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Divine Decadence
Fascism, Female Spectacle, and the Makings of Sally Bowles
By Linda Mizejewski PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1992 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07896-0
CHAPTER 1
FANTASIES, FASCISM, FEMALE SPECTACLE
AN INTRODUCTION
Divine Decadence
THOUGH THE FICTIONAL character Sally Bowles has appeared in a variety of texts over the past half century, this figure acquired a definitive iconography with Bob Fosse's 1972 film Cabaret. In the widely publicized image, Liza Minnelli wears the unmistakable costume of Berlin-cabaret-decadence—black boots, gartered stockings, black hat—and is perched on a chair, one leg lifted in homage to the pose of her cabaret predecessor, Marlene Dietrich, in the similarly well-known image from The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel) (1930). As a cultural sign, this representation is complicated because its significations extend from the campy to the pornographic, from homosexuality to sadomasochism. The image is certainly a quotation from other films, but it also reveals cultural transformations and uses of those films. These range from countless pop and camp representations of Dietrich in top hat and garter belt to the staged photos of blond, whip-snapping women and Nazi insignia on the covers of magazines in adult bookstores.
The closing scene of the Fosse film enacts the extended paradigm of this iconography. Wearing a different costume but nonetheless coded as Weimar siren, Liza Minnelli delivers the theme song, "Cabaret," in a performance that is filmed as mainstream musical act, privileging Minnelli's considerable stage presence and talent. She performs directly for the camera, directly to the film audience, and her performance is edited virtually to extinguish the historical references, the details of the diegetic Kit Kat Klub. But history is graphically and didactically reinvoked in what follows. Minnelli disappears backstage, and the emcee introduces a brief, startling montage of female and transvestite spectacle, shots from previous cabaret scenes; then the mirror wall reflecting the cabaret audience gradually begins to fill with uniforms displaying swastika arm bands. Considering how the cabaret has been characterized throughout the film, a historical cause-and-effect argument is suggested: the moral looseness of Weimar Berlin, in particular the sexual and bisexual play in Berlin nightlife, has made possible the tolerance of Nazism. The reflecting mirror wall further suggests that what the Nazis see onstage—the transvestites and sexually ambiguous emcee—are versions of themselves: grotesque, amoral, distorted—and homoerotic. That the inscriptive gaze also takes in the spectacle of female eroticism—Sally Bowles—only reinforces the stereotypes of Weimar decadence, the richness of its temptations, the multiplicities of its sexualities—a disruption of the "natural order" which leaves the society vulnerable to Nazism.
As a reductive reading of history, this may be no more serious than the cinematic fantasies that Nazism is as containable as the embalmed brains or genetic strands that haunt a certain kind of Nazi science fiction film—They Saved Hitler's Brain (David Bradley, 1963) or The Boys from Brazil (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1978), for example. Yet this psychosexual explanation of Nazism operates in other ways throughout our culture, and its investigation entails not only cultural disavowals of fascism, but also cultural versions of the fascinating, dangerous, ultimately horrendous sexuality that can be conflated into signification with Nazism. These cultural representations of Nazism, including the image of the secretly homosexual, beautifully costumed SS on parade, illustrate the complicated relationship between Nazi ideology itself—the Nazi cult of the visual, as Russell Berman describes it, or the aesthetization of politics, in Walter Benjamin's terms—and the subsequent cultural practices (in films such as Cabaret), which are themselves based on spectacle and obsessive delineations of sexual difference.
"Divine decadence, darling," gushes Minnelli as she flashes her green fingernail polish in the film. The Sally character herself is this century's darling of divine decadence, an odd measure of how dear to us is this fiction of the "shocking" British/American vamp in Weimar Berlin. Sally Bowles, the character created by Christopher Isherwood in his short story of the same name (published in the collection Goodbye to Berlin, 1939), has been re-created in four major stage and film adaptations, enjoying great popularity each time: in John Van Druten's stage play I Am a Camera (1951), in Henry Cornelius's film of the same name (1955), in Joe Masteroffs stage musical Cabaret (1966), and in Bob Fosse's film version of that musical (1972). A revival of the stage musical ran on Broadway and then on a road tour from 1987 to 1989; thus, Sally Bowles's story has been told and retold to diverse audiences in five different decades.
More accurately, the character of Sally Bowles has been rewritten to represent each decade's version of a historical dilemma, a haunting of conscience in the years since World War Two. The accumulations of Nazi horror stories—and the increasing willingness of Holocaust survivors to reveal their stories—raise uneasy questions. In dozens of popular films portraying mad Nazi scientists and monstrous Nazi prison guards, we can see some easily dispensed solutions. Who could possibly have been a Nazi? The madman, the monster, the psychopath, the sadist. Yet, as Alvin H. Rosenfeld points out, Western fascination with (and anxiety about) German fascism stems partially from our "resemblance" to Germans as Westerners sharing many of the same traditions and arts; in documentary footage of the crowds cheering Hitler, we find "familiar faces in the crowd, the look of neighborly, even family, resemblance."
How can we posit and signify our difference, then, our horror at and moral superiority to what we would like to think of as a historical aberration and nightmare? The Sally Bowles story, I would argue, constitutes one such positing of "difference." In each adaptation, a male writer-protagonist who witnesses the rise of Nazism is temporarily fascinated with both Sally and the "wildness" of Berlin in the early 1930s; and in each version of the story, Sally's sexuality converges with "wild Weimar Berlin" to represent the threat and—more explicitly in the later adaptations—the historical horror that the writer must denounce. The political disavowal is enacted as sexual repudiation, and a particular heroism is made available for the protagonist. As a writer, he will serve as both witness and prophet, through whose authority we will come to understand Sally's "divine decadence"—as Sally herself cannot—as the moral corruption of a culture that is about to embrace the Third Reich.
"She's kind of eternal," Liza Minnelli said about the Sally character in a 1974 Radio Times interview. But Sally's eternal returns are more historically specific. Isherwood's 1939 Goodbye to Berlin, with its foreboding accounts of growing anti-Semitism in the early part of that decade, became in retrospect even more chilling following the war. Although Isherwood's Sally makes thoughtless, casual anti-Semitic remarks, it would be impossible for any postwar Sally Bowles to do so in the wake of revelations about Auschwitz. The protagonist, after all, must be wholly fascinated by this character; thus her threat is manifest as sexual rather than political. Yet Sally becomes progressively more guilty in each decade's adaptation. "If you're not against all this, you're for it," Sally is told by the protagonist of the 1966 stage musical, who distinctly echoes the political rhetoric of that decade's confrontations with racism and the Vietnam War. In Fosse's film version six years later, no single line of accusatory dialogue is necessary; instead, the violence and brutality of the coming regime is graphically represented as the flip side of Sally's performances at the cabaret. That is, at the very time when political contention in the United States was being expressed increasingly in street spectacles and mass demonstrations, the "spectacle" of the rise of Nazism was itself represented as the cabaret, exhibiting issues of participation and guilt, performance and spectatorship. Likewise, the sexual disavowal of each adaptation is encoded differently with the shifting of each era's sexual anxieties, from specifically maternal discourses in the 1950s to the sexual revolutions of the late 1960s. Minnelli's garish makeup in the Fosse film is duplicated not only by the transvestite chorus girls among whom she performs, but also by the ambiguously gendered emcee, brilliantly played, with a sinister, heavily lipsticked smile, by Joel Grey. The cinematic cliche of the Nazi-as-monster takes on a particular sexual spin.
Central to these rereadings of both the Isherwood story and German fascism, the Sally Bowles character is inscribed in several cultural histories: the history of Weimar and the rise of the Third Reich, but also the popular, stereotyped version of that era; a fifty-year history of sexual politics; a history of the relationship between female sexuality and camera eye; and the evolution of a camp vision that has implanted Sally at the curious intersection of Nazism and eroticism—what Susan Sontag has termed "fascinating fascism." Thus, the Sally Bowles character provides a unique opportunity to examine the adaptation process as a function of the cultural production of social and political values. Rather than exploring these texts in a purely comparative way to determine how each medium constructs character and story, I want to investigate instead how the Sally Bowles character functions in each era as a paradigm of "shocking" female sexuality in the context of German fascism.
Although each adaptation demonstrates the textual pressures and codes of particular mediums and genres (for example, the harassed-bachelor comic narrative, or the formulas of the musical), these strategies are nevertheless employed as representations of a concept of history, roughly coded as "Weimar decadence." This history, in turn, is coded in each text not solely through textual or generic pressures, but through extratextual pressures that articulate "fascism" and "female sexuality" in specific ways. My questions, then, are directed not at how the adaptation process registers changes in character and narrative, 3 but rather at how particular strategies rework changing sexual and political anxieties in order to reproduce a story of disavowal, the tale of the male writer who is the authoritative witness to the "spectacles" of Sally Bowles and the rise of the Third Reich.
In addition, by focusing on the shifting gender dynamics in each text in relation to shifting historical conditions, I am suggesting that adaptations may provide for feminist theorists the opportunity to negotiate between materialist and psychoanalytic methodologies. As the analysis above suggests, the Sally Bowles texts demand work on both levels of theory. In a study of adaptation, a history is already present; the issues are already those of change. Yet what remains as a constant in these texts is a trajectory in which sexual anxieties and identities are paramount—and the female sexual image is devalued and disavowed by a male narrative authority and gaze. The key elements constructing the Sally Bowles character are precisely those that have most engaged feminist film theory of the past fifteen years: the dynamics of spectatorship and the impact of female spectacle, elements that operate in all five of the Sally Bowles texts and invite the use of feminist film theory across other media. But the psychoanalytic-semiotic model that has dominated that theory for the past several years is in itself inadequate in terms of explaining the uniquely historical hooks of this story about 1930s Berlin, as well as the persistence of this character and story in popular culture. Tracing these adaptations, then, demands the pursuit of divergent authorities or trajectories. On the one hand, the haunting, oedipal authority aims to reproduce the same story again and again, and it can only be thoroughly explicated with the tools of psychoanalysis. On the other hand, the authority of cultural experience—in particular, the experience that contemporary feminist scholarship seeks to expose as the underside of mainstream history—demands that the Sally Bowles paradigm be accountable to specific cultural shifts involving the construction and articulation of female sexuality.
The danger of Sally's story's being displaced by the oedipal one is immediately evident in a recent analysis of Fosse's Cabaret by psychoanalyst Stephen Bauer. Describing the repetition of Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin over the past four decades as a cultural "preoccupation," Bauer is similarly interested in linking the adaptations to moments of historical crises—the McCarthy era, the Vietnam War. Bauer's interest in these texts concurs with mine in its basic premise that the very repetition of this story in culture points to an important preoccupation or fantasy. However, Bauer's reading of the adaptations in relation to Isherwood's original text is perhaps most useful in its revelation of what happens to the issue of female sexuality—the character Sally Bowles—under the application of traditional psychoanalysis. Bauer reads the story as one of the oedipal hero's dealing with the death of the father(s), invoking parricidal fantasy and the concealed wish to submit to paternal authority. In terms of Isherwood's personal background—the death of his father in World War One—and the historical contexts of the later texts, Bauer makes a strong case for the repeated plot line of the missing father, rebellious son, and the impotent paternal figure in the background—Presidents Hindenburg, Eisenhower, Johnson. It is no surprise, then, that in this configuration, the character of Sally recedes into minor functions; in Bauer's reading, she is an embodiment of Weimar Germany, or she is a young boy in disguise, a same-sex fantasy that would be comforting to the hero abandoned by his father. In short, the lady vanishes.
These interpretations of Sally, especially the possibility that she operates as a same-sex fantasy, touch on central issues in her construction by gay writers Isherwood and Van Druten. The displacement of Sally's story by the oedipal one is worth noting here, if for no other reason than that Bauer's interpretation illustrates the problem that has led many psychoanalytic feminist film theorists, who seek to establish grounds of female spectatorship, toward speculations of how the oedipal trajectory is resisted or even parodied in mainstream cinema. Granted, as a psychoanalyst, Bauer would not be likely to interpret a film in terms of its uses of cinematic codes, and his description of Fosse's Cabaret as male trajectory is perfectly accurate; the camera's gaze is mostly the gaze of Brian Roberts (Fosse's version of the Isherwood narrator), and his voyage becomes our entrance into the cabaret world and our retreat from it at the end. What Bauer does not acknowledge is what recent feminist film theory has brought to the forefront: the impact of the female figure onscreen, especially in its powerful or threatening capacity which must be diminished or disavowed by narrative, camera work, or both. From this perspective, it is possible to focus not only on the representation and permutations of female sexuality in these texts, but also on the subversive moments in which the oedipal trajectory is often interrupted or seriously undermined.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Divine Decadence by Linda Mizejewski. Copyright © 1992 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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