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Notes from Underground

  And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment.  Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
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Hope

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.-- Erich Fromm


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Sophie's Choice (1982)




Director Alan J. Pakula adapted to the screen William Styron's acclaimed novel about a Polish immigrant, Sophie Zawistowska (Meryl Streep), living in Brooklyn after WWII.

Meryl Streep as Sophie, a Polish-Catholic woman, who was caught by the Nazis with a contraband ham, was sentenced to a concentration camp, lost her two children there, and then was somehow spared to immigrate to Brooklyn, U.S.A., and to the arms of an eccentric charmer named Nathan. Sophie and Nathan move into an old boardinghouse, and the rooms just below them are taken by Stingo, a jug-eared kid from the South who wants to be a great novelist. As the two lovers play out their doomed, romantic destiny, Stingo falls in love with several things: with his image of himself as a writer, with his idealized vision of Sophie and Nathan's romance, and, inevitably, with Sophie herself.
As the film progresses Stingo begins to unlock pieces of her real past, wading through her blend of truth and lies, and pushing her to reveal her most nightmarish secret in the film’s unforgettable final 20 minutes: 
“I’m going to tell you something now I have never told anybody.”
There is hardly an emotion that Streep doesn't touch in this movie, and yet we're never aware of her straining. This is one of the most astonishing and yet one of the most unaffected and natural performances I can imagine. 
“Sophie’s Choice” is a fine, absorbing, wonderfully acted, heartbreaking movie. It is about three people who are faced with a series of choices, some frivolous, some tragic. As they flounder in the bewilderment of being human in an age of madness, they become our friends, and we love them
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/sophies-choice-1982







Alan J. Pakula
Alan Jay Pakula (; April 7, 1928 – November 19, 1998) was an American film director, writer and producer. He was nominated for three Academy Awards: Best Picture for To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Best Director for All the President's Men (1976) and Best Adapted Screenplay for Sophie's Choice (1982). Pakula was also notable for directing his "paranoia trilogy": Klute (1971), The Parallax View (1974) and All the President's Men (1976). more








Directed by Alan J. Pakula and adapted from the 1979 novel by William Styron, Sophie's Choice is a seminal work of 20th-century cinema. It is widely regarded as one of the most powerful explorations of trauma, guilt, and the "unimaginable" moral compromises forced upon individuals during the Holocaust.





The "Choice"

The central moment of the film, and the source of its title, occurs in a flashback to the platform at Auschwitz. Sophie, arriving with her two children (Jan and Eva), is confronted by an SS doctor. In a moment of pure cruelty, he informs her that she may keep one child, but the other must go to the gas chambers. If she refuses to choose, both will be killed. In a state of paralyzed terror, Sophie chooses to save her son, Jan, and watches as her daughter, Eva, is taken away.





Critical Significance

  • The Nature of Guilt: The film explores "survivor's guilt" not as a generic feeling of sadness, but as a specific, corrosive force. Sophie’s eventually tragic end with Nathan is portrayed as an escape from a past she cannot outrun.

  • Historical Authenticity: While the film was criticized by some (notably Pauline Kael) for its melodrama, it is lauded for its unflinching depiction of the psychological scars left by the Nazi regime.

  • Cultural Legacy: The phrase "Sophie's Choice" has entered the English lexicon as an idiom for an impossible decision between two beloved or essential things where every outcome is tragic.





Awards & Accolades

  • Academy Awards: Winner - Best Actress (Meryl Streep). Nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Costume Design, and Original Score.















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