man in the
mirror
by Douglas Messerli
Henrik Galeen and Hanns Heinz Ewers
(screenplay), Henrik Galeen (director) Der
Student von Prag (The Student of Prague)
/ 1926
Generally, I have grouped films with
the same theme and characters with the hope that their many variations read in
context might reveal the LGBTQ subtexts of the works such as those centered
around Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Robert Louis
Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde fable, and the Zorro films. But
beginning in the second decade of the 20th century, the next three decades each
produced a new reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s tale “William Willson” titled The
Student Prague beginning in 1913 with Paul Wegener and Stellan Rye’s
expressionist work, and continuing in 1926 with Henrik Galeen’s far less
stylistically-centered but equally expressionist film, and finally ending in
another German director, Arthur Robison’s horror-film version of 1935. Accordingly, it seemed that these
three similarly plotted movies told more about the decades in which they were
released than in their collective interrelationships.
Indeed the 1926 version closely follows the story of 1913, save for a
few exceptions, with a scene-by-scene match, despite their obvious visual
differences. One is tempted to say, in fact, that there is nothing new here,
and what I referred to in my essay on the 1913 version with regard to the
story’s importance for exploring the narcissus theme, the myth of the other
trapped or closeted self, and the importance of the doppelganger myth in
connection with queer literature all remain as revelatory aspects of this film
as well.
Galeen’s film, however, is far less focused on its theatrical sets,
costumes, and lighting; and because of this, along with its more realistic
rendering, seemed even clearer to me in its revelation of the handsome Balduin, (played by the great actor of early German cinema, Conrad
Veidt) a university student’s problems concerning his secreted or closeted
desires.
As in Wegener and Rye’s work, Balduin begins the film sitting apart from
his fellow student rabble-rousers, presumably unable to afford a drink, while
they horse around, shout, and flirt with the local flower seller—no longer a
gypsy in this telling—who herself identifies with and is attracted to the
lonely Balduin. The others go over to him, attempting to cheer him up by
singing and buying him a drink, yet he still seems to reject them, apparently
too proud to accept their kind offers and obviously is stewing about the cost
of his education, which leaves him little time and, most importantly, even less
money to enjoy himself.
But in this film it also appeared that Balduin was simply a loner of
sorts, hardly the popular party-going individual we might have thought him to
be underneath his financial problems. And I began to realize that I had made a
presumption about the 1913 version that might not at all be true, namely that Balduin
at the beginning of the film, the one who aspires to wealth and marriage to an
heiress is the good man, while the man in the mirror is the evil being who
destroys his life and results in his death.
Interestingly the author of on-line sight Moira, which offered a
well-written summary of the 1926 film, came to my earlier conclusion, writing:
The story here is essentially a
borrowing from Edgar Allan Poe’s story “William Wilson” (1839) in which a man
is thwarted at every step by his doppelganger – although in the Poe story it is
the hero who is evil and the doppelganger good, whereas here it is the other
way around and with the addition of a pact with the Devil plot.
But watching it more carefully I begin to wonder whether that writer and
I weren’t buying in to the basic heteronormative values that Balduin wishes to
enjoy. Although the beautiful flower girl throughout the film makes it quite
clear that she would be willing to become his lover or even simply go to bed
with him, he immediately rejects her and later in the film most violently
pushes her away, not so dissimilarly from the way he sends off his well-meaning
student friends in the first scene.
Our young student wants something else, a woman perhaps, but not just
any girl but one of wealth and status, an “heiress” as he describes her to the
intrusive Scapinelli (Werner Krauss) who bothers his sufferings by offering him
what Balduin perceives as a cheap loan. He also sends Scapinelli away, again
proving that he doesn’t seek money alone, but status, the entry into another
social class than one into which he was born.
In short, our “sweet innocent” university student is at heart a real
striver who is not so much interested in
love but in social achievement, a fact which Scapinelli, who plays devil to
this Faustian figure immediately recognizes, calling up the members of a fox
hunt party which includes the wealthy Margit von Schwarzenberg (Agnes
Esterhazy) and her current fiancé Baron of Waldis (Ferdinand von Alten) to make
a wrong turn by leaping over the fences of the country drinking house and
spilling Margit to the ground as her horse refuses to jump the fence at
Balduin’s feet.
Once he has introduced Balduin to the woman of his dreams, the heiress
Margit, Scapinelli has no difficulty at all in convincing the enterprising
student to abandon his own “other” self, his mirror image. The Faust reference
in the 1920s was made even more clear given the fact that F. W. Murnau’s masterful Faust appeared in
theaters in the very same year. And recognizing that fact, we have to question
the values of our young student in this version, who, although appreciative of
the coins Scapinelli piles upon his desk, is really after what we would today
call a “trophy wife,” someone who might induct him into the upper class from
which all his life he has been excluded.
Galeen’s film makes clear where
Balduin’s sensibilities lie when the young man arrives at a party at the von
Schwarzenberg mansion in a full-horse carriage and proceeds to dance a minuet
with the girl’s elderly mother. He does not attend the affair as a secretive
and would-be lover, a man sexually compelled to attempt to lure Margit away
from her intended fiancé, but as a young newly endowed entrepreneur, a
businessman out to transact a deal which will allow him to marry his fairytale
princess. Even his secret missive demonstrates no passion, but simply a plea to
meet Margit before her marriage to the Baron to see if he might find a way into
her heart—in short, to make a deal.
The Baron realizes, once Balduin’s
intentions have been clear to him, he has only his title and his far more
substantial wealth to offer Margit, whereas the now financially stable student
has his beauty and youth as a lure to draw the girl to him. And accordingly,
Waldis has no choice but to insult Balduin, forcing the younger man to
challenge him to a duel which was seemingly the only way to properly settle
insults in those days.
The one gift, his single achievement
before his deal with the devil Scapinelli, was the young student’s prowess as a
swordsman. If there is any romantic hero within the social achiever we now see
him as, it is as the young fencer, who early on wins a bet with an older
challenger and further arouses the attentions of the romantic flower seller.
Although Balduin immediately takes up
the challenge to duel, Margit’s father, Count of Schwarzenberg (Fritz Alberti)
quickly rushes to the boy’s side begging him not to kill the Baron, to which
Balduin immediately agrees, obviously realizing that to kill the Baron would
end any relationship that he may have that my help negotiating with the von
Schwarzenberg family.
But the mirror image, his real
self—perhaps homosexual or at least disinterested in women, but even if not gay
still a fun-loving but honorable young man—makes no such deals with
respectability and, when Balduin, whose coach loses its wheel on his way to the
duel, fails to show up, he takes his place, easily outwitting his challenger,
resulting in the cad’s death.
Of course, once Balduin realizes that
his other self has queered the deal he has made with the wealthy family, he is
now terrorized by his doppelganger who, like any young student with
money might do, parties wildly—in this case perhaps with the intention of
purposely doing-in his hypocritical “other”—carrying on to such a degree that,
along with the killing of the Baron gets him expelled from the university.
Balduin has every reason to fear his own shadow; and even more reason to be
terrorized that he has so easily given up on his true self when, in attempting
to explain his condition to Margit, he discovers that he has no reflection in
her bedroom mirror, making it clear just how superficial he has been all along
in not truly seeking her love but the role in the world which her love might
offer him.
In complete despair, he retreats to his
room to be comforted by the flower girl, who in fact, has been part of his
undoing, having revealed his note to the Baron which led to his death and to
Balduin’s undoing. But, as I suggested before, Balduin brutally sends her away,
not because of discovering the truth, but because of his complete disinterest
in a girl who, had he been seeking heterosexual love, might have been the
Gretchen or Marguerite of the opera—who asks that he give up his last symbol of
the world of his false desires, Margit’s crucifix—now just a trinket which
cannot save him.
What Galeen reveals in the final
show-down between Balduin and his shadow is that the man-without-a-shadow has
terribly aged, becoming a hardened and howling older man, while his shadow self
is still an attractive young student. And in some respects, his murder of his
former self equally represents jealousy and revenge for that fact. Galeen
handles the final shooting of Balduin far better than did the 1913 version.
Here the shadow, returned to the mirror, pulls his own shirt open to prepare a
naked target for the gunman, who
when he shoots, observes the
fragments of self fall into pieces of glass around him, some of the fragments
still revealing his own reflection. At first, unaware of his own wounds, he
seems to take comfort in that fact, that his “other” image is now trapped in
the glass, but gradually he realizes that those fragments are the last images
of a dying man, himself.
The villain in this film, we suddenly perceive, is not the mirror image
but the supposedly “real” Balduin, who we discover is really all image, while
the mirror image has behaved as the full human being Balduin once was.
Balduin, we realize in retrospect, was
never meant to enter a heteronormative life, and even our belief that his
attempts to find that world are admirable are proven to be mistaken. The
student of Prague never properly learned the most important lesson of life, to
be himself.
August 14, 2022
Reprinted from World Cinema
Review (August 2022).
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
