You may have heard this film recommended; I’m pretty sure it’s been mentioned at least once in comments here. It was very highly praised a year or two ago when it came out. Set in 1984 in East Germany, it’s about a Stazi (secret police) official who finds himself sympathetic to a couple on whom he is spying, and gets involved in their lives. Well, “spying” doesn’t quite tell the whole story—the couple’s apartment is bugged, and the Stazi are listening to them 24 hours a day. Part of the effect of that movie is that you are left with an all-too-convincing sense of what that meant, and how it felt to know that it had been done to you.
We watched it last night, Monday night, and I’ll say no more about the plot—I’ll just say that it’s every bit as good as people have said, and you should see it. It’s only partly about politics, but its portrait of life in a totalitarian society is sobering and disturbing. Much of the world might have gone this way, and may yet.
Monday also saw Mr. Obama’s declaration of triumph on behalf of what he called “science” but which was actually a question of ethics, in which he declared, magisterially, that any moral reservation about the use of human embryos as raw material for medical treatment is an unfounded scruple to be dismissed with mild contempt. I suppose the mildness of the contempt is the reward, likely the only reward, of those who supported him in spite of their disagreement with him on this and other life-related matters, and who believed him when he said he would listen to them.
I had a dream sometime in the small hours which somehow involved three things: the anxious and paranoid atmosphere of the movie, Mr. Obama’s venture into ethics, and a counterfeit Catholic Church which featured more pomp and color than the real thing has these days—there were a lot of people in red and gold robes—but which was a fraud concealing something very evil. I can’t remember anything more specific about the dream, but the atmosphere of it troubled me off and on all day.
Update: Remembering a little more about that dream, I realized that this church-thing wasn’t really posing as the Catholic Church, but rather was a substitute for it. It was a dressing-up of secularism to satisfy the human need for ceremony and ritual, a structure built on and around nothing. And the evil thing that I sensed at the center was not some specific thing, some barbarous practice, but nothingness. There was something horrible—horrible in that indescribable dream way—about the lie involved, the trappings of devotion directed at the void. Something like the reaction I’ve always had to the Objective Room in That Hideous Strength.
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