thereader

Watch The Reader.

It's preferable that you go into without knowing anything about it. The jist is this: A young boy has an affair with a much older woman when he's in his youth. The woman leaves one day and he doesn't see her for a long period of his life until one day he finds her again, and is in a position where he alone has the power to change her life.

At the beginning of the film, don't be disturbed too much by the senseless, gratuitous nudity. Kate Winslet has no shame (we have learned this from Titanic) and basically walks around without a top for the majority of the film. Once you're able to get past this, the film delves into some pretty substantial subject matter.

Two general themes encountered are law & morality, as well as language & linguistics. Here is the interplay where word can equate to life or death, where responsibility is but a plaything to be trifled with, where the word "the" can be the beginning and the end. This is where books can fill you with emotion, yet by simply standing upon them words can be beneath you. This is the point where society chooses right and wrong, and right can sometimes be wrong and wrong can sometimes be right. Here the paths blur, choices become ambiguous, decisions aren't delineated.

What is the price of one life? Is it the truths of 300, or the lies of 6? Is it at the hands of responsibility, or in the arms of the moral compass? Can we admit our greatest fears when we are forced to choose, can we speak up when everyone is against us, when all hands point towards death as certain, inevitable, just? What is justice?

When is saving a life more important than moral standards?

words

Language is fascinating. I love the idea of words as symbols, as if they are grenades carrying the ammunition of meaning, and when used in the right spot, will explode into understanding. I find it so interesting that the way you use words can influence how a person thinks about what you say. Any first year psychology textbook has the story where participants watched a video of a car accident, then rated on a form how fast they thought the car was going. The only thing that changed between two conditions was the wording of the question:

"How fast was the car going when it bumped into the other car?"
"How fast was the car going when it smashed into the other car?"

Of course, people who read the first had lower estimated speeds, while those who read the second had higher.

Words are so influential, that during the war they didn't refer to Jews as humans, they referred to them as objects: "Figuren" or "stücke", dolls, wood, merchandise, rags. There were no people in 'Nam that were the enemy, because the enemy were gooks, the same as how coloured people were niggers or coons, chinks or coolies, spics, nips, pakis. You oppress them, you kill them, who cares because there's no human rights violations on objects - they ain't human.

Words can turn something that is into something that isn't.

You can omit words too and pretend like the thing it symbolizes doesn't even exist. Some neurophilosophers have proposed eliminating words like "mind", "conciousness", "imagination" thinking that if they don't talk about it in ways that can't be explained by biology, then maybe there will never be a materialist/non-materalist split. As if you can just throw a rug over God and pretend He isn't there, and say that just because we don't have the word God and that we don't talk about Him no more, He musn't exist, and that God must just be something your proteins and electrical impulses make. "Words that have truly lost meaning become obsolete by common consent, not banishment".

We speak, but rarely do we realize that the words we utter have so much power. Think about what you say.

***

Beauregard, M., & O'Leary, D. (2007). The spiritual brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul. Toronto, ON: HarperCollins Publishers.

Michaels, A. (1996). Fugitive pieces. Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart Ltd.