CAHUN YOUR ENTHUSIASM (15)
By:
February 22, 2026
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… anti-fascist art! Series edited by Josh Glenn.
THE LIVES OF OTHERS
The Lives of Others is a movie about surveillance in a totalitarian regime that begins with two performances. An interrogation from a Stasi Captain that’s being recorded, and an innocent play in a theatre somewhere in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), six years before the wall fell.
Our main character, Gerd Wiesler, is the perfect spy; a good eye of the many-eyed beast that is the regime. He’s forgettable, lacks any sense of humor, and is locked in that permanent state of quiet, grim observation that suits the job. During the play he gets a hunch; there’s something suspicious about the otherwise spotless writer, he decides, and triggers a secret operation to place him under total surveillance.
Like in any Greek-worthy drama, the prophecy contains the seeds of its becoming, and the state of surveillance causes the very thing it’s allegedly there to avoid — the writer’s betrayal of the regime — when a close friend hangs himself over it. He then writes an article about suicide in the GDR in bright red ink, the only available color for his unregistered typewriter, which he keeps hidden under the wooden floor of the apartment he shares with his partner, a famous actress.
By the time the red-inked article is smuggled to the West and published, something has changed in Wiesler. During his surveilling days in a depressing grey room, with a depressing grey jacket, and a depressing grey look of concentration, he’s been listening. “I’m your audience” he tells the actress during an unexpected encounter at a bar, then cryptically adds that she’s less performative at the stage than in that moment.
J.F. Nisbet says in The Insanity of Genius that “whenever a man’s life is at once sufficiently illustrious and recorded with sufficient fullness… he inevitably falls in the morbid category.” I would argue that one doesn’t even need to be illustrious at all. But Wiesler has stopped recording with sufficient fullness. He’s not surveilling anymore, he is listening.
He decides to protect the couple from the case against them by hiding the evidence and presenting false records, ending his own career. It takes the writer a decade to realize what happened during his days in the GDR and in turn writes a book for Wiesler: Sonata for the Good Man. Why was this spy a good man? Not for holding a righteous ideology or for standing against a monstrous one, but for the mere human act of truly listening.
This movie is about what technological surveillance could never be. The cruelty of phone surveillance is that it can keep people in an uninterrupted performative state, acting for a non-audience. My phone makes me feel uneasy because it can’t listen, it just collects data. It is surveilling, and I have no audience.
CAHUN YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Mark Kingwell on ONCE UPON A HONEYMOON | Lynn Peril on ZAZOUS | Judith Zissman on DIE GEDANKEN SIND FREI | Annie Nocenti on MEDIUM COOL | Mike Watt on FASCIST | William Nericcio on LALO ALCARAZ | Josh Glenn on THE LADY VANISHES | Carlo Rotella on INQUIETUD | Heather Quinlan on CASABLANCA | Adam McGovern on HEART OF GLASS (MAD JENNY) | Matthew Battles on WOODY’S GUITAR | Carl Wilson on PALACES OF GOLD | Ramona Lyons on UPRIGHT WOMEN WANTED | Lucy Sante on CAMOUFLAGE | Adelina Vaca on THE LIVES OF OTHERS | Tom Nealon on THE BARON IN THE TREES | Nikhil Singh on PARIS PEASANT | Mandy Keifetz on THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED | Gordon Dahlquist on THE CONFORMIST | Michael Grasso on PYNCHONIA | Gabriela Pedranti on THE ETERNAUT | Heather Kapplow on ANTI-FASCIST PASTA | Marc Weidenbaum on (WHAT’S SO FUNNY ’BOUT) PEACE, LOVE, AND UNDERSTANDING | Peggy Nelson on PUPPETS | Sonia Marques on CARNATIONS AGITPROP.
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