A Silent Dream of Sexual Cacophony: Psychoanalyzing E. A. Dupont’s VARIETÉ – Part One: The Dream
Movie of the Week #28, Part 1 of 4
For this week’s Movie of the Week, we’re doing something a little different, covering one movie, but over four days. The film is E.A. Dupont’s Varieté, from 1925, and instead of a ‘review,’ we shall be reading a very peculiar essay I wrote in graduate school, for a class on Psychoanalysis and cinema. It is presented in the form of 4 letters from my alter-ego, Dr. Johnathon R. Black, to a fictive colleague, Dr. Reginald G. Winterbottom.
Since I am years past actually submitting said essay for credit, I can now freely admit it is more a work of written performance art than it is an actual research paper. It was, perhaps understandably, not particularly well-received by the Professor it was written for; I am still rather fond of it.
Without further ado, today we begin with The First Letter. Enjoy…
The First Letter: The Dream
From the desk of Dr. Johnathon R. Black
The Third of Frimaire, Year CCXXV
(Editor’s Note: November 23rd, 2018)
To Dr. Reginald G. Winterbottom,
42 Cockburn St.
Motherwell, North Lanarkshire
ML18 0ZU, Scotland
We are standing in the clear light of a sudden insight. The dream cannot be compared to the random resonation of a musical instrument struck not by the hand of a player but by the impact of an external force; it is not meaningless, not absurd, it does not assume that one part of our store of ideas slumbers while another begins to wake. It is a fully valid psychical phenomenon, in fact a wish-fulfillment … But just as we are about to rejoice in this knowledge, we are assailed by a host of questions. If, as the dream-interpretation would have it, the dream represents a fulfilled wish, what is the source of the striking and disconcerting form in which this wish-fulfillment is expressed? … Can the dream teach us anything new about our inner psychical processes, can its content rectify opinions we have held during the day?
—Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?
—Bruce Springsteen, The River
My Dear Dr. Winterbottom,
I hope this letter finds you well, and recovered after the terrible chill that set upon you when last we met in Iowa. I write – a few weeks delayed by the burdens of circumstance – to relate to you all I saw at that event we planned to attend together before the cold so rudely intruded upon your health.
On that frosty Saturday night in October – but then, I scarcely need to describe to you that terrible climate – I ventured forth from my home to see a film. The experience was a bit like travelling backwards in time, for I was not headed South towards the local suburban multiplex to see a freshly captured spectacle, but West, into the heart of the city, to visit the Englert, that venerable old theatre constructed in 1912. It once showed some of the earliest picture shows, and I was there to see a silent film made scarcely a decade after the building’s erection. It was a bit like travelling to another dimension, too, for although this presentation would be accompanied by live music, it would not be the house piano or stately symphony of the olden days, but by the Alloy Orchestra, a three-man group of multi-instrumentalists whose strange and impossible sounds seemed to emanate from the deepest recesses of the film’s innermost unconscious.
The film was E.A. Dupont’s Varieté (1925), a German picture crafted right in the middle of the country’s towering decade of vibrant, hallucinatory silent cinema, from the time of Caligari and Nosferatu and Dr. Mabuse, of the boldly futurist Metropolis and the painfully present-tense The Last Man. Varieté is not spoken of in the same breath as these films, in those reverential hushed tones reserved for legends, for it exists in relative obscurity as compared to its cinematic brethren. Tonight, it would be lovingly elevated to its rightful place in the canon by a score that coaxed out every inch of the film’s electric energy. How I wish you could have been there! For over the course of the evening, I would come to realize I was not only watching a masterpiece, but, to my great surprise, perhaps the most erotically charged film I had ever seen in a theatre.
The full breadth of this experience would not become clear to me until I began experiencing it as a dream. For in this presentation, I am ashamed to say I fell victim to a weakness no film academic should cop to, but towards which I find myself chronically vulnerable: The scourge of drowsiness. As you know, it falls upon me at the most inconvenient of times, and neither the quality of the film nor the singularity of its presentation is a factor in fending off this nemesis. A scant fifteen minutes into the feature, feeling already that I was in love with it, and knowing for certain I had never heard musical accompaniment akin to that strange magic the Alloy Orchestra was conjuring, I began to nod off. Slowly at first, a gradual dip of the head followed by a sharp snap back into focus, until my eyes glazed over and, just as Emil Jannings absconded with Lya de Putti, his wandering temptress, I fell victim to my own femme fatale, and Lady Sleep beckoned me into her chambers. Time was lost, though I was not sure how much, until I awoke to see the central couple, now joined by a mysterious posh acrobat, preparing for a daring trapeze act.
Karl Freund, that most inspired of all silent-era cinematographers, cackled at me from behind the frame and across the decades, his imagery ready and waiting to capitalize on my dozy disorientation. Varieté is not a sexually modest film, by the standards of its time or ours, and even while I was awake, it was clear that Messrs. Freund and Dupont had no compunctions about putting de Putti’s body on display, nor about turning the camera itself into a highly charged sexual being. From the beginning, Mr. Freund’s lens moves like a lover through and within these spaces, in sensuous harmony with the characters it follows, from the depths of sexual frustration to the heights of orgasmic bliss. Ah Reginald, my dear friend, how astonishing it was! Yet nothing could prepare me for how far this philosophy would or could extend, when Mr. Freund takes his camera up into the air alongside this newly minted ménage-a-trois of acrobats – nothing, that is, short of the vulnerable haze that comes from groggily blinking oneself awake inside a darkened movie house.
Suddenly, the film became as if a dream to me, unspooling not from a projector but from deep within a psyche that had been wired straight into my own. As Mr. Freund’s camera swung through the air in complete experiential tandem with the characters, association upon association began crashing over me, as they always do for the person attentive towards the detailed movements of their dreams. From that moment on, until the Orchestra played its final haunting notes, I was taken aback at everything that unfolded before my eyes, by a film-dream wherein no image seemed simple or tame, because each was so desperately fraught with the language of the symbolic and the voice of the unconscious. The film’s exemplary craft – which, like the other great silent films, has, as you well know, remained largely unsurpassed in the century to follow – would, I think, have been apparent to me in any state of mind. But the pulsating energy of sexual desire and barely-repressed cravings that emanate from the film’s very essence may not have struck me, were I not myself primed, through the weight of my own fatigue, to see the film as I would my own nocturnal reveries.
Upon stepping outside the theater, back into that bitterest of colds, I tapped feverishly away at my cellular phone to procure from the web Mr. Dupont’s film on home video. Indeed, waiting for it to arrive was part of my delay in penning you this letter (apparently, the package spent some time waylaid at a small post office in What Cheer, just a few dozen miles from my home). In any case, a second viewing – for which I was fully and enthusiastically awake – confirmed what I had suspected within that evening’s waking dream: That Varieté was not only a bold cacophony of literal and symbolic sexuality, but that it was furthermore a cornucopia of psychoanalytic thought, a film filled with fetishes and phalluses, awash in symbolism and built to reflect the psychical processes that conceal our own deepest truths from our waking thought. A film about things concealed, repressed, left under the surface, only to bubble up in forceful waves of symbology and misrecognition, as they do in sleep, when our id beckons forth to our ego.
The film demands to be read along these lines, in excruciating detail and with a passion mirroring the work’s own force of will – not as an interpretation through the lens of psychoanalysis, but as an act of psychoanalyzing the work itself, for whatever that small but material difference is worth. It is a project I endeavor to complete in due course, and already I am overwhelmed with notes. For now, I have included with this letter my copy of the film, so that you may peruse it at your leisure. When next I write, I will begin to share my diagnoses of Mr. Dupont’s work, for which I invite your always apt and generous feedback. I see a multitude of psychoanalytic fault lines to traverse, grouped loosely into the thematic encampments of Fetishism, Phallic representation, and the fraught space of the ménage-a-trois – all of which I know you, my dear doctor, are well acquainted with.
Until then, I leave you, as always, with my best wishes, for yourself, Mrs. Winterbottom, and the many purebred hounds who roam your fine Scottish estate.
Sincerely,
Dr. Johnathon R. Black
Tomorrow: The Second Letter, “The Fetish,” in which we discuss pleasure, displeasure, displacement, and much more…
Read the book 200 Reviews by Jonathan R. Lack in Paperback or on Kindle
Subscribe to PURELY ACADEMIC, our monthly variety podcast about movies, video games, TV, and more
Like anime? Listen to the podcast I host with Sean Chapman, JAPANIMATION STATION, where we review all sorts of anime every week. Watch on YouTube or Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.