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Film, Luchino Visconti, Male Film Directors

The Damned (1969): The German Ruling Class Goes to Hell

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As the credits open Luchino Visconti’s anti-fascist classic The Damned, we are told that “no resemblance to actual events is intended.” Whether Visconti was afraid of lawsuits or he intended the disclaimer as a joke, it’s nonsense. The von Essenbecks are the Krupps, the notorious family of Rhineland industrialists and arms merchants who made an alliance with Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s, and survived the war with their property largely intact. The Damned is one of the most savage attacks on a prominent ruling class family ever made. Visconti’s hate is pure. It’s magnificent.

The Damned opens on February 27, 1933 at the birthday celebration of Joachim von Essenbeck, the family patriarch. One by one we meet the Essenbecks, their friends, family, and their contacts in the Nazi Party. There’s Joachim. He has no love for Hitler, but supports him anyway. He hates democracy even more. There’s Herbert Thallmann, the family firm’s vice president, an anti-fascist liberal, but isolated and ineffectual. There’s Konstantin von Essenbeck, a gruff, vulgar man played by Reinhard Kolldehoff, a German actor who bears an uncanny resemblance to George C. Scott. A young, vulnerable looking Charlotte Rampling plays Elizabeth, Herbert’s wife. A statuesque, blond Ingrid Thulin, the very model of  Aryan perfection, plays Sophie von Essenbeck, the widow of Joachim’s eldest son, a fighter ace who was killed in the First World War. Dirk Bogarde, who Visconti will cast as Gustav von Aschenbach 2 years later in his film version of Death in Venice, plays Friedrich Bruckmann, Sophie’s lover, an opportunistic Essenbeck Vice President from a middle-class family. Helmut Griem plays Aschenbach, a 30-something SS officer, the handler Hitler has assigned to manage the von Essenbeck family, and a clear stand in for Satan. Above all there’s Martin von Essenbeck, played by Visconti’s Austrian lover Helmut Berger, a flamboyantly androgynous young man in his 20s, that “rough beast,” who, to quote Yeats, “slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.”

February 27,1933 is Joachim’s last birthday celebration. It’s also, not incidentally, the night of the Reichstag fire. “Why can’t they chose a better night to burn the Reichstag?” Martin sighs after Konstantin interrupts his drag show — an iconic re-staging of Marlene Dietrich’s performance in The Blue Angel— with the news. The Essenbecks are not passive observers of German history. They are a stand in for the German ruling class as a whole. There’s been a coup in Berlin. Earlier, on the drive up from the factory, Aschenbach the SS officer had told Friedrich Bruckmann that there would be another coup inside the Essenbeck mansion itself, that he would soon have the opportunity to take Herbert’s place as Vice President. Later on, after Joachim has gone to bed, and the family settles in for the evening, we hear a scream. Even though an observant filmgoer has already figured out that Friedrich Bruckmann will kill Joachim and Aschenbach will frame Hebert, we are initially confused. Joachim also hears the scream. He’s in bed, still alive. It’s a testament to Visconti’s genius and artistic daring that when we put two and two together we realize that the scream had come from a servant who caught Martin molesting his 11 year old cousin. Earlier we had seen him get out of drag, take the little girl under a table, and begin to undress her. Yes, the evil in Germany is so thick you can cut it with a knife. After the brief interruption, and Joachim is finally sent on his way to hell — Frederick pumps him full of bullets from Hebert’s gun then puts the gun back in Herber’s bedroom— the SS storm the Essenbeck Mansion. Herbert escapes. But before he climbs out the window on his way across the border to France, he gives the gun back to Friedrich. Friedrich, as per Aschenbach’s instructions, then dutifully hands it over to the SS. Herbert, thus, has “proven” himself the murderer and middle-class Friedrich Bruckmann is now in full control of the Essenbeck arms factories. Vast wealth awaits him in the coming arms buildup if he plays his cards right.

If the murder of Joachim on the night of the Reichstag Fire was a coup against Hebert and German democracy, it also sets the stage for Hitler’s next move, the Night of the Long Knives. Konstantin von Essenbeck, a senior member of the SA and a clear stand in for Ernest Rohm, knows that if he doesn’t move quickly, his days are numbered. Let’s not overlook what Visconti is doing here. Visconti, a gay Marxist who joined the Communist Party during Mussolini’s dictatorship, is telling us that the theory lately so beloved of the American corporate propagandists at Fox News — that Nazism is socialism — is bogus. Ernst Rohm was a rough, gay, proletarian street brawler but the SA was never a “socialist” faction within the Nazi Party. Konstantin von Essenbeck is one capitalist jockeying for position with  Frederick, and then Martin, two more right-wing “masters of war.” The Night of the Long Knives was not about the SA and national “socialism” being replaced by the SS and national capitalism. It’s an evolution from one stage of fascism to another. Konstantin, his real life counterpart Rohm, and the proletarian street brawlers had served their purpose. They had violently suppressed the communists and Social Democrats. Now, like Hegel’s “delicate flower of history,” they had to be run down by the German state, utterly crushed, and eliminated from the politics of the Third Reich. Konstantin does manage to divert a shipment of machine guns from the Essenbeck Factory to an SA compound along the Rhine, but he’s doomed. Aschenbach and Frederick have the upper-hand. Konstantin and the SA, stupidly, hold a drunken, gay orgy when they should be preparing for battle. At dawn, in a gorgeous scene that Visconti would later replicate for the opening of Death in Venice, black clad SS men armed with the latest sub-machine guns manufactured at the Essenbeck factory come out of the mist in river boats, storm Konstantin’s compound, and, in an orgy of violence that’s nothing more than a continuation of the orgy of debauched gay sex that had gone on the night before, leave a bloody pile of Teutonic man flesh that would make Francisco Goya proud. Konstantin and the SA have been eliminated. Frederick, who Aschenbach convinces to come along on the raid, now reigns supreme.

But does he?

Sadly for Frederick Bruckmann and his wife Sophie, Aschenbach and the SS is thinking two steps ahead of him. Nationalism Socialism is not “socialism,” but it’s not capitalism either. The Essenbecks, the old German ruling class, are too weak, too perverse, too debauched to resist the German state. Friedrich’s Teutonic version of the American dream won’t last long. His days, like Konstantin’s, are already numbered. As Visconti shifts from the rivalry between Frederick and Herbert, then Frederick and Konstantin, he shifts from politics to family politics, or, to be more accurate, dramatizes Germany’s next step down into utter depravity and evil through the destruction of the Essenbecks themselves. Martin, who’s long been under his mother Sophie’s thumb, is Aschenbach’s instrument of choice. Even though flamboyantly androgynous, Martin isn’t gay, but a heterosexual pedophile. Not only is he molesting his 11-year-old cousin, he’s also molesting the 11-year-old daughter of his Jewish mistress, a young girl who hangs herself as Martin, by his own account, looks on and does nothing. Achenbach, who’s quite open with Martin about how there’s no danger of his going to prison for the death of a Jewish girl — it’s not even a crime in the Third Reich — nevertheless has Martin’s number. Martin is weak, hateful, amoral, terrified of his mother, the very embodiment of a ruling class ripe for takeover by the fascist state. He, not the upstart class climber Frederick Bruckmann will rule the Essenbeck corporation. Martin does not disappoint. When we next see him, he’s already decked out in the uniform of an SS officer. First he pushes out Bruckmann. But that’s not enough. The Essenbecks, and Germany, will implode under the weight of their own evil. In the film’s most notorious sequence, Martin rapes Sophie, his own mother, and leaves her a broken shell of her former self. The last scene of The Damned is chilling. Martin arranges for Frederick and Sophie to get married. Frederick is a beaten man, Bogarde’s slump shouldered body language effectively embodying the moral flaccidity that made him Achenbach’s tool, then his victim. Sophie is worse. A catatonic zombie with a white powdered face and bright red lips — an image Visconti will use two years later in Death in Venice to symbolize death and spiritual corruption — she’s already gone. The marriage is concluded. Martin hands them poison. The Essenbecks are no more.

Historical note: The real life Essenbecks, the Krupps, would survive. Although Alfred Krupp, the family patriarch, was tried and sentenced to 12 years in prison for his use of slave labor, he was later pardoned by the American High Commissioner in Germany John J. McCloy. McCloy also fully restored the Krupp family’s property. Sadly, the occupation of postwar Germany was managed, not by radical Italian filmmakers, but by Wall Street lawyers.

Film, Male Film Directors

Death In Venice (1971): Homosexuality and the Artifice of Eternity

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Luchino Visconti’s film version of Thomas Mann’s novella has been criticized for taking too many liberties with the original. But I think the film is underrated. Visconti, an out gay man, made a strong artistic choice — to play up the story’s homoerotic subtext at the expense of its classical, aesthetic subtext — and stuck with it. What he came away with is a powerful, if ultimately frustrating, meditation on the relationship between homosexuality and artistic failure.

In Mann’s novel, Gustav von Aschenbach, a famous writer in his early 50s, goes to Venice to overcome his writer’s block. There he becomes fascinated by Tadzio, a preternaturally beautiful teenage boy, a blond, Polish aristocrat based on the real life Baron Władysław Moes. In Visconti’s film, Aschenbach becomes a composer — a not unreasonable transformation since the character was partly inspired by Gustav Mahler — but the outlines of the plot remain the same. Aschenbach stalks Tadzio through the Grand Hotel des Bains on The Lido, pining for the boy’s unattainable beauty until he dies of a cholera epidemic ravaging the city.

For Thomas Mann, as the critics have noted, Tadzio is a classical and aesthetic idea, not an object of lust. Visconti’s daring choice is to make it clear that Aschenbach wants Tadzio as more than just his muse. He wants to fuck him. Were Visconti a heterosexual, this would be a profoundly homophobic narrative. As it is, it’s probably a reflection of Visconti’s self-hatred, but it doesn’t matter. Whether or not Visconti hated himself for being gay is beside the point. That he’s able to use his internalized homophobia to get at the heart of artistic, and ultimately masculine failure and despair is what makes Death in Venice a great film.

Was Thomas Mann gay? We really don’t know. He was married and had children. “Gay curious” might be more accurate. Gustav von Aschenbach, in turn, is not gay, not in the book, not in the film. But, if he’s not gay, then he also fails as a heterosexual. His child dies. His wife dies. His prim, artistic discipline entombs him inside a sterile formalism. If Death in Venice is a frustrating film to watch, then it’s partly because Dirk Bogarde, Visconti’s Aschenbach, is so good at building a character who’s uncomfortable in his own skin. A disciplined artist in his 20s or 30s is one thing. The vitality of his youth helps keep the rigid habits necessary to write either novels or symphonies in balance. But a man in his 50s who’s maintained that kind of discipline since his early 20s is in danger of smothering the wellsprings of his art, of crushing the urge to create by the process of creation. For Ernest Hemingway, the most disciplined of all American writers, the answer was alcohol. For Thomas Mann, it’s an unconsummated homosexual passion.

If Björn Andrésen, Visconti’s Tadzio looks a bit too much like a singer in a boy band, Lief Garrett meets one of the Hanson brothers, an androgynous fantasy for teenage girls, then Dirk Bogarde is genuinely repellent. Bogarde is a handsome, if nondescript looking actor, but here he, quite intentionally, makes himself ugly. It’s not a flamboyant, colorful ugliness a la Christian Bale in American Hustle, but a gray, quiet, lifeless ugliness. Aschenbach is a fussy little man who’s not only aging, but lacks masculine force to begin with. As he pursues Tadzio, as the cholera epidemic that will take his life closes in on Venice, we learn, in a series of flashbacks that show his life’s work being methodically shot down by fate, crushed by a world that doesn’t understand him, or strangled by his own personal failings, what brought him to his dead end in the famously beautiful city of canals. He has a wife — the beautiful Marissa Berenson — and a child. They both die. He goes to a brothel. He’s impotent. Above all, while an acclaimed composer, the sources of his inspiration have dried up. He argues with Alfred, a hyper-aggressive friend and artistic collaborator played by an obnoxiously over the top Mark Burns. Alfred screams at him that art is about the senses. Aschenbach protests that, on the contrary, art is about cutting yourself off from your senses, that it’s about seeking the Platonic ideal through discipline and form.

If gay men from da Vinci to Whitman and Oscar Wilde have always made a mark well beyond their numbers in the creative arts, then it’s partly because gay men don’t have children. Since they cannot connect to eternity by pushing their DNA into the next generation, the only connection they have to the next generation is what they can create during their time on earth. Aschenbach is not a gay man. He’s a straight man. So why does he ultimately succumb to a doomed homosexuality passion for a teenage boy? Luchino Visconti is one of cinema’s great artists. But in some respects he considered himself a failure. His greatest film, The Leopard, was butchered upon its release in the United States and wasn’t widely available until the 1980s. What’s more, a Visconti film takes work. None of them are very enjoyable to watch. The Damned is a 150 minute torture session. The Leopard is beautiful, but heavy and slow moving. Death in Venice is over 2 hours of physical discomfort and decay. Visconti, like Mann’s Aschenbach, was a disciplined, fanatical artist. But somewhere, deep inside, he must have felt, like Aschenbach, that that “artists are rather like hunters aiming in the dark. They don’t know what their target is, and they don’t know if they’ve hit it.”

The city of Venice is one of the glories of western civilization, a work of art as well as a city. But in Mann’s novel and Visconti’s film, it’s as corrupt as it is beautiful. Not only is it being stalked by cholera, its residents are decaying physically at a rate faster than Aschenbach. Upon his arrival, a red faced, clownish old man horrifies him. A red headed street musician, a man in his 30s or 40s with no teeth, serenades him against his will. Waiters, gondoliers, hotel owners, city officials are devious, secretive profiteers who fail to warn visitors of the coming plague so as not to lose the tourist dollars. Only Tadzio, the beautiful unattainable teenage boy, a Pole, a foreigner, is as beautiful as the city itself.  The film’s climax comes when Aschenbach witnesses Tadizio in the lobby of the Grand Hotel des Bains sit down at the piano and slowly plays Beethoven’s Fur Elise. Tadzio is a clumsy, indifferent pianist, but the purity of his physical beauty matches the purity of Beethoven’s music. Tadzio embodies the spirit, if not the form of Beethoven’s romanticism. He  succeeds where Aschenbach — and by implication Mahler —- fails.  Later, we see Aschenbach — and by implication Mahler —  conduct his latest work. lt’s not only a failure. The audience boos so loudly he is almost afraid they’re going to rush the stage and rend him in pieces. He wants to get away from the people he should have been trying to connect with. He escapes, into seclusion, then illness, then ultimately to Venice.

In the poem Sailing to Byzantium, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats speculates on how art can rescue a mortal from death.  “An Aged man is but a paltry thing,” he says, “a tattered coat upon a stick unless soul clap its hands and sing and louder sing with every tatter in its mortal dress.” Aschenbach is that coat upon a stick. But his soul doesn’t clap its hands or sing. Yeats, like Aschenbach, knows that he’s “sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal.” His only hope to live on is art form, disciplined creation. “Gather me up into the artifice of eternity,” he says, a famous line that could be Aschenbach’s personal motto as well as the hope of every childless, gay artist. But Aschenbach, unlike Yeats, will never clap his hands and sing and louder sing for every tatter in his mortal dress. He will die, a tattered coat upon a stick.

Yeat’s ends his triumphal poem by saying that “Once out of nature I shall never take my bodily form from any natural thing, but such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make of hammered gold and gold enamelling.” Aschenbach, unlike Yeats, will never be gathered into the artifice of eternity. Tadzio is no longer an aesthetic form. He’s an object of lust, not healthy lust, but sick, twisted, defeated lust. Visconti, the out gay man, portrays Gustav Aschenbach, the heterosexual, as a pedophile stalker who surrenders to homosexual desire as a direct result of his failure as an artist. If American critics have been so uncomfortable with such a politically incorrect message, Luchino Visconti, the Southern European aesthete, is no politically correct American Puritan. He looks down into the hell of Aschenbach’s artistic and spiritual defeat without wincing.

In Visconti’s film, Yeat’s Grecian goldsmith becomes a Venetian hairdresser. “You’re too important a man to let slavish devotion to naturalism limit you,” the hairdresser, surely the most intellectual hairstylist in cinematic history, says. “I’ll give you back what was yours. Then you can fall in love.” By trying to defeat the aging process, Aschenbach becomes, not a form “to set upon a golden bough to sing to lords and ladies of Byzantium,” but a monster, a Teutonic Michael Jackson in an ancient Italian city.  The intellectual, even Satanic Venetian hairstylist dies the graying German’s hair black. He paints his face white. He smears lipstick on his lips. Gustav Aschenbach, the severe Northern European professor, is now a painted Venetian clown, his face a kabuki mask, red lips like The Joker, a face powdered white, dyed black hair that drips hair dye in black down his cheeks like blood. He has become one of those physically decayed, spiritually corrupt Venetian street people and hustlers that, up until now, have so horrified his prim, bourgeois sensibilities.

“There is no impurity,” the dying Aschenbach recalls Alfred saying as he watches Tadzio play on the beach, “so impure as old age.”