that’s entertainment
by Douglas Messerli
Ulrike Ottinger (screenplay and
director) Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse (Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press)
/ 1984
Beginning in the early 1970s German
artist and film director Ulrike Ottinger began making her own fantasy, slightly
surreal films that involved elaborate stories, often stolen from myth, the
cartoon world, fiction, and other works of cinema. Her earliest work, from 1972
was Laokoon & Söhne (Laocoön & Sons), and by the late 70s
she was ready to embark upon her great Berlin trilogy with Ticket of No
Return (1979), followed up by the second episode Freak Orlando
(1981), and the film I discuss here, Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow
Press (1984).
These films were not directly linked, but together presented an
emblematic vision of the German city that somewhat like Alfred Döblin’s
masterwork Berlin Alexanderplatz, was adapted to film at least once
before Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s important TV adaptation in 1980. Instead of
being dominated by the male views of the everyman Franz Bieberkopf and the evil
villain Reinhold Hoffmann, Ottinger’s works were focused upon women, notably
feminist and lesbian, presenting views which might also be broken down into
issues of good and evil, but were played out for more eccentrically in
elaborately costumed and scenic works involving various genres.
The last work of her trilogy, Dorian Gray, for example
incorporates a kind of murder mystery-detective story, opera, and elements of
cabaret, while overall approaching something close to an anatomy of the Berlin
world from those in the highest echelons of society—the evil newspaper chain
executive Frau Dr. Mabuse (the remarkable actor Delphine Seyrig) and her
socialite friends, Dorian Gray (the actor Veruschka von Lehndorff in drag), and
others—to those in the lowest depths of the society who Dorian encounters
through an amazing voyage with Mabuse into the underworld.
Even in the names of her major figures, Ottinger has tipped her hat to
notable works of cinema and fiction: Mabuse, of course, is a reference to the
fictional villain of Norbert Jacques’ 1921 fiction—the character itself a
version of other cinematic villains such as Dr. Fu Manchu, Svengali, and the
figure of Fantômas, as well as Dr. Caligari of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari—made even
more famous by Fritz Lang’s three films Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), The
Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), and The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse
(1960); one of Ottinger’s assistants is named Golem (Magdalena Montezuma), a reference to the Hebrew folklore of
a clay figure brought to life and to Paul Wegener’s and Paul Boese’s 1921 film
version of that myth The Golem; and, of course, Oscar Wilde’s The
Picture Dorian Gray, re-recreated in dozens of cinematic representations.
But while Ottinger’s characters may call up all of their previous
personas, they are not at all imitations of the original figures, but merely
inhabit their names, females who have hatched out of the male shells to become
utterly transformed and interesting in far more complex ways, often, than their
original male identities might have permitted. Although Ottinger’s Mabuse is
most certainly evil—Seyrig speaking in a mumble of languages and letting out
from time to time one of the most hilariously terrifying cackles ever captured
in motion pictures—she is also a truly dynamic force, as imaginative and
inventive in her interlinked plots as not only Mabuse but the more recent Ian
Fleming’s James Bond villains Buonaparte Ignace Gallia (Mr. Big), Dr. Julius
No, and Auric Goldfinger.
Mabuse not only worms her way into Gray’s fairly organized and aesthetic
life (made of up lectures, charity events, and interviews controlled primarily
by his incredible cook / butler / secretary Hollywood (Toyo Tanaka), inviting
him to a memorable open air opera where he falls in love with the work’s star
Aldamana (Tabea Blumenschein), and soon after taking him through a night-long
tour of the underworld where he smokes opium, and observes the mutual murder of
two sailors. The meeting up of the two young lovers, Dorian and Aldamana, their
breakup out over his nightlife affairs, and their eventual reunion and marriage
is also secretly and openly filmed by Mabuse’s spies. Ultimately, Aldamana’s
death is arranged (in part because of her willing involvement in Mabuse’s plot
to manipulate Dorian and the fear she might reveal the truth) and the murder of
Dorian himself when he has outlived his usefulness.
But the real substance of the film are the major two events organized by
Mabuse: the opera about the Happy Islands and new ruler Don Luis de la Cerda
and the various set vignettes of the underground tour. In these central
elements of the film we perceive that Ottinger’s cinema does not behave at all
like more traditional European and American subtle psychologically-centered
fictions, but didactically emblematizes and frame major moral issues of Western
culture in a manner more associated with Bertholt Brecht.
Composed Peer Raben (the creator also of many of Fassbinder’s film
scores) the opera features a young naïve man just made the Prince by the Pope
and Spanish King to rule over their new colony The Happy Islands. There he
discovers another King already in a power, a beautiful, almost naked ruler
Aldamana. Briefly the two battle over their positions, but soon sitting down
together to get to know more of one another, fall in love and begin living in
the native manner, much to the disconcertion of the local priest, sent to the
islands by the Pope.
Before they know it the months pass by
and so too the date by which the new Prince must pay 400 gold guilders or lose
his kingdom. Before long, a ship arrives bearing the young Prince’s uncle, the
Grand Inquisitor of Seville, whose soldiers round up the natives to convert or
kill them, demanding the island’s natural foods and spices be marketed, and the
Prince himself dethroned, Aldamana killed.
With beautiful natural sets of nature,
marvelous costumes, and glorious voices we become engaged with in the opera
itself, spinning before us much if its tale that has little do with the
nefarious plots of Mabuse—except to introduce Dorian to the actor who plays
Aldamana—takes us into another world that to many viewers might seem not only
interruptive but extraneous. Yet most of the pleasure of this film lies in our
patient observation of these long set-pieces, as if other films, more in the
manner of Fellini or even Marcel Carné in this first example, were dropped into
the original like pop-up illustrations in the midst of a larger storybook.
So too is our long tour through the
underworld led by Mabuse as if evil herself were guiding the mostly innocent
Dorian through what the general population mistakenly perceives as evil, but is
really simply a kind of comic rendition of various deadly sins. The evening
begins with a lavish feast by a fountain, where the servers of large platters
of rare foods place them, one by one, in the small waterway, floating them down
to their diners, Mabuse and Dorian.
A leather-clad lesbian couple engage in a kissing session for everyone
to watch.
In an episode that might be right out of Genet’s and Fassbinder’s Querelle,
two sailor boys kiss, pull away, and pull out knives, alternately threatening
each other and embracing and kissing before returning to their violent fight
which ends in their stabbing each other to death.
A Haitian woman casts a spell and stabs a voodoo doll in front of a
startled virgin Mary, Mary herself perhaps being the incarnation of the doll
since she screams so loudly and horridly that Dorian cannot bear it and speeds
away.
A set got up as a strip club features three overweight, large-breasted
women who dance, one marching like a Nazi with workers looking on who
eventually joining the women on stage to dance, Dorian dancing inexplicably
with a leather boy instead of one of the girls or even a sailor.
And finally, Mabuse leaves him with dancing Siamese twins who eventually
move down from a platform to join him, Dorian soon after finding himself in a
small circular bin among others smoking opium.
These tableaux vivants or living statues brilliantly demonstrate
aspects of a world apart from the ordinary lives of the bourgeoise who make up
Mabuse’s audience. No judgment is made about these “types,” and indeed Mabuse
and Dorian find them all interesting to observe and, in Dorian’s case, to
engage with. But it is apparent that these kinds of “sins” are fascinating to
Mabuse’s audience because of their difference and abhorrence.
By comparison, Mabuse and her three wonderful assistants—the already
mentioned Golem, Passat (played by Fassbinder regular Irm Hermann), and Susy
(Barbara Valentin)—trapped in their plastic-covered world of TV screens that
display journalistic updates around the world and in a board room with its
fatuous and unthinking members seem almost insignificant in its functioning
control of the most of the world.
That is not to say there are not hilarious situations and images there
as well. Besuited in a chic plastic black and white suit within which is a
hidden phone which except for its constantly rising antenna might almost be
perceived as a cellphone long before its day, Mabuse breakfasts American style
(a plate of pills) as opposed to continental style and speeds about town with
the grace cackling broom-stick-laden witch (rhyming words apply), a figure with
which we are also spellbound. Indeed, the first long take during the credits of
the evil feminine quartet, heels clacking at the entrance of the headquarters
that looks over the Paris sewers with a small flotilla of plastic-covered
objects (presumably some sort of electric devices) floating through the winding
caverns is an
And not only do we find in the more mundane world of everyday evil
marvelous figures such as Hollywood, but a world of the journalistic elite in a
newspaper ball, the walls covered with a papier-mâché collage of old
newspapers, board members that attend a meeting in head coverings in the form
of roosters, and Dorian’s chauffeur, a dog.
In short, Ottinger’s film, in its visual overkill, is an astounding
experience, difficult even to rationally explain. After a while, we hardly care
about the plot, but readily and expectantly—much like Mabuse’s newspaper
readers—await the next bit of entertainment it provides.
Like all good cartoon-like fables, evil is seemingly routed by film’s
end, as Dorian, not as stupid as he seems, recognizes the death in store for
him and instead of swallowing up the breakfast American-style-pills, shows up
at Mabuse’s doorstep, single-handedly killing off her and her chicken-headed
board.
Soon after he interrupts his own sham burial by driving through the
mourners, mowing them down as well. He now is the head of the once evil empire,
and we can hope that the three ancient virtues of journalism, Independence,
Impartiality, and Objectivity, might be taken out of the archive and brought
back into the news room. But given how easily Dorian has been manipulated and
the evidence of his own rather empty shell of a life, we certainly must retain
our doubts, even given that the well-organized and clever Hollywood will
certainly be asked to take up the slack.
Los Angeles, November 21, 2022 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).
