The Machinery of Death and Desire: Modernist Landscape in the Films of Fritz Lang

Julie Grossman

Tom Gunning. The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity. London: BFI, 2000. xiii + 528 pages. $49.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

Tom Gunning’s The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity is a vast and insightful study not only of Fritz Lang’s body of work but also of the place of his films in the context of modernism. The book is structured around the idea of the Destiny-machine, Gunning’s image for Lang’s representation of fate. As Gunning shows, however, Lang’s preoccupation with destiny is less metaphysical than materialist in its examination of technology and the pervasiveness of the machine in modern culture. Hence, the key to Lang’s films, and to what Gunning finds to be the source of their power and poignancy, is Lang’s sense of the constructedness of destiny, since it is people who make the products that will determine their fate. Lang’s characters strive to achieve a visionary role in order to see through to the workings of the Destiny-machine.

Gunning’s themes all in some way work off the idea of the Destiny-machine, which gives his book strong narrative coherence as well as a good deal of depth, since the term works on a variety of levels. Most obviously the idea of the machine serves to reveal the dark powers of technology in Metropolis, but Lang also plays with more domestic forms of technology, such as clocks, telephones, and televisions. It is, however, the more far-reaching resonance of Lang’s Destiny-machine in relation to central features of Lang’s films that constitutes its usefulness as a trope. Gunning is largely interested, for example, in the potential marriage and ultimate tension between the Destiny-machine and the master criminals, such as Mabuse (Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler [1922], the first in the Mabuse series), or Haghi (Spies [1928]). Both of these “grand enunciators,” as Gunning calls them, attempt to gain control of the workings of culture by mastering the psyches of others. Mabuse, in particular, “stands as the archetypal Langian figure who attempts to maintain control of the film’s narrative action and the processes of the Destiny-machine by becoming the master criminal organizer, the energy at the center of the technological web” (100). Gunning notes Lang’s symbolic presentation of this power of the master enunciator in a favorite shot, the close-up of an enunciator who gazes straight into the camera as a means of establishing control and authority.

For Gunning, Lang’s fascination with criminals and the detective genre is two-fold: first, Lang explains the megalomania of the criminal as an attempt to compete with other sources of power (such as myth, politics, religion, and filmmaking) as a determining narrative force; second, crime stories allow Lang to explore the architectural space of the modern city as a forum in which technology gains control of the culture. For Gunning, Foucault’s panopticon illuminates Lang’s view of the modern city, since Lang’s films wish to bring to light the “patterns of alienation” that result from the surveillance of an increasingly labyrinthine system of technologies employed to discipline city dwellers. Thus, M becomes a “Hinge” (as his chapter on M is called) in Gunning’s analysis, because Lang depicts “M” (Beckert, marked as murderer by forces he cannot control) as the perverse emanation of the modern city.

The political implications of Lang’s themes are not lost on Gunning, who is sensitive to their political subtext. As Gunning points out, the issue is complicated by Lang’s own fabulist narrative of his relation to Nazi Germany and his long-term collaboration with eventual Nazi sympathizer Thea Von Harbou. Yet Gunning shows that the logic of Lang’s films reveals the possibility of a critique of the forces that shape and characterize fascism. The commentary on myth in Die Nibelungen may be equivocal: “Even the Nazis were unsure how to view Lang’s film—as part of modern, capitalist mass media cheapening of national myths or as (as Goebbels claimed when he re-issued The Death of Siegfried in 1933) a partner in the cultural renewal they were calling for” (38). Still, Gunning suggests that the film details the appropriation of myth by powers of technology, clearly a harbinger of Hitler’s systematic politicization of myth in Nazi Germany.

Gunning also addresses the fascist undertone of the mob in Lang’s German films. From the burning of “the false Maria” in Metropolis to the collection of gangsters and citizens in M (where Schranker proclaims about the criminal pederast Hans Beckert, “he has no right to live. He must disappear” [187]), Lang’s films shift the point of view from attending to the individual villain to reacting to the fury of the mob, generating in M a surprisingly sympathetic perspective on the criminal pederast Hans Beckert. While what we remember most vividly from M is the wrenching performance by Peter Lorre, Gunning persuasively suggests that Lang is less interested in the psychology of the individual than in how the role of the marginalized individual functions as a symptom of a sick society, a perverted city, an inverted culture, where the criminals, for instance, take on the role of the police. In fact, the fascist potential of the mob is portrayed as dependent upon the erasure of individual identity necessary in the regulation of culture by the systems that discipline our actions, notably the police force.

This erasure of identity is often reflected in Lang’s use of empty space, another symbolic rendering of the workings of the Destiny-machine. As Gunning notes, from Der Mude Tod (1921) on, Lang often shows us emptied space (or alludes to it in off-camera looks), as in the shots of empty domestic space in M that should be filled with the children murdered by Hans Beckert. Throughout his book, Gunning charts Lang’s continued interest in a mise-en scene that replaces individuals with objects, not only placing emphasis (in strongly modernist fashion) on image rather than story or character, but also allegorizing the appropriation of individual identity by other social systems of power.

Gunning’s careful attention to Lang’s mise-en-scene also helps to drive the analysis of Lang’s American films, which, for Gunning, cast the Destiny-machine more pointedly in terms of desire. In his analysis of “The Social Trilogy” (Fury [1936], You Only Live Once [1937], and the generically hybrid You and Me [1938]), Gunning explores the frustrations of deferred desire in capitalist culture. Here, the Destiny-machine converges with American consumerism and “the instability of modern identity” (298), where coherent notions of the self are constantly deferred by the machinery of consumerist desire. Lang’s expression of modernist alienation is thus captured in these films’ exploration of the pressures brought to bear on the average American whose dreams of social status set in motion the workings of the Destiny-machine.

In a section entitled “Framing Desire,” Gunning next analyzes four of Lang’s films usually allied, at least in canonic film histories, with the noir cycle, The Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945), The Secret beyond the Door (1948), and House by the River (1950). While sexual repression and eroticized mise-en-scene play a strong role in these films, Gunning’s book deals more generally with the idea of desire, since the energy of desire in Lang’s films is matched by the pathos in these films’ modernist treatment of loss: the mourning of the limits of experience, the impossibility of mastering loss. For Gunning, Lang’s American films address the attempt to master objects of desire, which often take as their form cultural commodities. An apt metaphor for larger concerns of social and psychic obstacles and the absences that stimulate desire in a commodity culture, the store-window, for example, often appears as a symbol of the barriers that exist between the self and its desired objects of vision.

For Gunning, the “Framed Desire” cycle extends Lang’s commentary on the ways in which the average working male becomes a tool of modernity whose interest (and tragedy, for Gunning, in the case of Scarlet Street’s Christopher Cross) lies in his attempt to gain control of the machinery that regulates his life. Indeed, The Woman in the Window’s Prof. Wanley is “like a well-regulated machine” (288), one of the “clockwork men” (290), and Gunning notes that Christopher Cross “is a timepiece himself” (314). The emphasis on the routine nature of these men’s lives, and their dream of breaking out of their own framed existences (literally a dream, or nightmare, in the case of Prof. Wanley), marks these films as modernist in their critical stance toward middle-class values, the “commodity market, the Destiny-machine of modernity” (329).

While readers might wish for more of Gunning’s excellent analysis of these men’s ambivalent struggles with their status as feminized objects of vision, Gunning does elicit the gender implications of the “private movies” set in motion by Lang’s male characters, since their means of escaping the limits of their experience is to objectify the women they encounter as projected images of their own masculine desirability. Gunning is right to point out that Lang questions the assumptions of the male gaze, taking issue with critics such as Stephen Jenkins and Mary Ann Doane who read these films as more in line with the objectifying vision of their protagonists than they are. As Gunning says, “vision and seeing become a problem [in Scarlet Street], not simply the domain of male privilege” (311). Gunning’s larger treatment of Lang’s fascination with the potentiality of images to mislead extends Lang’s critique of the master gaze and the corrupt vision it engenders. Photography and film, in particular, threaten to deceive, which Lang represents as part of the narrative in Spies, Fury, and While the City Sleeps and as part of his own technique in the red-herring use of image to mislead viewers, as in the false newspaper heading in You Only Live Once or the camera’s confrontation with and temporary erasure of Celia from the narrative of Secret Beyond the Door. Lang’s self-conscious allusions to images that mislead function as a critique not only of the flawed vision of those (read us) seduced by these false images but also of the ways in which those possessing the gaze (read, the grand enunciators, read Lang) exploit their objects of vision to mediate their own desires.

In Gunning’s discussion of the films about “Framing Desire,” the most compelling part of the book’s argument emerges, as Gunning characterizes the struggle of Lang’s fictional people as fundamentally modernist. The artist figures in these films—Prof. Wanley, Chris Cross, Mark Lamphere in Secret Beyond the Door, and Stephen Byrne in House by the River—are all designers, domesticated, dumbed-down versions of the master criminals Mabuse and Haghi from Lang’s German films. What these small-time artist figures share with the grand enunciators, however, is the drive to use their “private movies” as a means of warding off death. From its earliest and most explicit appearance as a character come to claim its subjects in Der Mude Tod, Death haunts Lang’s characters, as a relentless mark of the limits of their powers and the impossibility of their desires. Like his master criminals, Lang’s artists are betrayed by their creations, which return, with a Freudian vengeance, like figments of a repressed consciousness. The forced confrontation with the pervasiveness of death suggests the value of seeing into things, of being willing to view death at the bottom of it all: “Coming to life again entails accepting that part of you is dead” (234). Lang’s signs of death exist in creepily tangible form: the balloon that marks Elsie Beckmann’s death in M; Emily’s body floating up the river in House by the River; even the ghosts of Kitty and Johnny in Scarlet Street, who belittle Chris Cross from beyond the grave by cooing to each other rather than “haunting” Chris directly.

Gunning’s interpretation of Lang’s films is always enhanced rather than reduced by the book’s investment in large concepts and guiding principles. For example, Gunning offers a fresh and compelling reading of Bannion’s supposed conversion at the end of The Big Heat (1953), as Debby dies to bring down the big heat on Lagana’s mob. From the murder of his wife Katie (killed in a car explosion at Lagana’s bidding), Bannion proceeds like the walking wounded, the morally dead (like Joe Wilson in Fury). But Gunning provocatively suggests that after holding her in contempt for most of the film, Bannion connects with Debby at the end—not because her redemptive self-sacrifice brings him back to life, but because of the very fact that she is dying. Bannion’s empathy with her is thus predicated on death rather than life, which complicates a simplistic reading of the film’s conclusion as a victory for crime-fighters and the living.

The pervasiveness of death isn’t, for Gunning, just an acknowledgment of mortality; it is a corrective to culturally inscribed notions of the genius-artist. Gunning suggests that the critique of romantic visions of the all-controlling artist figure applies to Lang’s own status as filmmaker, as Grand Enunciator. Gunning’s insight into the self-referential nature of Lang’s portrait of the artist supports the book’s proposal to do more than merely pay tribute to the auteurist genius of Fritz Lang. If auteurist studies assume a master at the helm of a film’s production, much of the force of Gunning’s book lies in its submerged application of Lang’s modernist theme of the limits of authorship (the limits of the power of the grand enunciator) to Lang’s own role as artist. If the creation of art is also an act of erasure (“The author’s hand . . . erases as well as writes” [479]), Lang’s films point up the paradox of the celluloid image, since life in film is, of course, only an illusion. The point is synechdochally made in Gunning’s continual reference to Lang’s favorite transition, the overlap/dissolve, the power of which lies in the dissolution, or death, of objects or images as they merge with, or give life to, other objects or images, “piercing through appearance to [the objects’] mournful significance.” Gunning continues, “The dissolve, which seems to reveal an image lurking beneath a previous shot, works as an allegorical device par excellence, stripping away the surface of the world and revealing the bare bones of significance” (27). Throughout his analysis, Gunning emphasizes Lang’s rendering of thematic concerns in visual symbols, noting (with sensitivity to anti-auteurist objections to a “study of Fritz Lang”) that “it is not the script, the written words, that Lang has authored, but their translation into images” (6).

Finally, The Films of Fritz Lang suggests that an important source of Lang’s interest in emptiness and erasure (Lang’s “piercing insights into the emptiness of things” [476]) is the desire to master, to author, to commodify and reify objects of vision. Gunning thus negotiates between analysis of Lang’s role as The Master (which Gunning finesses as Lang’s “imprint” on his texts, the extent to which he “merges” with his films) and the book’s own theme of the limits of authorship: creation as, necessarily, an act of erasure (a register of loss), which must function to some degree as a caveat on auteur studies.

While most of Lang’s themes and much of his expressionist camera work are allied with the concerns of film noir, Gunning doesn’t much discuss Lang’s contributions to the genre. Admittedly, noir is a large and unwieldy term. Still, the characteristics shared by Lang’s films and film noir are important, including the nature of Lang’s vision of the modern city in Metropolis and his insistence on the pervasiveness of guilt in M; as Gunning notes, “The anonymous crowd cloaks the murderer from detection, but also renders everyone suspicious” (177), prefiguring the concerns of original-cycle film noir. Particularly since noir is so indebted to the ideology of modernism Gunning relies on, greater attention to shared sources and preoccupations might help those interested in noir to articulate its parameters.

In a book that does so very much, however, the criticism may be peripheral. The Films of Fritz Lang is exceptional in its attention to detail and its simultaneous commitment to contextualizing these details in larger frameworks. Gunning works the details of each film with careful observation, always coming back to the issues of modernity he wishes to foreground. The book is a capacious project, as it reiterates the tenets of the modernist movement while illuminating the work of one of its most passionate and interesting participants and critics. Gunning’s book is an impressive critical accomplishment, a book that truly resonates, since the effect of reading it is to feel as if we are following the bidding of allegory to gain insight into the workings of the system, to see below the surface of things, even if it’s very dark under there.

Julie Grossman is associate professor of English at Le Moyne College.