Pondering ‘The Reader’ After 16 Years: Part 2

As a film, The Reader asks us to grapple with the very notion of love. What is it? What does it look like? How does it manifest? And can we know it when we see it? What happens when something clashes with our perception of love? And more importantly, what happens when something clashes with our perception of the object of our love? Complex questions for a two-hour movie. But The Reader beautifully demonstrates that love is not merely idealization, adoration, or the simple existence of positive feeling. It is what persists when confronted with harsh truths — even and especially those we cannot escape.

What The Reader does is solidify for the viewer and for Michael the idea that love is not the absence of conflict. Love exists in spite of it. Michael is at a loss for what to do with that understanding.

In a 2008 press conference, Ralph Fiennes says that Michael “can’t divorce himself from wanting contact with her [Hanna] — but a very one-sided contact. He’s traumatized by what he knows about her. He doesn’t want to write her a letter. He doesn’t want that kind of intimacy but he wants to maintain contact. He’s conflicted. He doesn’t want to engage with her because of all the feelings her actions have provoked in him but he can’t lose her.”

For Michael, his growth hinges upon this conflict of feeling. In the early parts of the film, he’s peeking at Hanna through rose colored glasses. There are moments when he glimpses parts of her reality — when she reluctantly tells him her name, when they fight over what happened on the tram, when she quietly navigates her own inner conflict. But he never truly sees her.

Hanna seems incapable of holding this complexity — that love and conflict (perhaps a stand-in for judgment) can co-exist. In her case, it’s as if those absolutes are the only truths. “War and peace, kid,” she tells Michael after an argument. There’s no sifting through the details of the conflict. For her, the conflict arises and then it ceases. End of story. Perhaps this is her own war-inflicted trauma playing out.

In a more fascinating read of this peculiarity of Hanna’s, one might consider that she deals in absolutes because she herself is stalwart and consistent. She is who she is regardless of the circumstances. Therefore, it does not matter whether there is war or peace. Hanna and her illiteracy (and all the turmoil that results from this fact) remain.

We see this play out again in court when Hanna cannot seemingly absorb the nuances of the court’s questioning.

“What would you have done?” she responds when asked why she allowed hundreds of Jews to burn to death during a death march. She justifies over and over again her role as an SS officer (“We were guards. Our job was to guard the prisoners… we were responsible for them!”) as if she simply cannot grasp the gravity of her actions. And it’s here that we see she is incapable of understanding her impact on Michael.

The court sequence also sheds light on Hanna’s relationship with the truth — her own truth. She tells it so long as it protects her from being revealed as an illiterate. When we look back at the scene in which Michael asks if she loves him, she has nothing to lose. He isn’t asking if she can read or write. He is simply asking if she loves him. And with a simple nod, she tells him that yes, she does.

Even so, the seed of doubt — like Hanna’s illiteracy — remains. Hanna’s inability to read (between the lines), to express, to communicate becomes Michael’s.

What a tragedy it is to be loved and to know you are loved by someone who cannot and will not fully express themselves. The uncertainty lingers like a plague and permeates every part of you such that other questions begin to surface. You no longer ask yourself whether someone loves you but instead turn it inwards. Am I lovable? Can I love? Have I ever really experienced it? How can I recognize it if I’m not even sure I’ve been the recipient of it?

It is a journey — an odyssey — back to yourself when faced with such questions. We see Michael traversing this odyssey under the greatest of pressures. To free himself, he needed to free Hanna first.

The final scenes are like a deep, cleansing breath. And the answer to all those burning questions sound like a resounding yes. For Michael, anyway.