I loved the movie. It was a very honest depiction, reminicent of The Battle of Algiers. I wish more films took this bold approach to storytelling and didn’t rely on pandering to the audience (the way a movie like Munich did).
I can’t speak for Germany, but I can say that the shit that’s going on in the U.S. today pales in comparison to the 60s and early 70s. I think if you had as much civil upheaval, as well as a draft with large casualities coming home in body bags, you might have a more pissed of society. But you don’t have that and even with all the bad things going on, Americans are pretty well isolated from it all. Whether that’s good or bad I’ll leave it to the people to conclude for themselves. But I will say that even back then when there was the Red Army Faction and the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers, etc. etc. – these were still fringe groups. Most people were not marching in the streets and protesting the war – if they did, Nixon wouldn’t have been overwhelmingly reelected.
So yeah, life sucks. Watch a movie and have a cocktail.
http://www.baader-meinhof.com
I think the drop off in youth activism compared to thirty and forty years ago (and while I don’t have any statistics on such a drop, the reduction in intensity and mass participation seems quite obvious) is owing to a number of unrelated factors. First and foremost can be derived from the IR theory that democracies (or, in a more popular thesis, countries with McDonalds) don’t go to war with other democracies: industrial and post-industrial democracies, and citizens within those democracies, have multiplied, and as the middle-class swells and a comfortable standard of living becomes more common, we see fewer youth interested in “rocking the boat.” Materialism is so ingrained by now that if you have to choose between messing about with your iPad or living in a utilitarian hovel to study extremist ideology and recruit like minds, you’re invariably going to go with the former.
Much of the disinterest is unlikely related to the extreme fragmentation in leisure and media; as you point out, George, there’s so much out there with which to piss our time away that it probably drums an inherent lack of focus into any sustained social or political activism. While the rise of movements to help the environment and help Africa, etc. have been bolstered on campuses in the last twenty years especially, it feels more and more like a badge for an ambitious undergrad than anything to do with the genuinely ideological militancy of the 1960s and 1970s. Going to Kenya to work on irrigation for two weeks while you’re in your third year of university is more of a distinction for your grad school application than some sort of primal scream against the lack of infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa.
The fragmentation seems to feed the “slacktivism” that we see on the likes of Facebook, in that if there were a mushrooming RAF or FLN or FLQ today, they’d be most palpable in a 500-member Facebook group, which is to say that the sum total of action involved in “agitating” would be akin to a light breeze. Further still, I feel like it would have been a lot easier for a group of people to be radicalized after watching the same nationwide state television broadcast or Cronkite report on My Lai than it is with hundreds of newspapers and media feeds at your fingertips, thousands of divergent voices at once, all aimed at niche audiences. The Internet surely brings activists and agitators together like no other force in the history of communications, but it also compartmentalizes and specializes everything to the point that a mass uprising would be restricted to a narrow segment (and even then, they’d probably write manifestos until getting lost in a game of Farmville).
As for movies? I like to think that they still have the power to incite, radicalize and what-have-you. Even though I didn’t even really like “Baader-Meinhof” as cinema, it certainly lit the old I-wish-it-was-1968 fire, in spite of how unromantic and cautious the whole film was. Beyond sparking political action and revolt, I think the very best quality of good cinema is to tell us, “This is a way of living,” and in the case of “Baader-Meinhof,” “This was a path that was taken; this was lived, here are the results.” It’s up to all of us to evaluate and read further and try to reconcile our own world view to what we’re seeing up on the screen.
George
Yesterday I watched “Der Baader Meinhof Komplex”, and found myself wondering: what made youths back then become more involved in social issues than youths nowadays? I believe there are many other things we can use up our time with, or we just don’t want to become involved. The world is going mad right now; there are wars everywhere, you hear of murders on the daily news, we are wasting all of our resources away, … Yet, very few do anything at all.
Do you think movies can inspire people to act, and stand up to fight against all the crazy stuff going on around us?
And what are your thoughts on the movie? Did you like it?