's why the judge tries to discern whether Hanna "willingly" joined the SS. But if it turns out that Hanna's psyche is not so unlike our own, is not so alien and other, what then? How are we really to distinguish ourselves from Hanna?

This has to do with the problem of what philosophers call moral luck. Hanna was unlucky in her circumstances -- or in the combination of her circumstances and her character. Suppose that she had been born in Britain rather than in Germany. In such circumstances, the very traits that made her a willing SS guard, might have led her to willingly enlist in the British Red Cross. And then we might have praised rather than blamed not just her acts but the inner character that led to those acts. But the point is that it's the very same inner character in the two cases. So on what basis do we condemn its expression through acts here, while praising its expressions through acts there?

我之前说过，这部电影探索了它所引发的道德问题可能的答案。我在想很多不同的事情。首先，回忆一下影片结尾的场景，迈克尔去纽约见一位犹太妇女，她写了一本关于奥斯维辛集中营死亡行军的书。她严厉而坚定地拒绝给予汉娜任何赦免。我不认为这部电影代表她这样做是错误的。相反，电影注意到并接受了这种态度，作为我们可能采取的一种完全合理的态度。回忆一下，迈克尔并没有试图改变她对汉娜的态度。事实上，面对这样的道德确定性，他似乎相当沉默。就像法庭没有回答汉娜尖锐的问题“你会怎么做”一样，迈克尔也没有回答幸存者拒绝向汉娜提供任何赦免。

虽然这部电影注意到了道德确定性的事实，并没有对它提出任何挑战，但它也没有把道德确定性作为最终和唯一的合理回应。电影拒绝停留在道德确定性上的一个证据是迈克尔自己对汉娜态度的复杂性。他的各种态度极其复杂。我甚至不确定我能完整地描述他的全部态度。一方面，他与她之间充满激情的恋情，既为他打开了人类经验的某个领域，也给他留下了创伤。他年轻时的汉娜仍在他的记忆中挥之不去。另一方面，他后来遇到了她，他吃惊地意识到，她似乎是自愿参与了过去的暴行。直到最后，他希望得到保证，她已经“从过去中学到了一些东西”。这是一种持久的谴责。但还有更多。 There is, of course, Hanna's refusal, driven by I am not quite sure what -- a kind of shame, I suppose -- to reveal that she is illiterate even when it might have saved her from years in prison and his silence in the face of that refusal. He cannot even bring himself to see her to speak to her about what he knows and she knows. And then there is the mercy he offers her years later, through his subsequent act of recording books for her again. Or is this a way of seeking absolution for himself? You could see his failure to come to her aid as a kind of moral cowardice, driven by revulsion and shame, perhaps. But if it is a kind of cowardice, it is the kind that disguises itself as "respect."

So how, ultimately, should we understand the moral relationship between Michael - who I suppose is some sort of stand in for the generation whose moral task it was to narrate the history of Nazi Germany as somehow both a chapter in its own history and a chapter from which it is determined to make a decisive break -- and Hanna -- who I suppose is a stand in, not for the main movers and shakers of the Nazi era, but for the millions of ordinary Germans, inwardly indistinguishable from the average run of humanity, without whose cooperation the Nazi's could not have carried off their barbarism? How are we to understand that moral relationship?

The movie doesn't really tell us, I think, because it doesn't really know. It leaves us with no simple answers. But I do think it leaves us with a profound question. Again, as a protective impulse, we may tell ourselves that evil is other, alien and distant. But the reality is that it lives just around the corner in the souls of people little different from ourselves. Only if we come to grips with that fact, I think the movie is trying to say, can we really come to grips with the past.

Comments(9)

Richard's picture

Richard

Sunday, February 15, 2009 -- 4:00 PM

"the very traits that made her a willing SS gua

"the very traits that made her a willing SS guard, might have led her to willingly enlist in the British Red Cross. And then we might have praised rather than blamed not just her acts but the inner character that led to those acts."
真的吗?我没看过这部电影，所以我不知道你说的那些确切的“特征”是什么。但并不是所有的动机都是值得称赞的。正如Nomy Arpaly所主张的那样，值得称赞的行动必须源于“善意”，或者是对行动的正确决策特征的敏感性(比如对人类福利的关注)。如果一个人加入红十字会是出于道德中立的动机(比如“穿制服”)，那么这个行动就不是特别值得称赞。另一方面，因为这个原因而加入党卫军的罪责，与其说是这种积极动机的任何缺陷(它本身是中性的)，不如说是对党卫军受害者的福利不够关心的消极失败。
So I disagree that one and the same trait can be praiseworthy in one context and blameworthy in another. In any case, what is praiseworthy is (de re) moral concern, and what's blameworthy is a lack of such concern.

Guest's picture

Guest

Sunday, February 15, 2009 -- 4:00 PM

Richard, Ken said not that her acts would be prais

Richard, Ken said not that her acts would be praiseworthy, but that "we might have praised" them.

Richard's picture

Richard

Sunday, February 15, 2009 -- 4:00 PM

Well then, if we don't think the agent's character

Well then, if we don't think the agent's character really deserves praise in that case (but we merely praise her for pragmatic reasons, or perhaps for no reason at all), then there's no longer any puzzle, is there?
(Q."So on what basis do we condemn its expression through acts here, while praising its expressions through acts there?" Answer: On the basis of desert in the one case, and pragmatics or whatever in the other.)

Guest's picture

Guest

Monday, February 23, 2009 -- 4:00 PM

I found the film hugely interesting. The court

I found the film hugely interesting.
法庭的部分很奇怪。在我看来，房间里的许多女士和先生似乎都到了他们应该在战争年代发挥作用的年龄。因此，大多数人都知道发生了什么，而汉娜显然是有罪的，我想知道法庭上还有多少人同样有罪，要么因为忽略了这个问题，要么就是其中的一部分。
They seemed somehow to be ridding their own internal guilt using Hanna as a proxy.
此外，我怀疑当汉娜最初得到党卫军的工作时，她并不知道其中涉及到什么。如果一名党卫军警卫直接走开，决定不做那项工作，后果会是什么?
* I just want to make clear I'm not condoning ANY of the things which were done *

Guest's picture

Guest

Tuesday, April 14, 2009 -- 5:00 PM

We are discussing The Reader in our book club this

今天下午我们在读书俱乐部讨论《读者》。我在网上读了一些讨论，发现像“恋爱”、“做爱”这样的词被用来描述迈克尔和汉娜之间发生的事情，这让我很惊讶。我很抱歉，但那是猥亵。你好，他15岁的时候就开始了。看了这部电影，这句话就更加真实了。我认为有些人没有意识到性骚扰并不一定让人感觉不好。如果我发现一个30岁的女人和一个15岁的男孩打架，我们会报警的。我是个高中老师，这太恶心了。高中男生应该和高中女生做爱。她毁了他的一生。 He was ruined just as many who are molested are.

Guest's picture

Guest

Wednesday, May 13, 2009 -- 5:00 PM

And at 16 he some how magically becomes responsibl

And at 16 he some how magically becomes responsible enough to have sex with whom ever he chooses.
I don't believe the sexual relationship ruined him at all, more the inability to reconcile what this women did during the war to how he felt when he first met her. Indeed, he was so "ruined" that much later in life he sends her tapes. Don't try and turn this film into a predatory sexual hate fest when it clearly isn't.
Incidentally, if you want to really feel pissed off then take in "The History Boys" in film or book and try and understand how the viewer is supposed to feel sorry for and indeed support the predatory teacher (no spoilers..)

Guest's picture

Guest

Saturday, September 11, 2010 -- 5:00 PM

I saw the movie for the first time this weekend an

I saw the movie for the first time this weekend and wow! what a movie. The Reader has so many layers and I,m certain that the movie connects differently with each person. Can someone just tell me if Hanna joined the SS after she met Michael, when she ran away from her promotion, or did it happen before she met him?

Guest's picture

Guest

Wednesday, February 15, 2012 -- 4:00 PM

I didn't hear the first part

我没有听到关于伍迪·艾伦的《午夜巴黎》的评论的第一部分，但是你对《赛点》的赞美让我吃惊。这只是现代版的《了不起的盖茨比》。我一直很惊讶艾伦能声称是他写的。