Issue #353: A Fritz Lang Double Feature Changed My Life
My birthday is on Friday. It’s a perfect time to buy a celebratory newsletter subscription with a birthday note.
I recently had an experience, celebrating someone else’s birthday, where they made a comment along the lines of “I’m not having any more after this.” The idea is that they are no longer aging, or no longer documenting the continued progression of their life with a number in excess of their current age. But it can be read morbidly, too. So I’ll be satisfied with continued birthday celebrations.
This year feels particularly auspicious. Dragon Quest III HD-2D (2024) comes out the day before, so I’ll be experiencing transcendent video game bliss.
I already am, actually, playing Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven (2024). This game is no joke, a full remake of the SNES game that had a previous remaster, with some mechanical upgrades, back in 2017. Party members, including your protagonist, can permanently die. In fact, they will. The game requires the advancing of generations where your player character is replaced by successive ancestors. There is a mechanism of time progression in the game which works as god intended, advancing after a certain number of battles instead of a Persona 3-esque calendar. Every story beat has multiple resolutions which, in turn, cascade into other minor and major differences in the successive story events. Its gameplay is so much more open-ended and dynamic based on player choice than the Mass Effect or Dragon Age series. This was true when Romancing SaGa 2 originally released in 1993. As yet unseated as the emperor of meaningful player choice in video games, this fresh coat of paint and gameplay systems refresh brings it to a new audience.
Revenge of the Seven has three difficulty settings to begin with. The 1993 original was notorious for its challenge. Revenge of the Seven provides the option to dial it back significantly. There is truly no reason not to play this game if you enjoy JRPGs.
This week, I saw two great films at the Brattle Theater, both of which I wrote about. If Erin wasn’t hard at work making something better in photoshop, I would’ve used this image in my (hopefully) retired header image template:
But in truth, one of the more memorable things about my visit to the Brattle was the concessions. They are the unambiguous titans of movie theater eats in the Massachusetts area. It all comes down to popcorn and soda in my book. I love AMC popcorn,and Somerville Theater is also really good. But, as I mentioned about Mr. Pibb last week, I’m off high fructose corn syrup. Somerville leaves me with the anemic option of diet Pepsi. The Brattle, however, has cola with cane sugar. Unbranded, I think, or at least the brand is totally illegible. It’s so good, as is their popcorn. Both Brattle and Somerville use real butter. But Somerville melts it and puts it into a dispenser, Brattle ladles it on. It makes a difference.
The Unsightly World of Fritz Lang’s Beautiful Human Desire and The Big Heat
There is no question regarding Fritz Lang’s place at the top of any superlative list of cinematic auteurs. Until yesterday, Scarlet Street (1945) was my favorite of his works. I haven’t stopped thinking of it since first seeing it in 2021.
Scarlet Street only hints at the savage mind of Lang, but a double feature of Human Desire (1954) and The Big Heat (1953) makes it undeniable. Both films are astonishing in what they put on the screen through the Hays Code. They both pair Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame to brilliant results, exploring different dimensions of human depravity, misogyny, and the enforcement of social order. Human Desire also has a component of class analysis, as the principal problem for the plot is the destitute and momentarily unemployed Carl Buckley’s (Broderick Crawford) murder of the wealthy and sinister John Owens (Grandon Rhodes). This economic motivation is crucial for the film that offers no possibility of redemption for its cast of flawed characters and examines the conditions under which one might harm another.
The Foul Stye of Human Desire
Lang’s Human Desire adapts the same source material as Renoir’s La Bête Humaine (1938), a 1890 Zola novel. But its most important cinematic antecedent is Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), though I haven’t seen any writing about the two together. The similarities are almost uncanny, with the heavy-handed symbolism of trains and plumes of unsightly smog and the setting of a small, uneventful town. The economic condition of each town sets them apart, Desire’s unnamed Oklahoma train town starkly contrasting the idyllic Santa Rosa, California. Class is the additive quantity from Hitchcock’s film to Lang’s, the obscene murder of Owens by Buckley brimming with the subtext of wealth redistribution.
Almost every action in Human Desire is tinged with determinism. Buckley is monstrous, abusing his wife Vicki (Gloria Grahame) as if something out of a textbook or PSA, taking out the vicissitudes of his employment — and eventual unemployment — on her. Buckley looks nothing like Hitchcock’s Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten), but the two have far more in common than they appear. In fact, they are two sides of the same masculine coin.
If Shadow of a Doubt has one failing, it is Uncle Charlie’s exceptionality. He disrupts domestic life and gives young Charlie (Teresa Wright) a monkey’s paw manifestation of her wish to escape familial homeostasis.
As the “Merry Widow” killer, Uncle Charlie is exceptional. Charlie’s only connection to normalcy Hitchcock presents is the fascination with murder of Joseph Newton (Henry Travers) and Herbie Hawkins (Hume Cronyn). The evil he embodies is nearly supernatural, attributed not to the conditions of his upbringing or gendered subject positioning but a bicycle accident on an icy road.
And it’s young Charlie’s acceptance of domestic bliss that finally repudiates Uncle Charlie’s sinister stain.
Lang, by contrast, focuses on evil’s banality in Human Desire. Buckley and Uncle Charlie kill in the same way, by strangulation (though Buckley kills also with a knife). Strangling is associated with perversion in both films, with Buckley himself associated with the kind of perverse exceptionality of Uncle Charlie in Vicki and Jeff Warren’s (Glenn Ford) final argument.
After Warren decides not to kill Buckley, he tells Vicki:
It takes somebody who doesn’t think about anything but himself. It takes somebody who has no conscience and no decency.
Warren believes himself to be accusing Vicki of having “no conscience and no decency,” but he more accurately describes the depravity of Buckley’s act, despite its various motives.
Motive also separates Uncle Charlie, who acts without one, and Buckley, who is motivated manifestly by his abusive and brutish personality but sub-textually by his class position. Characters repeatedly describe Buckley as animalistic, devoid of the impulse control required to function as a law-abiding citizen.
What Buckley appears to lack and the traits he embodies are both features, rather than bugs, of the masculine subject position. His masculinity is what he shares with Uncle Charlie and Warren, his antagonistic foil. Neither Warren nor Buckley seem to be able to control their base urges. Though Warren can’t carry out the killing he plans, he pursues a relationship with Vicki and then abandons her to die at Buckley’s hand. Warren is governed by a different sort of masculine hegemony, one that enforces a standard of propriety that forces him to choose Ellen (Kathleen Case), the symbolic equivalent of young Charlie, over Vicki.
If neither Buckley nor Warren are the masters of their fate, what of Vicki herself? Buckley is the outcome of economic disadvantage and imperilment meeting the most malignant form of masculine subjectivity. Warren fails to live up to his self-righteousness, and, indeed, any other standard set for him. Vicki is a survivor of horrendous abuse at the hands of both Owens, Buckley’s victim, and Buckley himself. But Vicki’s final act is an act, as she commits suicide-by-abusive-husband. She lies to Buckley and tells her that her relationship with Owens was consensual, and even identifies with him:
See if you can understand this. I’m in love with Jeff and he walked out on me. Do you know why? Because I wanted him to kill you and he couldn’t. You never knew me. You never bothered to figure me out. Well, I’m going to tell you something. Owens did have something to do with me. But it was because I wanted him to. I wanted that big house he lived in. I wanted him to get rid of that wife of his. But he wasn’t quite the fool you are. He knew what I was after. And you know what? I admired him for it. If I’d been a man, I’d have behaved exactly as he did.
The story Vicki tells Buckley is different from the one she tells Warren, a tearful account of predation by Owens. Which one is the truth? Though the film leaves some ambiguity, it seems to me that Vicki’s reluctance to contact Owens at the film’s outset suggests her story to Warren is a true account of events. The story she tells Buckley, however, has its own element of truth. It’s the truth of Vicki’s desire; to occupy the masculine subject position she is fundamentally excluded from, to be shielded from the imperilment the feminine subject position occasions, and to have the agency that she believes Buckley and Warren to have. The irony is, of course, that Buckley and Warren aren’t the masculine agents she thinks they are. Like the subject’s admiration of the other jouissance, the freedom Vicki covets is fantasmatic. In fact, Vicki herself is the ultimate exemplar of idealized masculinity through the determination of her choice to die. Buckley, Warren, and Uncle Charlie are manifestations of the actual condition of masculinity, endlessly flawed, always already failed, and violent by action or inaction.
Debby Marsh Taking the Lid Off the Garbage Can
In The Big Heat, Gloria Grahame is again cast in the role of phallic woman (or, perhaps what she has is masculinity without the phallus’s embedded failure) who radically overturns the status quo. Grahame’s Debby Marsh ultimately reveals the sinister plot of Vince Stone (Lee Marvin), her abusive boyfriend, and his boss Mike Lagana (Alexander Scourby) with Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford) following behind her like Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) chasing after Gabrielle (Gaby Rodgers) in Kiss Me Deadly (1955). She says she has taken the lid “off the garbage can,” evoking Shadow of a Doubt’s foul stye.
Similarity of Grahame’s role aside, The Big Heat is a vastly different film from Human Desire. If Human Desire is a film where no one is innocent of inflicting abhorrent harm on another, The Big Heat is more conventional as it presents the triumph of community over the exceptionalism of the one.
Once again, though, it’s Gloria Grahame embodying this particularity, this time as Debby Marsh whose exit is the symbolic equivalent to Shane riding off into the sunset (Shane released only six months before The Big Heat… what a stacked year of movies).
Lang makes sly nods to psychoanalytic theory and desirous self-destructive spirals rather than relentlessly dissecting them. Bannion re-writes the Oedipus complex when he needles his wife (Jocelyn Brando) about her and her daughter competing for his love, and Lagana is a villain because he grew up under the thumb of a domineering mother.
Both works, largely because of Grahame’s characters, are amenable to feminist readings. Instead of a femme fatale, Marsh is the avenging angel of “mink-coated girls.”
In one of the film’s most violent scenes, Stone scalds Marsh’s face with coffee, leaving her with a disfigurement only revealed at the film’s conclusion — where Marsh repays Stone in kind. Divested of her looks, Marsh “breaks the mold” of a kept woman. Because she is outside of that frame, she is able to see clearly her solidarity with women like Bertha Duncan (Jeanette Nolan) even as she is in the moment set apart from Duncan. This notion of shared fate and solidarity is what grounds The Big Heat. Marsh can change the conditions of the life of everyone involved usurping the untouchable crime boss only as a result of her exclusion, becoming the same kind of figure as the ill-fated detective of other films noir. The Big Heat’s tagline is “a hard cop and a soft dame,” but in reality the film shows the opposite. Bannion is a man of family and community, vulnerable as a result but assuming these risks of interconnection, as most do, for society to function. Marsh is the one who is hard, overturning not just the crime boss of her own film but the exceptional position of protagonists across the history of the genre. She fulfills the dream of Vicki Buckley, to live like a (cinematic — fictional) man, and die like one.
The Same Women With Different Faces
All of this close reading perhaps buries the lede. Human Desire and The Big Heat are two of the best movies of all time. Maybe you’ve been reading this newsletter long enough to be able to tell when I’m analyzing a film I loved and when I’m analyzing one I didn’t like so much. I’m not sure if I have any tells. Both movies have exquisite scripts, Alfred Hayes handling Human Desire and Sydney Boehm the screenwriter for The Big Heat. Human Desire is hard to watch at times, because of its subject. But for all the descriptions of The Big Heat as “violent,” “cruel,” and “ruthless,” I found the movie to be a joy.
Lang, Hitchcock, and Melville, are relentless in pummelling the ideas in their works into nothing but sights and sounds. To close read them is to excavate artifacts of spurious value from the self-evidently sublime. But Lang doesn’t leave a moment unworthy of thought, especially in Human Desire which is as dense a movie as has ever been produced. In a moment of comic relief between Buckley and Vicki’s friend Jean (Peggy Maley), she remarks to him, “All women are alike. They just got different faces so that the men can tell them apart.” Jean is focused on the disjunction between sight and substance, also quipping “most men I know see much better than they can think.”
These rapid-fire lines are suggestive of how Lang positions women in his film, as vulnerable but ultimately unseen under a regime of masculine hegemony that conflates the feminine subject position with a constrained horizon of life. At the same time, what femininity conceals as a result is the agency that is constantly bursting onto the screen in film noir after film noir, no more so than in these two films.
If sight and thought are opposed to one another, then filmmaking and criticism are opposite poles of a dialectic. Following Lang’s example, sight distinguishes between that which is actually similar while thought works to disentangle apparent similarities — or rearrange seemingly self-evident groupings. It is only Vicki Buckley and Molly Marsh who turn thought into action, changing what the world will see as a result. They’re different women with the same face.
Weekly Reading List
I don’t have much interest on commenting on the election until I can give the last word on it. But there are some other reasonable commentaries on the result.
I have never known Jessa Crispin to be a strict Freudian, but I couldn’t help noticing this bit:
In the lead up to the election, I had a lot of trouble processing the cognitive dissonance of being told over and over again “this could be the end of democracy” while seeing no one acting with anything that resembled urgency. Do you ever have those nightmares where a threat is looming — a house is on fire, there’s someone bad lurking just out of sight — and you can’t seem to convince anyone to run or to help? Yeah, like nine months of that.
Of course, the dream of the child who reminds the father of his ongoing immolation in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) is unmistakable in its similarity to Crispin’s own dream.
Crispin goes on to allegorize the election outcome through her unpublished review of That Librarian (2024). Not for nothing, despite this being a relatively popular book, I read the title as That Libertarian at least the first four or five times I saw it written in Crispin’s piece.
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-eighteenth-brumaire-of-donald-j-trump/ — Peter E. Gordon writes for The Boston Review about the election with the intertext of Marx’s “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (1852). Pessimistic Marx is my favorite, and Gordon makes a great deal of this affect, quoting from “Brumaire,” “Everything that exists has this much worth, that it will perish.” Gordon seems at least nearly as pessimistic when evaluating the electoral aftermath:
Some will—convincingly—cast blame on the elitism and inertia of the Democratic party, which cleaved to its habits of liberal centrism and dismissed the grievances of the working class. Others will blame the Democrats for prioritizing issues of sexual or racial identity over the universalism of economic justice; still others will blame the brute misogyny and racism of the American public. Others will blame those groups who, moved by justified anger over the U.S. support for the devastation of Gaza, cast their lot with fringe candidates such as Jill Stein, motivated by a moralist’s belief that “sending a message” was more important than voting for somebody who might actually have won. All of these critics capture at least some share of the truth; social reality is infinitely complex, and our explanatory instruments always shed only a partial light on what we do. But we would be well advised to consider the most obvious fact: that the tragic ascent of Trump is not an anomaly to democracy but its fatal flaw.
The fatal flaw that Gordon diagnoses is this, “Democracy without content becomes a mere spectacle, a void organized around the two poles of ‘the leader’ and ‘the people,’ filled with nostalgic images of national and racial community.”
Though I find the connection between “The Eighteenth Brumaire” and Trumpism that Gordon draws very convincing, the conclusion seems insufficient to account for what exactly is going on here. Trump is an extremely elastic political signifier, encompassing regime-overturning iconoclasm, pious institutional regression, overdetermined masculinity, and paternal authority, among other things.
But this idea of community is an important part of the story. Naïve Trump supporters, numerous though they are, believe his ascension will mean a fundamental change to behavioral propriety across the nation. My guess is homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and misogyny will be more prevalent, but no more tolerated in most spaces anyone would ever want to be in. Indeed, there is a third pole, that of the other, the group of supposedly unified “liberal elites” who condescend to the “silent majority” (in practice, extremely loud). Votes for Trump are cast as much to spite this group as anything else. But they are, if not a total conservative invention, imagined to the extent that they represent the majority of non-Trump voters. Not just inclusion, but exclusion, is the mandate of U.S. democracy that has transformed the abstract voting one doing their civic duty into an agent full of ill-intent when they cast their vote — regardless of for whom.
Until next time.