The never-ending criminal kingdom, the destructive will power towards doomsday, the depraved mixture of hypnosis and telepathic…Fritz Lang strikes me with his unexpectedly entertaining, expressionistic crime-thriller, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse(1933). Dr. Mabuse as a proficient disguiser and hypnotist directs a gang executing various criminal activities in Berlin, including murder, robbery, counterfeiting, fraud, etc. His madness and monstrous nature make me recall a similar character from The Dark Knight(2008). The Joker, sinister and insidious, recruits schizophrenic to slaughter, arbitrarily creates chaos inside Gotham City. However, it is The Joker's injurious life experience and broken family led to his animosity and belief in anarchism. Dr. Mabuse was depicted as if having this distinct divine idealism of chaos which stems from vicious and depraved nature. His characteristics and actions are brought to an impersonal level, " larger-than-life while it erases the traits that personalize his antagonists”(Butler, 484). Lang had effectively utilized the concept of monstrosity, and had metaphorically embedded elements like demoniacal possession and religious fanaticism into the story to portray the turbulent status of the young post-Weimar society in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse.
The evil that Mabuse created is not only from his criminal actions but more from his metaphysical form and outer-dimensional monstrosity, pervading the plot with immaterial pressure and uneasiness. Being physically contained in the asylum doesn't limit him from appearing as a supernatural figure, demoniacal possessing and haunting. Especially with Professor Baum, we can see Mabuse continuously "appear[ing] before him in a monstrous form", "blend[ing] into Baum on the screen", "exercis[ing] power over him”(Butler, 490). It is crafty that Lang achieved Mabuse's demoniacal scenes by "split[ing] him into scattered visual and acoustic images that occasionally meet up but never produce a unified subject or object”(Butler, 487).
Prof Baum being the therapist had been studying Mabuse's testament, a document outlining the campaign of crimes, for a decade. This process is actually Baum's own mental journey, letting Dr. Mabuse's mad idealism gradually occupying himself. By this mean, Mabuse has widely spread and embedded his monstrosity into the hearts of his followers, which is likewise "demoniacal possession".
Ultimately, Mabuse's metaphysical form activates others' “fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy (ataractic or incendiary)"(10) both on-screen and off-screen. The real reason for this "evil" possession is the fragility of society, the spiritual crisis, and declining of belief in science, happening in Germany during the Weimar Republic. Lang and Jacques were keenly aware of this and hoped for some extreme turns and a "superman" to save Germany's spirit.
If Mabuse's monstrosity brings limited terror, then the underlying metaphor on religious fanaticism has deteriorated this terror mechanism and has sublimated his monstrous figure up to an omnipotent place. Technically, Dr.Mabuse could be unscrambled as a religion than being a monstrous person. This religion was functional with Mabuse's criminal gangs executing the plans, and it was still functional after Mabuse's death, having the committed epigone and worshippers obeying the creed and striving to achieve this radical idealism of criminal empire. Particularly, Lang presented Mabuse's death in a nirvana way, supposedly as a god-like figure. When Baum fled after the conspiracy was revealed, Mabuse reappeared above the vehicle, looking down at Baum while gesturing, assembly guiding his way out. Notably, Baum saw these motions of the phantom as oracle than instructions. He deemed himself as a surrogate for Mabuse, a missionary or a Pontifex, devotedly administrating the crimes. The religious metaphor aggrandizes Mabuse's omnipotent and omnipresent impression when Lohmann admits defeat but senses the accidental essence of the event which "goes beyond the secular scope of detective work”(Butler, 488).
How Mabuse was promoted "as a realistic depiction of the unique problems of the time- … a true-to-life formulation”(Koenig-Woodyard, 11) resonated "to [the] contemporary audience's anxieties and fantasies of omnipotence that were triggered by a widely felt loss of control over their lives. Mabuse, who incarnates reckless individualism, provided unconscious wish-fulfillment to a public that dreamed of regaining power over its destiny”(Butler, 482).
Monstrosity is defined within a social boundary. When behaviors and appearances crossed cultivated and engendered normativity (Kalat, 10), abnormal forms, then stimulates the society with terror and anxiety. I think Lang's use of demoniacal possession and religious fanaticism metaphor have successfully intensified the effects of monstrosity to bring out the portrayal of the fragile and turbulent status of the Weimar society in the film The Testament of Dr. Mabuse.
HD720P中字
