THE MADNESS OF DR. CALIGARI

by Dennis Weiler

  (Thunk.)

  “You know very well what I mean, Winona,” Claire tells her again, peculiarly specific, especially since Winn doesn’t think she’s ever heard her use her full name before. And then the room itself seems to iris, squinches shut all at once, with an audible, mechanized clack.

  ***

  It was a mistake to answer Claire’s ad, Winn had already started to think, by the end of their first week together—a mistake to think she needed any roommate, let alone this one. It was a mistake to think she could deal with Claire’s lack of sleep schedule, or her neediness, or her craziness. That Winn could be the sane one in this relationship, or any relationship. That it wouldn’t undermine her completely, point by hard-won point, make her equally unable to sleep, or work, or cope; that it wouldn’t, inevitably, do anything other than just end up making her crazy too. Again.

  What does surprise her, though—even in hindsight—is exactly how little time it all actually took, to do so.

  Reality is nothing but an agreed-on construct, one of her Philosophy profs liked to say, back when that was her major; it’s quorum, best guesses and metaphors cross-bred, the closest miss out of a hundred. It’s majority rule. “Reality,” scare quotes entirely intentional, is a negotiation, at its very best. And at its worst…

  At its worst, Winn now thinks—knows—it’s a tale told in first person by an unreliable narrator, signifying nothing: egocentric presentism, perceptually based and utterly experiential, therefore unprovable by any scientifically valid means. Most especially so when that unreliable narrator is you.

  So many mistakes. But Winn supposes they don’t matter unless Claire’s as real as she is, or Winn’s model of reality is real. If there’s anything like “reality” at all, for either of them to count on.

  But then again, if there isn’t, she guesses she’ll never know.

  ***

  Caligari was a critical success in France, but French filmmakers were divided in their opinions about its impact. Abel Gance wrote, “What a lesson to all directors!”, while René Clair said its deliberate embrace of complete artificiality—later attributed frankly to the lack of production budget—“overthrew the realist dogma” of filmmaking. But Jean Epstein called it “a prize example of the abuse of décor in the cinema […it] represents a grave sickness of cinema,” and Jean Cocteau called it “the first step towards a grave error which consists of flat photography of eccentric decors, instead of obtaining surprise by means of the camera.” French critic Frédéric-Philippe Amiguet wrote of the film: “It has the odor of tainted food. It leaves a taste of cinders in the mouth.”

  Outside of France, the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein, who disliked Caligari intensely, said the film was a “combination of silent hysteria, partially coloured canvases, daubed flats, painted faces, and the unnatural broken gestures and action of monstrous chimaeras.”

  “Winn,” the doctor says. “Are you listening to me?”

  Winn looks up, again, and it’s as if her eyes suddenly click into focus, even though they’re already open. Her pen is still in her hand, nib still pressed to paper, elbows on the table; there’s a subtle intimation of pain in her right forearm, her shoulder-joint, like she’s been pressing down hard. The doctor’s sitting across from her, leant back in her chair, legs elegantly crossed at the ankle; Winn doesn’t know her name, never having had a reason to. But here she is now, apparently deliberately posed to let slip just a slice of the window behind her, blinds drawn, the sky beyond bright blue—(—which is wrong. Isn’t it? Not how it was. Not how it should be.)

  “I’m sorry,” Winn says, slowly. “I think… I think I got distracted, maybe. Caught up in what I was doing. I didn’t even notice…” She trails away, then gathers herself; starts over, trying for a friendly, professional tone. “Have you been here long?”

  “Not very, no.”

  “Oh, okay. Well… you’re here for Claire, right? I mean—” Winn looks around, surreptitiously shaking her head as she does, trying to clear it. “She was right here, I thought, not that long ago. Um…”

  And here the bones of her face seem to buzz slightly, aching where they intersect, as though longing to pull apart. Here she has to pause yet again, take another long blink of a moment to figure out what she’s actually trying to say, while the doctor—her name, what is her name?—

  “…you could wait, I guess,” Winn finishes up, at last.

  The doctor smiles, dimpling high up one cheek, a shadow that flickers just beneath one eye-socket like a beauty-mark. “Could I?”

  “…yes.”

  But now Winn isn’t sure.

  The doctor just keeps on smiling, eyes level, vaguely amused in a completely internal way, one her lips don’t match. She gestures at Winn’s paper, commenting: “You did appear very—enrapt, to say the least. In a sort of trance.”

  “Sleep-writing,” Winn suggests, expecting a laugh, to which the doctor simply nods. Flustered, Winn adds: “It’s for cinema studies, Professor Kuhn; you know, pick a topic, discuss it for five pages, all that. Pretty basic stuff.”

  “Yes, so it sounds. What about?”

  “Caligarism.” Explaining, as the doctor cocks a soft eyebrow: “A film crit term, very old-school. After The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen it.”

  “Silent film made in 1920, during the Weimar Republic—German Expressionist, very influential, its art direction aimed at creating a concrete visualization of dementia. Roger Ebert called it one of the first real horror movies.”

  “Ah, right. The one about the evil psychiatrist.”

  Winn feels herself flush. “Well… yeah; more of a mountebank, a carny, but I guess it did sort of establish that trope. Then again, Freud and Jung were still alive, back then. Most people didn’t even think psychiatry was a science.”

  Dryly: “Most people still don’t.”

  Which Winn can only suppose is probably true, but it does throw her off a bit. “It, um…” she hears herself begin, then swallows, recoups. “The, uh, qualities associated with Caligarism—Caligari—are a kind of… persistent sense that everything around you is, um… not real. Because that’s how it is, in the movie; it’s like one long dream sequence, right? All filmed on a sound-stage, all theatrical effects, done physically. Very few real props, just a whole lot of builds and painted backdrops, all black and white but with the perspective all… skewed, you know, sort of deformed, designed to draw the eye towards various directions—”

  “Subconsciously, you mean?”

  “Yeah, a lot like that. To create a kind of… hypnagogic state.”

  The doctor nods. “Hypnotic,” she suggests.

  “Uh huh. In that Caligari is a hypnotist, or thinks he is.”

  “Thinks?”

  Now it’s Winn’s turn to nod, half-shrugging, half-smiling. Elaborating, after a second: “Um—yes. Because hypnotism really isn’t real.”

  “Hmmm. Is that what you believe?”

  “…yes.”

  The doctor hums once more, reflectively; leans back a bit in her chair, fingers steepled. “Some might disagree,” she says, eventually. “I use hypnotism myself, for example. As a therapeutic tool.”

  Winn feels her eyes fall back towards the paper, as though magnetized: down, down, down. Things get slow and muffled. “Uh huh?” she mutters, vaguely, her voice weak.

  “My patients often find it very helpful.”

  “Like Claire?”

  The doctor blinks. “Why would you think that, exactly?”

  “Well… you’re here for her. Aren’t you?”

  “Not today.”

  Another blink, as if timed to match Winn’s reaction. And there’s something just, so—fake about it, inherently; too big, almost vaudevillian: wink wink, nod nod, knowwhatImean? Like the doctor’s whole interaction with Winn thus far has
been a performance, and she’s nothing but an actor, on stage rather than on screen. Like she’s playing to an invisible audience stationed somewhere behind Winn, silent yet intent, staring over Winn’s shoulder and egging the doctor on to ever-greater heights of artificiality.

  Matte lips, perfectly drawn. Pale skin, lightly powdered. Her dark hair sits flat, smooth as a pelt, except in one small spot—an area above her right temple, where it almost seems to be popping up, coming away. The hairline itself just a moment away from blurring, lifting slightly as though about to start peeling back, like the inexpertly-glued scalp of a wig.

  What’s her name? Winn wonders, helplessly. Did I ever know?

  “You can’t be here for me, though,” she says, out loud, refusing to imply she thinks that’s even a possibility. Only to watch the doctor’s red smile deepen.

  ***

  (Blink.)

  The white page beckons, pen scratching. More words she can’t recall thinking, let alone intending to write, already forming beneath Winn’s hand.

  In October 1958, during the first recorded universal film poll (organized at the Brussels World’s Fair, with input from one hundred and seventeen international film critics, filmmakers and film historians), Caligari was ranked the twelfth-best film of all time. As film historian and critic Paul Rotha wrote: “For the first time in the history of the cinema, the director has worked through the camera and broken with realism on the screen[, proving] that a film could be effective dramatically when not photographic and… that the mind of the audience [can be] brought into play psychologically.” Likewise, Arthur Knight claimed: “More than any other film, [Caligari] convinced artists, critics and audiences that the movie [could be] a medium for artistic expression.”

  Expressionism, she watches her fingers write. “[A] reaction against the atom-splitting of Impressionism” (Kasimir Edschmid). World reproduced as perceived; emotions expressed through extreme visuals; aesthetic value exchanged for emotional power. The best impulse is always whatever elicits any response, even disgust.

  Down, down, forever down: a spiral drilling inwards, spokes twisting, each word on the page a pixel, starting to pop and blur. Random letters jump out at her, like black sparks; snatches of text string themselves together, syntactically broken, calving information in jagged, blurting shards. Reference turns to opinion, shedding objectivity wholesale.

  In Caligari’s immersive visuals, reality is reproduced as if reflected in a fun house mirror, distorted as a matter of course. Elongated shadows are painted onto set walls, while streets wind crookedly past equally crooked houses. Everything in the background is off-center, slanted as if about to slide out of frame at any moment—but then again, so is everything in the foreground. Cesare the somnambulist climbs through a trapezoidal window into a house whose walls are diagonal and whose furniture has lines that all go in completely different directions. At no point is there a sense any given direction is consistently or necessarily “correct.”

  Because of all the above, Caligari creeps up on you, a perspective shift done almost subconsciously, imperceptible until fully achieved… until you realize that the sky you’re looking up at is just a painted ceiling, the street you stand on just a painted floor. That the buildings around you have been drawn with charcoal on badly-folded sheets or backdrops, sketched quickly, at a clashing series of angles. That everyone around you is just an extra in someone else’s narrative, puppets whose faces are nothing but a suggestion of features made from slapdash theatrical makeup, black and white and grey all over.

  (Blink.)

  Another click, or the same one—same skew, same wrench, same vaguely nauseating blur. The world catches between frames, heating all too quickly; blue sky flips to black as white yellows, bubbles at its own edges till it begins at last to char, to melt. Winn can almost smell it, sweet and ill and sharp, a vinegar reek. A slaughterhouse fire glimpsed from very far away, in darkness, at such an oblique angle that it makes your side-tugged eyes hurt.

  And: But you know my name already, Winona, the doctor murmurs, in one ear. We both know that; all three of us, in fact. You, me, Claire.

  We know it very well.

  (BLINK.)

  ***

  “I don’t trust her,” Claire says, faintly, from somewhere far above, as though filtering down through dark fathoms. “And I’m pretty sure she doesn’t trust me, either. So… not the best relationship, really, even if she wasn’t my damn doctor.”

  “Uh huh,” Winn hears herself reply, meanwhile, equally faintly. She feels herself shrugging back out of the blackness, slower this time—like it’s some sort of shroud, some enfolding curtain she’s managed to trap herself inside, only slipping away by degrees: a struggle, viscous and prolonged, as if wrapped in plastic. Then, with a twist and a twitch, she emerges, face-first.

  The room is brighter than she remembers, but less colourful. Claire’s sitting right where the doctor sat, however long ago; leant forward rather than back, legs sprawled rather than crossed, arms knit and fingers tight on either elbow. She’s looking away. Behind her, the window’s slice seems slanted, odd-angled, and the sky outside—

  Not black, not blue. Grey, and strange with it.

  As strange as though painted on.

  (Ever notice how the sky looks fake sometimes?)

  Claire sighs. Asks: “She want to know anything about me, when you talked?”

  “I…” Winn shakes her head, slightly. “…not that I remember.”

  “Not even where I was?”

  “Um… I think I suggested she wait for you, but I, uh… I don’t think she did.”

  Now it’s Claire’s turn for a head-shake, a truncated bob, so curt and sidelong it reads more like a nod. “Yeah,” she says. “She’s like that. The bitch.”

  They sit there for a while after that, Winn can’t tell how long. Claire still won’t look at her, but Winn’s not unhappy with the idea—she finds Claire’s gaze discomfiting at the best of times, and these aren’t those. Instead, she looks down, always down. Chases words. Watches them dance their little dance, syntax like a film-reel dragging static image along after static image, to eventually form a moving whole.

  Thinking: Do I really want to see this?

  (Maybe not.)

  Thinking: Do I really have a choice?

  On its face, the paper reads, Caligari appears to be a story about authoritarianism refuted. Caligari the character claims an expertise he doesn’t possess, misusing his skill as a hypnotist first to shore up the illusion by making Cesare the somnambulist predict audience members’ deaths, then by sending him to murder the people in question, so that the prediction comes “true.” Like the young men forced to participate in World War I, Cesare is an innocent deformed into a human weapon, another victim of Caligari’s own madness. When Caligari is shown to be nothing but a charismatic lunatic literally running an asylum, his projected self-image collapses, and everything he has managed to achieve is revealed as a monstrous, destructive sham—much like the War to End All Wars itself, in Weimar Republic eyes.

  The framing revelation that Francis is insane and a patient in Caligari’s asylum himself, however, casts doubt on his tale’s veracity: it figuratively absolves Caligari of his (war) crimes and also neuters the film’s inherent social critique, transforming a revolutionary narrative back into a conformist one. In his book From Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer claims the original screenplay by Janowitz and Mayer did not include the frame at all; instead, the production company and the director forced them to apply it in order to reach a wider, more popular audience, “a change against which the two authors violently protested. But no one heeded them.”

  Thus an otherwise revolutionary film is transformed into a conformist one, just another freak-show entertainment in a post-war carnival whose glaring design, transparently fake shocks and air of childish delight allows traumatized adults to regress and be
reassured, forgetting all the terrible things unreliable authority figures have inflicted on them…

  “She wants to make me into something I don’t want to be,” Claire says, as Winn scans that last part again, incredulous, eyes burning: God, it’s all so obvious, crude, trite—badly written and researched, just plain bad. Can this really be what she’s been working on, this entire time? Did she really write this?

  (Well, who else?)

  “Are you listening to me, Winona?”

  “Yes, of course. Of course I am.”

  Skeptical: “Really.”

  “Of course,” Winn repeats, forcing herself to smile and look up, to tear her eyes away from the car-wreck her thesis has apparently become. Instead of meeting Claire’s stare reassuringly, however, she finds herself goggling at the door she can see over her shoulder. Its heavy brown woodwork seems to be floating in front of the wall, like bad 3D, or one of those optical-illusion rooms where someone shrinks to half their height while crossing it. How the hell is it standing? Is it even there?

  “You should quit,” she blurts out, without meaning to. Claire looks startled; it’s the most natural expression Winn can remember her showing in a long while. She clings to that and pushes herself on. “Therapy, I mean, if it’s not working out... She works for you, you know. You don’t owe her anything.” Which certainly sounds reasonable, as she says it. Her eyes fall back to the paper. Christ, this is a mess; she’s going to have to rewrite the last two pages, at least—does she have time? When’s this due, again? She can’t... she can’t...

  (The word is remember.)

  “That’s true.” Winn jumps in her seat; so does Claire. The door is open. When did it open? The doctor crosses to the table where Winn sits, takes the last free chair there. “If you’re truly unhappy with our progress, Claire, you aren’t obliged to continue, at least not with me. But I must caution you that a change at this point may lead to backsliding. I wouldn’t want to see our work go to waste. Would you?” The doctor cocks her head, birdlike, eyes so bright and flat they might be glass. “Do you really find my objectives so intolerable?”