The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (Patreon)

I try and make a habit of not writing when I'm feeling under the weather, as I think it produces bad work, how could it not, but I'm going forward ahead right now, despite whatever illness I have currently, which I suspect is some lesser version of COVID, or perhaps my mind wants it to be that just so I have a comfortable name to affix to what ails me, giving me a sense of command over what it is, when in reality I know nothing, I am a fool, furtively fumbling in the dark for a dollop of Mucinex.

Fritz Lang.

I want these Patreon pieces to be less stiff, less standalone, less academic than they already are. I am not writing for anyone but people who already know what I write, so I need to be on guard against the artificial conventionality of style. If it sucks, I do not care. I only want to do what is needed now, what feels right.

Watched Lang's final film, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse. Another masterwork from a legend, blah blah, superlatives. It is a necessary film, there is no unwarranted part of it. Talk of 'late style', deterioration, no. Lang has always made Lang films. He made them in 1920 and he made them in 1960. Like the systems he engendered, nothing stopped his formidable gaze. Thomson and Sarris talk of Frankenheimer's freakish TV screened-out style -- Lang was already there in his last film, he was younger than the new generation. In some sense the cinema was invented precisely so that Lang would exist, he is the father of Hitchcock, grandfather of Kubrick and Kurosawa, great-grandfather of De Palma and Ridley Scott, ancient master of PWSA. Lang is the Sphinx of the cinema, a tyrannical liar who nevertheless was second-to-none in his hatred of fascism, his fear of it. He knew the tragedy of the 20th century before it happened, his vision was marked by the first World War, he was blessed and cursed to see what others did not.

monographs.

Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse. I do not want to speak of actors, stories, whatever. Elements matter more to me as I have come to see them through this dark glass provided by Lang and others. In each particular, you see the universal, so there is no need to address a film as product (unless it is nothing but product). Film as entertainment, is useless. There is nothing to entertain when everything is marshaled into the attention economy. Now we must be bored, we must appreciate boredom as the earth consumes us. The dead air is the real thing left, the grace between the gouts of fire and fury. Thousand Eyes has plenty of it in store for us, why it matters.

I can tell you the obvious things: Lang knew of the world where we were not only being constantly watched, but constantly watching each other. Thousand Eyes, the scene where the hero, American Businessman, watches his lover who he saved from suicide from behind a one-way mirror. Voyeurism, but we are also watching him, and then seeing through his perspective, and then noting that we are being watched from the corners and edges of the hotel in which all this takes place. Like in PWSA's Resident Evil saga, Lang extended vision everywhere and nowhere. Vertov thought this was liberating, the free mechanized kino eye that could show the world to be a vivacious and pulsating network of material conditions, that the workers could be radicalized by watching themselves and gaining consciousness of their class system and their role in history.

Well, it's about a hundred years later, and it's safe to say that has not happened yet. What has happened is Lang's prediction: this hyper-awareness granted by the mechanical and then the digital world is not freedom, but paralysis. You can donate to a charity in a few clicks, and not understand anything about the cause or the organization. The digital world has turned our lives themselves into 'content', selling ads tailored to individual persons based on having 24/7 access to everything they do via smartphones and satellites, and we know all this. We know that we are being watched and evaluated and judged and we participate in it instead of turning away. I write movie reviews on a website which has a whole catalog of my taste. If someone wanted to create an AI replica of me, they'd have plenty of data to go off of...

Which is why this is the third Dr. Mabuse film: First Mabuse was a real man, a hypnotist subverting civilization itself seemingly for personal power. Second Mabuse, from Testament, was a ghost in the machine, a mad man who was puppeting the world from beyond the grave through possession -- we have the supernatural coming closer. Third Mabuse is not even being possessed by a ghost, but by the idea of Mabuse, the Mabuse archetype, the self-immolating urge at the heart of the whole rotten enterprise of post-war society, claiming you want piece while building up nuclear stockpiles. Not just a ghost in the machine, but almost a seedling, sprouting from within the damned soil worked-over by the fascists -- it is not a coincidence in Thousand Eyes that the Luxor Hotel's surveillance center is located in the deep basement (like Lang's 1928 Spies), and that a character remarks how buildings too have their own astrological character -- this Mabuse hotel's first brick was laid down in 1944, it is cursed by the legacy of fascism no matter what it is used for in 1960 West Germany.

This mystical aspect of Lang is under-examined by critics, because they lack the nerve to grapple with a subject matter that liberal-centrist consensus reality dismisses out of hand. But why wouldn't Lang be interested in astrology, in hypnotism, in ghosts and spirits? He made Die Nibelungen, which has dwarves and dragons! Lang is a fantasist as much as he is a sci-fi prophet, he is speculative in every respect, even in his more sober American works (remember the seance scene in Ministry of Fear, which occurs in Thousand Eyes verbatim.)

Compare to Hitchcock, Kubrick, PWSA.

From what I have seen, Hitchcock is a good British empiricist, every expression of the supernatural is a surrealist gimmick to him (I have read many critics say that there is this strong Catholic core to Hitch, which I want to inspect more closely as I see the rest of his work).

Kubrick has room for the sublime, the Old Testament YHWH, powers which regard humans as one step in a developmental chain, maybe a misstep. Man misunderstands himself, so how can he understand God? Kubrick laughs as Sisyphus' boulder falls back down the mountain, but he still finds the struggle of this creature to be worthy of consideration. Bathos or Pathos, either/or.

PWSA believes in sub-worlds, nested realities contesting for power as we navigate them. Science and magick are the same for him, it is a methodology of control (the evil overlord's island in Mortal Kombat, Umbrella Corp's hollow earth facilities, Versailles in Three Musketeers, etc.)

Where does Lang fall? The villains in his films are always 'men behind the curtain', all-powerful terrors who can be killed by car crashes and bullets, and in Thousand Eyes, it is the idea of Mabuse that scares more than the instantiation of him. What Lang fears is the demiurge which can function as an invisible God, the calculated mechanized replication of the divine. This is obvious with all the Tower of Babel imagery in Metropolis, but you look at Die Nibelungen, and even there we see this sadness over a 'passing of the age' -- when Siegfried dies, the potential for redemptive heroism goes out the window entirely, and Part 2 of that film is nothing but an anguished death spiral where all parties are debased and consumed in fire -- mankind fucked up what was once good, and now is trying to replicate it with his industriousness, and Lang finds horror in this, he sees the PKD/VALIS version of reality where one day we'll wake up and discover that we're trapped inside of this digital coffin we've built for ourselves and there will be no 'outside', no escape.

Lang ends his final feature film not with this nightmare, but with the villain's sunken car fading into the subconscious of his heroine, as if it emerged there to begin with, and she is woken up by American Businessman, and they share a passionate embrace. Lang is very deterministic, but he also believes there is grace, that love can somehow win out at the end of time. For Lang, the machine system, the fascist system, the Mabuse system, the surveillance system, the system of nuclear weapons, all of these are roadblocks that we acquiesce to out of fear and misunderstanding -- in Thousand Eyes, the only man who figures out Mabuse's plan is a snide life insurance salesman who knows a hustler when he sees one. Lang was near-blind, but with the sight he did have, he tried to show what was both awe-inspiring and awful about the power of images -- like his spies, he was an 'inside man' of the cinema, sounding alarms.

But NASA scientists (many former ex-Nazis) took inspiration from his 1929 film Woman in The Moon for its conceptually accurate rendition of rocketry far ahead of its time -- Lang could see so many things, but they still came to pass. Sometimes I wonder if cinema is one big giant Cassandra Complex -- Eisenstein and Vertov made movies to 'change the world', but does the camera not just tell us what has happened, what will happen? There's no way to abstract ourselves from our historical circumstances, and the filmmaker, the supposed archon of control (which Lang was infamous for) seems like a boy crying wolf for decades and decades, now centuries -- we want the fantasy to actualize us into a better world, but we now live in Lang's reality, we are all being tormented by Mabuse and his ghosts. Can the camera see too clearly, too precisely? Lang was a totalizing master, but his work reflected a totalitarian world...

I think a lot about what David Thomson writes in his Dictionary:

"Lang's adult stories are too concentrated for today's world."