Dr Caligari’s cabinet of enigma-shopping malls and grotesque inversions
by Steve McClure

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari is an unsettling film in a carnival-like idiom. The film is set in a fair, depicted in impressionistic terms. Watching the film again, after many years prompted me to pull my dusty copy of the classic book on psychological aspects of German cinema, From Dr Caligari`s Cabinet To Hitler off the shelf. An essay on this film, viewing it in the context of the early post-WWI period, sees it as an anti-authoritarian statement on the failed Spartacist uprising in 1918, with two endings. The first faux ending, with Dr Caligari unmasked as a homicidal lunatic, and the second, with Caligari in the role of humane doctor of an asylum. The writers intended the first ending, the second by those tasked with marketing it. The second ending is most disturbing, suggesting the idea that there is no alternative to authoritarian power (Karacauer 1974).

Walter Benjamin in his essay Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction outlines his position that film, more than any other medium demolishes the aura of art, its cult value, and shifts emphasis to “exhibition of the work” (Benjamin1970). Benjamin found that, reading Marx, increasingly intense exploitation “ultimately would create the conditions to abolish capitalism itself” and that “Fascism renders politics aesthetic, and communism responds by politicizing art”(Benjamin1970). Adorno`s early essays on the Culture Industry evoke the historical context of Weimar, nazism and the long shadow of the Great War. Adorno`s essays contain a certain sense of inescapable inevitability to the logic of commodification. The contrasting perspectives of Adorno and Benjamin suggest an ambivalent role for mass culture, mirrored in cultural artifacts both yesterday and today. Images of the grotesque and themes of inversion are woven into the fabric of the art and culture industries articulated in movies and in everyday life. The Cabinet of Dr Caligari might be used as a metaphor for ambivalence as authoritarism, uncertainty and disorder hover on the margins of the everyday.

The insurrectionist model of the October Revolution failed to transform class relationships fundamentally, but neither has social democratic reformism. Despite the failures of socialism in all its guises, the essential contradictions of capitalism still exist even if the specific configuration of capitalism has changed. The question remains that of what is to be done. For Adorno, the solution was to continue to think, “open thinking points beyond itself” (Adorno 1991:202). Back and forth to an uncertain ending, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari in the visual vocabulary of film addresses the same question of authoritarianism that Adorno and other Frankfort school theorists considered.
Couched in the terms of the grotesque, the film refers to an undercurrent of misrule, carnival, and inversion. Interrogating the historical memory reveals that the grotesque is an ambivalent theme in western culture, at various times frightful or comic. Nikail Bakhtin in his book Rabelais and His World writes that in the grotesque realism of the middle ages degradation, “…means coming down to earth, the contact with the earth as an element that swallows up and gives birth at the same time…” (Bakhtin 1984: 21) Bakhtin goes on to write, that in renaissance and medieval thought …”contrary to modern canons, the grotesque body is not separated from the world…”and that the Romantic and Modern notion of the grotesque “usually expresses fear of the world” (Bakhtin 1984:39). Madness, is integrally related to the grotesque, in renaissance and medieval narratives, it“…makes men look at the world with different eyes not dimmed by “normal” or commonplace ideas and judgments…” (Bakhtin 1984: 39)
Hans Janowitz and Carl Meyer authored at a time when urban modern mass society and culture were crystallizing. Industrialization and urbanization demolished traditional social order, A growing middle class strata of managers and technicians, the remnants of the old order, emerging industrial proletariat and bourgeoisie, all confronted a society based not on organic community, but mechanical (Weber 1947).

In Rites of Spring: the Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, Modris Ekstien describes the growth of Berlin and the rise of Germany as an industrial power. He notes that the rate of change must have been dizzying for Germans experiencing it. The sense one gets from reading historical accounts is one of anxiety. Social and psychological fragmentation was ubiquitous as the old gave way to the new (Ekstien 1989). The same dizzying rate of change continues, institutionalized and normalized, but with a trace of superficiality, as change and newness are expected. Adorno writes in his essay Culture Industry Reconsidered “…the culture industry transfers the profit motive onto cultural forms”(Adorno 1991:99). Commodification has reached every corner of the world, what was once only concentrated in the core might now be also a phenomenon of the periphery. What Germans experienced at the time that this film was made, might now be a reality for everyone, everywhere. This continuity is what makes the cultural artifacts of Weimar Germany still relevant when wandering in the retail landscape of shopping malls.

Stores that appeal to male shoppers, such as Abercrombie, successfully transformed itself from a staid purveyor of sporting goods to a lifestyle store are repeatedly imitated. The formula of specialized fixturing, oversized lifestyle photography, and integrated merchandizing and display follow the pattern. When someone steps into one of these stores, the environment is overwhelmingly homoerotic, with photographic images of Aryan youth strategically placed at key focal points. The photos are reminiscent of Triumph of the Will or Olympiad; and punctuated with massed groupings of headless mannequins displaying the latest in military/sportswear inspired casual clothes. Youthfulness is at a premium, with sophisticated sound systems pumping out techno. Plasma screens show endless loops of well-produced advertising for the total branded look. In the postmodern culture-scape, aesthetics are the content. In a period of endless war, and blatant empire, it is not surprising that the reified image of a surplus army store is reshaped into a marketing motif evocative of Leni Riefenstahl`s classic propaganda images. The idea of macho carelessness and rugged individualism seems to be the hot message in the Abercrombie look for active guys, compatible with SUVs, extreme sports, and frat house beer bashes.

According to Baudrillard, reality follows art in a society where all reality is mediated by technology. Images are as real as the reality they represent. The emergence of California oriented beach shows like the O.C. and the popularity of stores like Hollister point to a possible re-emergence of a California death cult. The west has always been a metaphor for death in euro-American culture; California is the end of the American dream, the end of the frontier (Rickels 1991). The California of our dreams is a place of eternal teenager hood, the denial of death, and the endless summer (Rickels 1991). It is a paradise for Anglos. It’s ironic that the Anglos that moved to California brought with them assumptions based on temperate ecosystems with incremental change, to a Mediterranean ecosystem characterized by catastrophic change, earthquakes, fires, and mudslides (Davis1999). Hollywood is obsessed with disaster, externalizing the real cataclysmic cycles of a Mediterranean ecosystem onto the unreal-as if the periodic disasters were something unnatural instead of routine (Davis1999). We all are going to the happy land of California for another go round.

The grotesque and inversion might be considered one possible avenue of negation in both the formal cultural sphere and in subcultures of resistance. In both spheres, the use of grotesque images suggests a distopian vision, a discomfort with modern industrial society, and a sense of inescapability. In Weimar Germany, youth subcultures of resistance are a footnote to the rise of Nazism. One can trace parallels between the nihilistic punk culture in the wild hiking clubs and renegade youth gangs of Weimar and early Nazi Germany described by Daniel Guerin in his book The Brown Plague: Travels in Late Weimar and Early Nazi Germany. Inversion, petty crime, and rejection of modernity were themes emergent in the youth subcultures described by Guerin, taking inspiration from the novels of Karl May and romantic attachment to the primitive (Guerin 1994). In the reified world of the arts, the New Grotesque recalls German Dada and the images of Otto Dix or George Grosz.

In The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink, Mark Dery writes, … “the New Grotesque gives twisted shape to the pervasive freakishness of the wunderkammer we live in, a media landscape that seems to be populated exclusively by the grotesque, the macabre, and the pathological” (Dery 1999:162). In keeping with the modernist and romantic notions of the grotesque, Dery finds killer clowns in the dark carnival at the end of the millennium (Dery1999). Killer clowns resemble Caligari`s remote control killer somnambulist that marauded out from the fair., and the modern and romantic identification of the grotesque with fear.

In contrast to the New Grotesque of a reifed art industry, Punk culture inverts the negative associations of the grotesque in favor of a celebration of degradation. Punk is one vernacular subculture of resistance to commodification, itself a commodity. Making a distinction between the use and exchange value of cultural products might be relevant, as the content of punk encourages “do it yourself” production and anarchist political action. An ethnographic study of punk cuisine illustrates inversion and the “do it yourself” ethic of punk practice. In The Raw and the Rotten: Punk Cuisine, Dylan Clark in a study of the black Cat Café in Seattle found that “…many punks associate the civilizing process of producing food with the human domination of nature and with White, male corporate supremacy.” (Clark 2004: 19) Foods are purified by way of the dumpster and “…mainstream American food is countered with raw and rotten foods of punks: foods that are ideally natural, home grown, stolen, discarded, and uncommodified” (Clark 2004: 30)

In The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, the question of the ending implies a choice, a choice that resulted in Fascism in Europe a few years after the film’s introduction. As Fredric Jameson noted, film is the definitive medium of modernity (Jameson1999). Mass society and mass culture; determined by the technologies of communication, a one-way communication in hierarchical collective structures of production is a characteristic of modern capitalism. German Weimar films were the most technologically sophisticated cinema , even as Berlin rivaled New York as the center of modern cultural experimentation. (Ekstien 1989).

The current moment resembles in some ways the circumstances of Weimar Germany and the retreat from secular modernism, but differs in others. I watched the film on a plasma screen, from a DVD. Interactive media have replaced film as the cutting edge of cultural production and consumption. In a post fordist system, resistance does not take place only at the point of production, but at multiple points of contestation (Bologna1977). We are a “tribe of moles,” in the words of one autonomous writer (Bologna1977), but we still face the choice between authoritarianism and democracy. However, linking modernism with the late capitalist milieu we find ourselves confronted by at the beginning of the twenty first century, this film is as powerful today as it was when it first hit the movie houses of the 1920s.

Viewing a film as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is like doing archaeology of the present, stripping away layers of our culture to expose the raw kernel of the present, undiluted and unrefined by repetition. Post modern culture is a cut and paste job, a collage of elements from the past, flattened like a Photoshop image. As Fredric Jameson suggests, post modernism is the realization that modernism has happened, and nothing new can happen culturally until the decay and rot of dead history is swept away from the living (Jameson1999). Artifacts of earlier periods can speak to us if the message they carry is still germane. The Cabinet of Dr Caligari is still frightening in a world still shaped by the contradictions, which surfaced at the time of the Great War.

References:
Adorno, Theodor. (1991) The Culture Industry. London, New York: Routledge.

Baktin, Nickhail (1984) Rabelais and His World. Bloomington Indiana: Indiana University Press.

Baudrillard, Jean. (1984) The Evil Demon of Images. Trans. Paul Patton and Paul Foss, Sydney. Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1987, pp. 13-34. Republished in The Continental Aesthetics Reader. (2000) Edited by Clive Cazeaux. London, New York: Routledge.

Benjamin, Walter. (1970) The Work of Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn. London: Jonathan Cape, pp 219-53. Harcourt, Brace and Company. Republished in The Continental Aesthetics Reader. (2000) Edited by Clive Cazeaux. London, New York: Routledge.

Bologna, Sergio. (1977) A Tribe of Moles.
http://www.endpage.com/Archives/Mirrors/Class_Against_Class/moles.html
Clark, Dylan. (2004) The Raw and the Rotten: Punk Cuisine. Ethnology 43(1), 19-31.

Davis, Mike. (1999) The Ecology of Fear. New York: Vintage.

Dery, Mark. (1999) The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink.
New York:Grove Press.

Ekstien, Modris. (1989) Rites of Spring: the Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Guerin, Daniel. (1994) The Brown Plague: Travels in Late Weimar and Early Nazi Germany

Durham, London: Duke University Press.
Karacauer, Sigfried. (1974) From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film.

New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Rickels, Laurence A. (1991) The Case of California. Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted 2001 Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press

Jameson, Fredrik. (1999) Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Janowitz, Hans, and Meyer, Carl. (1920) film on DVD, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari

Weber, Max. (1947) The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, Translated by A.M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons. New York: Free Press.