City Jungles and Expressionist Reifications from Brecht to Hammett

Abstract

The subject of expressionism, that tortured mutilation of congealed panic and anxiety, emanates its strongest contours when cast against background of modern urban landscape. The noisy and unpredictable machinery of metropolis confronts subject as an alien force that continuously threatens any vestige of individual autonomy. The harsh juxtaposition of wounded subjectivity with chaos of commerce, cacophony of technologies, and utterly inhuman industrial backgrounds exhibits dissolution of social community into scattered and disconnected fragments. In midst of most developed concentration of forces of technological achievement and civilized social organization, isolated and alienated character of modern subject comes most prominently to surface. The urban zone of expressionism is a monolithic entity that antagonizes and annihilates isolated energies of subject. Walter Benjamin refers to the impenetrable obscurity of mass existence (Baudelaire 64) in which individual is dissolved into mob. The city itself figures as anthropomorphic subject of many modernist endeavors, from Fritz Lang's Metropolis to Alexander Doblin's quasi-expressionist Berlin Alexanderplatz, which depicts a protagonist entirely constructed from assembled rhythms, ideologies, and fragments of information imposed on subjectivity by monolith metropolis. In cityscapes of George Grosz and Otto Dix, geography of city resembles infernal regions of Hieronymous Bosch, where each individual is consigned to a particular torment and compelled to replicate mechanically a specific and pointless task in utter isolation from swarming multitudes on all sides. Modern literatures unite paradoxical vision of urban landscape as technological anti-utopia with metaphor of primeval jungle. Metropolitan technologies contribute to an atmosphere of noise, light, and sudden violence whose obscure origins and unpredictable concatenations conjure visions of jungle environments. The arbitrary violence and apparent lawlessness of city life create an atmosphere of anarchy that recalls social configurations of tribal warfare. Economic imperatives that set individuals in hostile competition replicate primeval conditions where survival is based on a struggle against all others. The conflation of city and jungle corresponds to a similar conflation of machine and animal. The total mechanization of activity and subsequent death of inner life experienced by subject of modern labor is represented by analogies to inanimate mechanical processes or to unreflective instinctual violence of savage beast. The absence of civilized responses of sympathy and social conscience, made obsolete by market imperatives of total competition, engender a sense of identity with amoral extravagances of animal kingdom. American gangster and detective literatures fully incorporate urban mythos of expressionism; noir genre is based on exploration of underside and unconscious of city and its geography. Noir film and detective story of 1920s and 30s do not merely adopt landscape of expressionist scene, but further assimilate and develop expressionist atmospheres, techniques, and theoretical orientations. These genres intersect most prominently in films like Fritz Lang's M and works of German emigrant Otto Preminger. The expressionist resonances in Dashiell Hammett's work are so pronounced that direct citations from movement can be clearly identified. The urban jungle mythos that serves as background for expressionism and noir is elaborated in Bertolt Brecht's Jungle of Cities, composed in 1924. Brecht constructs a gigantic Chicago of mythic proportions, a metaphysical projection of Chicago in its distorted and transfigured essence in which audience is instructed to concentrate on expressionist agon: concern yourself with human element, evaluate antagonists' fighting spirit impartially and concentrate your interest on showdown (12). …