conflicted
selves
by Douglas Messerli
Hanns Heinz Ewers (screenplay
and adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson”), Paul Wegener and Stellan
Rye (directors) Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague) /
1913
I believe it would be
mistaken to describe Paul Wegner and Stellan Rye’s 1913 film The Student of
Prague as primarily an LGBTQ movie. Yet I would also be remiss if I didn’t
include it in my discussions in My Queer Cinema volumes since it
contains so many elements of the important tropes in queer filmmaking, theater,
and fiction.
The plot of this 1 hour and 25-minute-long
film is rather simple. It begins in the university at which Balduin (Paul
Wegener) is a student. He is known by his companions as one the finest of
swordsmen, as well as the wildest young man in the student body. But at the
point we meet him Balduin is anything but a wild, drunken lout as he sits
alone, refusing to participate with his fellow students who are drinking and
celebrating with the women servers and a Gypsy girl who sings and dances. The
student has come to the end of his finances and is pondering what to do to
raise the money upon which he depends to support his excessive behavior.
Out of the proverbial blue, a coach
arrives bearing a shriveled-up, scowling being who taps the unhappy boy upon
the shoulder vaguely whispering in his ear something about a large inheritance
that may be in store for Prague’s finest fencer and most unruly scholar.
Balduin rebuffs the strange man, jesting
that he’d do better to bring him “the luckiest ticket in the lottery or a
dowered wife.” The old man chuckles and moves back into the shadows in which so
many of the film’s characters spend their time lurking, matching the dark scowl
of worry that remains on the student’s brow.
Meanwhile, the local Countess Margit
Schwarzenberg (Grete Berger) is off with the hounds, meeting up with her
cousin, Baron Waldis-Schwarzenberg (Fritz Weidemann), who once again attempts
to court her, she rejecting him, repeating that since her father has declared
she must marry him she will obey, but that it has nothing to do with love. She
pulls her horse quickly away, and the horse, obviously sensing the jolt, runs
wild through the field, ultimately throwing her into the local river.
By coincidence, so it appears, Balduin
finds himself at the very same spot and rushes into the waters to save her by
pulling her ashore. Her hunting companions and the Baron, arriving on the
scene, award the boy a purse of coins for his good deeds.
In fact, the student has been compelled
to visit the scene by the evil sorcerer, Scapinelli (John Gottowt), who he had
just previously rejected at the beer garden. Now, taken with the beauty of the
Countess, Balduin almost immediately becomes involved with her and her family,
visiting her father the Count’s castle to inquire about her condition. He is
forced to depart almost immediately, however, when the Baron arrives with a far
more ostentatious bouquet of flowers than the simple garland he has purchased
from the Gypsy.
Distressed with his still relative
poverty he is tempted once again by Scapinelli, inviting him into his room to
discuss his promised “inheritance.” Displaying his magical powers with a few
quick sleight-of-hand tricks, the old man asks him to sign a document which
will sell him all the contents of the boy’s spartan room. Balduin looks around
the dreary place and, seeing nothing of value, gladly sells the contents of
anything the old fool might desire.
Scapinelli quickly pays him with a
shower of gold before, looking around the room, he spots the student’s
reflection in the long mirror, and calls forth Balduin’s image, walking out the
door with the student’s shadow self.
Quite horrified with what he has just
witnessed, but also a bit bemused and even more delighted by his new wealth,
Balduin quickly moves forward with his attempts to court the Countess, the
Gypsy girl, now clearly in love with the student herself, following him to the
castle and stalking him for most of the rest of the film.
Countess Magrit is rather charmed by his
attention, and even agrees, over her own doubts, to meet him the next day in
public spot near a cemetery. She finds herself falling in love with the boy,
but each time she encounters him he is stalked not only by the Gypsy girl—who
neither of them even seem to notice, suggesting perhaps her invisibility
because of lowly social status—but by Balduin’s double, a confounding phantom who
so terrifies them both that they break off their encounters in each instance.
The Gypsy girl, meanwhile, meets with the
Baron to tell him of Balduin’s rendezvous with Magrit, and in anger the fiancé
confronts the student, rashly challenging him to a duel with swords without
realizing Balduin’s skills. The Count, terrified that Balduin will not only
kill his daughter’s future husband but in so doing will kill off the last male
heir of the von Schwarzenberg family, meets with the student, pleading with him
to spare the Baron’s life. Reluctantly, Balduin agrees. But as the intertitles
are quick alert us:
The dead
he swore
to not do,
the other
did.
Horror-stricken by witnessing his other
self kill the challenger, Balduin rushes off. When he recovers, he attempts to
visit the Count to explain the situation, but the gates are closed to him.
Desperate to declare his lack of complicity with the Baron’s death, Balduin
finds a ladder and climbs into the room where Magrit sits reading. Upon seeing
him, she turns away in anger, but as he attempts to explain his innocence she
gradually is swayed by his declarations of love. When the student attempts to
further prove his innocence by demonstrating in her mirror that he has no
shadow, she backs off from him, more consternated than she has been previously,
and at that very moment his double reappears. Balduin, now abandoning any hope
of wooing the Countess, runs off in a kind of frenzied flight through the woods
of the estate and the shadowed streets of Prague, turning frequently back to
make sure that he has lost sight of his double. Out of breath, he finally
reaches his room, checking the windows and finally reopening the door just to
be certain his other self has not followed him home.
Finally, infuriated with the situation,
Balduin opens a box and pulls out his firing arm to await the phantom’s
arrival. When it appears in his room, smiling at him as it strides forward,
Balduin shoots and it disappears. A few seconds later, the student himself
falls to the floor, blood gushing from his stomach as he dies.
The story is based primarily on the Edgar
Allan Poe tale “William Wilson,” but obviously it incorporates elements of
Faust (in some British theaters it was titled A Bargain with Satan) and
Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 fiction The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde, along with references to Alfred de Musset’s poem The December
Night.
In each of these cases, a being is
troubled by the existence of a mirror-image of the self who separated from the
original being works against the other, sometimes for good but most often for
bad, ending in the destruction of both the body and the soul which the two
beings symbolize.
In selling himself for wealth and social
status, Balduin has destroyed the carefree, joyous young student he once was.
The two aspects are simply incompatible, since the joyful, goodhearted boy
cannot coexist with a scheming and plotting being determined to have everything
previously unavailable to him. And in this sense the Gypsy girl and the
Countess Magrit are also doubles, one representing the birthright of the
student Balduin, while the other symbolizes what by birth lies outside of his
reach. On one level, accordingly, the story is really about a man who has lost
his soul in his search for being something other than he truly is, the double
standing in for the avaricious and womanizing adult he would become, and which,
accordingly, must destroy the youth.
But on a far more profound level, this
tale tells us something else about the conflicted self. The world to which
Balduin aspires is clearly the normative vision of the wealth and heterosexual
marriage promised in every culture’s version of what US citizens describe as
the American Dream. But inside himself it is clear that Balduin cannot embrace
that. There is a part of him that obviously detests the very idea of marriage
and the heterosexual hegemony which he subconsciously works in various ways to
resist.
If there is no obvious homosexual
interest in this tale it is because Balduin’s true love is the self, within the
image in the large mirror lies his most treasured possession, himself. At the
very heart of this tale lies the vision of the self that Dorian Gray first
encounters in the portrait that Basil Hallward paints of the beautiful youth.
In Dorian’s devotion to that idealized self he must destroy almost all the
other individuals he meets since they cannot live up to his own image and,
moreover, in order to hide the fact that he is so infatuated with himself, he
must hide away the portrait which now reveals the truth. This, in turn, is
merely another version of the myth of Narcissus. And it is no accident that
early psychologists and medical practitioners once defined same-sex love as
being a version of infantile narcissism.
It is as inevitable that in stabbing the
canvas on which his now corrupted image exists, Dorian must die just as
Narcissus must drown in his attempt to kiss the beautiful image he sees before
him in the sudden ripples of the formerly still pool of water.
Deep in the heart of homophobia is the
belief that loving someone of the same sex is an outward manifestation of one’s
ability to love oneself—a terrifying concept for those inflicted, as most
homophobes are, with extreme self-loathing, being individuals far too often
unable to accept their own homosexual fantasies.
Los Angeles, April 15,
2021
Reprinted from My
Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (April 2021).
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