Trading Places: "Dr. Mabuse" and the Pleasure of Role Play

Abstract

Upon its release in 1922, Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou's two-part Sensations-film series Dr. Mabuse, der grose Spieler: Bild unserer and Das Inferno: Spiel von unserer struck a chord with an eager public, which found in the films a startling expression of its own experiences of upheaval and insecurity.1 Enthusiastic reviews written upon the premiere of the first installment, Dr. Mabuse, der grose Spieler, heralded the film's ability to reflect and the Weimar Republic's tumultuous state of affairs. The Berliner Lokalanzeiger described it as a mirror of the age, and noted that, though it was not especially uplifting, it was-as a result of the visual power of Fritz Lang's direction- ennobling and genuine in its effect (qtd. in Eisner 57). The B.Z. am Mittag reported that by condensing the spirit of the time into a rapid succession of sensations and adventures, the film successfully fulfilled its function of portraying an age set in motion, thus playfully re-enacting and mirroring life (qtd. in Eisner 57). On May 1, 1922, Die Welt am Montag praised the film as a of its time and a superb portrait of high society, noting its passion for gambling and dance, its decadent hysteria and its expressionism and occultism (qtd. in Eisner 58). Perhaps prompted by the films' German subtitles, Part I Ein Bild unserer Zeit and Part II Menschen unserer Zeit, such early responses to the film reveal themselves to be embedded in a unique variant of the reflection model. Fritz Lang himself underscored the factor of reflection in his essay Kitsch, Sensation-Kultur und Film, originally published in E. Beyfuss and A. Kossowsky's 1924 Das Kulturfilmbuch, declaring that the ultimate vocation of the cinema is to provide a of contemporary times and that Dr. Mabuse owed its appeal to its exceptional ability to do so. It is striking to see the readiness with which Lang and his critics placed, sought, and found in the film a record or a document of their own experiences, particularly because today's scholars in film studies and cultural studies are so aware of the shortcomings of the reflection model. By contrast, we are inclined to complicate the film's relationship to its time, choosing instead to elaborate on the ways in which the text engages in, works through, and thus transforms the historical discourses and cultural moments evoked by its story. Despite the fact that contemporary scholars see in the film than the earliest commentators may have discerned from such close proximity, it is important that we not dismiss responses to the film that rely on this kind of language. They have certainly proven useful in new scholarship on the film, which uses the reviews and the director's commentary as a springboard into discussions of the film's negotiation of the experience of modernity (Gunning) or as a case study for the gap that existed between Weimar intellectuals' ability to represent and recognize the pathologies of the age and their blind displacement of these pathologies through the development and analysis of elaborate metaphors, a process which permitted a lack of self-recognition that became fatal to the Republic (Elsaesser). Like my contemporaries, I build my analysis of Lang's first Dr. Mabuse installments on the moment of self-recognition that occurred upon the film series' premiere, but I shift the emphasis of the discussion away from broader historical and philosophical concerns in order to look in more detail at cinematic spectatorship as it is instantiated in the two-part series. I contend that precisely because of their reliance on a rhetoric of reflection and documentation, these comments and reviews present us with a perplexing yet provocative estimation of the relationship between early Weimar movie audiences and the films they loved. My analysis explores the reasons why such terms of self-referentiality and identification might have served so well to describe the audience's experience of the films. …