Review; In a Glass Cage

Seduction, Banality and Power

There occasionally occurs a time when either of my own accord, or due to a casual remark made by a friend, I am compelled to examine certain images created in my imagination by art, literature, music or film. More often than not I resist such inclinations as they tend towards the defensive, with the result being the distancing of myself from powerful desires, emotions, or even tastes that are integral to my total self. The images in question are those that exist on the fringes of several taboos, meshing with them in that zone between definition, making them elusive to isolate and examine, as well as giving them a sense of shame that goes with taboo.

Here I’ll try something new. I will attempt an exploration of a certain film, "In A Glass Cage" while resisting any justification of erotic pleasure that I derive from viewing it. The film remains seminal to me for several reasons. The most simple and acceptable of these is incidentally the most banal; it is a well-crafted, traditional, suspense narrative that is visually stunning. But this narrative contains images and representations of human behavior that like lightning, sear their way through my psyche.

I should state here that this examination will place the film in the context of religion. For me there is something deeply religious about it, but it is a sacred that inverts morality where atrocity is plucked from its abysmal depths and raised to the level of virtue. The process by which this phenomenon is actualized is a strange one, and however seemingly unlikely, is not unimaginable. By the screenplay's use of linear narrative such an inversion as this unfolds almost imperceptively, I am caught off guard by where I find myself precisely because the narrative is so trusted by me. But it is the narrative method that as used in this film always situates me in unrecognizable identities, explores the use of ritual in uncovering the truths that I resist, and leads me to where religion points, and that is to death. It is my hope that in some way I may communicate an interpretation of a film that horrifies me in the way religion did when I was a child, while keeping in mind that it is precisely from this type of horror that my first erotic feelings had sprung.

One could classify this film under the genre of film noir. It shares several of the qualities that emerged from that period of American cinema that include methods of lighting, strategic use of suspense in plot, and characters that exist within a psychic state that is damaged or ruptured. It seems though, that the new "film noir" goes much further than it's predecessor into embracing damnation. The genre of the 40's and 50's introduced to us the anti-hero. He was a character with whom we could sympathize, we saw him struggle for meaning or purpose in a world that operated in a way that tended to negate the very idea of meaning. His was the existential world of post-war America. His intentions remained noble even as he was corrupted by a universe hostile to his perceived dignity. His end culminated in tragedy and loneliness, and the movie patron departed with a slightly more bitter worldview, while retaining a faith in the redemptive power of humanity's spirit, having identified with the protagonist/anti-hero.

The new "noir" begins with tragedy as a given, or tone, rather than a culmination, and is acted out by characters beyond redemption, with whom we find it hard to identify. The hostile universe emanates from this new anti-hero; we are forced into his vision, and as such are asked to become him for a short while. We leave the theater with his guilt, and have to ask ourselves what indeed we are capable of, with whom we can identify, or what constitutes our humanity. The bad man is eliminated as we become him. Take Henry, the serial killer, Brando's Kurtz, the late Laura Palmer, Christian Slater in True Romance, the entire Corleone family, or Harvey Keitel in Reservoir Dogs. There is a tendency in film that resists dehumanization of these new mirrors of ours.

Such is the feeling I get from In a Glass Cage, though combined with the impression that I have somehow sinned by reveling in it's seductive and repulsive horror. We have a film here that is stylistically far from what would be considered avant-garde, a method more commonly reserved as the vehicle that carries us to the edges of taboo. Instead as has been pointed out, the director has chosen the traditional narrative to steep at least this viewer into the place where sex and death blend with the sacred while avoiding any notion of  “good”, and brings me to a place of abased sovereignty.

The film begins with a hanging, that of a young boy whose feet sway just above the ground. With the boy is his executioner; a man we later learn is a former doctor from Nazi Germany. From the first frames the film is imbued with the power of what is for the most part still difficult subject matter for cinema to approach, homosexuality and pedophilia, and links them to death. What is striking is distance, or absence of judgment of the doctor's attitude or demeanor. There is a certain lack of what most filmmakers would employ to communicate with audiences.

The first element that this lack consists of is a sadistic rage as a source or reservoir from which the doctor to carries out his actions, functioning as the criminalization and condemnation of the perpetrator of torture. As he is portrayed in this film, he is neither the enraged madman, or even a common sadist. A sadist would be deriving pleasure from the pain he inflicts, while the doctor seems to be searching for something else. Most film makers would use such a distancing of a central figure to the end of creating an antagonist, to disavow any identification with such a being, resulting in the construction of a safety net in which it is clear to the audience that both the director and themselves are morally sound. It is not a secure morality, but a morality that is totally dependent on antagonists to maintain. It is not a Self affirmation, but an Other negation, "we're all okay because we are not them" The making of an antagonist plays into a confined and limited world view based on this polarity of Otherness in which everything is easily defined as human/inhuman, the Other being the dehumanized necessary to establish the human.

The second feature to this lack is grief or guilt. The doctor is not stricken with remorse, not violently divided by his actions. This would be another clichéd method to reinforce a dualistic cosmology. Should grief or guilt have been present, the doctor could have been sympathized with. He too would remain human but his actions would be abhorred, seen as the Other, as if they did not originate from him. Filmmaking used in this manner would place the doctor as the unwitting victim of evil, not responsible for his actions because he is their conduit, not their source. Establishing an antagonist by these rather metaphysical means we once again arrive at a dualistic and simple universe where humans are all okay, but to a greater or lesser degree puppets or tools of higher and lower powers. There is no free will, and so it follows no responsibility. From this way of seeing, all humans are victims, a collective victimized Self, and hostile, unseen Others.

With the absence of these disclaimers, or communicative clichés, what the audience, in this instance me, sees is the image of a human, a reflection of myself. There is no distancing of the doctor, nothing "Other" about him. He is modestly clad, awkward in movement, and possesses a kindly face, evoking a sort of grandfather figure. One can easily identify with this character, aside from his actions, but given them, I am inclined to want to restrain myself, or him, yet there is some passion here stronger than me, or him, that demands to be acted out, and I am rendered impotent before it.

Conversely, the treatment of the object of his torture, the boy, I find nothing in which to identify. His lack of action, his immobility denies any such attempts at kinship. His inertness and passivity lend to him the qualities of a thing. There is a lack of struggle; he does not writhe about in his restraints, nor do his eyes show sign of malice or fear. The boy has completely undergone a metamorphosis into an object. However, should he have displayed any resistance, even moved willfully in the slightest, I would have latched identity onto him, and regardless of the human or inhuman qualities the doctor may possess he would succumb to the status of an antagonist by virtue of the boy's assertiveness of his own humanity, and my readiness at this point to see myself as victim as an all too easy out. This would have also amounted to the construction of a Self and an Other, at odds with, and fundamentally opposed to one another. Instead what we have is an intimacy between a human and an object, a fetish.

The doctor documents this torture with photographs, indicating an obsession with isolating each moment of this ecstasy. He swoons, is overcome by the tumult of emotions let loose by this ritual, which by careful documentation he may be able to relive to a lesser extent later. He is almost tender towards the boy he kills, looking at him with neither sympathy or regret, but with love. The moment of communication between victim and executioner comes when the doctor nears the boy's face in a confusing instant that at first seems to be a whispered message to the boy, next a paternal kiss, none the less tinged with incest, but finally proves to be the doctor running his cheek along that of the boy's, either smelling him, or attempting to breathe in whatever final breath the child may exhale. In either case what we have is a physical exchange, or intimacy more private than an act of copulation, more profound because at this moment very near the child's last, as the executioner/lover bestows upon the boy the last affection he will ever receive, the boy responds in his only assertive act in the scene by moving his eyes to meet those of the doctor's. In them there is no sign of reproachment, or conversely of love--but curiosity. The two are players in some ritual game, groping within it to find some ineffable thing, an epiphany or even a reason that could shed illumination onto the inevitable outcome, being the death of the boy.

Also to be noted here is the classic eroticism styled into this entire opening sequence. The boy is classically beautiful and the camera seduces with this emphasis. His lips are scanned in close-up, as are the curl of his lashes and hair, and a smooth, white, nude body that evokes images of both Cupid and St. Sebastian in it's beauty and laceration. The absence of a musical score imposes a bedroom silence and intimacy upon the room. We hear only the participant's breathing, the creaking of the rope by which the child is suspended. The silent sway of the boy through space is poetic, reminiscent of Klossowski's Ogier in his novel, The Baphomet, and the spinning of Aurora in the novel Leiris named after this heroine, as well as Nerval's Aurelia, indeed even of Nerval himself.

But there is one intrusion upon this intimacy, that of an invisible voyeur. I see, at intervals, what he sees, the camera follows his steps with a tense and shaky urgency. I walk with him through the rubble, amidst the labyrinth of corridors that are in an advanced state of decrepitude, and endure this maze as he does; an obstacle to a better view. I hear his breathing, rushed and in a state of anxiety--as if it were my own. Whenever it is that he captures a glimpse, the camera pulls back behind a corner or wall, much like a child would while spying on an erotic activity, and since I am now forced into his vision and role, I am therefore reinforced in the impression that this is not something to intrude upon. What could have been a murder is now more akin to coitus and voyeurism.

After the death, the doctor is dizzy, overcome by what is released or revealed in his expenditure, but again it is not in shame or horror in which he staggers backwards while transfixed upon his swaying fetish, but that euphoria that follows ejaculation. To this euphoria one can imagine added the power inherent in the universal taboos of homosexuality, pedophilia and death, all of which into the doctor has immersed himself. He ascends a spiral staircase to a rooftop and looks down on a countryside that although is beautiful, is just as irrelevant or absent for him as it is to me. His activity, his sacrifice and the vertiginous secrets it has disclosed have eclipsed the earth itself. The voyeur appears at the bottom of the staircase and I, through his eyes watch the doctor swoon in a manner that replicates that of the child, after which he falls from these heights. The voyeur then scrambles to gather the doctor's possessions, among them a notebook conspicuously opened to a drawing of the face of a young boy, and disappears.

We should note that the camera has attempted to place the viewer within the vision of the voyeur and the doctor, while avoiding any identification or placement with the sacrificed child. The child has remained for the most part an object throughout the entire scene, not even responding to his pain. While it is impossible to imagine this eroticism as consensual, there are some ambiguities that blur judgment. The initial abduction or seduction of the boy is left out. When we are shown this attic room, what once was human is now meat hung up in the rafters. Through what resignation or coercion did this occur? We will never know. What is horrific yet profound is the moment of communication between the victim and executioner. One can imagine the tenderness encountered at this moment as a form of gratitude on the doctor's part towards the boy for submitting to objectification, regardless if this process of objectification was due to exhaustion or pain, for as long as the boy presumably resisted, he would have delayed the moment of communication which the doctor places much meaning on. This is one way to see this refusal to situate us in the child's vision; should at any point an identifiable victim had emerged, we would found ourselves merely looking at horror from the jury/ spectator booths of our theater seats. Instead horror as spectacle is demolished by placing us in its erotic center, a fluid space of hazy definition where identities are resisted and where we can only hope to tread.

It is this scrupulous avoidance of judgment and identity that sets a tone that resounds throughout the entire film. I will attempt to explore here various impressions that I retain even after several viewings that continue to move me in ways that are just as lyrical as they are disconcerting.

Within a short period that follows the opening credits, it is seen that the doctor has survived his potentially lethal swoon, and now is completely helpless, sustained by a machine that operates his very breathing. It is constructed of metal and glass and resembles the kind of glass coffins that are used to display the cadavers of saints and tyrants, a method of preserving and displaying an object of devotion. There is a close-up shot of a sort of billows that mechanically pumps air into the doctor's lungs. It is black and inflates and deflates with a punctual and rigid hiss, accompanied by a clicking sound. This is the new breathing that has displaced the intimate and vital breathing that characterized the former scene. It is this new breath, forced and methodical that is heard in the background through the duration of the film.

Here enters the doctor's wife, Grieselda writing to her parents for assistance. She looks severe and harsh, having the type of beauty that reveals a certain corruption over time, as in molting. From this letter it is disclosed that the doctor, Klaus, Grieselda, and their daughter, Rena are in exile. His ties to National Socialism are revealed as Grieselda informs her parents of a man who could help them, a man who, "helped Klaus experiment on children during the war". From the start she, too is complicit and guilty, aware of her husband's activities during the war. The fallen grace of the house matches her own. The viewer is surrounded by a malignant and corrupt beauty. Their estate resembles the ruins of a Mayan or Aztec temple, Klaus being a high priest whose rituals and sacrifices once contained a grand authority and power. What would have been the god to which he expressed devotion now is obsolete or even absent in his exile. He continued them regardless, carried upon the intoxication of the sacrifice, now lost in the voluptuous void into which he attempted to hurl himself. In this way does the home resemble a ruined temple or bombed cathedral, and Klaus in his glass coffin is the sacred relic, the object of devotion. Here is set the stage for the entrance of a new priest, one who will revere this object and the nameless god it represents by resuming the role of sacrificial priest.

As we know, a god or divinity is useless in the sense that for the most part it is separate from the needs and cares of daily life. A god does not die, and its will retains a force over human actions. It is bound to no purpose, exists in and of itself, and is in need of nothing short of devotion. To retain it's status and remain in the sphere of the sacred, sacrifice is employed in most all religions, whether actual or conceptual. The god is cared for, loved and maintained by its subjects through this practice. One need only to examine the Christian myth of the sacrifice of Jesus to see that in order to fulfill his role in the prophesies, he himself was required to enter death through sacrifice to become more than man, to become one with God. In many religions the priest or priestess becomes one with the divinity through ritual sacrifice and thus act on behalf of the useless one, who cannot be soiled from contact with the profane; material and labor. Now I wish to show how this myth is acted out by the characters of this film.

Klaus sacrificed to his god until that god had vanished. Alone, he continued in his worship until replacing god by entering, or attempting to enter death, which is the space in which he sought god, where all who practice sacrifice seek him. His status as a divinity is confirmed in part by the letter which Grieselda opens the film with. "More than his wife, I seem his slave", she laments to her parents. This complaint can be seen as simply referring to the paralysis of Klaus, but more is at play here than she can understand. While she is aware of the activities of her husband during the war, she is not aware of their meaning to him, and as such unaware of their nature. Regardless, she is obedient to Klaus, and serves the same purpose that the Cyclops served for the divinities of Olympus, namely the performing of menial labor that would otherwise defile the gods. What Grieselda lacks is an understanding of the truly sacred nature of her husband's will to which she submits.

 

It is now that Angelo enters. Angelo. Angel. Messenger, Guardian and Reaper. In Grieselda's letter she prayed for deliverance from her suffering, from her perpetual enslavement to the care of Klaus. Angelo, the angel descends to deliver her from this burden, and to be the protector and guardian of the sacred relic, Klaus. He is humble and reverently holds his head down before those he wishes to serve.

In a conversation from which Grieselda, Rena, the housekeeper, and the audience is excluded, Klaus and Angelo remain locked in a room together. In line with the tradition of angels appearing first among the simple folk, Angelo appeared first to the housekeeper prior to his entrance into Klaus' chamber. This maid refers to Angelo as "the Devil", also true to the lore of literature and film in which the superstitious are often proved to be correct in their instinct. The audience is allowed into the conversation with the last sentence of Angelo's where a secret kinship is revealed between the two of them, "With what I have told you, you should hire me, there is not much time."

On that first night the Angel reveals his own nature, and his devotion to the God, Klaus. Angelo slips into Klaus' room, performs the identical smelling, or breathing on Klaus, that Klaus performed on the boy, in ritual mimicry to the object that represents the unnameable. Angelo then opens the glass lid that pressurizes and regulates Klaus' breathing, causing him to mutely gape in vain for air in a silent scream. His uselessness is apparent, as is the need for his divinity to be maintained externally. Angelo mounts Klaus, straddles him in a position that implies his penetration, recalling the image of Kali, the goddess of death mounted upon the phallus of Shiva, whom she has beheaded in her carnal embrace. Angelo proceeds to force air into Klaus' lungs by applying pressure to his chest, nears his face and exchanges breath with Klaus in a kiss, in doing so expresses his devotion to Klaus, as well as indicating that it is he, Angelo that holds the key to maintaining not only Klaus' life, but his status of reverence. As Klaus is shown in a terrible mute scream, Angelo undresses him, and crying in a way that to me appears to be the manner in which one cries when one has lost something in oneself that is irrevocable, he fellatiates what he worships.

 

What has begun to develop is a series of rituals initiated by Klaus, who, within his role as sacrificial priest was soon overwhelmed. By entering a state in which he becomes the object of devotion, a new role is forged for him in this developing religion. He assumes a Soveriegnity not unlike that of divinity in the sense that his uselessness (in his case complete paralysis) serve to push all activities within his immediate world into the realm of his needs. Without the aid of Angelo he would be a simple burden, but Angelo provides the substance of devotion to this thing that transforms it into god. The two of them share a vision, and that is to seek a type of divinity by means of ritual sacrifice. They are interdependent as object/subject, and through this relationship their cosmology begins to congeal.

  Once their covenant is made active by the initial coupling it wishes to expand, to be externalized, parallel to the way in which devotees anticipate the validation of their faith through prophesy. The absolute nature of divinity that religion is founded upon requires fulfillment, and once set in motion it's thirst is difficult to slake, it assimilates or eliminates according to the needs of it’s absolutes. In this film the process of annexation and elimination begins soon after the bizarre coitus of Angelo and Klaus.

  We can move on here to the examination of a text left behind by Klaus at the site of‘ the boy's death. The text in question serves as the scripture necessary for Angelo to fulfill the prophesy we have spoken of. The reading begins one evening in Klaus' room. Angelo reads the words in tears, seemingly moved in opposed directions by these words, "Horror, like sin, can become fascinating". There is no moral judgment of horror or sin here, but the acceptance of both as a given. With a lack of moral imperative joined to this negativity, they lose the polarity integral to uphold what is held in common as good. Taken as such they are aesthetics. One can imagine the boredom that overcame Klaus when seeing train after train deliver children to be killed before his eyes. This boredom must have resembled the drudgery that is today undergone at the workplace. But in his line of work, Murder and atrocity were an everyday element. These elements must have had to be first accepted without resistance as a given before they could have been viewed aesthetically, and assumed a superficial form. "These children already knew death", he lamented. Klaus was looking through aesthetic form to find a knew level, or way of viewing horror that could obliterate the boredom of labor that mortals feel. Klaus solved the dilemma by abstracting the aesthetic forms of horror into psychological and spiritual symbols. It is through this abstraction of form into symbol that "fascination" enters. Horror and sin can only be fascinating through a process that bestows upon them a psychological significance, hence the inverted, or negative spirituality that permeates this film, just as valid as any positive cosmology, and far more sensual, as it touches often on real life through the realities of human sovereignty, sex, power, and death.

The horror that Klaus first looks upon, then participates in by willfully sinning or transgressing, is such that the blurring of identity it foments creates the near trance state that takes him a step further; "His frightened eyes were inside me", boundaries of border and body dissolve as Klaus experiences a communion with the fetish/object/abstracted symbol that represents his God, Death. What I wonder, however, is whether those frightened eyes sought out and looked upon his own innermost desires, accounting for this discomfort., or if he experienced the communion as seeing through the boy's eyes, displacing his sense of self, thus bringing on the discomfort. Regardless of this unanswered speculation of mine it remains that there incurs a rupture or displacement of identity, and this rupture was both uncomfortable and pleasureful for him. Here is a return here to the idea of a human being united with God through sacrifice.

  At this point Klaus warns Angelo, "This is not a game", indicating his own understanding of the seriousness of these rites. Angelo responds by acknowledging the solemnity, " No, at least not to be talked about" They are both united in respect and understanding for this unspeakable mysticism, synchronized in both intent and desire. Up to this point Angelo could have been sympathized with, seen as an avenging victim, giving viewers a refuge within the identity of a protagonist, but this is thwarted by Angelo's eagerness to enter the horror, there is nowhere  to hide, and we are required to sit in witness to this violent metamorphosis of identity. Upon my first viewing of this film, I recall at this point that over half the theater had emptied, so great was sense of shame from passive participation in this inverted morality, or perhaps because of fear or even revulsion to this interpretation of an experience of life.

 

Angelo now makes an offer to Klaus, to act for him in a further fulfillment of the text left behind by Klaus on his last day of simple humanity. "I liked what you were", "I can become what you were", he says. The reversal of roles now begins. God in all religions is the supreme object whose subjects aspire to join with through emulation and adulation. Angelo is committed in a desire to be more godlike in this way, to seek the absolute by acting according to the principles set down by divinity. Religion's first objective is to annex or remove what it can. By this point in the film Grieselda has attempted to kill Klaus by shutting down the power that operates the machine that breathes for him. She cannot be converted and must be eliminated if this pact between the two men is to transpire.

The Angel had as of yet not killed. Acting on the seduction of the sovereignty that Klaus has commanded and that he wishes to attain, Angelo, after masturbating on Klaus while reading from the text that Klaus had left behind, declares that Grieselda must die. We hear no objection from Klaus. She has made one attempt already to kill her husband, and thus threatens to undermine what the fallen god and his angel live for. In order for this to survive, as well as for Angelo to become further initiated, he stalks and hangs her from a banister. He tosses a beautiful red cloth over the railing, and the camera records it with all the grace and authority of the blood shed and royalty it represents.

  Angelo here begins a subtle shift in identity, smashing a taboo by taking a life, becoming more like his god in the process. The daughter, Rena here begins her own metamorphosis into something other than the child she has remained up to this point, though this will be developed in greater detail later. She wakes during the scuffle between Angelo and Grieselda, and listens to the murder throughout the night. After Angelo removes the body, he carries it to Klaus' room where he dumps it on the glass coffin and turns on the viewing lamp for Klaus to stare at all evening. "Good night", he says. I'm somewhat inclined to laugh at this, as it resembles a cat that brings a bloody, featherless bird to the pillow of the sleeping master, but there is something about the way Angelo says good night that is taunting or arrogant, as if he now is beginning to feel the arrogance, independence and superiority of those who kill, as if he was letting Klaus know that he will soon be master.

 One person who could not be annexed has been eliminated, the process of which also served to begin Angelo's transformation by providing him with a taste of absolute power. There is one more person to be eliminated. It is obvious that what Angelo has planned could not happen with the maid still in employment, so when she arrives to begin her services Angelo makes up a story about Grieselda's absence. Rena is listening to this fable when the maid asks why the curtain that Angelo had thrown over the railing was gone. Caught off guard, Angelo responds by saying that Rena had torn it down while playing. Rena knew this to be untrue, and said nothing. Instead she went to her mother's room, checked the wardrobe and found that if her mother had left, she had taken nothing with her. At this point Rena knows her mother has been if not murdered, then severely disabled. She chooses to do nothing, becoming an accomplice, and thus assimilated into this ritual of death and transformation.

The maid is in need of pay. Angelo goes to Klaus to find where the money is kept. Klaus at first refuses to tell him. We can see Angelo is upset, but he is still humble before his lord, recognizes his own inferiority to what he reveres. "I did it for us", he says, including Rena. Now the players form a sort of unholy trinity. Klaus gives in, and when the maid comes to his room, Klaus says nothing that would lead her to believe that anything was askew. The scene is shot framing Rena, Angelo and Klaus together, with the former two leaning on the glass coffin with the casualness of a family portrait. With nothing left to impede or obstruct, what consumes Klaus and Angelo is left to fill its insatiable thirst.

Returning to the sacred book, though this time in the form of it's making. Klaus dictates to Angelo the scenes of murder in a night atmosphere of fire and smoke, scenes from an apocalypse in hell, but in which Klaus does not suffer, as he presides over the destruction. As he recalls an incident in which he selects a child to kill, it is apparent that all the deaths would be meaningless and methodical where there was nothing left to destroy but another child. The special deaths which were used as private ritual involved children who were apart from the rest in that they contained some defiance, thus some residual sense of self, a self that could be annihilated, or rather, consumed. 

"I felt his loathing invade me, giving me pleasure", he says. Once again there is a dissolving of barriers, the mystic exchange of essence. Klaus experienced an intimacy with the victim, but from a position of absolute authority made felt by the subject's hatred. The boy loathed Klaus, but was incapable in every way to expressing it or acting upon it in any other way save seeking out his captor's innermost being to despise. But this loathing remains impotent, and from this thwarted rage Klaus receives pleasure that is validated by an empty loathing. He goes on to narrate an incident in which a boy is given an apple prior to his murder by the injection of gasoline into his heart, elaborating poetically upon the boy’s impressive defiance. We see that his opposition, however doomed is why he was chosen to kill. Narrating this, Klaus recalls that the boy gave him an unintelligible look, filling him with rage, indicating a need for ritual rules to be followed, the violation of which threatens to negate the entire game. Never the less, as the boy slowly and painfully dies, Klaus confesses of watching his suffering that he had never before felt such pleasure, as if he had been, "intimately joined with death" The successful attainment of communion with God through sacrifice.

Having murdered Grieselda and removed the maid, Angelo has served to eradicate what is profane from the temple, making the grounds suitable for sustaining the sacred cosmos he now begins to re-create, and to a certain extent completes an initiation into it's order of blood sacrifice. Though Grieselda's death was nowhere close to what would constitute sacrifice, it has proved to him that he is capable and worthy of acting in lieu of Klaus. He is ready for his role as priest.

 

In religion, the priest or shaman is required to wear very specialized clothing that play an intregal role in ritual ceremony. These vestments are believed to be permeated with the powers of whatever particular divinity, saint, or aspect of their mythology that is represented on the clothing. The mask is used to simulate whatever god it represents, and contains the power to transform or metamorphosize the identity of its wearer. This phenomenon of ritual clothing is found in sources as diverse as Catholic vestments to the Ghost Dance shirt worn by various tribes of native Americans belonging to a messianic cult of the late nineteenth century.

It is my belief that in the twentieth century the uniform has become the mask in it’s capacity to transform identity, particularly when that uniform represents the power of the state, which has replaced the awesome capacity of divinity. We in turn, are now subject to the new state myths and the absolute authority they wield.

The Nazi regime stands alone in taking religious symbolism to it's furthest extreme, and in this way is the purest example of the divine nature of the modern state, and may be one of the many reasons why it is condemned, as it perhaps may remind us a little too much of our selves. The order and ritual with which it acted out absolute and brutal force bestowed upon the wearer of the Nazi uniform the authority of this absolute power, though still divided into strict levels of initiation. For instance, a khaki clad militia man wearing a swastika was still separated from the elegantly clothed in black S.S. officer by a gulf of power. Because of the rapidity of it's rise, as well as the vertigo resulting from this dizzying expansion, high placed officials had nearly unlimited power. It would seem that Klaus belonged to this class if we are to judge not only by his amassed wealth, but by his actions during the war period. Then he engaged in activities that involved his own sovereignty in a closed, private sphere independent of the state's particular aims, but with the autonomy that the uniform of the state enabled him to enjoy.

 

It is this uniform that Angelo is now fit to wear. He is transformed into Klaus in the same way that the wearer of the mask is possessed by it's divinity in the ecstatic rites of the shamanistic cult. In an earlier scene, Angelo was observed in his own clothes, seemingly smoldering as he rocked back and forth in a chair. He now sits in the same place, this time having donned Klaus' black trench coat, boots and sunglasses, tending a bonfire that may as well have been sparked by his possession. Rena comes downstairs and is pleased by what to her must resemble play. But mimicry carried to this extreme is no longer play, which is voluntary, but has the weight of faith, which is absolute and boundless. She asks Angelo if her father would not be angry at this bonfire in the house. He responds, "Rena, I'm your father now"

 

Angelo is now consumed, and in this consummation he recreates the world of the camps, buying wire-mesh to put up in the house that combined with the fires, changes the environment completely. He now wields the power that he has claimed from God, and from priest to God he is responsible for creation. within the confines of his encampment that he has enclosed. He moves with confidant strides, no longer displaying the moral reservation or ambiguity he previously had shown when reading the diary of Klaus had moved him to truly sorrowful tears.

Rena, too is changed by her environment that has been so transformed by Klaus and Angelo. She is seen feeding Klaus, who unwashed, is forced to lay in his own excrement within his glass coffin. He tries to persuade Rena to see that things have gotten out of hand, but she responds by laughing, as if Angelo's antics are amusing. She goes so far as to state that this new house suits her well, and like Angelo she is opposed to the intrusion of outsiders who would end or alter the world she now enjoys.

This as well resembles religion, but at a declining stage, more towards the end of it's history, where the faith has lost meaning and begins to crumble. What once was God or Ideal is now neglected, the original intent is lost as the leaders of the faith maintain the monopoly of authority that once was reserved for divinity. Klaus lays filthy and improperly cared for as Angelo accumulates sovereignty. At this point in the history of religion there is also the passive faithful, who accept the authority of a clergy that protects their own ways of living. Of course Rena does not want the maid to return as she now has much more personal autonomy than before.

 

There is one more return to the making of the text and a subsequent murder before this world runs it's course and completes a cycle. Klaus tells of how while listening to a choir nearby he would watch various victims in their agony, of how the panting of the boys almost seemed part of the song. He elaborates, "he had a beautiful voice, fear made it more so".and further, "the distended blue veins in is neck...moved me" The inversion of horror into beauty by way of abstraction had become perfected method, I cannot doubt  that he was indeed moved by the sublimeness of this fusion of death and beauty. It becomes acceptable to me in part because I, the viewer and voyeur have undergone this process as well. In order to make sense of this atrocity, I would under most circumstances simply condemn it, but have been incapable of doing so by my situation within the personalities of our Unholy Trinity.

As the uniform is a form of mimicry in the active sense, where the soldier or policeman assume the body of the divine state and act with it's authority, the uniform becoming a sort of shaman's mask, so cinema can serves as a mask of transformation and mimicry, but confined to a certain passivity that lasts only through the duration of the film. This, in part is what I mean by identity transfer. But cinema too often is employed in the aims of escapism, providing us with desirable characters to become for a short while.

Used as it is in this film, what we become is at first almost too strong for us to endure, but the transformation sets, and we begin to understand the logic of these antiheroes, leaving the theater wondering if what we witnessed could have been ourselves. 

In the final two scenes of the movie, the cycle of metamorphosis is completed. The first of the two reveals that Angelo had been one of Klaus' special children as a boy. Klaus, Angelo and Rena are in the room together, and with skillful editing the scenario is enacted identically in past and present tense. Angelo removes Klaus from his cage, and recites the same words to him as Klaus had to Angelo years prior. Here is the filthy, drooling God, gasping for air, as Angelo sticks his cock into his God's open mouth. With a parallel narrative showing the identical scene, but with the personalities and power reversed, the film draws into a close. Angelo once more has tears in his eyes while watching Klaus die.

The final scene involves Rena's transformation. She walks through the house to her room, where she examines a scar over her eye. She touches it in the same way as Angelo had touched his own the day of his arrival. She emerges from the dark into the room where Klaus had formerly lain. The room resembles paradise, done up in deep blues, and empty save the glass cage that Angelo now occupies. She kisses Angelo, straddles the machine and takes off her shirt, once again a perfect repeat of another's actions. He is now Klaus, and she is Angelo.

  This is one of those films when taken as an experience has the affect of being equal in measure in both repulsion and attraction. What has been undergone is totally imaginable giving the extent of this type of power in today's world. A monopoly of sovereignty inevitably leads to the worship of power. The predominant experience of power is entirely coercive, and when attained or usurped one cannot rightly say it is abused when wielded as it has been shown, this type of power is naked force, and is used for what it is meant for. It is a negative sovereignty because it is exclusive, it cannot be shared by all as it would then vanish. It demands sacrifice to exist, and the outcome of sacrifice is the death of they that are powerless. This is the essence of the negativity I see in religion and state. Both their roots and aims are in death, as such it is cyclical, enclosed and absolute. This is the absolute that assimilates or destroys.

  The situation of these characters within the context of the Nazi regime is perfect representation of ourselves today. The modern state holds in nature the same religious authority as the third Reich embodied. It was the most honest of all twentieth century states in regards to this, and because it was unashamed it was able to burn as furiously as the history of a religion in a decade or two what would take a faith a millennium, and it's sacrifices were in the millions.

Tim Blue 1990

Director:

Agustín Villaronga

Writer:

Agustí Villaronga

Stars:

Günter Meisner, David Sust and Marisa Paredes