PLUNGE! Dr. Mabuse vs. Ameritrade

 

If you're adverse to silent films, maybe you're like me and really just adverse to their usually trite orchestral or piano scores. The trick to enjoying DR. MABUSE, THE GAMBLER (1922 - avail. on DVD and Netflix Streaming) is to turn down the sound (no comment on the included score, which I've not heard) and connect your ipod on shuffle. Surrender to the possibly synchronistic juxtapositions rather endure the banal orchestral or piano score that tends to underlines even the smallest of gestures without a whit of counterpoint or ironic distance, to the point that even John Williams might say, too much.

Fritz Lang films can move like molasses at times, but this silent two-part event is never dull for a second, especially with the random counterpoint of your ipod. If you trust in it, you're bound to get at least a few songs worth of real, eerie synchro-connect through this random collage process. I had the theme from John Carpenter's Escape from New York: Main Theme start right as the action shifted to a big night club where a crazy woman was dancing on top of two giant wooden noses. It became Lynchian, this Lang-Carpenter synthesis, like two rights canceling each other out and leaving only 'Silencio'. Meanwhile hypnosis and staring eyes and disguises pervade the film - paranoia and shiftiness, the mad rush to get rich obscuring all judgment for self-preservation. You know how those Germans were, and how we are... driving over a cliff as we argue over whether or not seat belts are important.

The big day trader moment comes early: Mabuse's agent looming like a spectre over the Berlin stock exchange, kidnapping briefcases to drive stocks down and then releasing them to drive them back up. The timeliness is never far off, but now, more than ever, it's hauntingly relevant. America's credit rating has plummeted! Mein Gott! We're not far off from that Expressionist moment of post-WW1 Weimar Berlin, where the mark was devalued and everything and everyone was for sale, and Americans went over to celebrate how far their dollar could get them. Don't forget that the Great Depression was far away yet, in 1922, Berlin was the epitome of decadence and world-weary despair.

The recent bouncing of our national worth along the stock exchanges of the world has a lot to do, in my opinion, with the day traders, guys who think they're actually doing something important with their lives by their slot machine-like hunkering over the E*Trade accounts... Mabuse Lites, (with a crisp bold taste). The type of guys who wear khakis and high five a lot, so their beer ads claim. They must still be out there, but they're not the true Mabuses anymore. They got took by the master behind the scenes, the sneaky pete conservatives who deliberately shorted the market for their own sinister agenda. They sold out their own country in a lemming stampede. The less self awareness they have, the easier they are fleeced, according to Mabuse's supernatural theology. It's in clinging to the illusion that you are normal, a 'regular guy' that you befoul the world by funneling the treasure you never knew you had into the pockets of criminal cartels.

Mabuse would return under Lang in 1932 with TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE, confined to a mental ward and using his will alone to control sabotage. It was as if Mabuse could only thrive without sound, that the arrival of dialogue and sound effects reduce him to an empty shell, but somehow enable him to merge with the very fabric of German society itself. 

Lang hated the common man as much as anyone and you can see him siding with the sinister cash-hungry Mabuse during this stock sequence. You could probably stop watching, for awhile, right after the poker game that follows (scored by my ipod to Jacques Brel and Serge Gainsbourg's La Chanson de Prevert) as I did, and then watch again later, in 20 minute chapters of your ipod's choosing, but even as strictly a random collage of great expressionist images Mabuse is awesome. Weimar evil had seldom looked so inviting, so artsy, so terrifyingly expressionist, and Lang never seemed to be having as much fun as here, venting cobra venom with the mechanical cool of a cuckoo stock ticker.

Thanks to Lolita Kane's awesome blog post.