EXCERPT LOVERS, FILMMAKERS AND NAZIS: FRITZ LANG’S LAST TWO MOVIES AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY MICHAEL TRATNER

In the 1930s, the filmmaker Fritz Lang fled Nazi Germany and remade himself into one of the most successful Hollywood directors, producing hit films for two decades. Then he did something unusual: he went back to Germany to make two peculiar movies, one a two-part remake of a 1921 epic on which he had been a screenwriter, the other a black-and-white sequel to the last movie he had directed before leaving his native land. He then never made another movie, though he lived for sixteen more years, moved back to Hollywood, and received numerous offers, some of which he worked on but none of which he completed. Something in those two last German movies altered Lang; he said that in making them he felt a “circle beginning to close” (qtd. in Bogdanovich 111). The phrase suggests that these films represented to him a way to tie together his whole career, and indeed his whole life: they served some sort of autobiographical function, revisiting and recasting his past.

Besides being a fantasy of rescuing Von Harbou (and Lang) from Nazi influences, this movie is a meditation on what happens to individuals when they are surrounded by an extensive film industry that permeates even their private lives, a problem Lang felt acutely in Weimar when the film industry and his marriage could not be separated. Lang could easily have felt that his love of Von Harbou had in a sense “seduced” him into collaboration with the Nazis in his filmmaking, but his last movie suggests a much larger problem in his life: that movies and politics may have shaped his feelings even before he met Von Harbou, so that his love for her was itself in part a product of the social forces that were leading the Nazis into power.

Both of Lang’s last two movies focus intently on the question of whether or not seemingly private love affairs can be manipulated or even created by outsiders seeking political ends. In The Indian Tomb, Ramigani tries to get the dancer to fall in love with the Maharajah, or at least to fake that love, because Ramigani believes that such a love and the ensuing marriage would lead to regime change. He fails to create even the illusion of love, and the true lovers—the dancer and the architect—escape to live happily ever after. That movie is a fantasy about love triumphing over outsiders’ efforts to control it.

The last movie is much more disturbing. In it, the good love affair that the movie suggests that Von Harbou was already “hypnotized” by something like Nazism when she and Lang fell in love. Lang and Von Harbou then both were caught up in the story of the rise of Nazism, and their love affair was partly a product of that larger story. We could say then that Lang fell into a movie already in progress when he fell in love. The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse goes to great lengths to show precisely that conclusion, that when the hero Travers falls into love, he is falling

into a movie directed by someone else. Travers watches through a one-way mirror as Marion is abused by her awful husband, and when the husband finally threatens her with a gun, Travers bursts through the mirror, snatches up the gun, and shoots the husband. It appears exactly as if Travers is breaking through the screen into a movie and changing its plot. Later we discover that this entire scene was a fraud—the gun is a fake, the husband is a fake, the woman is not married to anyone, and Travers was set up to break through the mirror in order to get him to fall in love with the woman. The rescue of Marion from a vicious lover was in effect a Hollywood movie staged for Travers, and he falls for it and into it. When he jumps through the screen, he is then not disrupting a plot, but just fulfilling his assigned role in a movie in progress. We even see that the “screen” he breaks though—the mirror—is just a stage prop in a larger movie, because just after he breaks through the one-way mirror, the camera pulls back and we realize we have been watching everything on a TV screen, the screen from which Dr. Jordan, the man who thinks he is Mabuse, is directing this entire plot.

The movie implies that there is no space in any person’s life which is not in a movie already in progress and written by someone else. This movie has numerous lines in it about the sense that everything is under surveillance, subject to public display and control. For example, there is one exchange where Marion says to a policeman, “this is my personal life and none of your business,” to which the cop answers, “when the police are involved, there is no personal life.” It is precisely this interchange of dialogue that I think finally gets at the core of the issue which haunts Lang’s last movies and turns them into very strange autobiographies. These movies— and perhaps all movies—imply that private life is subject to policing, and that such policing is carried out by the action of movie cameras. This policing is much more than simply catching people after they have committed crimes; rather, it operates by creating the scenery of private life in the first place so that people find their own desires leading them into plots that subject them to public control. Lang’s last movie implies that people are acting out stories they have been provided, “autobiographies” which they end up writing by performing acts shaped by such things as the movies they watch. what permeates almost all Lang films, that the private and public stories in which people find themselves inserted are at odds, and that to eliminate this division, to have one “autobiography, is impossible.