Curtis: Good Germans Go Bad

In the 1930s through the early 1940s most Germans were bad. In the world of academia most college professors who have affairs with their students are bad. In a film dealing with the emerging Nazi party, and on a smaller scale student-professor relationships, Viggo Mortensen, the star of the film who partakes in both situations, is portrayed as Good.

The writers of the film, C.P. Taylor and John Wrathall, must have had some idea of what they were doing when they chose to title their screenplay Good. The films protagonist seems to have lost his moral compass in the labyrinth that is his mind. Good is an analysis of one’s personal principles juxtaposed with those of societies. Viggo Mortensen’s character, John Halder, begins the film as an ethical, well read professor of literature. We watch him admirably cook dinner for his family as his beloved wife plays around with the piano, we watch him respectably disregard his father-in-law’s attempt to persuade him to join the Nazi party, and we watch him honorably care for his ill mother. The audience is witness to all the righteous good Halder exemplifies and we are shown that his good extends into his career as he allows a lost student into his home as a heavy rain occurs outside. However, this good is not so pure, this good is laced with faint nefarious deeds. This “good” is the point in which Halder takes the plunge into a world of shameless wickedness. In the photograph of Halder with his new wife, his former student, we are shown a tight and shadowed view of the couple. The framing and composition of the shot makes it appear as if the characters are trapped or, more specifically Halder is trapped. He is trapped in his downward spiral of rottenness and there is no way of him escaping. 

I believe the film was titled Good for this very reason; so the audience is forced to examine the characteristics of the John Halder and compare him to what is unadulterated good. I believe the film was not distributed in the United States for the sole reason that Americans take every little detail of films far too literally; we are constantly looking for some type of meaning (ie. dog is God spelled backwards). This is a simple enough reason for the distribution of Good in America to have been limited. The president wouldn’t want his public to question his ethicality, would he? The United States has a reason for banning everything.