Bye Lenin the Film Good-Bye Essay

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It is a farce, founded on dishonesty: like the old regime itself. And Alex has become the neurotic, control-freak prime minister, acting on behalf of an ageing, debilitated monarch" notes Peter Bradshaw, the film reviewer of the Guardian. A real-life parallel might be that of a child in a nursing home who carefully controls his or her parent's visitors, diet, and lifestyle. Politically, Bradshaw's implication is that the love parents and children feel can mirror a kind of tyranny. The love of an old parent can distort the feelings that the young have a changing world as they become dependant upon propping up the lies of parents. This suggest that love the young for elderly people can inhibit and even unconsciously prevent the ability of the world to change, as they live for a dying, rather than a new ideal.

The film at its best shows how love, perhaps too much love, can kill the truth in the relationship between mother and son. It also reveals how over-involvement in politics can become a substitute for a real, family life. The film at first suggests that when Christiane's husband, her children's father, ran away, she used communism as a substitute for real, family feeling, partially because her husband left her for a Western woman.

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The hatred she felt at the loss was turned upon capitalism. But the reunification brings about a harsh truth -- when finally reunited with her husband, who escaped to the West, Christiane reveals how she never believed in communism at all, that her teaching career was ruined by the communists.

What is real, and what is false? Can 'real' love, or real feeling, produce lies? The unity of East and West forces Germans to confront their collective past, and to confront the incomplete nature of both of their systems. Capitalism has a false and shallow side, as did communism. Neither system is entirely true or life-sustaining. However, the imperfectly reconstructed family at the end and the fact that every member of the family is forced to confront some uncomfortable truths shows that there is hope for East Germany and West Germany's future. But to truly move forward and to create something that is stronger and better than before, everyone must give up their fixation upon the material goods and ideals and ideas of the past -- whether Trabants, old husbands, or even Coca-Cola.

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"Bye Lenin The Film Good-Bye" (2008, May 01) Retrieved May 3, 2024, from
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