colinr0380 wrote:I don't know. I always thought the film was about the dangerous pursuit of absolute beauty and perfection and the way that it can sometimes lead us to look foolish or do foolish things like pursue the impossible (and unfulfillable, even in simple legal terms!), and often end up looking comically, tragically, parodically absurd in our desperate attempts at dolling ourselves up to be noticed, and eventually put our own very wellbeing on the line as of secondary importance. Is wasting away in the presence of almost graspable but ever illusive perfection, that barely even notices your presence (or barely reacts when it does) worth it for simply the brief pleasure of sharing the same hallowed spaces, if only for a moment?
In the novella, the reading you give above is precisely how Aschenbach conceives his desire to himself, as desire to behold perfect, classically proportioned beauty and from there engage in productive aesthetic and artistic contemplation. But Thomas Mann was primarily an ironist. He was very much aware that, tho' this is what Aschenbach claimed, the situation and Aschenbach's actions within it are indistinguishable from common sexual lust, and that however the subject frames it, we're still getting an aging and lonely old man following around a half naked boy. Mann was not so banal and clumsy an ironist to make this simply a grotesque man trying to justify his desires with pretentious motives, however. Mann's ironies are creating an ambiguity between what Nietszche (sorry!) called the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the ordered rational search for artistic purity, and the disordered, chaotic pursuit of physical and emotional instincts. So this is simultaneously the story of genuine artistic pursuit and pathetic lust, both eventually tied by Mann to the death drive through that classic Mann conceit of desire producing infection and disease (he returned to that in
The Magic Mountain). This is worked up, many think, into an analysis of the competing pursuits of then contemporary Europe, between its high artistic desires and its drive towards the irrational and sensual that would culminate in destruction. It's all very complicated and literary.
The problem with the movie for me has always been: is it even capable of capturing any of this? The arguments between whether the movie is an artist's pursuit of high artistic ideals or a pretentiously filmed story about some dirty old man are seeing only half the point. It should be both. Literature can juggle the two sides a lot more easily than film; it can set a disparity between what's being narrated and how it's being narrated. Without a voice-over, a film has a hard time layering a narrative in that way; it has to alternate moods. VIsconti's film tries the latter, I think, but it doesn't manage it properly, and its methods are clumsy. The film implies the Apollonian through its art house sophistication, its lingering takes and pictorial compositions, but mostly through Mahler's music. It's really Mahler's that carries this mood, which is why it's so omnipresent. As for the Dionysian, the movie creates it through comic grotesquerie, eg. scenes of Ascenbach behaving pathetically, especially in moments of overindulgence and revelry.
So here's the problem: the film doesn't balance those two moods. The Apollonian is not counterbalanced by the Dionysian, it devolves into it. The film moves from Aschenbach in aesthetic appreciation mode on the beach and in the cities to Aschenbach's dissolution in grotesque parties that go on for ages, culminating in him painting himself like an old queen and dying on the beach. It's hard not to get the feeling that the film is being tendentious and moralistic: rather than Mann's ironies and his ambiguity between the two moods, the Apollonian merely degenerates into the Dionysian, which is not so far from a fascist's view of culture. Please don't mistake me for saying either Visconti or his film are fascist. It's more that this kind of tendentious and moralistic conclusion is attractive to fascists precisely because it's both simplistic and looks backward to a purity untroubled by corruption. Mann had the good sense to imply that artistic purity and irrationality aren't easily extricated. Visconti seems to be setting them up as separate steps in a temporal process.
Visconti's film I think sees itself as redemptive rather than tragi-comic. It ends with Aschenbach's pathetic death at the hands of the disease his desire seemed to create, but it also ends by moving away from Aschenbach to observe Tadzio once again, now freed from Ascenbach (if not his gaze), Mahler surging, as Tadzio points offscreen, out to sea. The figure of Appolonian grace, beauty, and purity points off into the distant horizing, ie. towards the grand and unbeheld ineffable before us. It does feel like Visconti sees artistic purity as both persisting and pointing the way out. Art may lead us to corruption if we're not careful, but it offers us our only salvation from corruption and death. In another movie, this conclusion would be beautiful. But in the context of a story that seems to be symbolizing (however inadvertently) the degeneration of art and culture into disease and death, this conclusion is troubling. Art as perfect bodily proportion, as purity, as physical perfection untouched by eros, well, we all know what cultures enshrined that idea. The same ones that attacked so-called degenerate art and sought a return to mythical pasts of reason, order, and purity untroubled by the irrational drives of Freudian theory. Societies that wanted to be untroubled by sex and modernity. So, yeah, Visconti's film seems to repeat ideas in contexts that gives them an ugly edge.
Again, Visconti's film is not fascist nor is he. It's just that I don't think he realizes the context he's built his ideas around and how it inadvertently shadows those ideas with ugly implications with only a modicum of extension. Far from achieving Mann's ironies, with eros and thanatos forming an inescapable undercurrent to aesthetic and artistic goals, Visconti creates a movie where art is in opposition to eros and thanatos, and we are invited to follow artistic perfection away from disease and degeneracy. No thanks. I prefer Mann.
