SPOILER ALERT - The end of The Reader is revealed below.
“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.”
-Oscar Wilde
During the last scene of Stephen Daldry’s The Reader, I felt a rush of cathartic emotion. I’m not sure what exactly caused it: the autumnal setting, the mournful music, Ralph Fiennes’ wet eyes. But when the emotion came, it came strong.
First, I chuckled. Chuckles quickly turned to laughter. Then guffaws. Soon I was helpless. I held my sides, tears running down my face.
It was so great.
Most of us have, at one time or another, experienced the phenomenon known as “church giggles.” This is the feeling of uncontrollable laughter at a spectacularly inopportune moment – wedding, funeral, big breakup. Church giggles are frowned upon by moralists, but they shouldn’t be taken lightly. What they represent is very important.
In essence, church giggles are a manifestation of the innate human bullshit detector. In a moment when everything is supposed to be extremely serious, some part of you rebels. Some part realizes that all this solemnity is phony, or that the great revelation quivering on the horizon has been obvious for years. So as you consciously are trying to act inauthentically, the church giggle is the part of you is the part that refuses to go along. It won’t play ball. And if you try to stamp it down (as anyone who’s ever experienced church giggles can tell you) you’ll only make it worse.
I think my first giggle at The Reader happened about halfway through, when Kate Winslet’s illiterate trolley-car worker goes to a restaurant with her young lover. When a menu is put before her, she reacts with (I’m sorry Kate, but it’s true) glaringly obvious terror, presumably because she can’t read it. At this point I started to wonder. She’s in her early 30’s, lives in Berlin – has she never gone to a restaurant? And even if that is somehow true, was she unaware of the very existence of menus? How did she imagine this restaurant trip was going to play out?
Now, a terrible movie is a terrible movie. It may cause laughter, but not the church giggles. So why did The Reader inspire those gloriously cathartic guffaws at the end? Let me answer that by making a couple of obvious yet possibly controversial statements:
1) Just because a movie is about the Holocaust doesn’t mean it’s good.
2) Just because a movie is about the Holocaust doesn’t mean it’s “serious.”
3) Just because a movie is about the Holocaust doesn’t mean it’s moving.
I didn’t laugh at The Reader because it’s about the Holocaust. I laughed because it’s awful. But I got the church giggles because I knew laughing at a movie about the Holocaust is considered to be in very bad taste (Ricky Gervais at Golden Globes – “You know the problem with Holocaust movies? No gag reels on the DVD.”).
The reason for this reverence towards Holocaust movies is pretty obvious. Holocaust movies, even if they’re bad, are thought to be good in the Platonic sense, which is to say they are morally good. After all they bring light to a horrible atrocity, and they take the right stance (they’re against it). How can that not be edifying?
But I don’t think it’s that simple. Loathe as I am to take anything about The Reader seriously, there is actually an insidious message to it that is worth noting. The movie implies that Kate Winslet becomes more moral by learning to read when she is in prison. So when she kills herself at the end (which, I think, the movie views as noble), it’s a sign of her heart having opened due to the glories of the written word.
This is a very reassuring message. It may have a lot to do with the success of the book (“I’m reading, I could never be a Nazi!”). I personally revere education and read constantly. That said, the idea that being well-read renders you immune to the allures of fascism is utter horseshit.
Martin Heidegger may well have been the smartest person in Germany in the 1930’s. He not only read a lot of books, he wrote a few of them (which revolutionized modern philosophy). He turned out to be a pretty fervent Nazi. This was not an anomaly. There were well educated Nazis throughout the academic and business world.
To me, this means that The Reader gives a false sense of security about something people really shouldn’t feel secure about. The question of how a nation, Germany, with a civilization as rich as any in the world, committed perhaps the most horrific atrocity in human history, is a really important one. Imagining that the answer lies in getting everyone to read a few good books is actually a little dangerous. That The Reader peddles this message makes it morally bad, as well as being bad art.
Mind you, I don’t really want to get up on my moral high horse about it. The Reader is far too silly to get worked up about. And, in my own small way, I enjoyed it. It gave me the church giggles. What’s more fun than that?
