… a loathful dandy dogged by aesthetic qualities he probably detested within himself. The mood was for moderns. Cinematic narratives based on Germanic supermen stuffed into the economy class sized bodies of everyman, but with an ego remaining mythologically gigantic and restless. Fritz Lang and the glorification of the antagonist, an adoration of the unsupportable. Value-neutral against the grain of his own self-aggrandizement. The intellectual transfer of German intelligentsia into the American experience is itself an interesting study in cultural symbiosis and was the path of least resistance in a neurotic post war world.
Hangmen Also Die, (1943)
In terms of social consciousness in relief of post-war German guilt as a cutting edge of moral ambiguity where light and virtue is dark, calculating and restrained (Fritz Lang-Die Nibelung).David Levin cleverly refers to this ”transfer” as ” the dramaturgy of disavowal”, a form of reverse inside out psychology where the poisonous and viperous is ”transparent, naive and exhuberant”. The sentimentality was out of touch and the emotional disconnect was inebriated on Nietzsche and Freud theories of unconscious drives collaborating with a tormented and anguished search for clarity regarding national and cultural identity.
The tactical aesthetic was , ‘‘fending off the complexities of modern life by seeking musical and textual embodiments of an earlier language of feeling.” T he dynamic of Lang and other of the Austrian/German immigres was dealing with a world of evolving culture which to them stood for the embodiment of a language gone astray as language, and as such, centrally represented an impediment to the reconciliation of language and nature. To Lang, the crisis of modernity was paralyzing in its fright, ‘‘modernity invoked a culture that favoured the garrulous, tenacious and, as Thorstein Veblen called it ‘predatory’ personality, able to circulate widely and adapt in any kind of circumstance.”
Lang did however, effectively capture the idiom of fragmentation of local community and the embodiment of strangeness as a common feature of everyday life. As a melancholy bleak assessment of humanity or an antidote to the Hollywood light fare and comedies, this genre of film would also develop its cliches and predictability, whose purported social consciousness was nonetheless blunted by the style’s own form of viewer escapism and its own tendencies to fold back onto itself and promote the same propaganda it set out to counter.
COMMENTS
