Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles
Cabaret (1972)
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.
