"Business is business": M and (the disruption of) social economy

M (1931; dir. Fritz Lang; starring Peter Lorre, Otto Wernicke, Gustaf Gründgrens) Here is the (nearly-empty)IMDB page for the film; here is the (informative) Wikipedia entry.

The scene you see in the image above is a crucial moment in this extraordinary film: A street-person had earlier surreptitiously marked Hans Beckert (Lorre) with the "M" in true sneaky-posting-of-'Kick Me!"-sign-on-unsuspecting-mark fashion, and it is a child--Beckert's would-be victim--who has just pointed the mark out to him. Almost from the film's beginning, the audience knows it is Beckert who has been terrorizing Berlin via his committing of several murders of children, but he had remained invisible to the city, whose citizens, in several wonderfully-intense scenes, had been operating on innuendo as they lived in fear and anger. From this point on, though, he is rendered visible, even--as here, literally as well as figuratively--to himself as a Murderer (Aside: visit my bloggy friend Raminagrobis' post esse est percipi for an elegant discussion of the socially-constructed self.)

M is a rather odd crime film, in that it is not even about the criminal or his crimes but about his function as an element within society--and, by extension, society itself: The "M" stands not for "murder" but "murderer." A social pariah as having a function within a society? Well, perhaps "anti-function" would be a more accurate way to put it.

Below the fold: some musings on this within the context of the film, along with a tie-in to recent events in Wichita.

A quick word about M's structure: while most narratives have a rather straight-line quality to them, tracking as they do the movements of a very few characters, M's structure is much more organic, as befits the fact that it is in fact about a society's responses to an unseen evil in its midst. Thus, the camera pans up from the chilling opening scene, in which the text of a children's choosing-game makes explicit reference to the murderer and his targeting of children, to a woman who berates the children for this. This woman is carrying a basket of laundry, and the camera follows her up a flight of stairs to the door of a washerwoman. The washerwoman reassures the other woman by saying that at least the children's singing means that they are still there and still safe. The washerwoman, as it happens, is awaiting the lunch-time arrival of her daughter Elsie from school, and in the next scene we see her leave school, then stop to bounce her ball off . . . something out of frame. The camera slowly follows the arc of the ball to reveal that its target is a poster announcing a reward for information leading to the arrest of the murderer. About the time we finish reading it, a man's shadow falls over it and a man's voice compliments Elsie on her ball. All that occurs well within the film's first ten minutes. It's not until Beckert realizes that he's been marked, which occurs well past the film's mid-point, that it assumes a more conventional narrative structure.

The poster asks "Who is the murderer?" To borrow some Saussurrian terminology, we have a signifier ("murderer") in search of a signified ("who"). The long second act of the film is the city's collective seeking to unify the two and thus create a sign--which moment occurs when the street person marks Beckert. Or, it might be more accurate to say that that unity of signifier and signified occurs in the moment depicted in the image at the beginning of the post: Beckert can now "read" himself through the lens of the community and now will begin to behave more fully in accord with the community's sense of what a "murderer" is or does--he will try to hide not his crimes, but himself. It's here that I want to pick up on the oft-noted fact that it's not just the police and not just the upstanding citizenry of Berlin who are on the hunt for the killer. Even the city's large criminal element begins the search, not to aid the police but to find him before the police do. For these crimes, prompting as they do frequent raids on brothels and other less-than-savory locales, have been "bad for business." There's a bit of dark humor here: their criminal activities are treated in the film as an alternate economy (as a barmaid at one of the brothels tells one of the police, "Business is business"). And even more interestingly, as the Mrs. noted while we watched, we start to root for the criminal element in their quest to find the killer before the police do. Not that the police in M are incompetent or corrupt, but their hunting him is their job, and they go about it in methodical--but, let's face it, plodding and inefficient--fashion, always acting after the fact. As the Mrs. pointed out, the murders are bad for (the criminals') business, but they also seem to have an emotional investment in his being found, too. Elsie, after all, is certainly a member of the underclass, as they themselves are.

So, then, we have in this film a city's legal and illegal elements, which we usually think of as being in opposition to each other, here bound together in something like yin-yang fashion against someone who has done violence to all the citizenry. More specifically, he has done violence to the usual unspoken-yet-powerful bonds of the social contract that usually holds citizens together as a community. Those bonds can be summed up as the avoidance of bearing false witness. Yet in a social space in which apparently-motiveless crimes are being committed, fear and speculation and paranoia, no matter how unfounded--misrule, in other words--become the order of the day. I found myself reminded of the effect that BTK's re-emergence and eventual arrest in Wichita had on the city (which I wrote about here and here), and thought of my own position relative to that story as analogous to that of the audience for M: As relative newcomers to each story, we can more clearly see the logical traps others--who, in their defense, have had to live within that narrative and have had it shape their thinking and actions--fall into.

Despite its reputation as one of the supreme examples of German cinema and its close attention to camera movement and staging, M has an almost documentary-like feel to it. It doesn't construct the narrative but follows it as it reveals itself, and its themes reveal themselves through the narrative and not in Greek-chorus fashion. Yet, those very themes are at least as ancient as the Greeks. I think it is for these reasons that it remains so contemporary in its feel.

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"Are YOU a serial killer??"

I had a restful spring break, during which I delighted in the company of my children.  The hardest thing about my visits is the driving there and back (by car, about 14 hours if I drive straight through).  For once, my stay there coincided with some school activities that I could be part of: my younger daughter and the rest of her class had memorized little poems about an animal they had selected (she had chosen a crocodile) and then, at an evening recital, each group of kids who had selected a given poem dressed up at that animal and recited their poem.  Two days later, all the kids in her grade, accompanied by their parents, went on an all-day field trip to a large zoo in a nearby city; I got to go with her.  She had been to this zoo 2 years ago, but she didn't seem to remember having been there before.  No matter--in fact, in retrospect it could be that the trip went so well precisely because all seemed new to her.  The 8-week grading period for the girls' school also ended that week, and my older daughter was announced in an assembly, along with other kids, as being an all-A student AND, according to her teacher, the best writer in her class.Not quite "cute-kid" stories, but I had promised from the outset of this blog not to talk much about them.  But suffice it to say that nothing happened last week to make me anything else than very proud that I am their father.
And then I return to Wichita and I learn that a serial killer who had been active here from the mid-70s to the mid-80s had, last week, sent a letter that, despite the absence of text, signaled to this place that he had "returned."  Or had never left and wanted to let us know that.  No matter: some extreme unpleasantness from the past has exhumed itself and forced itself back into this town's collective awareness. Some links follow here, in case you're interested. This second link gives extensive background to this guy's activities from the mid-70s; what's especially unnerving about his resurfacing as he has, as you'll read in the first link, is that he has sent images that in their very muteness declare, more powerfully than writing ever could, that he's responsible for a murder that had not previously been attributed to him.
On the one hand, in my composition classes such an event as his reemergence is fresh meat for class discussions about critical thinking, the separation of fact from speculation . . . indeed, the teaching of the basic but crucial principle that facts, in and of themselves, have no meaning (recall Hamlet: "Nothing is good or bad/But thinking makes it so.").  And let me tell you that this news has fairly emasculated some of my coworkers' critical thinking faculties.  It's that last observation that leads me to my "on the other hand": why it is that serial killers fascinate us even as they chill us to the bone.  The same reason, incidentally: we just don't get this kind of murder.I'm under no delusions here, by the way, as to how original this thinking is, even though it's only now come to me why we're so naturally drawn to such stuff.  The crime buff or criminologist or psychologist reading this will likely roll his/her eyes at this entry's cliche-ridden (or at least very familiar) "analysis."  But.  To ME, my awareness of this line of thought is new.  So, it's not overly familiar and thus not cliche. (The immediate above, by the way, is a nod to Fearful Syzygy's recent entry about cliche--look for the link to his blog in my Friends list in my profile.[note: Newcomers will find that here])We understand the motives for the vast majority of murders, no matter whether we personally would or could ever do such a thing.  Love, requited or no.  Passion/anger.  Desire for someone else's money or possessions.  Because we so clearly and easily can locate the cause(s) of most murders and we innately understand that the vast majority of murders occur between people who know each other, even as we register their horribleness we instinctively know we are safe.  We don't have to think about them anymore.  One of the primary functions of narrative is to make sense of experience, and the motives of most murders are narratives that usually write themselves, they are so familiar--like our morning/afternoon commute.  But who knows what motivates the serial killer?  Because we don't, we immediately engage in speculation, and the lack of motive, even as we're fed elaborate detail about MOs, the selected contents of letters and FBI profiles, renders unfamiliar those usual well-travelled roads.  Narrative fails to make us feel as though we can order this experience and thus feel safe.  Jack the Ripper still haunts, a century after the fact, not simply because of the gruesome nature of his crimes but because (Patricia Cornwall notwithstanding), we don't know his motives and can't confirm his identity.  So now, I see things like this: Whether coincidence or not, it's a fact that all of BTK's victims have the number 3 somewhere in their street addresses.  So, those of my friends and colleagues that happen to have that to be true about themselves worry more--they can't otherwise exclude themselves from this man's list of possible targets.  It's irrational, those of us without 3's say, and they would agree, but because this narrative lacks motives and facts, that one fact assumes a larger importance--as with Henry James's famous description of a symbol, it throws a shadow curiouser than itself.  They forget that BTK would be at least in his 50s by now and thus way past the age of the typical serial killer; they forget that his most recent correspondence consisted solely of pictures--no text (so we're told by the police) that would indicate even why he sent them, much less an intent to kill again.  They cling to speculation in hopes that it will make them feel safer; it ends up frightening them even more.  The comfort machine that is narrative fails them. Hmm--the "typical serial killer."  A profile of a serial killer is a kind of stand-in narrative shaped by a combination of the facts of a particular case and what has been generally true of serial killers in the past.  But they too fail.  The DC-area police were initially looking for an individual white man, not two black men: they were working from a profile built on, among other things, the fact that such killers are overwhelmingly white and male and alone.I don't have any conclusions here; I'm merely describing a dynamic that is and will always be true.  I derive an odd sort of comfort, though, from recognizing that narrative fails, that, to borrow Mr. Compson's words from Absalom, Absalom!, it just doesn't explain.  Knowing that makes me more alert to new fact and how it might (re)shape speculation, and more ready to accept the failure of profiles and eyewitness accounts if those failures should come.
For Friday: back on track with a discussion of some music.

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