Wei-Noir Cinema

             Despite immediate appearances, the Weimar Republic was way ahead of its time.  While other countries thrived during the 1920s, living off the prosperity World War I had brought them, oblivious to the Depression that would hit at the end of the decade, Weimar toiled prematurely, slogged down by almost every problem imaginable.  The Treaty of Versailles may have ended the war for the rest of the world, but it lived on in Germany, perpetuated by Article 231, the War Guilt Clause, which placed the blame solely on German shoulders.  Suddenly the country was faced with territorial changes, military restrictions, an Allied occupation of the Rhineland, rampant hyperinflation, a political gridlock and the modern equivalent of $442 billion in reparations.  The Great Depression hit in 1929, but by that point the Weimar Republic was jaded, its suffering having gone on for so long as to be the norm.  Weimar had been humiliated by its degrading treatment at the end of The Great War and left to its own devices in a time of staggering global change — when a helping hand was needed most.  Modernity was a cruel mistress and with it came uncertainty, the existential crisis of a country down on its luck and at odds with the rest of the world. 

Weimar angst gave voice to new forms of representation, opening the floodgates for the experimental tropes and new aesthetic codes that would come to define German Expressionism.  The country was socially and politically disadvantaged, but culturally avant-garde.  Fritz Lang’s 1922 film Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler exemplifies the prodigiously high watermark of Weimar cinema, serving a twofold purpose: commentary on, and entertaining escapism from, the tumultuous nature of the Weimar condition, all while epitomizing the influence Weimar cinema would have on American culture, film noir and hardboiled literature in particular.

            Cinematically speaking, Mabuse is most important for serving as a precursor to the film noir genre — literally “black film” — which took off in Hollywood in the ‘40s as a natural progression from hardboiled crime literature and the zeitgeist of the Great Depression.  Crime dramas heavy on cynical attitude and lurid subject matter, complete with brooding black and white cinematography and visual motifs borrowed from German Expressionism, film noir has consistently served as the perfect vehicle with which to express the heightened anxiety and alienation of a country in crisis.  Film noir feeds off social frustrations, presenting a world of increasingly brutal indifference where normal people get caught in unbelievably dire situations and ideas like right and wrong go out the window faster than a man thrown to his death from the tenth story of an apartment building.  Despite its release in 1922, well before the first film noir proper, this is no less true of Mabuse and its place in the fabric of the Weimar Republic.

            A mark of its cinematic maturity, Mabuse makes do without the eccentrically exaggerated set design seen in other Weimar films like Robert Wiene’s 1920 proto-horror flick The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, in which the precariousness and uncertainty of the times is palpable in every exaggerated angle of every building, roof and window.  Instead, a creepily tense atmosphere is introduced by way of the subtle, shadowy nuances of Berlin and its seedy criminal underworld. Everywhere contains a den of sin and corruption lurking in its depths, from the ritziest of hotels to the darkest of alleys.  There is an illicit backroom card game going on in each of them, a vice paradise shrouded in cocaine mist and cigarette haze.  This subterranean world of shady inhabitants has of course become a staple of the genre, immediately reminding me of ‘50s film noir like Jules Dassin’s Night and the City and Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street, two especially hardboiled examples that made similarly labyrinthine purgatories of their urban settings of London and New York City.  This is indicative of a greater motif of film noir, stemming from Weimar cinema, to make the city a character in and of itself.  The setting is almost always a metropolis, where it is somehow always night, and is an irredeemably sinister place where the threat of danger lurks around every corner and lies rooted in the very modernity that defines it.  The city plays the role of omniscient narrator: inescapable, dictating the terms by which the game is played. 

Instead of an actor like the inimitably exuberant smart-ass Richard Widmark (the star of both NatC and PoSS), our anti-hero is played by the much more fitting Rudolf Klein-Rogge. Widmark’s characters are very much of their time (the late ‘40s and early ‘50s); manic and cocky as they bounce around the frame like a ping-pong ball.  Similarly, Klein-Rogge plays Mabuse in a manner befitting the silent film era.  He’s more of a caricature than a character, always playing one emotional extreme or the other.  He is mechanically aloof until he flies into one of his fits of rage and becomes a whirlwind of melodramatic facial expression and embellished movement.  He is almost a cartoon villain at points, pseudo-menacing eyebrow raised in silent mocking of the characters he manipulates to no end.  Mabuse’s archetypal, now cliché, qualities are not due to the actor’s shortcomings, but a casualty of some now-risible traits of silent filmmaking.

Mabuse’s incomprehensibility is exactly what makes him such an effective villain.  He’s a greedy gangster looking out only for himself, an amoral hedonist in a world that takes itself far too seriously.  He is transgression incarnate: thief, killer, gambler and actor.  Operating under the guise of a psychoanalyst, he is a modern continuation of Weimar cinema’s obsession with the mystical, hypnosis in particular (as is seen in Caligari, Warning Shadows, etc).  He is trusted because he is a doctor, one of the universal bastions of society.  When something as supposedly incorruptible as medicine is turned against us, as is the case with Dr. Mabuse, can anything be trusted at all?  By making us fear the very aspects of modern times that we hold sacred, Mabuse is emblematic of both the nihilistic film noir spirit and the unpredictability that defined the Weimar Republic — he even causes a mini-recession of his own, early in the film, just to prove he can.

State Attorney Von Wenk nicknames Mabuse “The Great Unknown,” and that’s exactly what he is: the omnipresent, inscrutable threat to Weimar society.  This idea of the menacing unknown would carry on into American film noir at the zenith of the Red Scare during the Cold War, most noticeably in Robert Aldrich’s 1955 classic Kiss Me Deadly.  A deceptively simple b-movie about a private eye on the hunt for a mysterious box (“the great whatsit” as one character calls it, echoing Mabuse), the box in question represents the nuclear paranoia that had taken hold of American society, and in the end it blows up, literally bringing about the apocalypse.

Mabuse’s tone may be foreboding, but it doesn’t get anywhere near as dour as much of the American noir it influenced.  Just as Weimar art of the ‘20s was obsessed with the disillusionment that followed the country’s crippling WWI defeat, American hardboiled fiction of the ‘30s supplied constant commentary on the woes of the Great Depression.  Princes had turned to paupers, steady, middle-class families had seen their whole life savings go down the drain and all of a sudden America was seeing things the Weimar way.  This nationwide change in attitude, alongside an exposure to edgier, more outré fare such as Mabuse allowed for a novel like James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice to be so successful upon its 1934 release.  A depressing parable of senseless cruelty and moral depravity, the book was immediately banned in Boston for its mix of violence and eroticism.  The public flocked to it anyway, realizing what it was: a grand literary statement for the times and an indictment of the American Dream.  Although Cain does not offer sustained social criticism in the narrative, the Great Depression is simply taken as a given, something constant in every character’s life and a factor in his or her motivations.  The characters are victims of a society traumatized by national economic disaster but driven by myths of limitless opportunity and success, regardless.  They impulsively follow the American Dream, and when they have finally attained their goals they find that all they have really secured is their own defeat.  It may have not been a carefree read, but neither was the common American disposition of the time.  In one fell swoop Cain uprooted the American Dream and showed the perverse underbelly of it all, in concise enough terms that it could ring true with anyone.  The disenchanted hardboiled fiction that rose to prominence in America as a response to the Depression, like Postman, would not have been possible without the template offered by Weimar cinema.  The noir tendencies that emerged from films like Mabuse are just as significant for their (however accidental) influence on the culture of rest of the world as they are for their function in German Expressionism itself.

Mabuse may have film noir inclinations, but it is still a work of German Expressionism at heart — that is to say, it is very much of its time.  The climax, for example, in which Mabuse goes mad in a cell of his own creation, is all over-the-top imagery and surreal symbolism.  It’s fantastical in a way that the rest of the film is not, but it still works.  Mabuse has just escaped from the police by way of a trapdoor and a trek through an underground tunnel, emerging in the lair his late henchman Hawasch used for counterfeiting money.  He locks the door on accident, and realizes there is no escape.

Mabuse cowers, pushed into the bottom corner of the frame, attempting to inch away from the creepy blind counterfeiters who begin to surround him.  The blind men dissolve, and in their place are the ghostly apparitions of the four characters whose deaths Mabuse has been responsible for over the course of the film.  They walk toward him in a zombified trance, following him to the table.  They are his inner demons, the skeletons in his closet, and now he is at their mercy.  The film cuts to a shot of the five of them standing around the table.  Mabuse is visibly stupefied as he looks at them pleadingly.  They stare him down with the intense, accentuated, bugged out eyes that can only be found in a silent film.  He sits and they follow his lead, one of them pulling out a deck of cards ominously.  “Take over the bank, Dr. Mabuse,” he intones, letting the cards fall from his fingers as he does so.  Mabuse shuffles the deck and begins to deal, never taking his eyes off his unwanted companions.  He reveals his cards, expecting to win as he always does.  Another of his victims calls him a cheat and they vanish as suddenly as they materialized.  The camera is slightly askew as Mabuse begins grabbing and throwing the counterfeit money in a fit of deranged excitement, first at the blind men in the corner, then at the camera (thus the viewer himself) and finally up in the air above him, letting his capitalist confetti rain down all over the room.  Turning around, he watches in horror as the clock on the wall anthropomorphizes into the mechanical version of a human face, itself staring him down.  Mabuse is caught between a rock and a hard place as he falls backward onto a pile of his fake money on the table, unable to tear his eyes away from the assorted pipes and machinery in the room that are sprouting human features and coming to life.  Mabuse’s world is revolting against him and he has nowhere to run.  Not even his riches can save him.  Exhausted, he collapses on the floor in yet another pile of fake money, rubbing his face in it, trying desperately to escape from the absurd modern technology Grand Guignol of a nightmare his life has become.

As Tom Gunning points out, “The image of a man ‘holding all the cards’ is, of course, an image of control and power” (Isenberg 99).  As soon as the ghost pulls the deck of cards out, the role reversal becomes clear.  The viewer knows Mabuse is about to get his comeuppance.  The climax is hyper-imaginative, but it needs that over-the-top quality in order to carry the weight of the climax’s role in the story.  This is the culmination of a long (four-hour!) film.  Without the amplitude that the bag of visual effects tricks brings, it would be literally anti-climactic.  By presenting this scene of Mabuse losing his mind as a sensory overload, it gives the film the visceral quality it needs to send the viewer off on an intense emotional note. Mabuse’s cocked eyebrow, once raised in arrogant defiance, has become a thing of the past, and in its place is merely the vacant stare of a madman.  Mabuse is left with nothing but counterfeit bills and four blind men: when all is said and done, his empire is worthless. 

The film’s climax harkens back to a little over halfway through the film when, revealing who he is as a character, Mabuse proclaims, “There is no love — there is only desire.  There is no happiness — there is only the will for power!”  This line exposes Mabuse’s deep-seated cynicism and, consequentially, the universal cynicism of the times.  Coming from Mabuse, however, it is as much a celebration as it is a condemnation.  Nothing is fair.  No one is righteous.  The deck is loaded.  The game is rigged.  In the land of the contemptible, Mabuse is king.