A Silent Dream of Sexual Cacophony: Psychoanalyzing E. A. Dupont’s VARIETÉ – Part Two: The Fetish

Movie of the Week #28, Part 2 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.

If you missed yesterday’s introduction, The First Letter, you may read it at this link. Today, we continue with The Second Letter. Enjoy…

The Second Letter: The Fetish

From the desk of Dr. Johnathon R. Black

The Twelfth of Frimaire, Year CCXXV

(Editor’s Note: December 2^nd, 2018)

To Dr. Reginald G. Winterbottom,

42 Cockburn St.

Motherwell, North Lanarkshire

ML18 0ZU, Scotland

…The female image as a castration threat constantly endangers the unity of the diegesis and bursts through the world of illusion as an intrusive, static, one-dimensional fetish. Thus the two looks materially present in time and space are obsessively subordinated to the neurotic needs of the male ego. The camera becomes the mechanism for producing an illusion of Renaissance space, flowing movements compatible with the human eye, an ideology of representation that revolves around the perception of the subject; the camera's look is disavowed in order to create a convincing world in which the spectator's surrogate can perform with verisimilitude. Simultaneously, the look of the audience is denied an intrinsic force: as soon as fetishistic representation of the female image threatens to break the spell of illusion, and the erotic image on the screen appears directly (without mediation) to the spectator, the fact of fetishisation, concealing as it does castration fear, freezes the look, fixates the spectator and prevents him from achieving any distance from the image in front of him.

—Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

I guess I discovered there are a lot of fetishes – footishes, they should be called – connected to feet and shoes … The shoes started talking, as I say, the body’s always talking, and the mood is always talking, and you go with that kind of feeling…and it sort of tells you how to go.

—David Lynch, Foot Fetish exhibit at the Galerie Vero-Dodat

My Dear Dr. Winterbottom,

Scarcely did I set down my pen on our last communique before I found my hand beckoned in its direction once more. I have been writing feverishly about the subject to which I last alerted you, and the letter that follows these words was ceased in the writing only because of the fatigue of my hand. Mayhaps, in the time it takes this second letter to cross that vast and inscrutable Atlantic, you and Mrs. Winterbottom shall have watched the film about which I write, so that my words will not fall on deaf ears (though of course, I know yours are always attentive).

As I consider the beginnings of my subject – Mr. E.A. Dupont’s 1925 film Varieté – I find myself wondering whether my untimely summons to sleep – as related in my last letter – were not due solely to the happenstance of fatigue. For the space in which Mr. Dupont’s film begins is so innately dream-like as to raise the prospect of slumber within the viewer’s being.

“Call in Number 28,” the prison warden intones, sitting behind a stately wooden desk in his cavernous stone-walled office. Number 28 enters, a hulking, imposing mass of a figure, head hung low: a man who already had no name, in the story that shall soon unfold, but stands here stripped of everything, come to face authority in a monotonic room that seems to stretch infinitely in all directions, the only cardinal anchors being the Warden, his desk, and the large, looming cross hanging above, with the bloodied figure of Christ hanging in anguish from its carved wooden slats (not unlike our mutual acquaintance, Dr. Wilkins, in that old dungeon of an office he always insisted on maintaining).

It is not a prison Number 28 inhabits, but the idea of a prison – that space which is signified by guilt, by remorse, by the boundaries of a self which cannot break free from the wicked actions of its past. The walls form a void of entrapment, a dimension in which exists no notion of escape, and the only discernable figures are those of a higher authority to which the beckons of a moral imposition must be answered. Mr. Dupont has not constructed the stage of a penitentiary, but of an intense internality, a space of memory and introspection, where thoughts buried deeply may rise once more to the surface. This is the stage of the dreamer, the proscenium of the mind, upon which all that shall unfold are the subjectified recollections of a man in a state of confessional awakening.

“Would you like to lighten your conscience now?” beckons the warden of the dream. In the course of the great unburdening that thus pours forth, we shall come to understand the nature of this man’s heinous crime. Before then, we shall become intimately acquainted with the obsession that ruins him, an obsession that turns a mysterious woman into a personified fetish object, and reduces the man to a slave of his own uncontrollable gazing.

The confessional commences at a carnival, where Mr. Karl Freund’s sensuous camera follows the fairgoers as they move through spaces packed with spectacle, or glide through the air on a ride that frees their earthly bodies from gravity’s cruel shackles. It is a space of manufactured wonder, a false oasis from the slum-like slice of city passing by outside, a festival of attractions constructed to prey upon the common man’s baser instincts. And it is the natural habitat of Prisoner 28, henceforth known to us only as ‘The Boss,’ who enters the scene presenting a parade of young, scantily-clad women to a leering audience.

“Youth! Beauty! Grace!” he proclaims of his specimens; the men that ogle them are anything but. Slack-jawed, eyes bulging, mouths nearly foaming with animalistic craving, the disheveled men of the crowd are, you shall surely agree, detestable creatures of immense grotesquery. But then, so are we, sitting in the theatre or, even more perversely, in our home, staring hopelessly at the screen, oglers one and all. The film wastes little time in positioning the gaze as a monstrous force, one in which we, too, are complicit.

Into this world docks a freight ship christened Berta Marie, and onto the shore it brings a young woman known only as “The Strange Girl” – “Das fremde Mädchen,” I believe, though your German was always better than mine – whose mother perished of fever around Cape Verde. An old, hunched man tries to sell her off; like a figure out of a nightmare, or one of the men in the crowd, his figure is savage and unkempt, and his eyes are always seeking, darting from point to point in a gaze of ceaseless treachery. His look meets that of The Boss’, and into our doomed protagonist’s hands The Strange Girl is passed.

The good Dr. Sigmund Freud, in his voyage to map the mind’s topography – a voyage you and I have traced in such detail over the years – writes of an internal battle in man’s psyche between the principles of pleasure and unpleasure. Towards the former do we always strive, and from the latter do we flee in a perpetual state of flight. But as a harmonious life cannot consist only of those cravings which satisfy the id’s deepest desires, we cannot be at the exclusive whim of the pleasure principle. Thus enters the reality principle, the Doctor theorizes, which, while not forgoing a path of pleasure as the preferred course, “nevertheless demands and carries into effect the postponement of satisfaction, the abandonment of a number of possibilities of gaining satisfaction and the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure” (as the Doctor writes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, though I doubt you of all people failed to recognize the source of this sentence.

In Mr. Dupont’s film, The Boss does not elect a path from the crossroads of pleasure and unpleasure, but betwixt the winding lanes of pleasure and reality. When he brings The Strange Girl into his home – the home he shares with his wife and infant child – these two psychical forces temporarily coexist under one roof, represented in the two feminine bodies with which he cohabitates. The wife, with whom he shares a sexless, passionless marriage, beckons him toward the domain of the real, of a life where long-term pleasure is crafted by carefully laying the bricks of compromise day-in and day-out. The Strange Girl, so exotic and foreign, belongs entirely to the province of pleasure. Mr. Freund’s camera, locked behind the eyes of The Boss, finds endless fascination in her skin, almost translucently pale and displayed to us frequently, and from the moment she enters their home, The Boss finds himself continually distracted from his family to gaze not upon her totality, but the various component parts of her body which he begins to fetishize. In one moment, while The Boss endeavors to wrestle his attention away from her, Mr. Freund’s lens is suddenly trained on her posterior, as the Girl is bent over, caring to the crying child, while the camera lingers in The Boss’ point of view, as he centers himself through the act of gazing.

For this, too, Dr. Freud has a diagnosis (I am sure this passage has been oft-underlined in your well-worn copy as well).

“The pleasure principle long persists, however, as the method of working employed by the sexual instincts, which are so hard to ‘educate,’ and starting from those instincts, or in the ego itself, it often succeeds in overcoming the reality principle, to the detriment of the organism as a whole.”

Another ‘Boss,’ whom you know I have a terrible fondness for quoting, states the issue a little more plainly:

Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack
I went out for a ride and I never went back
Like a river that don't know where it's flowing
I took a wrong turn and I just kept going

Everybody's got a hungry heart
Everybody's got a hungry heart
Lay down your money and you play your part
Everybody's got a hungry heart

From either philosopher, we see The Boss’ dilemma laid out before us: Reality gesturing weakly on one side, Pleasure, so clearly personified in the form of The Strange Girl, calling out to his hungry heart on the other, and to his own eventual self-destruction.

Somewhere deep inside, The Boss seems to me at least subliminally aware of how dire the consequences of this vexing dichotomy may be. In the picture’s earliest sequence of manifest sexual energy, The Boss watches The Strange Girl disrobe after a day of work at the fair. The wife is absent, and as The Girl undresses, he begins, unconsciously, to mirror her. She removes her pearls; he slips off his coat. Her fingers unbutton her top, and his clumsily follow suit. From across the room, in an invisible dance verging on psycho-sexual transference, they dress one another down, engaging in foreplay without ever touching. How peculiar! Yet the moment explodes into violence when the baby, heretofore silent, begins to cry – a wail from the throat of reality’s principle, breaking abruptly into the ether of pleasure. The Strange Girl moves to swaddle the babe, and The Boss slaps her away to do it himself. Distrusting of her, and disgusted in himself, he clings to the infant, this talisman of a reality he feels slipping away.

His grip, as you have surely deduced, will not last long.

The Boss’ grasp shall fail him utterly upon the rostrum of fetishized gazing, that stage upon which he compels The Strange Girl to dance. Here, she wields a power the film describes for us as “The Strange Charm” (“Der fremde Zauber”). In the parlance of Dr. Laura Mulvey, who so deftly wields the tools of psychoanalysis as a weapon against the Unconscious Patriarch, The Strange Girl can, in her position as ‘show-girl,’ exhibit both sides of the scopophilic formula at once – “as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen.”

Over the course of the dance, The Girl grows steadily aware of this mysterious energy she possesses, her movements drawing in the vile men of the audience – both within and without the diegesis. Our own vileness – yours and mine, yes, but so to every potentially susceptible viewer – is put to the test too. The Boss, we see, is fully cognizant. He watches her, as also he watches them. So much leering. Such abominable grotesquery! He leers upon the leerers. In this coliseum of communal scopophilia, he rages; in Emil Jannings’ hulking physicality, the flames burning across his psyche are palpable. He cannot merely look upon The Strange Girl – he must own the act of looking upon her. When one of the filthy men from the crowd drunkenly lumbers on to the stage, Mr. Freund’s camera tracks in on him violently, its piercing force mimicking the movements of The Boss, as he approaches to stare down this human mirror of his own distorted perversions.

“The show is over!” he declares, his rough face, hewn by the fault lines of obsession, overwhelming the frame, consuming the look of the audience, claiming ownership over us all.

Dr. Mulvey condenses for us Dr. Freud’s original conception of scopophilia as the act of “taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze.” Curious, indeed! In this moment, so tangibly aware of all the other retinas locked in sexual reverie upon the object of his own fetishization, The Boss locks eyes with the visage of his own destiny. From here on out, he shall command the gaze, no matter the cost.

In the long, drawn-out sequence that follows, The Boss is left alone, skulking through the now-abandoned theatre until he finds The Strange Girl, hidden away in some corner recess. Mr. Freund’s camera is once again animated with the grandiose gestures of a dark sensuality. The Boss’ physicality is visually embodied to such a deeply-seated, dream-like degree that it seems as though he moves not through a physical theatre towards his flesh-and-blood sexual conquest, but across the twisted maze of his own psyche, journeying to the recesses of a repressed desire, to claim and bring it forth from the cavern of repression constructed by the id out into the waking light of the ego. As The Boss and The Girl move in for an embrace, he suddenly rips free her shawl with animalistic ferocity. Just as we glimpse the flesh underneath – that pure, pearlescent skin that signifies his hidden desire, that which he lusts for, needs, must obtain for himself – Mr. Dupont cuts away with violent precision, to The Boss’ Wife, left waiting outside, forgotten, unseen, unglimpsed, the human epitome of the reality principle abandoned now for an existence governed entirely by the whims of pleasure.

Throughout this letter, I have referred, if at times obliquely, to The Strange Girl as a fetish object. In fact, she is, for the increasingly distorted mind of The Boss, a personified fetish object. This idea is, you would probably tell me were we speaking in person, in need of further explication. We do so again with the assistance of Dr. Freud, who, in one of his masterful strokes of perverted wisdom (or, perhaps, of wise perversion) distilled the fetish condition for us thusly (in that aptly titled psychosexual manifesto, simply titled “Fetishism”):

“When now I announce that the fetish is a substitute for the penis, I shall certainly create disappointment; so I hasten to add that it is not a substitute for any chance penis, but for a particular and quite special penis that had been extremely important in early childhood but had later been lost. That is to say, it should normally have been given up, but the fetish is precisely designed to preserve it from extinction. To put it more plainly: the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and – for reasons familiar to us – does not want to give up.”

Now, I cannot responsibly speculate here on what precisely in The Boss’ childhood may have burrowed itself in his unconscious deeply enough to result in the eventual creation of a fetish object out of The Strange Girl. Whether he was, as Dr. Freud revealingly presumes all men are, traumatized by the vision of his mother’s penis-less genitalia is, like said penis, outside our field of vision.

But we may examine how, in the scope of Mr. Dupont’s cinematic dominion, The Boss fetishizes this exotic creature, and in so doing, Dr. Freud’s analysis, however odd it may at first strike the uninitiated, rings alarmingly true. For The Boss’ chief points of obsession with The Strange Girl, particularly once the two have absconded after the film’s first act, are entirely and unmistakably phallic, as I am sure you yourself have observed. His focus is situated – with palpable sexual clarity – upon those parts of her body which read most obviously, even to the only mildly perverted among us (rare though they may be), as penis substitutions.

Let us take the most magnificently explicit example the film has to offer as our primary case study, a sequence which I have taken to calling ‘The Stocking Scene’ (TSS, I scribble in my notes, to save my hand the effort of writing its full name out over and over). It occurs shortly after our not-quite-star-crossed lovers have decamped together for Berlin, where they return to The Boss’ once-trademark trapeze act in a dusty little carnival on the outskirts of town. The Boss returns to their shared tent at the end of the day only to find his lover pulling on her stocking – and Mr. Dupont cuts in close, inhabiting the man’s point-of-view, to a shot of her stockinged foot, center frame, large, consuming our vision. She wiggles her toes, and he approaches, happily transfixed. Noticing a hole in the sole, he lovingly unrolls the stocking to repair it, while she strikes up a conversation about how the famous Artinelli, a high-class English trapeze artist, wishes to hire them for a performance at the prestigious Wintergarten. Her excitement is unrestrained; his less so, for it would mean, of course, sharing the object of his fetish, which, once shared, ceases to be his – ceases, in fact, to be a fetish at all.

She coerces her bewitched lover, in a seductively styled title card: “You h a v e to say yes…” (“Du m u s s t ja sagen…”). (Ah, what founts of expression the Silent Cinema was capable! I know, my dear Dr. Winterbottom, that you and I are bound in regularly mourning its untimely passing).

This seduction is enough – the principle of pleasure calls to him, and he buries himself in its metaphorical bosom. He responds by reaching out for her arm, not merely kissing it, but feasting upon it, taking her flesh into his mouth, the arm-object consuming his entire personal universe. In the following cut, The Strange Girl arches her head back in ecstasy into an empty frame, her body filling its space in a posture of pure orgasmic bliss, this still shot instilling such a seductive sense of movement that the viewer can practically feel her pleasure.

Falling back into bed, she extends the de-stockinged leg back out to him, onto which he pounces with glee, rolling the now-repaired stocking back onto it in an enthusiastic act of foreplay, the movement – starting at the tip, unrolling down her leg – so obviously echoing the act of unrolling a condom onto an erect penis that one wonders how the action can be shown uncensored in a commercial theatre, even now in our supposedly liberal modern times.(*) And then, like with any good phallic object, he worships it, consumes himself with lust for her leg, enfolding it in his arms like a precious treasure. She leans back, again in bliss, soft light cresting across her face, basking in the glow, as his veneration of her phallic appendage continues unabated.

(*) At this juncture, my dear doctor, you may find yourself wondering whether our modern conception of condoms and their application existed in the Germany of 1925, as did I when the association wandered across my conscious while watching The Stocking Scene unfold. Would condoms have existed in such a fashion as to be employed symbolically the way they are in this scene? Our scholarly endeavors have never prompted us to investigate before – yet what cursory research I have now done on the topic has revealed more than I could have expected: that although contraceptives were by and large illegal in Germany throughout the 19^th century, condoms themselves exploded in national popularity after the German military became, near the end of that century and into the outbreak of the Great War, the first national army to encourage its soldiers of their use. The modern condom, as we conceive of it, was in no small part an invention of German ingenuity, as names like Julius Schmidt, an immigrant living in America, and Julius Fromm, working back in Germany, both made significant advancements to condom technology – such as adding texture or manufacturing using glass molds – and created popular, long-lasting brands. ‘Fromms Act’ was the first popular branded condom in the world and, although Fromm’s business was dismantled during the detestable Nazi regime, the brand itself remains popular in Germany today (perhaps a visit is in order to see for myself, next time I venture to the European continent). By the 1920s, the decade of Varieté, the majority of condoms in use throughout Europe were in fact exported from Germany. In a sense, one might call the Germany of this decade the Condom Capital of the World, and it is therefore entirely appropriate to assume that this symbolic visual association at work in Varieté would not only be purposeful, but expected to be commonly understood amongst its home-field audience. How fascinating, indeed! I have included with this letter several printed articles found in my research, which I am sure you may wish to peruse for your own edification.

The significance of this scene hardly requires further explanation. Look how fervently The Boss clings to these body parts. Not just any body parts, but the limbs, extended in full, phallic glory, relishing them with a childlike reverie, as though they have no material permanence in the world and to let them escape his field of perception would be to lose them forever – as the platonic Freudian child did his mother’s mystic penis so long ago in those indelible days of youth.

The Stocking Scene is but one such moment. In another, not ten minutes later, The Boss sits with The Strange Girl at a raucous party, clasping her leg in his arms, her foot up against the side of his face, strumming with his hands along her calf as though he is playing an instrument, possessing the leg as a musical object he wields for pleasure. And in the menage-a-trois that is still to come between The Boss, The Girl, and the acrobat Artinelli, the silent sexual conquest between the two men shall manifest itself most obviously upon – where else? – her arms.

It is into this arena of gladiatorial sexuality we venture forth next, now that we have locked into our understanding the origins of The Boss’ obsession, his abandonment of the reality principle for the purview of pleasure, and the actualization of his fetish onto the body of The Strange Girl. But I will leave this ensuing phase of analysis to my next letter, as my pen is running dry, and in any case, there is much more research to be done before I can write with the authority our profession demands, even in such interpersonal communication as ours. The siren call of knowledge beckons always!

Sincerely,

Dr. Johnathon R. Black

P.S. - This letter’s arrival may well be further waylaid by the assortment of treats I included alongside it for your many hounds (the size of the box required was, as you can surely see, ample). Should you be able to corral them together long enough to share these small victual tokens of affection, I would of course be most grateful, as your fine canine friends forever have an important place in my heart.

Tomorrow: The Third Letter, “The Ménage-a-trois,” in which we discuss threesomes, aerial and otherwise…

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