What Is Truth?
A spate of reviews convinced me I should go and see Ilker Çatak’s The Teachers’ Lounge, which premiered in Norway yesterday. I am glad I did, though I can’t say it was a fun night out at the cinema. The film is painful to watch as it places its finger deftly in one societal wound after another. It touches issues of racial prejudice, surveillance culture, subverting rhetoric, and the backfiring of good intentions. At one level it can be seen as a critique of liberalism gone dictatorial, driven by a mixture of self-righteousness and a furious desire to please. But there is more. Mathematics are a motif, pointing towards the question of what constitutes an objective burden of proof. Can truth ultimately be proven? This question suffuses the whole. I was unprepared for the burlesque of the ending, set to a rousing interpretation of the overture to Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Puck’s final monologue in the play might provide one interpretative paradigm. The Biblically minded might find another in Leviticus 19.14.
