The Damned (1969, Luchino Visconti) (Patreon)

36/100

Bear with me. I'm gonna come at this one in a roundabout way.

In my youth, I wanted to be an actor, and spent several years (between high school and college) doing semi-professional theater in the Bay Area. The way traditional acting works is this: You, the actor, are given a text to perform, the play. You read the play. You memorize all of your character's lines, and the cues that prompt them. (If you're any good at all, essentially the whole thing gets committed to memory. I could usually perform every other role in a pinch.) Occasionally—and this tends to happen more frequently with the very best plays—you come upon a line or an action that makes no sense to you, that seems out of character or otherwise inexplicable. The text is the text, though, and the playwright is theater's God; always, always, you assume that they knew what they were doing (which may or may not actually be the case) and reapply yourself to understanding the intention of that seemingly discordant exchange. "If I'm not getting this, it must be my fault. And my job is to make it comprehensible to an audience. So I have work to do, whether on my own or in conjunction with my fellow actors over the rehearsal process."

(Some of you have leapt ahead: Ah, there must be something in The Damned that Mike found inexplicable. No. This film is almost painfully clear. I told you it'd be roundabout.) 

Obviously, there's a significant—what the hell, let's call it critical, haha—difference between performance and reception. No point in being a critic if you're gonna give the benefit of every doubt to every work in every respect; nobody wants to spend his/her life rationalizing Rob Marshall's poor decisions. All the same, there are, very broadly speaking, two kinds of film critics, who I'll term sadists and masochists. The popular conception of a critic is fundamentally sadistic: "I'm the authority here, qualified to determine what's treasure and what's trash. Here's why this particular movie is awesome, or wretched, or okay, or forgettable. Trust my learned judgment." On the other end of the continuum reside critics—there aren't many of these, but they exist—who strive to exercise humility, at least when it comes to filmmakers they revere. Like an actor dedicated to figuring out what Stoppard meant by that (because otherwise how can they communicate it to spectators?), the masochistically-inclined critic places the filmmaker on a pedestal of near-infallibility, such that any apparent flaw must reveal an embarrassing lapse in comprehension on the critic's part. The vast majority of critics fall somewhere in between, striving to achieve the right mix of quasi-objective analysis (here's what the movie is doing) and highly subjective assessment (here's what I thought of that). Most, though, are ultimately more sadists than they are masochists. Myself very much included. 

But I'm tryin', Ringo Visconti. I'm tryin' real hard to be the shepherd.

What prompted all of that throat-clearing—apart from my having come up with nothing worth reading when I initially tried to just dive directly into the movie itself, as I normally do—is the way that this sadist/masochist dynamic sometimes gets complicated by extratextual knowledge. I didn't care for Let the Sunshine In, mostly because it treats Binoche's protagonist as the sum of her largely self-debasing sexual relationships, affording her virtually no other pursuits or interests, as if that woman were of interest solely in juxtaposition to men. Had that film been written and directed by dudes, I wouldn't have hesitated to call it sexist bordering on misogynistic. But since I knew that it was directed by Claire Denis, and written by Denis with Christine Angot, my (brief) review opens by rhetorically asking whether I even have the right to be offended. And so it is here (finally!): The Damned, set during the Weimar-to-Nazi transition (it begins with a dinner party that takes place on the night of the Reichstag Fire), overwhelmingly struck me as a grotesque study in equating the German aristocracy's lack of moral fiber with various forms of what would have been considered, both in 1933 and in 1969, sexual perversion: homosexuality, cross-dressing, incest. The Nazi Party was allowed to flourish, it seems to suggest, because those in the best position to oppose them were warped and depraved. Not only is this horseshit, it's repugnant horseshit, not far removed from the way that cretins nowadays reflexively accuse anyone they hate of being a pedophile. Yes, the Nazis actually were evil, but those who tolerated and sometimes profited from that evil, while arguably evil themselves, were nonetheless ordinary citizens (represented in The Damned by Dirk Bogarde's Friedrich, who ought to have been its central figure), not deviants. And even if one wanted to metaphorically represent soul-sickness in that way, dressing up like Marlene Dietrich and molesting small children are not the same thing. 

Again, though, I know perfectly well who Visconti was. So there's a masochistic part of me that wants to discount my reaction, on the grounds that it's absurd to think that this filmmaker would have intended to depict queerness as depravity, or to equate it with incestuous behavior...even though it's hard for me to imagine any other reading (and contemporaneous reviews, when I looked them up, often made the same charge, e.g. Kael: "Anyway, whatever Visconti’s intentions are, I think he’s not using decadence as a metaphor for Nazism but the reverse: he’s using Nazism as a metaphor for decadence and homosexuality"). Spent some time trying to persuade myself that Visconti had made a non-musical version of Cabaret, which I mostly like with some reservations. (The Damned predates Fosse's film, but was made three years after the show premiered on Broadway.) Ultimately, though, my masochistic efforts take me only so far—not very, to be honest. I don't think for a moment that Van Sant meant to obscenely trivialize Columbine's victims, but I still strongly believe that he did. And for all The Damned's doomily gorgeous lighting (every interior dazzles and suffocates) and impeccably reptilian performances (plus Charlotte Rampling, superb as the lone figure of sympathetic decency), it makes its case against the Krups (more or less) in a way that I had considerable trouble stomaching. Nor would a different interpretation somehow miraculously ennoble didactic dialogue like "Nazism, Günther, is our creation. It was born in our factories, nourished with our money," or make it less unintentionally hilarious when Sophie looks through Martin's baby things after they fuck. I gotta be me, and methinks this is a pretty bad motion picture. 

Least explicable thing I've seen in a while: After expressly setting the film on the night of the Reichstag Fire, Visconti has a police officer give the date, in a report, as 18 February 1933. (It's not a flashback.) I know they didn't have Wikipedia back then, but come on.