The Lives of Others

And the Transforming Power of Art

By: Cooper Carr

In October of 2022, Matty Healy, lead singer of the English band The 1975, did an interview with radio host Zane Lowe. Near the beginning of the interview, Healy and Lowe talked about art and culture. The front man seemed more earnest than usual. As an artist himself, it’s no surprise that Healy had strong feelings. He expressed disdain for the leaders of the British government who cut public funding for the arts. “It’s literally ‘cause they are philistines,” Healy said. “If you are the Minister of Culture, you should be able to f**k. And you should know who Aphex Twin is.”

Even if art has become more difficult to support financially, it hasn’t become any less essential. Art is powerful. It is a force in and of itself. Those people who have been the most affected by it know this, and they know how important art is.

“Some people are a person,” Healy said. “And then they hear ‘Blue’ by Joni Mitchell. Or they hear Bob Dylan. They hear whatever record it is and they immediately become someone else. They are transformed.”

For many people, this will not just be a statement they hear, or even something they learn. They will hear it and realize it is something they have always known. Or it is something they have known ever since it happened to them, though they never really thought about it. They have been transformed by art themselves and whatever work of art it is that did the transforming will immediately come to mind.

These are the kinds of people who devote their lives to art and end up transforming someone else. In some cases, the art they make is itself an ode to that transforming power of art, either directly or indirectly.

The Lives of Others is a 2006 German drama film directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck starring Ulrich Mühe, Martina Gedeck and Sebastian Koch. Set in East Germany in 1984, the story follows Gerd Wiesler, a captain of the Ministry for State Security (Stasi), playwright Georg Dreyman, and his girlfriend, actor Christa-Maria Sieland. The Stasi closely monitors the affairs and households of most prominent artists in East Germany, including all of them that Dreyman knows.

At the movie’s start, Dreyman is not being monitored due to his apparent sympathy for the ruling East German Communist Party. Wiesler, seeing Dreyman at the performance of one of his plays, indicates to his superior, for no apparent reason, that Dreyman may not be as “clean” as he appears. So the Stasi begin monitoring him, with Wiesler leading the mission.

Every inch of Dreyman’s house is bugged, and Wiesler constantly listens in from the abandoned attic of a nearby building. Later, knowing when Dreyman comes and goes, Wiesler sneaks into the apartment where Dreyman lives with Sieland, walks carefully through the artists’ rooms, and steals a book of poetry by Bertolt Brecht. He reads the poetry back at home and is visibly moved. This is the first significant hint that Wiesler will not remain the force of East German Communist oppression that he is at the beginning of the film.

The second scene that makes Wiesler sympathetic and adds depth to his character comes when Dreyman plays the piano in his apartment. Wiesler is listening in as usual, wearing head phones, surrounded by technical sur veillance equipment. He is shown from behind first, and as the camera slow ly moves around Wiesler, he stares off into the distance. A single tear rolls down the Stasi agent’s face as Dreyman continues playing for the audience he doesn’t know is listening. Throughout the rest of the movie, Wiesler is trans formed, which began with art.

I don’t know what inspired Matty Healy to start making music or what made Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck want to make movies. But I know both of them could tell anyone in a second the name of the art that transformed

I remember watching Barry Jenkin’s Moonlight in 2018 and falling in love with film because that movie opened my brain to all that movies can be. And I remember seeing Porter Robinson per form his song Musician in 2021, seeing the lyrics on the screen, later screaming them in the shower, and knowing I would never be an engineer, even though I was studying engineering at the time. And I remember finishing Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, thinking Baldwin used words more beautifully than any one I’d ever read before, and realizing I wanted to use words like that too. If not for those works of art, you wouldn’t be reading this because I wouldn’t be writing it. I would be someone else. I wouldn’t be myself.

I don’t know if you have been transformed by art or if you even want to be. But I feel these transformations are usually for the better. If you’re struggling to find yourself, I hope you dive into art. Find the stuff you like. There is more art at our fingertips than there ever has been. So if it’s not a single song, poem, or movie that does it, it will be a synthesis of many of them. You will hear it, read it, watch it and become someone else—yourself.