The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space by Pippa Goldschmidt

trials. Their purges. No,’ he corrects himself, ‘no-one will be shot in the head or sent to a camp. They will just be publicly condemned. And not be able to work again.’
    ‘For what?’ Her voice is calm, unbothered. She is used to Brecht’s outbursts against life here.
    ‘For being a Communist. Which is apparently un-American. Or possibly even a Socialist. I’m not sure they understand the distinction.’
    ‘Ah.’ She does not react to this, but opens a newspaper lying next to her coffee and starts to read.
    ‘Do you know what this means?’ Brecht can’t stop himself from sounding annoyed. Helene’s calmness in the face of all their crises, such as having to leave Germany, then Denmark, then Sweden, is admirable. But sometimes he would like a reaction, a little drama. ‘It means the end of us here.’
    ‘Why? Can’t you just refuse to do it? This is, supposedly, a democracy. People here have rights against the State. Even German playwrights have some rights. Say no.’
    The castle walls rustle in the breeze, as Brecht and Laughton wander around. A tear in the fabric of the mad scientist’s house exposes its cardboard frame. The colours, too, are not what Brecht imagined. The castle is painted purple, the house red and somewhat splotchy around the edges. It seems that film sets are even more fake than stage sets.
    There is the constant sound of workmen hammering, presumably constructing a new set somewhere else. Brecht wonders if God views his work like this. A gigantic, or perhaps a very small, film set.
    ‘You have to appear,’ Laughton’s face looks almost grey with worry. ‘They will stop you working if you don’t show up.’
    ‘I don’t
have
to do anything, dear Charles. Anyway, there is a whole group of us, nineteen people in fact, who will refuse. We will become
causes célèbres.
’ He can see the newspaper headlines, the photos of their heroic faces. The workers who stood up to the State.
    ‘Really?’ Laughton doesn’t look persuaded. They amble past a heap of wooden boards lying on the ground. The boards have clearly been there for some time, paint is peeling away from the surface, and the grain of the wood has been cracked apart by the heat of the sun.
    ‘I wonder what that used to be,’ says Brecht. Laughton is a good man, but perhaps he is the wrong man to speak to about such matters. Brecht cannot imagine him being outspoken about his own beliefs or actions.
    Laughton smiles for the first time since they arrived at the studios, ‘It amazes me how these film sets look so fake when you see them in real life, and yet on the screen they always convince.’
    ‘Because the audience wants to believe what it is being shown.’ Brecht can never resist the opportunity to make a point, ‘That is what I hate about the movies. The audience should make up their own minds. But Frankenstein is still wonderful. I will never forget the mad scientist pulling the switch. The whole audience screamed when the monster started moving. And when it offered flowers to the child, I cried, Charles, I admit. I hated it, the shameless manipulation of my emotions. It made me angry, but I still cried. That’s when I thought that it is wrong to make an audience feel emotions that are not real.’
    ‘Emotions are always real, surely?’ Laughton looks anxious again.
    ‘You were not at the Nürnberg rallies. The manufacturing of extreme emotions out of air. Nobody had those emotions before Hitler conjured them up. And he learnt it from the movies, you know. It was more terrifying than anything, even Frankenstein. That’s why I want my audiences to think, not to feel.’
    ‘You can’t stop people feeling, and empathising with other people.’
    ‘Well, alright. But they must think too. And remain clear-headed, even when crying at the monster.’ Brecht remembers sitting next to Helene as they watched the Frankenstein film in Berlin, and is suddenly overwhelmed by nostalgia. Why can’t he be there, in the