By a Thread: Civilization in Fritz Lang's Fury

Abstract

JOE: THE LAW DOESN'T KNOW that a lot of things that were very important to me-silly things maybe, like a belief in justice, and an idea that men were civilized, and a feeling of pride that this country of mine was different from all others-the law doesn't know that those things were burned to death within me that night. I came here today for my own sake. I couldn't stand it anymore. I couldn't stop thinking about them with every step and every breath I took. (Fury) Indeed, law doesn't know. Worse yet, it does not care. Nor does it feel, think, judge, or act. An abstraction that exerts palpable influence only via its human enforcers, law depends completely on those enforcers to connect it with actual process of justice. Thus it cannot protect in most concrete sense-and realization of this cold, hard fact adds a note of terror to Joe Wilson's anger as he makes his courtroom speech at close of Fritz Lang's first American film. To eyes and ears ofthat court, Joe (Spencer Tracy) is an uncanny apparition, an apparent returnee from grave. His presence indicates literal untruth of his death, but his words confirm that death figuratively. Lang and Tracy show us difference on Joe's face: this is not man we met at beginning of film. The loss of that man, who believed in those silly things, is statistically insignificant but nonetheless of great consequence: if Joe cannot find life after death, then civilization, film charges, is dead as well. In what follows, I read Fury as a document of, as well as a contribution to, cultural construction and critique of civilization during 19205 and 19305. My analysis takes textual and contextual factors into account as it illustrates one result of Lang's productive encounter with codes and constraints he became subject to when he took up creative work in United States. Arriving after witnessing Weimar Republic's collapse, Lang was well positioned to contemplate features of each national situation and consider how each society thought, lived, and possibly questioned idea of civilization. The work on his first American film yielded a concrete rendition ofthat abstract, often incoherent idea, variations of which had currency on both sides of Atlantic. Fury shows that only option open to those who lay claim to civilization is to both embrace and reject concept, to take as foundation for actual life an idealized fantasy of what Norbert Elias calls the social weave(2:330-31). The alternative is a rogue's life, an existence torn away from social fabric, a life that, though it is more logical for subject whose own flesh has been burned by civilization's collapse, is psychically unbearable. I consider Lang's film and Elias's theory in tandem because Elias's work on civilization surveys a set of problems central to Fury. These problems involve social-structural relationship between individual and state, as well as subject-internal workings of affect and intellect. Such issues call for an analytical vocabulary that draws on traditions of social thought and psychoanalytic theory but elaborates itself independently in space between, and Elias's genealogy and technical model of civilization furnish such vocabulary. The term civilization itself was even more loaded in 19305 than it is now, marked as it was by German intellectual right's insistence on incommensurability of German kultur and Western Zivilisation. Elias chose it nonetheless, not to defend virtues of a naive concept of civilization as achievement but to offer a history of an evolving process and a theory ofthat process's continued workings in modern society. Mary Fulbrook argues that Elias, despite his attempt to characterize process in value-neutral terms, certainly operated with an evaluative hierarchy (9), that is, that he participated in very Eurocentric discourse of civilization that he sought to analyze. …