in denial
by Douglas Messerli
Martin Sherman (screenplay, based on his
play), Sean Mathias (director) Bent / 1997
Streets of Berlin, I must leave you soon
Oh, will you forget me? Was I
ever really here?
Ah, streets of Berlin, I must leave you soon
Oh, will you forget me? Was I ever really
here?
Find me a bar on the cobblestone street
Where the boys are pretty
I cannot love for more than one day
But one day is enough in the city
Find me a boy with two
Ocean blue eyes that show no pity
Take out his eyes! He never needs to see
How they eat you alive in the city!
Below Max (Clive Owen) appears as a kind of party organizer while his
roommate, sometime boyfriend, Rudy (Brian Webber), carefully puts on his long
stockings while painfully observing his promiscuous lover, as usual, kissing
and making out briefly with everyone with whom he comes in contact. At a nearby
table sit a group of SS Nazi troops, greedily eyeing everyone in sight, Wolf
particularly having determined that Max is the man who whom he wants to spend
the night.
If
there was ever a Hollywood Cecile DeMille-like view of the final days of Weimar
sexual depravity, here it is in loving color. While Greta, carefully, eyeing and
noting attendees from her high perch, is surely aware that the world below has
suddenly come to an end, those in the hellish trenches seem oblivious that
either the same night or the night before Hitler has had Ernst Röhm and many of
his followers killed in what became known as The Night of the Long Knives.
When Max wakes up in bed with Wolf, hardly able to remember what
happened during his drunken, coke-sniffing, sexual encounter with the cute man
beside him, and while Rudy simmers in anger nearby, the storm troopers—obviously
alerted by Greta who has sold out to the Nazis—
Those first several moments of Sean Mathias's film adaptation of the
play Bent which he also had directed on stage in Britain, tell us
everything we might need know about the film that follows: it’s over- stated
and, like several of its characters—particularly Rudy and Max—not completely
aware of what’s actually happening.
One might argue, in fact, that this was true of the original stage
version from 1979 with Richard Gere (as Max) and David Dukes (as Horst). The
publicists declared that finally this play revealed the fact that homosexuals
were arrested in Nazi Germany, several of them dying in the concentration camp.
In fact, given the little information we have, we know that about 50,000 mostly
gay men were sentenced under the new Nazi anti-homosexual laws, with about
5,000 to 15,000 being incarcerated in concentration camps. They may have
actually been more, since gays were often not given the pink triangle, but were
grouped with lesbians as anti-social beings forced to wear a black patch.
During the Nazi years, about 60% of those in camps were killed, many
through beatings, torture (some had their testicles boiled in water), and
intense rapes. Others were experimented on by Nazi doctors. And, as the work
suggests, their pink triangles represented the lowest of camp demarcation, some
simply being used for target practice. Those who initially survived were often
given the most dangerous work tasks as part of “Extermination Through Work”
policies, assigned work in the underground rocket factory at Dora-Mittelbau,
and the stone quarries in Flossenbürg and Buchenwald.
And even after the war many were re-sentenced to prison or unable to
tell their stories since until 1969 homosexual behavior was still outlawed by
the German government, Chancellor Adenauer going as far to describe it as a
“healthy law.”
Yet before 1979, there had been many stories told and the history of gay
incarceration had been significantly recorded. Certainly, I had read some of
that history before the appearance of Bent whose publicists continue to
describe the work as one of the first recognitions of the decimation of gays
through World War II.
However, just to put the suffering of gays in Nazi prisons in some
perspective, while conservatively speaking about 9,000 homosexuals were killed
in the camps—not an insignificant number of men killed simply for loving their
own kind—over 6 million Jewish individuals were murdered, often in even more
inhumane ways.
So, we must recognize both the play and the movie Bent, despite
being a well-intentioned and perhaps even important document that helps
us to further comprehend the vastness of the Nazi hatred, is simply not as
earth-shattering as its author and Mathias might have meant it to be. In
particular, in the case of the film, the tale it tells, moreover, is often so
muddled that it loses some of its significance.
After the almost prurient opening scene, we follow Max and Rudy for a
while as if they were part of an underground adventure story, as Max attempts
to get two passports to Amsterdam from his closeted Uncle Freddie (Ian
McKellen), promising to ditch Rudy in Holland and return to marry the daughter
of a wealthy industrialist to whom his father has previously wanted him to
marry.
Even when they are eventually rounded up and sent on their way to Dachau
they appear not yet to have comprehended what is in store for them. Another
voyager, Horst, being transferred from a previous camp to Dachau attempts to
tell Max what is in store after the Nazi’s force Rudy to stomp upon his glasses
and take him away to beat in a nearby rail car. But all that Max can mutter
over and again is “This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening.”
His disbelief results in a reality even worse when the officers return
Rudy’s near-dead body to ask Max if the boy is his friend. When Max denies it
several times like Peter denying Jesus, they demand that Max prove it by
bludgeoning him with a metal rod. Max does so, even with some sense of sadistic
pleasure, killing his lover before the Nazis toss the corpse off the train.
They take him to another car where a young 13-year old girl who has already had
her throat cut is positioned to have him prove he is not a queer by raping her.
While the leering soldiers watch, he does so not once but twice.
By this time, accordingly, we are so disgusted by the probable “hero” of
this tale, that anyone with a shred of empathy has lost interest in him. And it
gets even worse, as taking what Horst has told him to heart, he denies his
sexual orientation replacing it with a lie that he is Jewish instead, thus
awarding him a patch that, in this perverted world, he sees to be of more worth
that the pink triangle labelling him a simple pervert. It seems not to matter
that he has already proven himself a pervert, reiterated over and over by his
insistence that he will survive the ordeal by sacrificing any sense of human
decency he has left.
In
other words, as I wrote about the play which I saw in 2015 in Los Angeles but
is equally applicable to the film, Sherman has chosen a nearly impossible
monster as his hero, whose redemption—in this case by a scrawny
pink-triangulated Horst (Lothaire Bluteau), whose
major sin is that he signed a petition in support of the sexologist Magnus
Hirschfeld—appears nearly impossible from the start.
Mysteriously—and this is a continual problem with Sherman’s seemingly
naturalistic tropes—Max gets Horst transferred from the brutal tasks of
breaking down rocks with a pick-axe to the nearly existential task of moving a
pile of stones from one place to another before returning them back to the
other, again and again, ad infinitum—a job which, Max.argues, is intended to
make one mad.
Although, I would like to know whether or not Sherman had any evidence
that such a task was really given to prisoners at Dachau, it at first seems a
kind of perfect metaphor for the madness of the camps themselves. Yet we still
cannot quite believe in the reality of what is presented as a metaphorical
situation. Might the Germans truly waste their energy on someone they might
more easily have simply shot or beaten to death? And would they have two guards
available to waste their energies tracking the meaningless trek of their
victims back and forth in space?
Later, as his characters’ conversations increasingly become infused with
talk of sex, the author does not share Beckett’s abilities to transform the
inane into a poetically rich language. And, accordingly, no matter how well
acted—and in the case of Owen and Bluteau they are not equal to the acting
skills of the original stage actors—it is difficult for us to believe that two
men during a three-minute rest period might whisper themselves into mutual orgasms. It
reminded me, a little, of those early network chatrooms wherein participants
talk about sex in order to actually experience it. But in this case, involving
a room full of movie-goers unable to experience the intimacy of live-acting, it
appeared to function more as a voyeuristic moment than a true shared experience
between two untouchable lovers. And later, when the freezing and sickly Horst
lamely refuses to go through the same verbal sexual encounter, Sherman reaches
to the bottom of his often jokey quips—“I have a headache”—in response, turning
what might have been a somewhat creative dramatic trope into a sit-com quip.
What we are surprised about is that Max—whom we have finally believe has
truly begun to understand love as something different from mere sex—once more
stands by without being compelled to aid his friend. That he is forced to bury
him and, at the very moment of the pietà like enactment wherein he begins to
carry his dead friend to his grave, he is forced to stand still while looking
forward as dictated by the whistle announcing the “rest time,” having no choice
but to hold Horst’s body before him, merely reminds us of the fact that this is
the first time in this film since the decadent body against body friction of
the first scene, anyone has actually touched another being (excluding the commanded
blowjob obviously). When the whistle signals a resumption of action, he
seemingly puts Horst into the ditch with the voiceless howl of Brecht’s Mother
Courage. Once again, just as with Rudy, Max has in large part been the cause of
this man’s death.
We
can only conjecture that if he has any human feeling left he will no longer to
be able to live with himself. Accordingly, when after moving a few rocks, he
returns to the ditch to remove Horst’s shirt with the pink triangle, and,
removing his own yellow starred garment, puts it on—although meant to be a
truly moving moment, an acceptance not only of his sexuality but of his
recognition of love—there is something empty in the act.
No matter how Max has been transformed, his recognition has simply come
too late. And even his rush into the wall of electrified immolation at film’s
end, seems to be a melodramatic aftermath. Perhaps if he had really dared death
earlier on, had actually reached out to touch the other instead of simply
imagining him, we might have truly been able to celebrate what Mathias certainly
intended to convey: W. H. Auden’s contention that “We must love one another or
die.”
Los Angeles, October 13, 2020
Reprinted from World Cinema Review and My
Queer Cinema blog (October 2020).
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