Probably one of the
greatest influences upon me in my adult life if music from the first
wave industrial bands, COIL. Founded, and mostly maintained with
assorted guest appearances by Peter Christopherson and John Balance.
Christopherson was a member of Throbbing Gristle, the group that
coined the term, “Industrial”. After that seminal group
terminated their mission, Genesis P Orridge went on to found Psychic
TV with Christopherson and Balance. Both Balance and Christopherson
left after a few records to start COIL. The element of fine recording
quality stood in start difference to previous projects. In fact COIL
always had ties to a mainstream; Christopherson did album work for
Pink Floyd, and videos for the likes of Samantha Fox. Madonna is
reputed to have bought a photo by Man Ray after seeing the cover of
their record, Scatology. But all that was paying the bills so they
could keep up their own, decidedly counter-cultural work with COIL.
It was a time when
such artists and fans alike thought we could change the world, and
like a last gasp of 1960s utopianism, we worked across all lines.
There was explicitly gay work, as well as the machismo swagger of The
Birthday Party, the elegance to records by The Swans,or the
confrontational extremism of Whitehouse. What we shared was we stood
in opposition to society, and dared to think we might actually
survive to see a better day in spite of evidence to the contrary.
In all of COIL's
work there was finely crafted art, but always with an ear to the
underground. Some records like Angelic Conversation were elegant,
symphonic works set to Shakespeare sonnets and made into a frame by
frame super 8 movies by Derek Jarman. Then they had their noise
records, some being single notes played over the length of an EP and
released as box sets meant to cause drug like effects, audio or
visual hallucinations. Then there were the dance records, one with
Annie Anxiety on vocals as a prostitute trying to get both paid and
free cigarettes from the trick she turned. What is this doing if not
painting a picture of the world they found themselves in, without
moralizing. COIL recorded the very first record to benefit AIDS
relief and research, a dirgy cover of Soft Cell's Tainted Love.
They lived hard,
known for excessive drug use and drinking. Balance died a few years
ago after a month long drinking binge sent him toppling down the
stairs. Christopher son followed a couple years after that, dying of
'natural causes' at the age of 55.
But it is not an
extremism I want to celebrate, but the work of fine artists who stood
on the fringes of a society they wanted to change. These works
changed me, politicized me, helped make me an artist. As I write this
Genesis is dying as well. Derek Jarman is long gone, as are many who
were actively engaged in trying to make a better world, and I am
playing the collaboration COIL made with equally influential
publisher, Adam Palfrey, who in perhaps a twist of irony died last
month after falling down stairs.
Stevie Wonder's output of four studio
records beginning with Talking Book in 1972 remains a period of
artistic masterpieces firmly rooted in a cultural and political terra
firma that has rarely been matched.
The deeply funky Maybe your Baby,
though not political, sets the tone of paranoia that could be said to
characterize the aftermath of the 1960s. Later on the record, the
defeat of utopian hopes and the faint, dying pulse of an American
Left are heard, (or felt) on the song, Big Brother;
You've killed all our leaders
We don't even have to do nothing to you
you cause your own country to fall.
The richness of the analogue synths,
the production of Talking Book marked the beginning of a string of
albums that showed Stevie as no longer 'Little Stevie', but rather a
fully mature artist doing what artists should do, which is giving a
generation both a gift, in that those who receive this work are
shaped, are taught by the works they receive, as well as paint a
picture of the times they find themselves in.
The next record, Innervisions, saw
Stevie recording virtually all the instruments. The album covers a
wide range of themes and emotions. The song, Higher Ground redeems
one's failings in life, negating regret by seemingly insisting on
reincarnation while still alive, in this life, in this body. Mistra
Know it All is a scathing attack on the Nixon administration. Too
High, and Livin for the City describe a time when cities were an
anathema, decades before they were put up for sale and had become the
overpriced playgrounds for privileged young adults.
The next record, Fullfillingness' First
Finale is a stark record in production, opening with the telling,
Heaven is Ten Million Light Years Away, and the bitter, wrenching
They Won't Go when I Go. This record was done after Stevie had been a
car crash with a logging truck that left him in a coma. It seems to
be a deep rethinking of what it is to be a human in the waning days
of a tumultuous century. One cannot say it is a return to form, as it
is the third of a string of brilliant records, but it does show an
artist rethinking his place and role.
While 1977 saw punk as taking up the
Vanguard for political music, disco moving to the forefront of
popular music, and Peter Frampton and Fleetwood Mac inserting their
bloated egos into the marketplace, Stevie was to release the crowning
achievement of his career with Songs in the Key of Life. The title
alone sort of says it all. By this time, the artist has shown us so
much, art as activism, the depth and breadth of what a song about
love could possibly be. Here, at the end of these four albums we
could say, “Thank you, Stevie, you have made the world a better
place”. A double album with a four song 45 bonus single included,
which sums up the polarity of his vision in two ways. One is a line
in the song, Ebony Eyes; Devastating Beauty. Indeed. The other is the
song, Saturn, which seems to imply that for all his hope, all his
love, things would be better anywhere than on this Earth.
Books, those magical objects
that neatly contain whole worlds, have shaped and changed me just as much as
has my movement through Space in Time. Certain books have detonated like a
mortar in my brain, shattering ideas of what was real and opening up infinite
possibility.
I have carefully built
collections of books and sold them time and again. I have owned beautifully
designed books printed with the finest of paper, with mounted illustrations and
bound in soft leather, and I have owned cheap paperbacks with the covers ripped
off. At one point I covered each and every book I had in plain, brown paper so
I could not see the author or title. At this point my collection was so fine
that I could grab one off the shelf and say to myself, “today I will read a slim
book, and a tall one tomorrow”. It was my encounter with the books of Jean
Genet that first showed me the true, transformative force that writing can be,
and since then I have sought out literature, prose, poetry and memoir of equal
beauty and strength.
There are shops whose
shelves I have combed in cities across America and Europe. I can recall one,
rainy afternoon in a bookshop dedicated to books on film in Dublin as easily as
I can finding shelter from the fierce sun in Athens in a cool, dark shop. Some
shops are rich like a stew, thick like nectar, as neat and orderly as a plate
of sushi, or as indiscernible as a pot of thrice-cooked jambalaya.
Twice I have traded one
continent for another, both times losing by collections and starting again. Now
living again in the town I was born in, I am slowly excavating the thoughts of
others and growing my own through the shops of this city. Powells bookstore is
a thoughtless, dimwitted giant where a good book might be found like a polyp
clinging to a colon, yet this store seems to be revered like the Tomb of the
Unknown Soldier.
My shock however was great
when I recently visited Mother Foucault’s bookshop the other day. I said once
of Paperback Traffic, A shop I worked at owned by Margaret Cho’s father, which
you could go in blindfolded and whatever book you touched would be an excellent
volume on whatever subject. The same could be said of Mother Foucault’s
My heart raced as I spied
books I long ago read as if I were seeing dear friends from times gone, such it
was like watching a home movie on super 8 film, or taking a walking tour
through the history of my brain. The store is charming and welcoming, seemingly
designed after the principles on Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space with each
corner and crevasse loaded with intimacy and image.
I purchased two books, Trio
by Robert Pinget and Juan Goytisolo’s Space in Motion, and in the quiet of my
car not an hour later I found the following sentence in the latter book, a
sentence referring to the author Jean Genet mentioned earlier;
‘who transmutes the inner
impulse into a manner of intuiting and revealing an alien oppression, which up
until that point has never found a literary expression. The alchemy through
which passion is transmuted by a body—a physical and cultural model of a
body—into a voracious form of knowledge, capable of turning a lover into a
linguist, a researcher, a scholar, a poet; of making him leap from the
individual to the collective and opening the eyes to history and its tragedies
and injustices…’
Hell
is a place on Earth. Heaven is a place in your head. David Wojnarowicz
The
first book of David Wojnarowicz I encountered was the small art book, Memories
that Smell like Gasoline, and what stood out were its contradictions. I recall
being attracted to the title but not liking the cover for its striped border.
Then there was the lurid and dangerous content that was beautifully rendered in
words from the gutters, streets and porn shops that raised him from a tormented
childhood. These stories then were illustrated in delicate, cloudy watercolors.
Thumbing through this book unlike any I had held before I turned a page to see
a painting of a man covered in Kaposi Sarcoma legions and was viscerally hit
with fear.
This
was when to get HIV was indeed very often a death sentence. I was in my early
20s living in one of the epicenters of the epidemic, San Francisco. In the
early years of the Plague, the virus changed everything. It brought out the
homophobia in our government, our churches and our families. Hate seethed and
fear seeped. It felt like war. It was war, with real deaths everywhere.
I
bought the book, and later his others. David was an artist working in several
medias. He was a writer, a film maker, a painter and musician. His memoir,
close to the Knives was his war cry. That book, like Memories, contained
beautiful texts, black with sorrow and rage.
I
have just finished Fire in the Belly, by Cynthia Carr, a great biography
framing the cultural context in which David moved from an abused childhood, into
the East Village scene, and on to become a very famous artist. It brought back
those days to me. Days of a viable and thriving underground, where bands were
not simply a weekend’s entertainment, but a form of activism that articulated
our values, when art was not simply a decoration or investment, but stood up in
anger for a youth with little hope for a future.
“He
saw his death, the secret theme of Memories, as the logical outcome of a
society that did not value him, that did not protect him, and never would” Fire
in the Belly, page 531
Times
have changed much. In my years of making art I have even met many of the people
in this book. Some of the stories Cynthia Carr tells I have heard first hand.
Fire in the Belly paints an accurate picture of those Viral Days.
When I was in my very first years of school, I remember
sitting around the breakfast table, eating my cereal behind a wall of cereal
boxes I had made using three packages to hide myself from the rest of the
family so that I could wake slowly while examining these marvels of graphic
design. In those days breakfast cereal would even come with a 45 rpm single on
the back, which you could cut out and play on your record player, which is precisely
what I did with the Bobby Sherman song that came on one such box, playing ‘Easy
Come, Easy Go’ till my Mickey Mouse player wore its grooves into nothing.
This close scrutiny and curiosity of product packaging has
continued all my life. Later things like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon,
with its bold prism cover, fold out sleeves and poster were treasures I would
nearly give my young life for. Fonts, colors, shapes, images all in the service
of selling something. Maybe this is what Marx meant when he said, ‘the
metaphysical niceties of commodity fetish’
Still I somehow value a book a bit more, regardless of
content if it has a pleasing and unique size, harmonizing color, and a spine
with a title that calls out just a bit more to be picked up and read. The
revolution of silk screening has spawned and endless sea of banality in regards
to T-Shirts, but the simple image of a gun on a tank top of a gangster in the
TV show, The Wire was brilliant. Graphic design as self-expression; I am a
weapon. Indeed the merging of politics and popular culture bled into the 1960s
and 70s, from Black Power to Punk through graphic design
Acid Mothers Temple
A Friend of mine visited me in San Francisco once.
Throughout the 80s he was a research engine on anything ‘underground’, and
though he was never the type of person to wear it on his sleeve, being more
interested in the contents of his passions more than personal credit, he is
probably one huge force in supplying ‘cool people’ with their tastes in film
and music.
This particular trip we made our customary trips to record
and bookstores, and when we got back to the house we put on a copy of Acid
Mothers Temple. Pataphysical Freakout. Within seconds I asked him to take it
off, knowing that what I was about to hear would blow me away, and that moving
around the house and cooking dinner would not be compatible with such an
experience. I later bought my own copy and entered a universe that would change
me forever. It was all there; the connection to the past in the form of mind
bending psychedelia, and even to Dada it the reference to Alfred Jarry’s
Pataphysics. I submerged myself in the waters of Japanese underground as the
underground dried up here on this continent, morphing first into Grunge, then later
Indie Rock.
Whether it is the masterful musicianship and arrangements of
Tsuyama Atsushi’s troubadour albums that sound as if they came from the middle
ages, or the psych/drone, aggressive minimalism of the solo works of Tabata
Mitsuru,, the lovely shimmering light on water sound of Higashi Hiroshi, and
Cotton Casino’s project, Pardons, powerful drumming of Shimura Koji (who could
very well have fit into Coltrane’s world), or the searing, ripping guitar work
by the group’s leader Kawabata Makoto, AMT remains a strong and vital force, both live and studio,
working their asses off with constant touring, being a huge inspiration to me
in my own work. Indeed it was after hearing a side project, Mainliner years ago
with Kawabata and Nanjo called Imaginative Plain, that I felt I needed to
attempt an answer in my own record with Jerry Blue, Mark Gergis and Cheryl
Leonard, The Pixie Kitchen’s RIOT 00:00, a record that also was in my own way a
tribute to one of my favorite records of all time, Sly Stone’s, There’s a Riot
Goin On.
Mainliner, in a new lineup put out the most amazing record I
have heard in years in 2013. It is called Revelation Space. It sounds like
predator and prey, or the song of oil on water fucking. The Ouroborus with a
contact mic on its tongue!
Savory and Sour
I prefer these tastes in both beasts and in the bounty of
our earth. Warm squashes, baked with butter, maybe stuffed with nuts and other
things, Tender little quail are among my favorite fowl, living or on my plate.
Rich stews, Kale sautéed with onion, garlic and tossed in mustard. Quince pies,
lemon tarts. Music played while preparing this feast could be begun with
Coltrane’s Favorite Things
Francis Bacon
I can make sense of the 20th century by looking
at his canvases. The blood, and the fear exist in a clean, modernist
background. He paints the Utopian dream of Modernism as a failed project, or at
least an impossibility. One thing I did not know until seeing many of his
paintings up close is that much of what I thought was white space painted was
unpainted canvas, absence as part of the composition. Clean nightmares.
COIL/Genesis/TG
I first heard Throbbing Gristle at a record shop on Burnside
in downtown Portland called Singles Going Steady. They had a turntable
available for customers to play records before buying them. A friend was with
me and he was taken with the name of the band. It was a 45 rpm, but I no longer
remember the name of the song. We both were familiar with punk, but were
completely unprepared for what we heard. My friend laughed his head off, and
gave me the headphones. What I heard would change me forever. It was noise
alone, aggressive and anarchic, but done on purpose and committed to vinyl, and
with art on the sleeve. What could this be, or mean? It instantly had me
questioning everything; what is music? What is political? What is Art? It took
me some time, a couple of years in fact to wrap my brain around what I heard
that afternoon, but TG became MY Velvet Underground, and an inspiration and
soundtrack to my life. Various other, later projects and offshoots I would
follow sporadically, but to this day always returning. The symphonic,
diabolically beautiful music of COIL is a wonderful trajectory to follow from
beginning to end. Genesis’ Psychic TV Theme records are among my most cherished
records. It was an amazing birthday brunch in 2009 where my friend, Marie
Losier brought Tony Conrad, AND a copy of a record he had just finished with
Genesis. It was through Marie that I met Genesis later, and had a chance to
personally thank for helping make me a musician and artist.
The Arcades Project
Begun in 1927, Walter Benjamin began collecting a variety of
texts relating to life in the 19th century. These texts range from
political tracts, letters, essays, bits of advertisements, newspaper articles.
His aim was to use collage of various sources to paint a critique of life as a
whole when Capitalism was consolidating itself into a great and fearsome force
during the Industrial Revolution. It began as an idea for an article and grew
into a massive, unfinished tome. The book is a dizzying one, best read
non-linearly, and is by turns exhilarating and heartbreaking. As well it is an
important book for us, laying down a history which we are connected to as
Capitalism revolutionizes itself again in our post information, post
speculation days in the 21st century.
Lewis Mumford
Though I love all the books I have read by him, the one I
will talk about here is Sidewalk Critic, a collection of article he wrote
during The Great Depression for New Yorker magazine. Nothing escapes his gaze,
he will review a local diner, a Laundromat, a row of houses or something as
ambitios as the Rockofeller Center. He examines how these structures impede, or
help life flourish, and of the forces creative or monetary which shaped what we
know to be the New York today as it was being built. Sometimes hilarious,
always entertaining and sometimes very sharp. But when Lewis Mumford shows his
fangs is sometimes when his writing is its funniest.
Tsai Ming Laing
I first saw The Hole, a musical set during a pandemic where
humans were ‘turning’ into cockroaches. It is a love story of two who refuse to
evacuate, and the erotic center is a hole in the floor between their
apartments. Fantastic! Later I saw The Wayward Cloud, also a musical and a love
story, where thwarted lovemaking due to porn shoots ends in what could possibly
be necrophilia. This film comes complete with dancing penises coming out of
toilet stalls and having sex with watermelon helmets! Also Fantastic!
Feedback
Maybe guitar feedback is the Dark Matter of rock music, and
those who wield it, shape it and coax it out are alchemists. Feedback is chaos speaking. Playing with feedback is dangerous, like feeding the big predators at
the zoo. Hendrix at Monterey pop Festival, John Fahey on his revelatory
Womblife. I always have kept an archive of feedback to season any new music
with, like garlic or hot sauce.
Women behind the more famous men
Unica Zurn/Hans Bellmer
Yoko Ono/John Lennon
Dorothea Tanning/Max Ernst
Alice Coltrane/John Coltrane
Laure/Georges Bataille
Beverly Conrad/the Warhol Scene
Diane Arbus/Allan Arbus
Yes this could go on and on, and while most of these women
are famous as well, the stories of these relationships fascinates me, and I
would love for someone to write this book (I am too lazy, but would eagerly buy
it)
For many reasons I have been celebrating a personal holiday
every year on October 17th. When it lands on a Thursday it extra
special. There is a feeling in October that you are in the company of a very
dear friend, and you both know for whatever reason you will not see each other
in a very long time. So the feeling is a calm presence, yet very strong, and
tinged with a bit of sadness.
This year I spent my three days off leading to the 17th
in a nice way. On Tuesday I drove to the beach with my Mother and Sister. Every
millisecond was visual overload of psychedelic beauty, like gold and red
flowing into your eyes at 60 miles per hour. There were quiet times when my
sister read her textbooks in the back, and my mother and myself simply were
conduits of yellows, reds, purples, and light flashing off forest streams
alongside the highway. At the ocean we could see for miles on the empty sands,
and I could let Lola off her leash safely to run her full strength with that simple
joy that dogs have.
The next night I went with my dear Friend/Twin to see the
premier of a documentary on The Satyricon, a punk club in Portland that had a
run of nearly 30 years. It was an emotional night for many reasons. The first
was that this was the first time I had gone to see a feature in a theater since
coming back to the US, and it made me miss my Berlin friends quite a bit. It
was intense to see thirty years later so many faces from a youth that set
standards for the rest of my life in what friendship means, and also to see
what both time and hard living has done to many of us. Indeed, many did not
make it to 2013. The film, Satyricon, Madness and Glory was a success for a few
important reasons. One was it showed clearly how a nightclub is more than a
place where people listen to loud punk and experimental music, score heroin or
coke in the bathroom, or breakup with a bad lover, but a nightclub can also be
a political work of art. This film showed us as a politically minded
generation, and the owner of the club as an artist. The film had nice many
performances that had me very much missing playing music live, but more
importantly it also showed the violent side of gentrification in a section on
the bombing of that block by a few would be developers, and police intimidation
in a section on an alleged riot started at the club when police roughed up the
owner. Afterwords I went with a group of folks to The Matador and oh did we
conjure the old days, ending in an impromptu dance in what was by no means a
dance bar. God, it was a night to love life.
Lastly, today, the 17th, I went for a nice long
walk at a nearby marsh with a dear friend. Tonight I cook dinner listening to
music made by my friends Cheryl E. Leonard and Jim Campbell. Cheryls compositions
are as if nature came alive and started playing weird and lovely songs, and
Jim’s are like all the flotsam and jetsam and debris from our overworked,
beaten world had started vibrating, pulsing, shaking and humming.
Earlier today I went to go see new paintings by Eric Stotik
at the Laura Russo gallery in Northwest Portland. I have not seen Eric’s work
in about 30 years, but the time back then is worth a story. Then the
neighborhood was affordable, and most of my friends were part of the vibrant
and fertile, as well as destructive and drug addled post punk scene, and many
of us lived there.
One of my domiciles then was a storefront on NW 21st.
I remember sleeping in the display window the first night hoping someone would
want to buy me. I lived there alone at first, and did not know what to do with
the place, so I painted a question mark on the door, thinking that and an
‘open’ sign would speed up the ideas. A woman came in one day and asked if the
space was a gallery, because she would love to do an installation there. I had
no idea what an installation was, but said indeed it was a gallery and she was
welcome to do such a thing, and my first show was on. I think it was Tammy (now
Stotik) who arranged for Mike King and Eric to do the next show at the Question
Mark Gallery. Mike hung paintings on glass, and Eric hung a few very intricate
paintings.
Back then there was a very strong current flowing between
art and the Underground, and flowing through our young politics. I learned much
about 20th Century art back then in our minor utopia which we saw as
standing against SO much; Reagan’s covert wars in Central America, AIDS (then
still a ‘gay cancer’), and a never ending cold war. For myself, a 20 something
gay boy, I really did not feel myself as having much of a future. Many of my
friends were in bands, were performers, writers, poets and painters. Though I
did not really know him then, Eric was among us young embattled underground
utopians.
I soon left Portland for 30 years, returning now, finally as
the artist I was sort of made to be. Clay has called it a disease, others have
called it a ‘calling’, others still have called it a career. Art does a few
things. It shows a person’s soul, and how they see their world. Art shows
history from the side of the extremely personal, art is a synapse between
individual and collective imagination. Art tells stories.
Eric Stotic has become a fine artist. All those things art
does, he has learned to command with skill and grace. The large painting, maybe
50 feet long, was conceived as a circle, a painting with no beginning and no
end. The slide from a barely maintained peaceful rural setting into hell is a
very quick one, and the bodies strewn about, tortured and dismembered are the end
of so many stories. The work is a staggering comment on the state of the world,
a hymn to all those torn apart by largely western, capitalist interests. For
all its violence, it remains a somehow tender thing as well. Shit, so may
things come to mind, but the one that sticks out is a painting I saw by Hieronymus Bosch at the National Gallery in Berlin. On a
black, wooden square, he painted a white circle. Very small, in the center of
the circle is a fire. It seemed to me that all of his paintings were conceived
in this tiny fire. It appears Eric has wandered into that fire and gives us the
vision he had there.
Walking down 21st as I left the wake of bodies hung on the gallery wall, I was looking at all those fine
buildings we lived in back then when cities were not bought and sold by the rich,
and I could not help but wonder what it meant to say something like, “Look how
far we have come”
painting details were not uploaded with permission, just trying to get y'all out to the show
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.
