Derek Jarman / Wittgenstein / 1993

unspoken contradictions

by Douglas Messerli   

 

Derek Jarman, Terry Eagleton, and Ken Butler (screenplay), Derek Jarman (director) Wittgenstein / 1993 (TV drama)

 

Since I love both the often contradictory films of Derek Jarman and the fully contradictory philosophical thinking of Ludwig Wittgenstein, it would seem almost impossible for me to express reservations about British director Jarman’s 1993 theatrical comic drama about the man who argues, as I have long posited in my own work, that the meaning of words is not something fixed but best understood within their use in the everyday world as a “language game.”

    Rumor has it that Jarman was challenged by producers to attend to a gay figure and his ideas without revealing his ass or penis. The great director achieves the latter, creating at times a quite hilarious farce about the boy genius who had absolutely no ability to control his disdain, sometimes expressed quite physically, regarding his students’ (the youngest especially) and peers’ utter stupidity, and yet could not allow himself the delights of even a soft bed, living often like a religious fanatic—which despite his wild philosophical ideas, his then unacceptable views of human relationships, and his radical viewpoints—he often seemed to really be, attempting to model his life more on Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy (in his later religious phase) than upon any of the conclusions he had come to in his Tractatus and his later Philosophical Investigations, the latter the work of some of his most devoted students who through their copious notetaking in his classes, brought together his major later thoughts. Wittgenstein was the kind of man who might had laid down each night upon a bed of nails if he hadn’t thought such an action was too ostentatious and illogical.

 

“To believe in God means to understand the meaning of life.

To believe in God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.

To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning [ ... ]

When my conscience upsets my equilibrium, then I am not in agreement with Something. But what

     is this? Is it the world?

Certainly it is correct to say: Conscience is the voice of God.”

 

      Jarman quickly mentions that his “hero” had given up his inheritance, making him one of the richest men in Europe, to a group of poets who may never have read (including Georg Trakl, Rainer Maria Rilke, and architect Adolph Loos) and returned to his own wealth to his remaining siblings, three older brothers of whom, Hans, Rudi, and Kurt, committed suicide, his noted pianist brother Paul having lost his arm in World War I. Paul was so respected as a pianist that Maurice Ravel composed for him “Piano Concerto for the Left Hand,” the score of which he hear in this film.

 

    Yet, strangely, given Jarman’s own homosexuality and his obvious attention to major gay figures throughout his cinema oeuvre, he merely mentions, through an aside by the child Wittgenstein (Clancy Chassay), that Ludwig’s brother Rudi was most certainly gay, committing suicide in a Berlin bar by drinking a glass of milk laced with potassium cyanide while a pianist played Thomas Koschat’s “Verlassen, verlassen, verlassen bin ich,” (“Forsaken, forsaken, forsaken am I”). One of Rudi’s several suicide notes referred to what he described as his “perverted disposition,” and earlier he had evidently sought advice from Magnus Hirschfield’s the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, an organization that actively campaigned against Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, which prohibited homosexual sex.

     And even the death of the eldest brother Hans, also a musical prodigy, who at age four could identity the Doppler effect of a passing police siren as a quarter-tone drop in pitch, died quite mysteriously in May 1902, disappearing off a boat in the US Chesapeake Bay very much in the manner of gay poet Hart Crane.

    Although most Wittgenstein commentators and biographers, many with a deep intention of attempting to downplay or even cover up Ludwig’s own homosexuality, describe it simply as the families’ pathological disposition to depression, it might have served Jarman to have even slightly explored this anomaly, connecting the sons’ deaths with the imperious father Karl, whose steel cartel made the family the second richest, next to the Rothchild’s, in Europe.

    Alas, Jarman, defying expectations, seems to be more interested in exploring the many other contradictions of the great philosopher, quoting bits and pieces of the adult Ludwig’s (Karl Johnson) contradictory philosophical thinking, such as the famous “The limits of my language are the limits of my world,” and the later “There is no private meaning. We are what we are because we share a common life.”

   The film, as well, reveals Wittgenstein’s roiling battles with his Cambridge mentors, particularly the man who believed Ludwig, despite his disagreements with or perhaps his misunderstanding of various of his ideas, was “a true genius”: the highly respected Bertrand Russell (Michael Gough). Russell is rightfully given a major role in this film along with his highly sexually active, brilliant, but also conventionally thinking Lady Ottoline Morrell (played by Tilda Swinton who quite stunningly   brings her character to life). Despite Russell writing the introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, perhaps the only reason why the difficult text was even published, it was perhaps inevitable, so Jarman’s film makes clear, that the two men would eventually break up as friends, while Ludwig remained friends with the flamboyantly gay, far less brilliant, but for a time more influential, economist, John Maynard Keynes (John Quentin), who despite his sexuality (or perhaps because of it) married the Ballets Russes star ballerina, Lydia Lopokova (Lynn Seymour).

     Along with his Cambridge student’s early mockery of Wittgenstein, and brief episodes from Wittgenstein’s attempt to teach elementary school children which ended in accusations of his physical abuse of the children he found to be representative of the village Trattenbach where he was surrounded by adults and children of “odiousness and baseness.” Although Wittgenstein’s utter intolerance of ignorance or perhaps even disagreement is truly interesting, it should be a given for the character created by Jarman, who was also visited by a silly green Martian—perhaps just to allow him to quote his statement: “If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.”—and argues with Russell that he cannot agree to his certainly that a hippopotamus is not in the room because philosophy does not deal with postulates.

      One would think that given the rich opportunity of having Wittgenstein as his subject, Jarman might also have explored the entire family’s vacillations about their own Jewish background. Although raised Roman Catholic, Ludwig and his siblings were 3/4 Jewish, and under the Nazis were therefore, particularly after the Austrian annexation, defined as Jews under the 1935 Nuremberg racial laws. While in Ireland, he was now also declared a German citizen under the enlarged notion of the German borders. Paul left for the US, leaving behind his common law wife Hilde Schania with whom he had had two children, and, accordingly, was served a summons for Rassenschande (racial defilement).

       Ludwig had even gone to the same school as Hitler, one year between them overlapping, although there is no evidence that the two, who probably would have met, were ever friends or even close acquaintances. Hitler, however, did grant the Wittgensteins “Mischling” status, only 12 of 2,100 applications granted, perhaps on the basis that their paternal grandfather had been a bastard son of a German prince. And soon after Gretl, an American citizen by marriage, began negotiating with the Nazi’s over the 1700 kg of gold held in Switzerland through a Wittgenstein family trust, using it and the family’s large foreign currency reserves as a bargaining tool. Paul, arguing against the negotiations, permanently split with his family, while Ludwig asked Keynes to help him gain Irish citizenship; he was eventually declared a British citizen.

      None of this we brought up in a film that centers itself on the numerous contradictions that the philosopher faced throughout his life.

       Nor does Jarman, most surprisingly, deeply explore Ludwig’s homosexuality. One figure, a young philosophy student named Johnny (Kevin Collins), who whom Wittgenstein is said to have had sex with only three times, becomes a stand-in for the very serious relationships that the philosopher had with David Pinsent, a mathematics undergraduate related to David Hume, with whom Ludwig as very close to in 1912, nor of his relationship with Francis Skinner in the 1930s, and his 1940s sexual relationship with Ben Richards. No sign of the young Norwegian man, who helped his to build his isolated shack in Norway in 1936-37, whom he wrote about in letters, no any mention of the couple of German officers mentioned in his private diary which Marjorie Perloff suggests might have offered him some respite from the ordinary “beasts” with whom he served in the German army. Jarman seems uninterested in investigating the close friendship Ludwig developed with the working-class teenager, Keith Kirk, when the philosopher was working at Guy’s Hospital early the 1940s.

      In the film, although Wittgenstein argues that as a philosopher he is not at all embarrassed or disturbed by having sex with men, the closeted Christian in him still feels shame. Jarman has Russell accuse Wittgenstein as “infecting too many young men”; but that phrase, although so commentators see it as a reference to AIDS, is actually a justified statement given Ludwig’s attempt to get the working-class Johnny—whose miner father has saved and scrimped to get him a proper education—to quit the university and become a mechanic in an attempt to play out his own fantasies through the boy.

      How much richer might have Jarman’s film, when he himself was so very close to death by AIDS and in the very same year lost his eyesight, to have truly explored that major series of contradictions in Wittgenstein’s life, which few people have wanted even to talk about. How did the man of God, even if he had long ago abandoned religious teachings, still deal with the complex problems of homosexuality in a world of so much anger and hate—his own included. What might have been his feelings about his elder brother Rudi? What did he think of Keynes hypocritical sexual behavior? How did a man who refused to be seen as special and challenged himself to serve like other men his age in a military which he surely felt horrific, face what Germans were doing to people of the same religious background as his own family; did he find his sister’s actions as unforgiveable as Paul did?

      Here we observe Wittgenstein the troubled genius, a man willing to even give up his own ideas when he perceived them to be wrong-headed, a man willing to live simply even though he had been awarded a major chair at Cambridge. But if there was anyone who challenged his intellect with the physical almost every day of his life, Ludwig Wittgenstein fits the bill. Isn’t that what Jarman himself had been doing for most of his life as well? Why didn’t the genius director Jarman show us the gay other of the man so aloof that even the greats were terrified of his presence, who was banned from the famous Vienna Circle for letting no one else speak? It appears, I am sad to say, that the director simply did not have the energy to fully engage himself with his subject.

      As the Letterboxd commentator Ashley summarizes the film: “The path of Wittgenstein's philosophy hangs together; the path of his life does not.”

 

Los Angeles, November 28, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2023).