Next year we are putting on an Anti-Communist Film Festival. We’ll be screening great freedom-loving films like The Lives of Others, Trial, and Red Dawn.
One of the films we hope to show is The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) starring Daniel Day-Lewis. The film is based on the 1984 novel by Milan Kundra. The story follows the lives of two men and two women: a surgeon named Tomas (Day-Lewis), his wife Tereza, Tomas's mistress Sabina, and a professor named Franz. Their lives, which are full of love and art and dancing, are disrupted by the communist takeover of their country. The story takes place during the 1968 Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, a brief moment of relative freedom before the Soviets invaded with tanks and crushed all dissent.
The literary critic Sona Hal describes it well:
Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being is an absolute masterpiece, a literary gem that transcends conventional genres and storytelling norms. It’s a captivating fusion of profound philosophy and the most unconventional love story, all woven together into a breathtaking tapestry that intricately unravels the enigma of human existence. This novel, my friends, is not just a mere work of fiction; it’s a soul-stirring experience that has left an indelible mark on my heart.
This book defies the rules of categorization, daring you to label it simply as a novel. It’s a philosophical treatise, a profound exploration of existential dilemmas, artfully cloaked in the guise of storytelling. Kundera’s prose is a revelation, inviting readers to plunge headlong into a world where the weight of human existence is both unbearable and yet remarkably light.
The novel and the film compare an existence that is “light,” where one can have many lovers, live freely, and avoid political conflict, to one that is “heavy” with responsibility and social turmoil. Author Milan Kundera is also the author of A Kidnapped West, or the Tragedy of Central Europe. The essay first appeared in the French journal Le Debat in 1983. It was just reissued.
Kundera is best known as the Czechoslovakian dissident who came to the West after being stripped of his citizenship by the communists in 1975. He is the author of The Joke, an indictment of totalitarian societies that imprison people for telling jokes. Until 1989, his books were banned in Czechoslovakia.
Kundera’s A Kidnapped West, which caused a huge reaction when it was first published, is a love letter to the rich cultural material that makes a civilization truly adored. According to Kundera, it was culture, not political ideas and abstractions, that led to the 1968 Prague Spring, where the people revolted against the puppet Socialist government. According to French historian Pierre Nora, who wrote the introduction to the reissue of The Kidnapped West, Kundera “saw … cultural vitality as an element in preparing the Prague Spring: a culture that was not a privileged invention of the elite but rather the living value around which the people itself gathered.” Kundera himself wrote that “it was the theater, the films, the literature and the philosophy that, in the years before 1968, led to the Prague Spring.” He added that “nothing could be more foreign to Central Europe and its passion for variety than Russia’s uniform, standardizing, centralizing.”
Americans revere the Founding Fathers and honor our military veterans and the sacrifices they made to keep us free. Yet as Kundera notes, there is also a level of lived-in culture that makes one not just appreciate a certain place, but adore it. Americans don’t just respect America - we adore it. We adore our movies and novels and TV shows and comedians, or at least we did before they all went woke. We adore John Coltrane and Johnny Carson and Taylor Swift and Richard Pryor and baseball and skateboarding and swing dancing and Marvel Comics.
This is why woke culture is so Soviet, so uniform, and so poisonous. Rather than appreciating the variety of cultures and traditions — some more conservative and some more liberal — that make America so dynamic, fun, and interesting, the woke try to force a humorless, totalizing society exactly like the one Kundera battled against. Kundera’s 1967 novel The Joke explored the despair and absurdity of life under Stalin, where a single joke about a government official could destroy a person’s entire life. Of course, in today’s woke culture, a politically incorrect joke can have the same effect. In recent years, Kundera himself has been in danger of being canceled by feminists, who don’t like the depiction of women in some of his books. A young Kundera today might find himself canceled before publishing a word.
In A Kidnapped West, Kundera despairs for America. Our country, he writes, “has forgotten what it is.” We have forgotten our heritage from both Athens (philosophy) and Jerusalem (Christianity) and are now awash in, as Kundera saw in 1983, not great works of culture but “entertainment and technology.” While Central Europe was once considered just a satellite of the Soviet Eastern Bloc, America is now under the thumb of the Woke West.
A particularly potent medium to remember who we are is film. It’s an original American art form that celebrates freedom and the imagination. That’s why we’re having the Anti-Communist Film Festival and why it can have such a profound and long-lasting impact. It can be our own Prague Spring.
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