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Willing Seduction: The Blue Angel, Marlene Dietrich, and Mass Culture

2010; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 102; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mon.2010.0017

1934-2810

Esther K. Bauer,

German History and Society

Reviewed by: Willing Seduction: The Blue Angel, Marlene Dietrich, and Mass Culture Esther K. Bauer Willing Seduction: The Blue Angel, Marlene Dietrich, and Mass Culture. By Barbara Kosta. New York: Berghahn, 2009. xi + 195 pages + 21 b/w illustrations. $60.00. Located at the intersection of cultural, visual, film, German, and women's studies, and primarily pursuing a new historicist and feminist approach, Barbara Kosta's study traces key cultural discourses of the Weimar Republic in Josef von Sternberg's 1930 film The Blue Angel. At the same time, the author pinpoints the role of notions of German national identity in the movie and in the perception of its lead actress, Marlene Dietrich, and explores the connection between national identity and Dietrich's iconic status in the reunified Germany. Kosta builds on the few existing analyses of The Blue Angel and draws on a number of well-known studies of Weimar and modern culture, for instance, by Kracauer, Benjamin, Adorno, and more recently, Petro and Bronfen. Kosta's work reveals that underneath the conventional plot presenting a reputable member of the bourgeoisie destroyed by his desire for a femme fatale, the film's thematic and narrative structure reflects its time's cultural rifts, most prominently the dualism of mass/modern/American vs. high/traditional/German culture. With culture a pillar of German national identity, this debate was directly related to the definition of Germany's self-image. Kosta shows that von Sternberg's film is a milestone in movie history, both as one of the first German sound films and as an example of the use of this new medium—a symbol of modernity, Americanism, and democracy that stood at the center of the time's cultural tensions—to explore these very controversies. [End Page 424] Kosta starts out proposing that in line with contemporary literary and cinematic conventions, the cabaret singer Lola Lola (Dietrich), a sexualized female offering her image for commercial consumption, represents mass culture and modernity. Her counterpart, Professor Rath, stands for nineteenth-century bourgeois ideals and patriarchy. Thus Rath's surrender to Lola betrays his gender, class, and, by extension, national identity and the associated notions of art and culture. Juxtaposed with Lola's iconic performance, Rath's death emphasizes the incompatibility of high and mass culture and the fears provoked by the latter's inexorable rise. In the second chapter, Kosta proposes that looking and displaying are key elements of the film's power structures, reflecting and subverting gender, class, and generational paradigms. Von Sternberg's film focuses on Lola's manipulation of her viewers, "exposing and even devaluing the very idea of a stable male gaze" (62). Illiterate in the visual conventions of mass culture, Rath takes the spectacle of Lola's body for real. His desires prompt him to ignore the boundaries between fantasy and reality—a mistake traditionally associated with female viewers—enabling his masochistic relationship with Lola. Chapter Three focuses on gender roles and on Lola as an independent modern woman. The Blue Angel responds to the time's notion of a crisis of male subjectivity, depicting Lola as the bread winner and Rath as the disempowered male, and staging women's increased visibility and their newly-found control over their images. In addition, it comments on the increasing instability of gender roles in the film's depictions of marriage and female promiscuity. The fourth chapter explores the role of sound, and especially music, in the seduction of Rath (and the spectator) and in the film's larger project "to amplify and conceal the tensions among notions of national culture, art, and mass culture" (112). Kosta highlights the function of sound as a narrative device that comments on, heightens, and subverts the images' effects. Thus Rath and Lola are identified with and characterized by distinct types of music—popular songs for Lola, "serious" music for Rath—stressing their incompatibility. As Kosta writes, "the aural structure [ … ] simultaneously produces and dispels illusions of unity and harmony and lends to sound the ambiguous task of communicating crisis and redemption" (121). In Chapter Five, Kosta turns to Dietrich as a cultural icon of the reunified Germany, suggesting that the actress's current stardom points to...