I’ve been working my way through the silent film era in Germany recently, and I have to admit that silent film is one of those things that takes getting used to. The pictures are often grainy (1920’s Golem), the stories are often abbreviated (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), and scenes take far too long to play out for too little payout (Spiders). What do we expect? After all, these pictures are some of the first of their kind. Dr. Caligari, for instance, is the first horror film. Just like with Alfred Steiglitz, we need to make allowances for the fact that movies have improved from that day to this. And, like Steiglitz, we (or at least I) can appreciate them for their experimental nature.
So in the spirit of forgiveness, I watched Pabst’s silent masterpiece Pandora’s Box on Netflix last week. This is my favorite German silent movie I have ever watched (though to be sure I am still watching them). And the key to the success of the film can be laid upon the talents of Louise Brooks, who brings her magnetic presence to the screen. Pandora’s Box was her masterpiece.
Synopsis
The film takes place in four parts. In the first part, Louise plays Lulu, a somewhat frivolous show girl who gets a wealthy man to marry her, despite the fact that she knows he is wrong for her. She is the quintessential woman who uses sex (outward beauty) to get what she wants. Barbara Stanwyck would play the same sort of creature in 1933’s Baby Face, the film that got Hollywood serious about the Production Code; but this role is far, far darker. At the beginning of the film, Lulu is not a serious person. Instead, she dances gaily, protected by the world of wealth and privilege that he has access to. He is so distraught by the fact that she has seduced him that he offers her a gun and tells her to kill herself. “It’s the only thing that can save us,” he says. That’s hardly fair, so she murders him on their wedding day (she is Pandora, after all).
The second segment of the film takes place during her trial. She is found guilty, but she escapes with the man she actually loves. They are free to love one another, but the cocoon of wealth that protects her from the harshness of life is stripped from her.
The third segment takes place on a ship at sea. Her lover turns out to be a gambler and he owes money to someone. She is sold to a guy (for $300!) who is planning on bringing her back to be one of his prostitutes in his seraglio in Cairo. Her only hope is that her lover can win enough money at the gambling tables to save her from this terrible fate. Well, if you have read any novel ever, you know that he’s going to fail. And voila, he fails. Predictable, really.
But, deus ex machina, they escape and go to London, where the fourth and final scene takes place. There, Jack the Ripper is murdering women, and (once again, voila) she meets him on the foggy streets, where she is working as a prostitute. She lures him back to her room, but he tells her he doesn’t have any money. He draws his knife and is preparing to kill the evil prostitute. In a series of close-ups which draw closer and closer to the faces of these two lonely people, Louise Brooks shines. Her electric personality made Pabst focus on her as a great star. She says, “Come up anyway. I like you.” They go in together, but the psychopathic killer’s itch to kill cannot be overcome. After he places a mistletoe above her head (like halo of an angel, really), he kisses her and, seeing the glint of a knife on the table, kills her. All Lulu really wanted was someone to love her, not for herself alone, as Yeats would have it, but for her yellow (or in this case her black) hair.
To see the appeal of Louise Brooks, watch this clip from Pandora’s Box:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1CHyM1TZOM
Why Haven’t You Heard of Louise Brooks?
Okay, I don’t know that you haven’t heard of her. I hadn’t heard of her, so I looked her up. And she is fascinating. She was a true rebel girl and fought against Hollywood’s studio system, which she thought was exploitative. This ruined her career, as explained in the following clip from a self-righteous documentary about how Hollywood used to censor people’s free spirit and artistic talents:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bk7hLN44-uM
“That Hollywood treatment is murderous, just murderous. You’re not a person anymore. The people who you’ve been to dine with and spent weekends with, they look at you. It isn’t as if they’ve rebuffed you. You don’t exist anymore.”
Louise’s Life
In an interesting article in New York Magazine (May 31, 1982), Gael Greene, currently famed and fabled restaurant critic who is a frequent judge on Top Chef Masters, then author of Dr. Love (wow!), writes a book review of Louise’s autobiography, entitled Lulu in Hollywood. Gael writes of Louise’s days as a Ziegfeld girl, but leaves out the fact that her bob haircut is to this day still called a Louise Brooks. But other details catch the eye of Sex and the College Girl, Dr. Love, and Delicious Sex.
Louise Brooks has survived, precariously, to 75, but her career after Pabst seemed like the proof of his prediction [about her being exactly like her character Lulu]. Careless about her work and her love life, she drifted into worse and worse roles, and never married any of her numerous lovers. She could have had George Marshall, the owner of the Washington Redskins, but “my heroes were men of action who pursued death unyieldingly.” Following a spell as a ballroom dancer and a failed comeback attempt in the late thirties, she was a salesgirl at Saks, then gave up the charade of being “an honest woman” to be kept by three men.
She left all three. I presume that Gael thinks she should have played the game better. But, like Veronica Lake, who famously said “I’ve reached a point in my life where it’s the little things that matter… I was always a rebel and probably could have got much further had I changed my attitude. But when you think about it, I got pretty far without changing attitudes,” Louise was her own woman, but unlike Veronica Lake her attitude ruined her career.
Her Rediscovery By the French
The French, careful discoverers after-the-fact of fine things foreign like film noir and Jerry Lewis, rediscovered her in the 50s. (For a complete timeline of her life, see here)
Then, after she became famous, she started writing books. Her life as an outsider began to fascinate people who were hoping to place her experience into a historical framework so that they can feel superior to their shady past. And it was at this point that she granted an interview to a film critic, which she made in a dowdy house coat:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02xMWmc64ps
Her frankness is shocking sometimes: “It was very hard for him to find a beautiful woman in Europe. Did you know that about Europe. They weren’t beautiful all over” (5:45) (if you think she is lying, take a look at a picture of German film star Pola Negri):
But by far the best part of the interview comes at 7:10, when she begins talking about her relationship with Pabst. He was an intellectual, and she…well, she was not:
Louise: “He knew instinctively that I was Lulu. And that was fine in the picture. Making the movie was perfect. He’d just turn me loose, and I’d be alright. But off the set, he wanted me to be an intelligent woman, a well-disciplined actress, and I just wasn’t. He was taking drinks out of my hands; seeing that I was kept in my room. He was furious, because he approached people intellectually, but you couldn’t approach me intellectually, because there was nothing to approach. He was always a little bit mad at me.”
Interviewer: “At the same time, he was aware that you were a Lulu.”
Louise: “Oh, absolutely. But he didn’t like it.”
In other words, she was the uninhibited woman who had lesbian affairs and who posed for pictures like this one:
That sort of frankness and self-awareness in an actress is extremely rare .
Compare Her With Britany
Compare the ironies of Britany Spears’ Circus.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVhJ_A8XUgc
She sings about there being ‘only two types of people in the world / The ones that entertain, and the ones that observe.’ Well, she is not the watching type. ‘Don’t like the backseat, gotta be first.’
That’s fine. Everybody’s like that, I suppose. But (again like everybody) she wants people to follow her. Well, I have a problem with that. As she is telling people to follow her, her life was a circus train wreck, and I for one can’t reconcile the image stuck in my head of her with a shaved head with her telling her to “follow me, show me what you can do.” Why, I ask myself, would anybody want to follow her?
The key to understanding what she thinks she is doing is to focus on Britany’s sense of tradition. She is following in the path tread before her by Madonna and Jane Birkin. She divides the world into those who lead and those who follow. She is a leader, so everyone should follow her, not into the ‘reality’ of her life, which, like Lana Turner’s life is sad and pathetic, but into her fantasy life, which is fantastic.
I don’t really have a problem with that, as long as I know that she is talking about a fantasy. And I think the American people understand that, as well. Whether Britany understands that is a separate matter.
The Difference
The difference between intellectual art and life itself becomes apparent when you think about this. Marx, like all moderns, thought to elevate himself above himself in hope that from his elevated position he could see all. He was mistaken. By his mistaken belief that he had reached the end of history, he turned the intellectual environment on its head. Nature had been corrupted by false values held by the falsely conscious. They needed to be corrected by their betters. Man Ray would also attempt to forgo the temporal dimension of life for a static view of life which rearranged life in an a-temporal space.
But there will always be Lana Turners collapsing who don’t tie themselves back to the literary and intellectual world. And I think that Louise Brooks articulates the difference better than most from the point of view of those who are not intellectuals. They live their lives without the intermediaries of an intellectual framework. And when Pabst—or anybody else—attempted to control them, they fled. And yet, she seems to understand her predicament in ways that Britany Spears, who still expect people to follow her into decadence, if not insanity, never does.
Rather than following Britany, Madonna, and Jane Birkin back to the body, we need some intellectual component to our live that will free us from the terrors that await the live lived raw, as it were, uncooked
But the intellectual component has limits of its own. The tendency to do away with time elevates thinkers like Marx and Pabst and the later Madonna, Lindsay Lohan, Roseanne, Sandra Bernhard, Anthony Kiedis, Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, Mick Jagger, Jerry Hall, Lucy Liu, Rosie O’Donnell, Naomi Campbell, Pierre Lewis, Alex Rodriguez, Donna Karan, Mischa Barton, Britney Spears, David and Victoria Beckham, Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, James Van Der Beek, Heather McComb, Zac Efron, and Lauren Conrad away from their ordinary lives to take up the higher position outside of time from which they can lord their ‘higher calling’ over the rest of us, inviting us to join them from their elevated position in the sky (see my discussion of Shelley’s Adonais in the section of Rousseau and Shelly).
No wonder they look for something else to hang their hat on than fading beauty. And people like Man Ray can provide a more complete, and to some more satisfying, vision than that provided by the classical world’s vision of perfect, symmetrical beauty. But by traveling so far from the world we live in into the world that they can imagine in their minds, they still leave things out of their perfect universes.
There’s something to be said for time. Look at Louise Brooks in her interviews. She’s old! Beauty, on which many of these actors and intellectuals trade, is fleeting. Even an old poet like Ovid knows that. The way to stop time is to travel into your imagination and live there. But Louise Brooks continued to exist long after she could not or would not be seen as existing by those who occupied postitions of power in Hollywood.
Waiting for the Revolution
In the years since I graduated from high school, the world has gradually realized that the revolution that people saw coming hasn’t come. Modernism has been exchanged for postmodernism, which is built on Derrida and his reading of Marx (among a lot of others). We now wait for a postmodern revolution. And until the time that somebody figures out what that revolution will hold, we are forced into a position of overturning the last revolution with the next in an ever-changing, ever-recurring, ever-renewing cycle. Hitler, having been repressed/suppressed, should rise again any day now.
Rather than forgoing the imperfections of the previous configurations of the world, I myself do not want to leave the imperfect pleasures, for a perfect world that must be deferred until the final revolution comes to pass. Such revolutionary fantasies are for children and intellectuals.
One Last Look
Anyway, here’s one last look at the woman, long since dead, who still has the power to inhabit my dreams:
