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Mad Doctors of the Movies: Rotwang and Caligari · The Difference Engine Podcast

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[music]
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SPEAKER_01: And today, we're going to be talking about Rotwang and Caligari, or perhaps Cagliari.
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SPEAKER_01: We haven't been up on minds exactly how it's pronounced,
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SPEAKER_01: but they're from two films in the 1910s and the 1920s.
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SPEAKER_01: The Cabinet of Dr.
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SPEAKER_01: Cagliari,
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SPEAKER_01: and of course Metropolis, in which Rotwang appears, which I think is about 1927.
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SPEAKER_01: Or 1926, I've just learned...
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SPEAKER_01: Anyway, should we kick off,
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SPEAKER_01: Neil, perhaps by saying a little bit about the cabinet of Dr Caligari?
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SPEAKER_01: Maybe not a lot of people would have viewed of Caligari.
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SPEAKER_01: Out of our top ten, he's perhaps the most mysterious of the Mad Doctors.
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SPEAKER_02: Do you want to say something about the film and so on?
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SPEAKER_02: Sure.
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SPEAKER_02: I mean, Caligari is the most mysterious of all of the Doctors because not
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SPEAKER_02: that many people have seen a classic of German Impressionism from 1919,
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SPEAKER_02: to be honest with you.
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SPEAKER_01: You can watch it on YouTube, though.
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SPEAKER_02: You can watch the entire thing on YouTube, yes.
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SPEAKER_00: Possibly not legally, but... Oh, is that right?
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SPEAKER_00: Yeah, who knows?
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SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
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SPEAKER_02: Well, it's out of the 70-year copyright thing, so it should be fine, there's no problem.
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SPEAKER_02: It's based on an earlier legend about a sleeping somnambulist,
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SPEAKER_02: about a sleepwalker that kills, and...
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SPEAKER_02: Actually,
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SPEAKER_02: The Cabinet of Dr Caligari is an influential film because it's one of these films
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SPEAKER_02: within a film, as it were.
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SPEAKER_02: There's a twist ending,
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SPEAKER_02: which I suppose I've given away now by virtue of telling you there's a twist ending.
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SPEAKER_02: But what happens is you have a carnivore sideshow in
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SPEAKER_02: which you have this sleepwalker who's on show and he is being shown off
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SPEAKER_02: by this chap called Caligari, Dr Caligari.
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SPEAKER_02: And throughout the course of the film he actually stalks and kills several people.
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SPEAKER_02: The sunambulist, not Dr Caligari.
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SPEAKER_02: And it turns out that Caligari is the head of a local insane asylum who's learnt
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SPEAKER_02: about this legend of the sleeping sunambulist and thinks...
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SPEAKER_02: Wouldn't it be a cracking scientific idea if I could actually make
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SPEAKER_02: the legend come true through science?
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SPEAKER_02: So he uses his powers of psychiatry and hypnotism to create this murderous somnambulist.
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SPEAKER_02: However, right at the very end, as I said, you have this...
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SPEAKER_02: Framing device where it's revealed at the very end of the film that
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SPEAKER_02: the hero who's been fighting against the somnambulist and who leads the peasants up
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SPEAKER_02: to the insane asylum to get rid of Caligari is actually in the insane asylum
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SPEAKER_02: as one person.
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SPEAKER_02: Oh, right, I see.
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SPEAKER_02: And asking him if he's okay and telling him that he's going to undergo treatment.
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SPEAKER_02: And it all gets very sinister.
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SPEAKER_02: For the look of it,
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SPEAKER_02: the best thing that telegraphs the look of it is the fact that Tim Burton said
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SPEAKER_02: that he drew the look of Edward Scissorhands with the black and the eyes directly
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SPEAKER_02: from the cabinet of Dr Caligari.
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SPEAKER_01: So there's an interesting theme there.
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SPEAKER_01: Which goes back to one of the themes we talked about before.
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SPEAKER_01: The mixture of the old and the new in Frankenstein.
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SPEAKER_01: There's the mixture of the old and the new.
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SPEAKER_01: There's the kind of medievalism sewn up into this interpretation of modern science.
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SPEAKER_01: And that theme is also in Metropolis in the depiction of the cinemas,
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SPEAKER_01: perhaps the most influential scientists in the history of cinema,
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SPEAKER_01: probably because it's one of the earliest representations of the scientists.
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SPEAKER_01: And this is Dr Rotwang in Metropolis.
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SPEAKER_01: And there's elements I picked up in this lovely phrase of the Gothic at the heart of
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SPEAKER_01: the modern,
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SPEAKER_01: Which is in Metropolis,
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SPEAKER_01: which I think is also common from what you've said, Neil, about Dr Caligari.
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SPEAKER_01: And there are also elements of this, of occultism and medievalism.
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SPEAKER_01: Which is also in Frankenstein.
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SPEAKER_01: There's that kind of influence.
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SPEAKER_01: There's a marriage of the two.
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SPEAKER_01: The modern scientist,
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SPEAKER_01: as Rocht Wang is portrayed in Metropolis,
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SPEAKER_01: is a scientist who wears a belted medieval smock.
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SPEAKER_01: His desk is lit by coils of neon light.
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SPEAKER_01: His shelves are crammed with worm-eaten leather-bound folios.
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SPEAKER_01: And there's even pentagrams.
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SPEAKER_01: There's retorts on stands.
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SPEAKER_01: There's neon tubes, curb vessels.
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SPEAKER_01: It's almost as if,
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SPEAKER_01: in fact, all the paraphernalia of the modern cinematic scientist owes its origin.
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SPEAKER_01: Certainly the depiction of Frankenstein,
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SPEAKER_01: Dr Frankenstein 1931, owes a lot to this portrayal of Rotwang in Metropolis.
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SPEAKER_01: And I understand that the production team took months,
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SPEAKER_01: literally months,
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SPEAKER_01: in developing the set associated with Rotwang and his famous laboratory.
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SPEAKER_02: But when Rotvang is in his office, it's portrayed as being at the top of this tower.
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SPEAKER_02: You get that sense, because you've got to descend down to the bowels.
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SPEAKER_02: It may be on the surface, as it were.
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SPEAKER_00: He lives in a little house, though, doesn't he?
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SPEAKER_00: Yes.
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SPEAKER_00: That goes back to the medieval side of things,
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SPEAKER_00: whereas where the rest of the city is these huge skyscrapers, very modern.
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SPEAKER_00: He lives in this tiny little windowless house.
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SPEAKER_00: And obviously when they go down,
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SPEAKER_00: they're actually descending into the bowels of the city where the workers are.
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SPEAKER_02: I just had the impression that when they go up and down,
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SPEAKER_02: even though it's a little house, it's almost like it's on the top.
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SPEAKER_02: In fact, I think the opposite is the case.
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SPEAKER_02: As Naomi says, the title card...
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SPEAKER_01: At the very beginning of the film says, in the middle of the city was an old house.
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SPEAKER_01: Yes.
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SPEAKER_01: And this guy is the man, the scientist, whose inventions make the city function.
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SPEAKER_01: But actually,
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SPEAKER_01: the heart of the city is this kind of medievalist and occultist,
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SPEAKER_01: this Gothic heart of the way that the city functions.
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SPEAKER_01: So there's that kind of interest in this idea of the evil genius that he represents.
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SPEAKER_01: We mentioned before that a lot of these geezers,
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SPEAKER_01: these mud doctors, they seem to be half automaton.
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SPEAKER_01: They have a gammy hand.
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SPEAKER_01: And Rotwang seems to be the first geezer with a gammy hand.
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SPEAKER_01: He lost it in some...
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SPEAKER_01: Dubious activity, we're not exactly sure what he was doing.
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SPEAKER_01: He has this unruly white hair, which is kind of Einsteinian.
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SPEAKER_01: Now I understand,
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SPEAKER_01: I read somewhere that actually Einstein didn't have that shock of white hair at
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SPEAKER_01: that time, and some even suggested
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SPEAKER_02: Einstein copied Rotwang.
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SPEAKER_02: I can't imagine that, can you?
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SPEAKER_02: Not really.
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SPEAKER_02: Einstein goes out to the
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SPEAKER_01: cinema and thinks,
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SPEAKER_01: aye aye,
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SPEAKER_01: it's a nice barnet he's got there, I think I'll dye my hair when I get home.
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SPEAKER_02: Because Einstein was sort of like,
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SPEAKER_02: He had black hair when he was younger and then started to go grey.
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SPEAKER_02: And it was only at the very end of his years that he had that mop of white hair.
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SPEAKER_00: I suspect that the mop-ishness was due to his fact
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SPEAKER_00: that he was notoriously unbothered by his appearance.
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SPEAKER_00: Oh, well, I thought...
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SPEAKER_00: Probably just couldn't be bothered to brush his hair.
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SPEAKER_01: I thought you were going to say it famously because Einstein didn't have any curling tongs.
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SPEAKER_01: I haven't previously heard about it.
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SPEAKER_01: But, yeah, so the physical appearance is...
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SPEAKER_01: It's an interesting thing.
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SPEAKER_01: Somebody's also suggested that there can be no understanding between the hands and
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SPEAKER_01: the brain unless the heart acts as a mediator, which I think is a lovely phrase.
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SPEAKER_01: And there's a suggestion,
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SPEAKER_01: of course,
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SPEAKER_01: that in Rotwang's case,
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SPEAKER_01: there is no mediation of the heart between the hands and the brain, you know, and...
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SPEAKER_01: Evil does as evil is kind of thing.
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SPEAKER_01: There's also some interesting indications.
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SPEAKER_01: There are some suggestions that Rotwang is an anti-Semitic portrayal.
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SPEAKER_01: Because I don't know if you know,
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SPEAKER_01: but the novel,
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SPEAKER_01: which was the originator of the film,
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SPEAKER_01: is written by Fritz Lang's wife,
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SPEAKER_01: Thea von Haber, and she later enthusiastically embraced Nazism.
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SPEAKER_01: So there may be some justification for this.
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SPEAKER_01: So some people have suggested...
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SPEAKER_01: That it's an anti-Semitic caricature of Albert Einstein, right?
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SPEAKER_01: And that who the Nazis were later to dub,
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SPEAKER_01: or to characterise as the relativity Jew, as they called him.
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SPEAKER_01: But the pentagrams of the magician,
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SPEAKER_01: again in this kind of idea of the occult, to be found in Rotwang's laboratory...
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SPEAKER_01: Actually are more to do with the Seal of Solomon,
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SPEAKER_01: which is more of a Masonic reference,
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SPEAKER_01: you know,
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SPEAKER_01: the dabblings of the occult,
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SPEAKER_01: than actually something to do with,
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SPEAKER_01: you know, anything to do with Einstein and his Jewish ancestry.
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SPEAKER_01: So that's interesting too.
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SPEAKER_02: It's interesting what you're saying about the hand and the brain and the heart,
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SPEAKER_02: because you've got Caligari and you've got Caesar,
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SPEAKER_02: the man that he hypnotises, that he brainwashes into...
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SPEAKER_02: Becoming his hands, his murderous hands.
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SPEAKER_02: And right at the very beginning, they both see Jane, the woman in the white nightdress.
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SPEAKER_02: They both ogle and lust after.
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SPEAKER_02: But of course, Caligari is filled with this murderous lust and rage.
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SPEAKER_02: So he sends Cesar with the knife to go and do her in.
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SPEAKER_02: But of course, Cesar actually falls in love with Jane.
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SPEAKER_02: And refuses to murder her.
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SPEAKER_02: And it's this idea, I think, that they're almost one.
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SPEAKER_02: Caligari and Cesar are the flip sides of the same coin, as it were.
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SPEAKER_02: But you have Cesar providing the heart.
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SPEAKER_02: Caligari, it's all intellect turned into murder.
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SPEAKER_02: And Cesar, it's murder that's mediated by the heart.
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SPEAKER_02: So I think there's a link there.
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SPEAKER_02: Between the two,
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SPEAKER_02: we've talked about the hands,
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SPEAKER_02: about the fact that black leather gloves seem to be au fait for the scientists.
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SPEAKER_02: And of course, the thing about...
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SPEAKER_00: The mad scientist.
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SPEAKER_02: The mad scientist, yes, the mad scientist.
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SPEAKER_02: Caligari doesn't have these black leather gloves, these black gloves, but César does.
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SPEAKER_02: His hands are often covered or cloaked in shadow, and it's as if César is...
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SPEAKER_02: The Hands of Caligari in that way.
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SPEAKER_01: Going on with this kind of
11:04
SPEAKER_01: these elements of what one might regard as prophecy
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SPEAKER_01: of Nazism within Metropolis,
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SPEAKER_01: there are also these very scary sequences of choreographed mob activity,
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SPEAKER_01: both in the novel and the film,
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SPEAKER_01: Apparently, Hitler and Goebbels both loved the movie when they saw it.
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SPEAKER_01: And there is this depiction of the machine city as wanting living men for food.
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SPEAKER_01: You know,
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SPEAKER_01: the furnaces,
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SPEAKER_01: the endless stream of human beings which have been processed through
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SPEAKER_01: the machine room.
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SPEAKER_01: There's this kind of...
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SPEAKER_01: It's almost as if there's a social question about the use of technology
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SPEAKER_01: in modern society and where exactly...
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SPEAKER_01: Is industrialisation leading us?
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SPEAKER_01: Is the question which you could even identify as being started by Mary Shelley
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SPEAKER_01: with Frankenstein and a question that we're still...
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SPEAKER_01: Having to grapple with.
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SPEAKER_01: Where is industrialization leading us to global warming?
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SPEAKER_01: Do you know what I mean?
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SPEAKER_01: It's the same kind of question now in a sense, and I guess in that sense it's kind of prophetic.
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SPEAKER_01: So Metropolis is a machine city which is energized by boilers and furnaces,
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SPEAKER_01: but is obviously the very kind of industrialized notion of a modern city,
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SPEAKER_01: which is different now,
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SPEAKER_01: and it has more to do with digital space and that kind of idea that we have
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SPEAKER_01: about cities these days.
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SPEAKER_01: But, of course, key to the The depiction of Metropolis is this question of the robot.
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SPEAKER_01: You know, the idea of robot is only a relatively recent invention at the time.
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SPEAKER_01: Early 1920s,
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SPEAKER_01: the Carol Capex idea of a robot as a kind of automaton,
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SPEAKER_01: meaning industrial slave labourer.
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SPEAKER_01: And the idea of Metropolis is, are we all to become industrial slave labourers?
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SPEAKER_01: That was the big question, I guess.
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SPEAKER_02: The thing that,
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SPEAKER_02: drawing in Caligari for a second,
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SPEAKER_02: is the fact that I think Rotwang in Metropolis is portrayed
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SPEAKER_02: as this great high priest of technology.
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SPEAKER_02: And it almost institutionalizes it in that way and gives it a religious bent.
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SPEAKER_02: And certainly later they set up this false idol, this metal Maria, who's not the real thing.
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SPEAKER_02: And, you know, all the masses are led astray from the true path, as it were.
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SPEAKER_02: And they are filled with this religious devotion in the same way.
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SPEAKER_02: And I think that Caligari draws on some of these religious themes as well because...
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SPEAKER_02: I think it's almost predicting the rise of the psychiatrist as high priest in
13:49
SPEAKER_02: the 1960s, that sort of thing as well.
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SPEAKER_02: In the end,
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SPEAKER_02: the very last bit,
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SPEAKER_02: where it's revealed that Francis,
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SPEAKER_02: the hero,
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SPEAKER_02: is actually in the insane asylum himself,
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SPEAKER_02: and Caligari appears as his doctor,
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SPEAKER_02: and he takes off his glasses,
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SPEAKER_02: the actor,
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SPEAKER_02: and says, strange, he thinks I'm Dr Caligari, but he will be cured immediately.
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SPEAKER_02: Now that I know his problem, he will be cured.
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SPEAKER_02: As if he's got all the answers.
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SPEAKER_02: And as if psychology and psychiatry was an absolute science in that way.
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SPEAKER_02: It was presented as an absolute science then.
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SPEAKER_02: When really, at that time, it had as much to do with myth as anything.
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SPEAKER_02: Okay.
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SPEAKER_00: Although I think it's interesting something that you say there
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SPEAKER_00: which makes these two doctors different from the other doctors
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SPEAKER_00: that we've been discussing,
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SPEAKER_00: which is the fact that both of these doctors are institutionalised.
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SPEAKER_00: They are part of the establishment,
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SPEAKER_00: whereas most of the other doctors so far have been outside of the establishment.
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SPEAKER_00: Someone like Moreau has been so far outside of the establishment he's had to go off
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SPEAKER_00: to a little remote island on his own.
14:59
SPEAKER_01: He's legged it, huh?
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SPEAKER_00: So it's very interesting that at this stage we start to see
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SPEAKER_00: the scientists being brought back into the mainstream of society
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SPEAKER_00: and having their actions being seen as being approved of perhaps
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SPEAKER_00: by mainstream society.
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SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's an interesting point.
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SPEAKER_01: I wonder what the...
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SPEAKER_01: I was at a loss to try to work out why...
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SPEAKER_01: What Rotwang's problem is?
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SPEAKER_01: Probably the problem is he's got a name like Rotwang,
15:27
SPEAKER_01: which sounds like a disease that perhaps these days you're going to get a cream for.
15:31
SPEAKER_01: But why exactly does he produce this female robot to lead the workers astray
15:39
SPEAKER_01: to ensure,
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SPEAKER_01: I think this is probably in his modus operandi,
15:42
SPEAKER_01: that the entire machine city ends in a cataclysmic and joyful apocalypse?
15:48
SPEAKER_01: What exactly is the point of him doing that?
15:49
SPEAKER_01: Just...
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SPEAKER_01: To bugger everything up?
15:51
SPEAKER_00: I think part of it was because they wanted to replace the human workers
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SPEAKER_00: with actual robots, perhaps to eliminate that.
15:59
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
15:59
SPEAKER_00: we see lots of shots of the workers becoming tired and failing in their jobs because
16:05
SPEAKER_00: by the end of their shift they're so exhausted.
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SPEAKER_00: So I think there is partly that desire to get rid of them completely.
16:12
SPEAKER_01: Cost-effectiveness.
16:13
SPEAKER_00: Efficiency.
16:14
SPEAKER_01: Efficiency.
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SPEAKER_01: For profit.
16:15
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
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SPEAKER_00: And put in robots that will never tire and never fail,
16:21
SPEAKER_00: and perhaps to inspire them to revolt in order to justify some kind
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SPEAKER_00: of mass repression, possibly murder, in order to get rid of them.
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SPEAKER_02: I accept that,
16:33
SPEAKER_02: but I also think that there's perhaps a sense that it was not
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SPEAKER_02: about physically replacing the workers with robots.
16:41
SPEAKER_02: It could be that Maria...
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SPEAKER_02: The original Maria was this very strong,
16:47
SPEAKER_02: very passionate woman in touch with her own emotions who stirred up the masses
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SPEAKER_02: and they all got very uptight and upset about things and they reacted in
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SPEAKER_02: a very human way and they replaced her with a metal Maria.
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SPEAKER_02: Who deals with things in a very logical way, a very ordered way, and is far more repressed.
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SPEAKER_02: If they're patterning themselves on her,
17:14
SPEAKER_02: then maybe it's about conformity and getting them to act more in a robotic fashion.
17:21
SPEAKER_00: I'm just saying I don't really agree with your representations of the Marias because
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SPEAKER_00: the robot Maria is the one that does the saucy dancing and is the one
17:30
SPEAKER_00: that whips them all up into their lives.
17:34
SPEAKER_00: Not literally whips them up.
17:34
SPEAKER_00: Frenzy, not literally,
17:37
SPEAKER_00: but she's quite wild-eyed and I don't know whether they mean that
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SPEAKER_00: the robot is passionate but certainly her behaviour is extremely passionate
17:48
SPEAKER_00: and reckless.
17:48
SPEAKER_00: I mean, even at the point when they are Is she an opposite to Rotvang as well?
17:53
SPEAKER_00: Does she serve to have a relationship with Rotvang in the same way that Cesare has
17:58
SPEAKER_00: a relationship with Caligari?
18:14
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
18:14
SPEAKER_00: I mean, certainly someone like Rotwang would never be able to relate to the masses in that way.
18:22
SPEAKER_00: They would probably reject him resoundingly.
18:25
SPEAKER_00: And certainly when he goes down to the undercity,
18:27
SPEAKER_00: he's always lurking in the shadows and staying out the way and making sure
18:31
SPEAKER_00: that he's not seen by the people.
18:33
SPEAKER_00: So she certainly acts as his instrument in that respect.
18:36
SPEAKER_02: I want to throw another thing in now,
18:38
SPEAKER_02: which is the women, OK,
18:40
SPEAKER_02: and the way that the women are portrayed in the two Because certainly in the cabinet
18:46
SPEAKER_02: of Dr Caligari, Jane is fainting a lot.
18:52
SPEAKER_02: And even at the end,
18:53
SPEAKER_02: when it's revealed that it's the twist and that Jane is actually another one of
18:58
SPEAKER_02: the patients in the Usain Asylum,
19:00
SPEAKER_02: she's still sort of like wandering around the back of her hand to her forehead
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SPEAKER_02: and off with the fairies and la la la.
19:06
SPEAKER_01: The studio lights are very hot.
19:08
SPEAKER_02: Yes, of course.
19:10
SPEAKER_02: But in no way is it a positive depiction of the woman, which, you know, it's 1919.
19:18
SPEAKER_02: We're not necessarily expecting that.
19:21
SPEAKER_02: But I think maybe Metropolis is,
19:24
SPEAKER_02: even though about only about 10 years has passed,
19:29
SPEAKER_02: does present a more positive representation of women.
19:33
SPEAKER_00: She's certainly more active in the way that she...
19:38
SPEAKER_00: She is the person who is calling together,
19:42
SPEAKER_00: I suppose originally the Maria is trying to get the workers to have some kind
19:48
SPEAKER_00: of peaceful uprising in order to improve their condition and she's the leader of
19:52
SPEAKER_00: that and of course towards the end of the film she's very instrumental in saving
19:57
SPEAKER_00: the children from the flooding of the undercity so she's certainly
20:00
SPEAKER_00: a more active character.
20:02
SPEAKER_00: Obviously there are still some elements,
20:04
SPEAKER_00: as you would expect,
20:06
SPEAKER_00: of the older depictions,
20:07
SPEAKER_00: of more traditional depictions of women,
20:10
SPEAKER_00: in that she still needs to ultimately be rescued by the hero.
20:14
SPEAKER_00: And, of course,
20:15
SPEAKER_00: perhaps more surprisingly,
20:16
SPEAKER_00: when we're talking about that liaison between the head and the hands and the search
20:22
SPEAKER_00: for the heart, Maria never seems to suggest that she herself could act as the heart.
20:27
SPEAKER_00: Again, that falls to the hero, Freyda.
20:30
SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, there's still some retention of the traditional elements there.
20:34
SPEAKER_01: It's interesting as well, apparently, the...
20:37
SPEAKER_01: I'd read that Thea von Harbu,
20:40
SPEAKER_01: who is the wife of Fritz Lang,
20:43
SPEAKER_01: who wrote the original novel, says,
20:45
SPEAKER_01: by her own admission,
20:46
SPEAKER_01: the things that influenced her in the writing of the novel were Jules Verne.
20:52
SPEAKER_01: H.G.
20:52
SPEAKER_01: Wells, and to my mind,
20:54
SPEAKER_01: a little-known French novel called Eve of the Future,
20:59
SPEAKER_01: in which we have this depiction of a female robot.
21:02
SPEAKER_01: Although somebody suggested that Lang had tossed these influences together
21:11
SPEAKER_01: like
21:11
SPEAKER_01: a salad by the family idiot, which I thought was a little... Harsh.
21:15
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
21:16
SPEAKER_01: It is a little harsh, isn't it?
21:19
SPEAKER_01: Another interesting thing, I think, you mentioned...
21:21
SPEAKER_01: You know, the time 1919 for the cabinet of Dr Caligari and then we've got 1926 for Metropolis.
21:31
SPEAKER_01: Not long after this,
21:32
SPEAKER_01: in the early 1930s, there seems to be a cinematic obsession with mad doctors.
21:37
SPEAKER_01: Next week we'll be talking about one of these with the case of Dr Fu Manchu.
21:44
SPEAKER_01: You know,
21:45
SPEAKER_01: this is 1932,
21:46
SPEAKER_01: the Fu Manchu,
21:47
SPEAKER_01: the first Fu Manchu films, which I think were later reprised in the 50s and 60s.
21:51
SPEAKER_01: But you've also got the James Wales film.
21:54
SPEAKER_01: Film adaptation of Frankenstein.
21:57
SPEAKER_01: There's an obsession all of a sudden with cinematic doctors.
22:00
SPEAKER_02: But it's not just these big budget films as well.
22:02
SPEAKER_02: The television serials of the time,
22:05
SPEAKER_02: the two famous ones of which are Buck Rogers in the 25th century and Flash Gordon,
22:12
SPEAKER_02: both have doctors at the heart of them.
22:15
SPEAKER_02: You've got Dr. Hans Zarkov in...
22:18
SPEAKER_02: Flash Gordon,
22:19
SPEAKER_02: who is he's on Flash's side,
22:21
SPEAKER_02: but he's always portrayed as this fairly cowardly venal character that will run away
22:28
SPEAKER_02: and it's left to Flash and his companions to actually do it.
22:34
SPEAKER_02: And then in Buck Rogers,
22:35
SPEAKER_02: you've got Dr.
22:36
SPEAKER_02: Elias Hewer,
22:37
SPEAKER_02: who's the head of the Earth Defense Force,
22:41
SPEAKER_02: who was portrayed as a scientist,
22:43
SPEAKER_02: but quite Ineffective as well at defending against Killer Kane and all the fleet
22:50
SPEAKER_02: that are coming towards him.
22:52
SPEAKER_02: Because of course you've got Killer Kane and Ming of Mongo who are ready to conquer the Earth.
22:58
SPEAKER_02: And it's not science that can save the Earth.
23:01
SPEAKER_02: It's good old square jawed heroism and damsels fainting left, right and centre.
23:08
SPEAKER_02: Now they're not necessarily bad scientists either.
23:12
SPEAKER_02: Mad, bad and dangerous to know scientists,
23:15
SPEAKER_02: they're more rubbish scientists that can't contribute towards the overall defence.
23:22
SPEAKER_02: And these were the serials that come back every week because it's in 24 parts.
23:27
SPEAKER_02: And that sort of mass media is only ever going to pick up and reflect what's going
23:33
SPEAKER_02: on in the big movies at that time.
23:36
SPEAKER_01: I wonder what you think it might be,
23:39
SPEAKER_01: what kind of cultural or social influence on the films over the time,
23:44
SPEAKER_01: other than perhaps self-reference within cinema itself,
23:47
SPEAKER_01: what scientific influences you think that might have been brought to bear?
23:51
SPEAKER_01: That was happening,
23:53
SPEAKER_01: which led to this,
23:54
SPEAKER_01: you know,
23:55
SPEAKER_01: common depiction of scientists as nutters or as rather lacking in virility and so on
24:01
SPEAKER_01: and so forth at that time, late 20s, early 30s.
24:04
SPEAKER_00: I suppose the obvious ones would be the end of World War I and the Great Depression.
24:09
SPEAKER_00: I mean, obviously,
24:10
SPEAKER_00: the early part of the 20th century and the late 19th century,
24:12
SPEAKER_00: you had the modernist movement, which was promising.
24:16
SPEAKER_00: And then,
24:21
SPEAKER_00: of course,
24:22
SPEAKER_00: you have these two absolutely horrendous global events,
24:26
SPEAKER_00: which seem to suggest that that's not the case,
24:28
SPEAKER_00: that science doesn't have the answers.
24:31
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, World War I in particular, there are a number of...
24:34
SPEAKER_00: New scientific developments in terms of things like tanks,
24:39
SPEAKER_00: mustard gas,
24:41
SPEAKER_00: which of course are being used for destruction rather than to make things better.
24:45
SPEAKER_00: So that would seem to be the...
24:48
SPEAKER_01: The famous German chemist Fritz Haber deliberately developed gases for the use
24:53
SPEAKER_01: in murdering large numbers of people in industrial proportions,
24:57
SPEAKER_01: as Kurt Vonnegut used to say.
25:00
SPEAKER_01: You know,
25:00
SPEAKER_01: I remember saying that nature will kill many,
25:03
SPEAKER_01: many people,
25:04
SPEAKER_01: but if you want to kill humans in industrial proportions,
25:07
SPEAKER_01: you can rely on humans to do that.
25:08
SPEAKER_01: So I think that's a good point, isn't it?
25:10
SPEAKER_01: Those kind of things,
25:11
SPEAKER_01: the realisation that actually science could be put too ill as well as good.
25:15
SPEAKER_02: The other element that's going on in between the war years is industrialisation
25:20
SPEAKER_02: and standardisation through mass production and the death of the craftsmen and
25:25
SPEAKER_02: the death of the small community as you have large-scale migration into these cities
25:32
SPEAKER_02: and everybody starts to wear the same thing,
25:35
SPEAKER_02: everybody starts to have the same pots and pans and people are consumed,
25:41
SPEAKER_02: as is directly depicted in Metropolis, by these vast...
25:47
SPEAKER_02: I mean, the arts and crafts movement is actually a direct pushing back of that.
25:57
SPEAKER_02: I mean, this was occurring in the 1920s and 1930s in Britain.
26:01
SPEAKER_02: People like Clarice Cliff and the arts and crafts movement are a rejection of
26:05
SPEAKER_02: that mass production.
26:07
SPEAKER_02: And you can trace that.
26:09
SPEAKER_02: The factories that were churning out saucepans and motorcars directly back to
26:14
SPEAKER_02: the military factories that were churning out armaments If we're talking about
26:20
SPEAKER_02: the influence of the cabinet of Dr Caligari and the influence of Metropolis,
26:26
SPEAKER_02: then perhaps we should bring it right up to date and talk
26:29
SPEAKER_02: about their continuing influence,
26:31
SPEAKER_02: not just contextually at the time in the pre-war years,
26:35
SPEAKER_02: but bring it right up to date and say that,
26:38
SPEAKER_02: for example,
26:39
SPEAKER_02: directors like Ridley Scott have said that Lang's vision of the city
26:45
SPEAKER_02: in Metropolis is Was hugely influential in the science fiction of the 1970s,
26:52
SPEAKER_02: 80s and 90s and their depiction of science fictional cities.
26:56
SPEAKER_02: In Blade Runner,
26:57
SPEAKER_02: for example, the city is referred to colloquially as Ridleyville after the director.
27:03
SPEAKER_02: And it's a mixture of these neon lights and smooth surfaces and this dark,
27:11
SPEAKER_02: gothic, rain-filled, black abyss.
27:16
SPEAKER_00: According to my friend who is from Port Talbot,
27:21
SPEAKER_00: the cityscape in Blade Runner is directly influenced by Port Talbot.
27:26
SPEAKER_01: I think there may actually be images of Port Talbot.
27:30
SPEAKER_01: Yes, the flames.
27:32
SPEAKER_01: Because it was filmed in the Docklands, famously.
27:37
SPEAKER_01: Fritz Lang,
27:38
SPEAKER_01: I understand,
27:39
SPEAKER_01: believed that an audience learns more About a character from detail and decor and in
27:45
SPEAKER_01: the way that light falls on a room or in a cityscape,
27:49
SPEAKER_01: I guess, than from pages and pages of dialogue.
27:52
SPEAKER_01: And I think that was a very fashionable theory of film design.
27:57
SPEAKER_01: In the 1920s.
27:59
SPEAKER_01: And you can imagine that that's also true of the way in which we talked earlier
28:02
SPEAKER_01: about the way in which Rotwang's house is portrayed.
28:06
SPEAKER_01: You know, you said it in one, doesn't it?
28:09
SPEAKER_01: And right at the beginning of the film, in the middle of the city was an old house.
28:13
SPEAKER_01: This modern city is actually unable to repress this element of mysticism,
28:18
SPEAKER_01: which is at the heart of science.
28:20
SPEAKER_01: So that's actually saying quite a lot in architectural terms.
28:24
SPEAKER_02: In Blade Runner you have the city above, as it were.
28:28
SPEAKER_02: You have the gleaming, pristine offices of those that have risen to the top in the city.
28:35
SPEAKER_02: Down below are all the peasants' shacks and little hovels and little shops where...
28:43
SPEAKER_02: The protagonist, Deckard, has to sort of like fertile amongst to find the replicants.
28:47
SPEAKER_01: Yes, it's also similar to The Fifth Element.
28:49
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
28:49
SPEAKER_01: Because the lower and lower you go.
28:51
SPEAKER_01: And there was a recent Doctor Who in which is also the case.
28:53
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's very much a case that in science fiction,
28:55
SPEAKER_00: the physical arrangement of a city is deemed to be emblematic of a class hierarchy.
29:01
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
29:02
SPEAKER_00: And you see it not just in cinematic science fiction, but also in written science fiction.
29:07
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, in the Michael Marshall Smith book.
29:08
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
29:09
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
29:10
SPEAKER_01: There's an entire hierarchy.
29:12
SPEAKER_01: The more successful you are, the higher floor you live.
29:15
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
29:16
SPEAKER_02: Robert Silverberg,
29:16
SPEAKER_02: The World Inside,
29:18
SPEAKER_02: people are actually,
29:20
SPEAKER_02: their status is determined by what floor they live on
29:22
SPEAKER_02: in these massive high-rise towers.
29:25
SPEAKER_02: So the higher your number, which you wear, Caligari 2.0.
29:54
SPEAKER_02: Had substantial influence right up to the present day.
29:58
SPEAKER_02: Caligari is often described as the proto-slasher
30:05
SPEAKER_02: film that has been made.
30:08
SPEAKER_02: So the Freddy Kruegers and Michael Myers wandering around with knives
30:13
SPEAKER_02: and attacking young girls can all be traced back to...
30:18
SPEAKER_02: This, and the fact that Caesar is,
30:21
SPEAKER_02: you know,
30:22
SPEAKER_02: in the shadows,
30:23
SPEAKER_02: in this dark unitard,
30:25
SPEAKER_02: and you can't tell,
30:26
SPEAKER_02: as the shadows are cast by the flickering lights,
30:29
SPEAKER_02: which is his hand being raised with the knife,
30:31
SPEAKER_02: and which is actually a genuine shadow,
30:34
SPEAKER_02: and has all of those shocks, is done here for the first time, and you can imagine...
30:39
SPEAKER_02: But if you'd never seen anything like that,
30:41
SPEAKER_02: we're world-weary about it today,
30:43
SPEAKER_02: but if you've never seen anything like that before,
30:46
SPEAKER_02: and you're this person in 1919 that goes to the cinema,
30:51
SPEAKER_02: of being absolutely scared to death,
30:53
SPEAKER_02: because it's dark in a cinema,
30:55
SPEAKER_02: and there are people wandering around with ice cream cones that are very pointy,
30:59
SPEAKER_02: and you're not sure what's going on.
31:01
SPEAKER_02: You're going to be stabbed in the eye by one.
31:04
SPEAKER_00: I forgot what I was going to say now.
31:05
SPEAKER_01: I'm surprised after all that.
31:07
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
31:08
SPEAKER_00: I think it's one of those films where the murderer is quite supernatural.
31:13
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's quite scary because he has absolutely no motive whatsoever.
31:19
SPEAKER_00: He's just killing for the sake of killing.
31:21
SPEAKER_00: Caligari,
31:22
SPEAKER_00: who's controlling him,
31:23
SPEAKER_00: is killing people,
31:26
SPEAKER_00: purely to prove that he can,
31:27
SPEAKER_00: that he can overcome a human being's innate reluctance to kill through his own...
31:34
SPEAKER_00: To project forward to our last podcast,
31:36
SPEAKER_00: there's another famous psychiatrist in cinema who famously programmes...
31:55
SPEAKER_02: And that's Hannibal Lecter,
31:58
SPEAKER_02: who in the film that he's introduced in most famously,
32:02
SPEAKER_02: Silence of the Lambs,
32:04
SPEAKER_02: it's not Lecter who we start off as Clarice Starling starts off chasing.
32:10
SPEAKER_02: She's actually chasing Buffalo Bill.
32:13
SPEAKER_02: And we learned through the film that Buffalo Bill was actually a patient of Lecter's.
32:19
SPEAKER_02: And it was through Lecter's influence that he started his murderous rampage.
32:25
SPEAKER_02: So that's a direct homage to what's going on here in Caligari.
32:31
SPEAKER_02: And at times Lecter is proud of his creation and what he's doing.
32:41
SPEAKER_01: OK, thank you for listening to the third in The Difference Engine podcasts of
32:46
SPEAKER_01: the Top Ten Mad Doctors of Cinema.
32:49
SPEAKER_01: Today we talked about Rotwang from Metropolis and Dr Caligari from the Strange Case
32:56
SPEAKER_01: of... No, he wasn't called that.
32:57
SPEAKER_01: The Cabinet.
32:58
SPEAKER_01: The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, of course.
33:01
SPEAKER_01: The Gothic at the Heart of the Modern.
33:03
SPEAKER_01: That's what we've been talking about today, I guess.
33:04
SPEAKER_01: That's something that you might say links the two things.
33:08
SPEAKER_01: And satires on Enlightenment science and exactly where Enlightenment science was taking us.
33:13
SPEAKER_01: Please join us again next time.