omake! #1: Fritz Lang's M (1933) and sleepwalking awake
The recorded vote went well in favour of the mini-editions, so here we have the first of an occasional series: today featuring your friend and mine, German Expressionism.
***
I finally sat down with Fritz Lang’s M (1933) Monday night, which is 1) one hell of a good movie — I mean, 92 years and totally bulletproof — and also 2) wildly evocative in what looks like it’s going to be another autumn of living around and against prevailing socio-emotional panic. It’s a film about a panic, and it’s handling that with rigor, flair, and depth.
I mean, for starters, it’s beautiful. Let’s take as given the ways some of Lang’s 1920s cinematography tricks are integrating into a more realist kind of worldbuilding and the general technicals of being choosy with how you deploy early sound (some of the ways it’s working silence I found a bit obvious, but hey, I have a century on them, they’re new at this). Because right now, so much of what stood out for me is the way it treats social fracture. By which I mean runs directly at the idea of social fracture.
It’s everywhere, and underlined repeatedly: long scenes of authority flinging itself around in pure reaction just to be doing something; a few mob panics precipitated by little to nothing; all the time that camera spends lingering on Berlin’s adults coming entirely apart, complaining about each other’s total incompetence — down to a lead detective bitching about the typos in his police bulletin. Berlin seems to be working more or less: there are brightly coloured toy shops and even in a small one-room apartment, people seem to be able to put food on the table, but peppered with bits of unease. The factories and schools have locked gates and night watchmen. Early on, a little girl steps into the street, distracted, and is almost hit by a honking black automobile. The focus isn’t so much on the conditions — the focus is on the seeping, pervasive sense of abandonment and fear.
As the erstwhile cause of all this fuss — serial child murderer Hans Beckert — Peter Lorre’s brilliant: practising faces in the mirror, microreacting, cowering, generally doing a great job of that combination of (implied) extreme violence and total cringing weinerdom that tends to characterize the absolute worst people. Every time someone lays hands on Beckert, no matter how harmless or kind they are, he clenches with terror. There’s a whole backstory there left for our inference in his body language, laid out quietly against the ways the children he’s preying on just out-and-out trust people and the adults around them conjure up a lot of different versions of what a monster looks like — all visibly quite personal.
The casting’s telling too. One later review described Lorre’s physicality as “a sleazy baby” and that’s exactly the thing: something Uncanny Valley happening within a body-language vocabulary we’d associate with childhood, or the things that as children other people feared.
The ineffectual crackdowns and panic escalate to the point where the criminals of Berlin launch an unofficial manhunt — mostly to sate police overreach, save themselves, and very tellingly, take a piece out of an outsider for destabilizing their society. Except — you kind of know those are just the reasons they’re giving, and they’re just as scared. And that instinct resurfaces when they find Beckert, the man they were so terrified of, and realize how eminently soft and murderable he is. Their kangaroo court sits cloaked in moral indignation, but you can sort of see from their reactions to him and the sheer switch in the energy that they’re in a very subtle way, humiliated by having been so frightened of this pudgy, sulky thing. Their whole goal morphs so quickly from protecting the children themselves to hunting him down to probably hand to the police in an effort to dissociate themselves from all this, to — there is no question of police involvement once they see what shadow scared them so badly. They are furious. If their surprising little grassroots action was about the problem at hand before, it’s not now. It’s about having made hard men scared, and not staying monstrous enough to vindicate it.
It’s a lot of weight to put on one actor, and Lorre’s barely onscreen for most of the run time. On one level, his physical performance carries this thing: it wouldn’t work without the manifold information of those twitches and sulks. On another level, it’s mostly the absence that makes the whole thing function. If you think about it, Beckert’s only real superpower in this story — a small, round, terrified, childish, clearly damaged, malicious man — is that he’s completely socially isolated. There’s no one near enough to him to recognize him, rat on him, notice a difference in behaviour or habits; his landlady’s deaf. He has no relationships through which to track his passage, and that is the only way people in this city find each other, or hold each other to account. In a film full of communal settings and ties where the criminals and police operate on a certain “you do your job, I do mine,” and even the beggars have an organizing union and membership numbers (I don’t know if that’s meant to be funny, that little bit of officiousness, but it is), nobody can seem to cope with that. Because if they could, he’s just a weird little man who writes in red crayon, in every way a fragment.
It’s weird to say that the child murder is a beard in M, but what seems to be the core of the film’s inherent terror is less dead neighbourhood kids and something almost more existential: That people can be near you, around you, impact you and be perfectly opaque and unreachable. How can proximity not equal relationship? Any kind of relationship? I’m legitimately jealous of a film and a society so staggered by that question. I think the beggars’ fraternal association is kind of funny. I also envy it. Those people know each other’s names, and they’re sharing their food. Good Christ.
I don’t think everything that floats to the top of Weimar art is a big prophecy about genocide: societies are big and have much in them and 1920s Berlin had some humanist/progressive game on lock, and it’s also a really blinkered reading — people are not the one thing you remember about them. But it is also true that this is socially-geared art from people who do this kind of thing often, stepping into a very active contemporaneous death penalty debate, actively fed by a few major collective traumas, so there’s an argument for looking at it here. The play with humanization and dehumanization is pretty blatant and deliberate: a thread running through all the ways people imagine each other when they’re not talking and not in the same room. Not just Beckert, or what Berlin decides monsters look like, but the funny and quite pointed parallelisms in how the Ringvereine bitch about the cops, and then run a perfectly parallel organizational structure and a perfectly parallel kind of raid to get social stability happening — while neither would dream of working with or trusting each other. It’s a unity of tactics, but not any kind of cooperation really, or trust. It’s not social glue. And what I’m left with, in that situation is — they’re stuck. They’ve run out of practical imagination.
And I think there’s backing for that, because one of the really interesting motifs in how those dual manhunts play out is that, when they aren’t in the arena of their choosing and wrapped up in wild rage, all these hard uniformed declarative people — police or criminals — are so weirdly helpless.
There’s this beautiful intercut a little less than halfway through of each of them holding a strategy meeting, the Ringvereine and the cops, and all each of them can propose to do is the same shit they’ve always done, angrier, more panicky, and harder. It’s an incredible portrait of two parallel institutional anxiety spirals — the way it’s very quickly stopped being about Beckert, and started being about everything. It comes out in little things: Notably, I can’t stop thinking of one of the Ringvereine bosses and his handfuls of carefully arranged pocketwatches, which he keeps rearranging on the table, waiting for someone he’s sure will be late even though the man is never late, and going so far as to call the phone operator to recheck the time. So many watches in his pockets, and he trusts absolutely none of them: That’s not just a piece of stage business. When the character is minor and doesn’t need too much establishing, and film costs money, and pacing matters, that’s a thesis.
Something should happen to Beckert, yes: everyone’s pretty solid that you shouldn’t lure and murder children and get away with that. But with all the twitching and hesitation marks covering everyone when he’s not there, you wonder — not even what is the right thing to happen, but whether his body isn’t just something for all these jumpy, anxious people to do. Beckert’s body is just a landing site, somewhere for that totalizing fear to go. And is it fair to make a body a landing site for an entire society’s rage — to make an example, to make a symbol? Probably (definitely) not. But frightened and hunkered down, they’re all stuck on then what?
I don’t think I’m reading too much in here, since Lang and von Harbou are always up to social satire, sometimes far more subtly than others (Metropolis is one of my favourite things on Earth, but delicate it ain’t). A lot of the plot is clever as hell, and it’s genuinely tense. It thoroughly understands the mechanics of a riot — in the gut, not academically: that line between a propulsive release and when it gets terrifying, when the machine starts walking you — and is really, really good at communicating that wordlessly. And it understands both the truth and the practicable limits of a certain kind of fear.
The thought of the killer stalking the streets is frightening, yeah. It’s on a certain level much scarier when the socially isolated Beckert, being tried by people who claim to be defending society, finally reaches into what he knows to be the existing social contract and tries to invoke it — I want to be turned over to the police — and he does not find it waiting there for him. It’s gone. And while there’s going to be subjectivity in this, re: what we find frightening and when, I think we are intended to find that the actual most frightening thing in M. Not that one man’s violating the social contract. That the social contract is not there.
At the end, they’re left on a note of mutual contempt that’s kind of amazing, and a fantastical, bleak anatomy of stasis: a whole society, heaving and pacing, reenacting structures, not knowing which way to turn; all the talking points made meaningless because everyone knows there’s nothing behind them, but nothing yet made new to replace them and give all this life. Der Schränker’s question near the end stuck with me: is this supposed to go on indefinitely? Every player in this drama is just cycling through the emptiness of every solution they know to try to end a problem none of those solutions ever fit. They don’t seem to know how to generate new answers. They’re terrified and furious. They get stuck. And — they are all stuck in the same place, but not together, y’know? It might start to amount to something, if they could figure out how to be stuck together.
I have the feeling this is speaking so hard to me right now partially because I’m in the ocean of building myself some new operating infrastructure (generate new answers), and there have been nights this summer where I’ve circled this apartment, knowing I have to do something, wanting action rather than repetition or stasis. The thing I need is none of the things I have; the right answer is not on the list of available options, but those options have to be done, and at that moment, I can’t find the new list, or make it with what’s not known, not to hand. And that can be, if you can catch it in flight, know what you’re doing there, and start experimenting, the beginning of some real liberatory action. But in the space between your need and your grasp, it’s awful.
However we’re expressing it, I think a lot of people might be in or near that place. Individually, or together. The old systems manifestly don’t work; we don’t have broad momentum yet on the new ones. Habits playing out like sleeping sickness, like a Caligari-esque reflex even though everyone goes in knowing the things they’re about to do with their situation won’t work, but inaction, unmotion is unthinkable. Society as compulsion. The horror here, for everyone — it’s knowledge of the futility. The gap between centuries is a gorgeous and terrible proposition. You can get so much done in here, but it’s so dark on that road.
I have mixed feelings on Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou, for many reasons. Without talking too much shit about people I don’t know who are also dead, they can have the stupid rigidity of the professional idealist and more than a little tendency to smash up things and creatures and retreat back into etcetera. They’re smart but they’re dumb, if you know what I mean?
But my first instinct on watching this was feeling all the muddle and pettiness blown out of me with clean and propulsive force. Here’s a film made neck-deep in a culture war that’s about to go terrifyingly hot, at a point where the political tilt into disaster is visible, the starting conditions years in place. They make a very good choice with M: not making the mistake of trying to enforce — or even suggest — any certainties. But instead doing the very astute and difficult and integrity-bearing thing of asking the question down to the ground.
To my eye, that is a valid response to a society in crisis. A workable answer, when a question’s turned into statements, can be, I think, to refit the punctuation: Take that question and ask it hard, ask it for real, from first principles, nothing taken for granted. Winnow that fucker down until you can see the inputs, until the emotion of it is mirrored true but not all-consuming, and — give yourself a chance at surfacing with a better question.
It’s eerie and comforting, almost a hundred years later, seeing someone run so hard and with such commitment at a question I’ve spent five years minimum on: So what do we really do with violence? No, for serious. No, they don’t come up with an answer, but there is perhaps one thing in the world that has ever set me free from anything and it is: ?.
So. I’m comfortable calling this a masterpiece. Sometimes I feel like I’m tracking myself down. Holy shit. O.O