The Big Screen (8 page)

In search of a purer existence and an elemental fable, Murnau took off for the South Seas on a sixty-foot yacht (skipper as well as director) with the documentarian Robert Flaherty. There they made
Tabu
(1931), with such burnished images of Polynesians you might guess Murnau was homosexual. It is a rhapsody to sunlight on the water and the perfection of young native bodies in which the central figure, Murnau thought, was like “a model for the Olympic Games” (to be held in Los Angeles in 1932).

Back in California, he hired a reckless chauffeur, an attractive Filipino, and was killed in a car crash in March 1931, days before
Tabu
opened. (So many car crashes—the battle between liberty and discipline on the new roads?) He was only forty-two, and more of a master than William Fox ever realized. Eleven people attended his funeral, one of them Garbo. If he had lived to find an American idiom, and worked with her, he might have reached authentic tragedy in which sound let her heave a last sigh. As it is,
Sunrise
hovers on the horizon still, and asks whether we really prefer Janet Gaynor's wife to the excitement of the city and the allure of the City Woman. Perhaps the ultimate message is the white lie that we can have both in our dark.

If Charlie Chaplin had lived in this sunless world, he might have killed himself, for surely the Tramp had a disposition toward sorrow or gloom. But the light on Chaplin's street is the California light that inspires American cinema. If his pictures end on an iris into the Tramp and his girl walking into the future, then they are headed toward the sunlight, too, and it warms them and promises to take care of them. Is that the abiding commercial cheerfulness in American film, the urge to spend money on a ticket and be with strangers in a shared mood, or is there some glow in the American screen, the sheen of burned emulsion, the wash of natural light, the promise of summer, the unforced imprint of a modest but habitual optimism? Who had heard (then) of the “inner disquiet” of the United States? But now that that despondency has set in, who can forget the influence of Germany on the light show? Imagine a book about Hollywood in the 1920s called
The Haunted Screen
.

The German army was the most efficient force fighting in the First World War, so the collapse of the country at the end of that war struck at the nation's confidence. There was the dismay of an army that believed it had never been defeated. There were the actual losses of the war and the inroads of influenza in 1918–19. There was the severity of the terms of the Versailles peace—including loss of territories, the reduction of the army to a hundred thousand, and then the crippling reparations meant to rebuke culpability in the war. There was the political chaos of 1919 and 1920, with attempts at Communist insurrection, rightist retaliation, the uncertain role of the mob, and the execution of figures such as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. There was hyperinflation whereby in four years in the early 1920s the value of a gold mark went from one paper mark to a trillion. Instead of wallets, you needed sacks. And there was the determined exploration of decadence that set in, the seething variety of sexual behavior, the public performances verging on the indecent, and the attraction of Berlin as a residence for so many of Europe's young avant-garde. Plus the sense of violence coming.

The arts flourished, even if much of what was done frightened middlebrow tastes. In the ten years that followed the war, Berlin was probably the most exciting city in the world, a place where the crises were being enacted—whereas Los Angeles was a tranquil watering hole in a benevolent climate amid great natural beauty. That's one of the reasons, after Europe turned so cold, that creative refugees and Berliners such as Christopher Isherwood went to California.

This is the period and the mood associated with Isherwood's observations of Berlin made more famous in the musical
Cabaret
, which in turn is based on the 1951 play
I Am a Camera
, by John Van Druten. At the start of his 1939 novel,
Goodbye to Berlin
, Isherwood promises, “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” That the sentence was so taken up suggests it met many needs. For Isherwood, it was a lesson in staying wide-eyed, in seeing everything, without being judgmental, the sort of cry that rings through the first decades of cinema and attests to the way people and societies were struck by so many things, outward and inward, that they had not noticed before.

Surely there was reason for being less judgmental—though the 1930s in Berlin would end in that very decisive, moralistic decision to have a war. But Isherwood's words announce something more chilling: a time has come for the passivity that has abandoned thought. It is the detachment and the helplessness of the camera as a neutral machine that seem alluring and persuasive. Is that like a camera photographing the business of the concentration camps? Isherwood would have never wanted that. Nor would anyone—except for those cameramen who did record much of what went on in the camps, and who would say they were only following orders. Or were they helpless adjuncts of the camera? In fact, Isherwood had one thing wrong: you can't leave the shutter open; it has to open and close; decision and choice have to intervene. But his insight about our willful self-denial and our urge to be like a camera is vital.

Not to burden this point with the concentration camps. There are subtler issues. Last night my son and I watched one of the
Jackass
movies. These are crudely made anthologies in which a gang of guys does absurd and reckless things to be amusing. In the film we saw, people snorted wasabi and vomited extensively; they tried roller-skate tricks that ended in disaster; they had bullets fired at them; they urinated on slush and ate it; one man put a toy car into his rectum. Several times, my son and I asked ourselves, “Why are we watching this?” I could have said it was to bring the material to this book, but I was laughing sometimes, and in dismay at my own reaction—that is more to the point. These are American films (and they are very popular with teenage boys). They are—if you want to hear the critic for a moment—nihilist extravaganzas, shameful and shaming, but irresistible. What will these idiots do next? Will you watch this? My son and I didn't feel like a camera, exactly, but I think we felt overpowered by the screen and
Jackass
being there. I watched another film afterward, a “real” film, and for half an hour I could not shake the sensation that it was
Jackass
going on and on, infecting the rest of the schedule. Once upon a time,
Monty Python's Flying Circus
had that effect on any shows that followed it.

In Berlin in the 1920s, a movie was not always benign light show, the sustained fantasy version of reality and a stream of beguiling stories for the public; it was a screen, often stark, tattered, and ominous, a place where Germans looked at a drastic portrait of melancholy. The audience was not invited in to the screen to relax; they were meant to behold it like children in a pitiless examination. For the screen now was not an easeful conveyance but a trick in a confounding demonstration of complicity and deception. For the first time—no matter from what disquiet—an essential question was being asked that endures today: “Are we mad to be believing in screens?”

This is not to minimize the confusion in Germany—in the next twenty years, this was the country that would film so many naked corpses being bulldozered into a waiting pit. The deepest questions in German society and movie experience would be, Do we see this? Do we believe it? Then why are we watching?

Let's start with that icy garden in
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
where Francis and an older man are companions in a kind of stricken oblivion. Its coauthor Hans Janowitz came from Prague, “that city where reality fuses with dreams, and dreams turn into visions of horror,” as the cultural historian Siegfried Kracauer put it. Janowitz recalled a day in 1913: He was walking in the Reeperbahn, in Hamburg; he began to follow a pretty girl, until he realized that another shadowy male figure was also nearby; he heard a sinister laugh. Next day in the papers, he read that a pretty girl had been murdered in that area. He went to the funeral and there, also in attendance, was the shadowy figure from the night before.

The war intervened, and then a few years later Janowitz met Carl Mayer, an Austrian. They were bonded by their experiences in that war. Janowitz had a hatred of officers and authority because of the slaughter. Mayer was similarly moved, with this extra: he was himself often under suspicion of being insane—as if a man did not need to be crazy to endure that war. The two men agreed to collaborate, and wrote a story in which a strange fairground operator, Dr. Caligari, has a somnambulist, Cesare, who is sent on missions of murder and destruction. The hero, Francis, realizes this. He tracks Caligari down and is astonished to discover that the man has taken refuge in another guise—as the head of a lunatic asylum. Francis is then able to unmask the villain.

In October 1919, Janowitz and Mayer took this story to Erich Pommer, the head of the Decla studio in Berlin. Pommer bought it on the spot, and as soon as February 1920 the picture was being shown in Berlin. What more could writers ask?—and this is, evidently, an example of a film generated by writers (a much rarer event in America at that time). But as the producer and the owner, Pommer exercised himself. He changed the script. He made the ending more palatable in that Francis turned out to be an inmate of the asylum. Caligari is the benign director of the place, and now that he has seen Francis pursue his “vision,” he believes, “At last I understand the nature of his madness. He thinks I am that mystic Caligari. Now I see how he can be brought back to sanity again.” And so the film ends with the Director's face, “a thoughtful, pleased expression on it.”

In the original Janowitz tale there lurks this possibility: The young man follows the girl and sees a mysterious figure doing the same thing. The shadowy figure apparently murders the girl. But if the young man is disturbed, then, in following the girl, he may be revealing his own hostility as much as interest or attraction. So the shadowy figure may not be a stranger—he may be the darker side to the young man's nature, and the cover for his murder of the girl. So they are both at the funeral the next day because they are aspects of the same person.

This is akin to
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(published in 1886), and a theme in so much nineteenth-century German writing—including that of Hoffmann, Novalis, and Freud. More important, this idea of the other, or the doppelgänger, is something that some Germans saw embodied in the essential circumstances of cinema. For instance: I go to the movies; I enter the darkness and confront a great light; I see a figure, or figures—some of whom may be antipathetic, but some of whom are so appealing that I imagine them as myself. I identify with a character, and I place my capacity to identify in the context of the story—so, in the case of Griffith's
Way Down East
, say, I am in love with Lillian Gish, I see myself as Robert Harron's hero, and I despise and disapprove of Lowell Sherman, the villain. I enter the melodrama and I come away feeling a little better about myself. Griffith pioneered so many ways of shooting, but his melodramas seldom required a more complex approach than this.

That is one way of putting American cinema in a nutshell—even today it catches the fantasy appeal of going to the movies. Whereas the German cultural tradition was more prepared to see identification itself—as a sign of error and illness. Freud had elaborate theories on “the screen” as a psychological mechanism for observing ourselves and admitting our doubled personality. Take an example from something more familiar than
Caligari
:
Psycho
(1960), the film made by Alfred Hitchcock, the English-speaking director most affected by the foreboding stylishness of German cinema.

In
Psycho
we concentrate on Janet Leigh. She is nice to look at, she is wholesome and pleasant, and three times in the first forty minutes of the picture we see her in her underwear (in ways that troubled the Production Code). So we watch more closely in case we may see more. We like her. We hope she will do well. Then her character does wrong: she steals $40,000. That impulse is folly, but it is understandable. We adopt a “double” stance: we say, I might have done that, too, but we add, “Oh, you bad girl.” The voyeuristic tension of the picture builds so that we desire Janet Leigh
and
feel her need to be corrected—so the grail of her naked in a shower meets our longing.

Then a strange man appears: Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins). He resembles her lover—but he is more understanding than the lover. He talks to her, and we slip into that lengthy conversation. We like this Norman, and we see that his kindness helps her realize how foolish she has been. Could they ever be a couple? In so many American films, everyone looks at anyone with that prospect in mind. Janet is going to go home the next day and return the stolen money. Her problem seems to have been tidied up. But our tension, our desire, our feeling, has to go somewhere, and Hitchcock is sufficiently understanding of fantasy to see that if we can't quite have her—and, of course, at the movies, we can never
have
these beauties—then maybe murder is another way to go. The film is only forty minutes old. It can't be over yet, or entirely begun. Murder comes along. We half-suspected it.

Hitchcock's game is so cunning that he shows the murder so that we do not realize Norman has done it. Indeed, when he discovers what has happened, Norman reacts with horror and does one of the most diligent clean-up operations in cinema. So now we are on Norman's side. We'll go anywhere—we might even watch
Jackass
.

Psycho
is American, of course, but it is intensely Germanic, not just in its use of two Normans, but also in its plan to confuse us through our passionate identification. In staring so hard at Janet Leigh, we have raised the possibility of some violent action. The suspense in Hitchcock is invariably erotic and threatening, and the screen is a weirdly calm, dispassionate presence, so full of a life we cannot join but must observe.