Showing posts with label sally bowles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sally bowles. Show all posts

28 Jul 2019

Existence is Elusive 2: Further Reflections on The Artificial Silk Girl

Penguin Books (2019)


When I put on my make-up, the pretty little mask's not me
'Cause that's the way a girl should be in a consumer society.


I. Artificial Silk

Artificial silk - which is really just a nice-sounding name for rayon (or viscose, as it is more commonly known in Europe) - was first developed from cellulose fibre at the end of the 19th century.

When, in the '30s, America gave the world nylon, soon even real silk stockings were outmoded and heavy cotton or woollen dresses replaced by garments made of more affordable and easier to clean synthetic materials. These mass produced clothes, sold in the new department stores that sprang up in big cities around the world, including Berlin, enabled even working-class girls like Doris, the protagonist and narrator of Das Kunstseidene Mädchen, to look good and follow fashion.  

In other words, artificial silk was a wonder product that furthered female emancipation and the creation of a consumer society.*


II. The Artificial Silk Girl

(i) A Girl Called Doris ...

I like Irmgard Keun's second novel - a follow up to Gilgi (1931) - for many reasons, not least of all because it contains elements central to my own concerns as a writer; such as fashion and sexual politics. But I'm also very fond of its 18-year-old narrator, Doris, with her rosy complexion, permed hair, love of tinned sardines, and seven rusty safety pins attached to her underwear providing a form of punk chastity.

Doris is a promiscuous tragi-comic heroine in the same mould as Lorelei, the young flapper who narrates Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) and the divinely decadent figure of Fräulein Sally Bowles, who first appeared in a short novel by Christopher Isherwood in 1937.

However, I also think we can see something of Doris in the character of Macabéa, in Clarice Lispector's brilliant novel, A Hora de Estrela (1977), which, like The Artificial Silk Girl, is a tale of crushed innocence and anonymous misery (although, to be fair, it's also a far more philosophically-informed work).


(ii) Venus im Peltz ...

Whilst described as an artificial silk girl,** Doris is actually a young woman who values the authenticity of natural materials; ermine, for example, is a sacred word in her vocabulary - one that gives her goosebumps just to think of it. At some point she steals a fur coat and it becomes the great love of her life:

"Such sweet, soft fur. So fine and gray and shy, I felt like kissing it, that's how much I loved it. It spoke comfort to me, a guardian angel, protection from heaven. It was genuine squirrel." [40]

If, initially, she intended merely to borrow the coat (albeit without permission of the owner), she knew deep down that she'd never return it: "The fur coat was attached to my skin like a magnet and they loved each other, and you don't give up what you love, once you have it." [40-41] Later, wandering the streets at five in the morning, disappointed and disgusted by an old flame, Doris thinks to herself:

"I look so elegant in that fur. It's like an unusual man who makes me beautiful through his love for me. I'm sure it used to belong to a fat lady with a lot of money - unfairly. It smells from cheques and Deutsche bank. But my skin is stronger. It smells of me now [...] The coat wants me and I want it. We have each other." [42] 

This, one might suggest, goes beyond a fur fetish towards a genuine example of objectum sexuality. Amusingly, she even gives her beloved coat a Christmas present; "a waft of lavender perfume" [91], and, at the end of the book, when she is considering returning the coat to its rightful owner, she composes a letter in which she writes:

"'Dear Madam:

Once I stole your fur coat. Naturally, you will be mad at me. Did you love it a lot? I'll have you know, I love it a lot. There were times where it lifted me up and made me a high-society woman and [...] the beginning of a star. and then there were times when I loved it just because it's soft and feels like a human being all over my skin. And it's gentle and kind. [...] And I can tell you that a thousand fur coats could rain down on me [...] but I would never love another coat the same way I loved this one." [129]
 
Those familiar with the novel will recall that it was her initial concern that the police might be after her on account of the stolen coat that made Doris decide to flee her hometown and catch an overnight train to Berlin, determined to become a movie star:

"And then everything I do will be right - I'll never have to be careful about what I do or say [...] I can just be drunk - nothing can happen to me anymore, no loss, no disdain, because I'm a star." [30]


(iii) Du bist verrückt mein Kind, du musst nach Berlin

At first, Doris loves the excitement of the Big City; the people, the U-Bahn, the enormous neon signs, etc. Not that she's happy exactly - or wants to be happy. She wants, rather, to become rich and famous and happy people are content with what they have and who they are and don't care about these things. "Only if you're unhappy do you get ahead." [54]  

This pessimistic philosophy is perhaps best expressed in the following paragraph, which could easily have been lifted from An Illicit Lover's Discourse

"If a young woman from money marries an old man because of money and nothing else and makes love to him for hours and has this pious look on her face, she's called a German mother and a decent woman. If a young woman without money sleeps with a man with no money because he has smooth skin and she likes him, she's a whore and a bitch." [56]

Sadly, things - as they have a habit of doing - take a turn for the worse. And soon Doris's misery is compounded by poverty and hunger and she is obliged to increasingly trade on her looks, shall we say, accepting the precarious patronage of sugar daddies. But still she retains her dreams of stardom and devotion to the city: "My life is Berlin and I'm Berlin." [60]

Her descriptions of the city to Herr Brenner - an old blind man who likes to hold her feet with reverence and stroke her silky legs and to whom she's extraordinarily kind - are really very beautiful and astonishingly observant. She wants him to experience and to love her Berlin as she knows and loves it.

He tells her: "'The city isn't good and the city isn't happy and the city is sick, but you are good'" [79] and I think that's probably true.


(iv)  Wir sind alle Prostituierte / Jeder hat seinen Preis

Actually, this remark made by Herr Brenner reminds me of a story that Norm MacDonald tells Jerry Seinfeld in an episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, about the naivety of Det. Crocker in an early episode of Kojak (the CBS series from the 1970s starring Telly Savalas).   

Investigating the murder of several prostitutes, Crocker interviews the mother of one of the dead girls and reports back to Kojak that, actually, she wasn't on the game - she was a good, good girl. Kojak, however, who's seen and heard it all, is cynically dismissive: "She was a good girl. Mama's apple pie. The Fourth of July - she was a hooker!" 

And, despite her protestations otherwise, that's really what Doris was - a good-time girl with a talent for storytelling and cooking her own goose. She remains defiantly proud of the fact that - despite everything - she's not a normal girl living a regular life: "Compared to that, a whore's life is more interesting." [120]

Ultimately, those men, including the ultra-annoying Ernst, who would oblige her to seek respectable paid employment and strip her of her beloved fur coat - which has such soft hair and been through so much with her - can go fuck themselves.

And if she turns into a whore like the girl Hulla, wearing "cheap, tight-fitting wool jumpers that emphasize her body shape in a vulgar way" [80], well, as the song says, we are all prostitutes ... And perhaps glamorous stardom - just like bourgeois decency - isn't all it's cracked up to be (or even all that different).


Notes

* Unfortunately, the history of artificial silk production is also a disturbing tale of toxic materials, environmental abuses, and economics trumping health and safety concerns; many workers involved in the industry suffered serious illness as a result of contact with this innovative and highly lucrative product. See: Paul David Blanc: Fake Silk: The Lethal History of Viscose Rayon, (Yale University Press, 2016).

** As a matter of fact, Doris is not a fan of artificial silk and advises against wearing it on dates with men as it wrinkles too quickly: "'Only pure silk, I say ...'" [72]

Read: Irmgard Keun, The Artificial Silk Girl, trans. Kathie von Ankum (Penguin Books, 2019). 

Play: X-Ray Spex, 'Art-I-Ficial', from the album Germfree Adolescents (EMI, 1978). The Pop Group, 'We Are All Prostitutes', (Rough Trade, 1979). 

Watch: Jerry Seinfeld and Norm Macdonald, 'A Rusty Car in the Rain', Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, Season 9, Episode 2 (2017): click here for the Kojak scene. 

Readers interested in the first part of this post in which I discuss the life of Irmgard Keun, should click here.



2 Jun 2017

Cabaret: Divine Decadence and Fascinating Fascism

Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles 
Cabaret (1972) 


For many people Cabaret (1972) is a near-perfect film musical: one that appears to starkly contrast the divine decadence of Berlin during the Weimar Republic with the fascinating fascism of Hitler's Third Reich, but which actually demonstrates how the two share the same cultural foundations and possess similar aesthetico-sexual concerns to do with questions of gender, style and performativity. For ultimately, if life is a cabaret old chum, then politics is just another form of show business and - as Jean Genet once wrote - even fascism can be considered theatre ...      

Brilliantly directed and choreographed by Bob Fosse, Cabaret stars the magnificent Liza Minnelli as international singing sensation Fraulein Sally Bowles and Michael York as Englishman abroad, Brian Roberts, a somewhat reserved bisexual academic and writer. It opened to rave reviews, was an immediate box office smash and won eight Academy Awards. And yet, without doubt, it's the darkest and queerest of musicals - one that even Nazis can enjoy. Indeed, it provides an anthem that is today sung without any trace of irony by neo-Nazi groups.

Written by John Kander and Fred Ebb, 'Tomorrow Belongs To Me' is certainly a catchy number. And when sung by a good-looking Hitler Youth in a bright, sunlit Biergarten (cf. the dark and seedy Kit Kat Klub), it's not surprising as, one by one, nearly all those watching add their voices and raise their arms in salute. But it's not just that the tune happens to be diabolically rousing; more important, as Susan Sontag points out, is the seductive idealism of the Nazi aesthetic itself:

"It is generally thought that National Socialism stands only for brutishness and terror. But this is not true. National Socialism ... also stands for an ideal, and one that is also persistent today, under other banners: the ideal of life as art, the cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage, the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community ..."

In other words, it's insufficient and a little dishonest to pretend audiences are powerfully moved by 'Tomorrow Belongs To Me' simply because of the songwriting genius of Kander and Ebb. The song is so compelling because, among other things, the Nazi fantasy of a future utopia is one which many people continue to share.    

Some individuals - les fleurs du mal - cynically reject the comfortable trappings of bourgeois life and like to indulge their taste for illicit pleasures and nihilism; they choose to be Jewish and queer rather than Aryan and straight as a die. Like Sally Bowles, they abort the chance of a stable family life, preferring a headless, homeless and childfree lifestyle. But most people do not; most prefer Kinder, Küche, Kirche and like to see men in black uniforms patrolling the streets rather than girls with emerald green nail varnish and black stockings. 

But this is not to say that the masses lack a libidinal economy; Sontag is right to remind us that National Socialism doesn't only offer an aesthetic, it also places sex under the sign of a swastika too. And Cabaret crucially hints at how a sexually repressive and puritanical regime on the one hand is profoundly kinky and perverse on the other; the leather boots and gloves providing us with a clue as to the likely predilections of SS officers who continue to figure prominently within the pornographic imagination.

And so, if at one level the film can be read simply as the tale of a failed love affair between Sally and Brian, the violent rise to power of the Nazis and how this influences every aspect of life for all characters - be they German, Jewish, or foreign nationals who just happen to be in Berlin at the time - is the real story. Cabaret demonstrates that fascism compels us to speech and obliges us all to take sides; of how totalitarianism leaves no space for neutrality or political indifference. 

Thus it is that, by the end of the movie, even the Kit Kat Klub is putting on anti-Semitic skits for an audience dominated by uniformed Nazis and their supporters and we are obliged to admit that there's a disturbing (almost symbiotic) relationship between the world of the cabaret and that of the concentration camp; the seduction is beauty ... the aim is ecstasy ... the fantasy is death.


See: Susan Sontag, 'Fascinating Fascism', The New York Review of Books, (Feb 6, 1975): click here to read online. 

To watch Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles singing 'Life is a Cabaret', click here