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Angels and the Modern City
Wim
Wenders: WINGS OF DESIRE
Produced
by Anatole Dauman.
Screenplay by Wim Wenders and Peter Handke.
Director of photography: Henri Alekan.
Starring:
Bruno Ganz as Damiel.
Solveig Dommartin as Marion.
Otto Sander as Cassiel.
Curt Bois as Homer.
Peter Falk as Himself.
I'd like to get something straight from the start. I'm no great fan of moving pictures. The cinema, for me,
has always been suspect. I think of it as a form of diversion that waits round
every corner, an escapism we'll never escape. The 20th century's great art
form, a totalizing art that's taken over so much of our lives--to assess its
influence is almost impossible for us. We've grown up inside it, we live
our lives under its spell. And unlike the great art forms of the past, the
cinema seems mostly a means of avoiding life, or snuffing life out. Its
flickering images are too compelling; we're too easily taken in by such
devastating visual powers. Such powers, however, the power that cinema lends
us--it's nearly always a sham. What are we left with after the credits run?
We've been entertained, and wait for the next fix.
Although the cinema certainly matters
to me (my point here, after all, is that it's impossible for it *not* to
matter) and although I'm often compelled by a particular movie for the two
hours I watch it, it's rare that a film will answer the demands that I bring,
say, to my reading. It's rare that a film forces me to widen my thoughts the
way certain books do. There are few movies, in other words, that actually *thrill*
me, that make me see something new in relation to spiritual life or think
something new in relation to the problem of being human. Wim Wenders' *Wings of
Desire* is the only film of these few that's made me actually want to write
about it. It's the only film I return to, and muse over.
*Wings of Desire* is one of the peaks
of cinema, it's one of cinema's highest accomplishments. If the art of cinema
has a *Divine Comedy*, it must be this single film by Wenders.
Never has a film given such powerful
answers to our most pressing questions. Not clearcut answers, but paradoxical
and ambiguous ones, answers that lead to further questions, to a rethinking of
basic assumptions. That a filmmaker can raise such existential problems so compellingly is something in itself to wonder over. Wenders makes these questions drive every scene in his film.
What are the relations between
material and spiritual? Is there something beyond the material world? If there is some higher or divine realm, how can we enter into
it or achieve communion with it? Is it true that transcendence can be attained
through conquering the body? Is the body material and the mind, or part of the
mind, spiritual? Is human history a parade of disasters finally leading nowhere
(or leading, perhaps, to some terminal disaster)? Does anyone hear our voices?
Do these voices resonate with some divine Word or words? Our triumphs and
perils--are they connected to some ultimate purpose, part of some cosmic
conflict, or are they ultimately meaningless?
Our culture's indecision regarding
the earthly and the transcendent is fundamental, and ancient. These are the
problems, after all, that dogged Plato into formulating the West's first great
philosophical system. They are the same problems that give impetus to the
ongoing struggle in the West between religion and scientific secularism.
Normally dealt with in academic or social/political registers, such questions
don't often become the animating spirit behind movies. But Wenders' film is
different; it stands entirely apart. He somehow manages to convey the immediacy
of such questions to modern life, to the lives and yearnings of individuals, to
their love lives, their thoughts about work, death, family. *Wings of Desire*
is utterly bizarre, in a quirky and often humorous way, but at the same time
utterly serious. Wenders' genius was to make a film both compellingly
realistic, as a documentary of life in modern Berlin, and convincingly
metaphysical, as a tale of the angels in charge of watching over Berlin.
*Wings of Desire* generates its
dramatic tension by exploiting the tension that holds between angels and humans,
between the two overlapping realms in which they live. The angelic realm is
particularly fascinating here because it is one we haven't ever glimpsed in
such a tactile way. Besides which Wenders' angelic realm doesn't exactly
conform to traditional ideas of angels. Beyond time and death, the angels here
hover over Berlin and can move in and around it at will. This, so far, is
familiar enough. They can enter any room or office and observe the people
there, even overhearing the thoughts that run through their heads. (The viewer
too can hear these thoughts as voiceovers.) We then learn that the angels have
been preparing for this job since the beginning of time. The two angels we know
as characters in this film have in fact been present over this same plot of
ground since well before human history. At first they merely awaited the
arrival of "the one created in our image," i.e. man. Then, after the
earliest humans arrived on the scene, their waiting took on a different
character.
Human beings in this film come forth
as a result of evolution, but they come forth destined to fulfil a spiritual
potential. Wenders' myth of men and angels thus strays from the orthodox
religious accounts, but has, to be sure, its parallel aspects as well.
Having carefully watched human beings
from the beginning, the angels in some ways understand us better than we
understand ourselves. In particular they understand how we reach for what is
spiritual, how we sense but can't quite enter into the spiritual realm just
beyond us. This understanding, however, doesn't necessarily imply an
intellectual superiority. Although their realm overlaps with ours, and although
they can read our thoughts, there remains the barrier, a barrier experienced as
such by both sides. As for us, we cannot see the angels, and we cannot normally
converse with them. We may even doubt their existence. For their part, they
cannot know what life really is for us, what it feels like. The coldness or
warmth, the color, the taste, the texture of things--these are completely alien
to angels. Their world is in black and white, and they can never really touch
things. Being that the angels transcend time, they cannot really know time
either. They cannot know its human meaning. Intellectually they may know that
man lives in the present, that man's present is ever running out, ever dragging
him toward death. They *know* this, as a matter of fact, but they don't know
what it feels like to actually live within it.
The angels' curiosity about the true
lives of men leads to desire. Their lack of real life, of the tragic feel of
life, eventually leads some of them to want to shake off their eternity and
join man in his time-bound state. The desire of the angels to fall is Wenders'
brilliant twist. Not to fall like Lucifer, by a denial of God, but to fall
through a need for human warmth, through a curiosity or empathy for human life.
The angels, in their perfection, can fall in love with man, with his compelling
imperfection. Wenders makes of this possibility a beautiful meditation on the
worldly and the divine, on what it might mean to be mortal and immortal.
It's through the dialogues of the two
angels Damiel and Cassiel (played by Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander) that we learn
of their long waiting for man's gestation. We learn also of their current task,
their calling: to witness the development in man of "spirit". Damiel
and Cassiel watch over the lives of Berliners and keep note of what they see
and hear. They must testify to man's spiritual side, and so they must gather
evidence of it.
One of the most telling dialogues as
regards Damiel and Cassiel's work takes place when the two of them meet to
relay what each has recently witnessed. It is evident that the two occasionally
make reports to each other of their individual observations, things they've
seen and heard as they each wandered around Berlin. The two are seated in a car
on display in a car dealer's showroom. Cassiel first takes out a small notebook
and begins giving the standard readings:
CASSIEL:
Sunrise and 7:22 a.m. Sunset at 4:28 p.m. Moonrise at [....] Twenty years ago
today a Soviet jet fighter crashed into the lake at Spandau. Fifty years ago
there were the Olympic Games. Two-hundred years ago Blanchard flew over the
city in a balloon.
DAMIEL: Like the fugitives the other
day.
CASSIEL: And today, on the
Lilienthaler Chaussee, a man, walking, slowed down, and looked over his
shoulder into space. At post office 44, a man who wants to end it all today
pasted rare stamps on his farewell letters, a different one on each. He spoke
English with an American soldier--the first time since his schooldays--and
fluently. A prisoner at Plotzenzee, just before ramming his head against the
wall, said: 'Now!' At the Zoo U-Bahn station, instead of the station's name,
the conductor suddenly shouted: 'Tierra del Fuego!'
DAMIEL: Nice.
CASSIEL: In the hills, an old man
read the Odyssey to a child. And the young listener stopped blinking his
eyes.... And what do you have to tell?
DAMIEL: A woman on the street folded
her umbrella while it rained and let herself get drenched. A schoolboy who
described to his teacher how a fern grows out of the earth, and the astonished
teacher. A blind woman who groped for her watch, feeling my presence.... It's
great to live only by the spirit, to testify day by day, for eternity, to the
spiritual side of people. But sometimes I get fed up with my spiritual
existence. Instead of forever hovering above I'd like to feel there's some
weight to me. To end my eternity, and bind me to earth. At each step, at each gust
of wind, I'd like to be able to say: 'Now! Now! and Now!' And no longer say:
'Since always' and 'Forever.' To sit in the empty seat at a card table, and be
greeted, if only by a nod.... Whenever we did participate, it was only a
pretence. Wrestling with one of them, we allowed a hip to be dislocated, in
pretence only. We pretended to catch a fish. We pretended to be seated at the
tables. And to drink and eat.... Not that I want to plant a tree or give birth
to a child right away. But it would be quite something to come home after a
long day, like Philip Marlowe, and feed the cat. To have a fever. To have
blackened fingers from the newspaper.... To feel your skeleton moving along as
you walk. Finally to *suspect*, instead of forever knowing all. To be able to
say 'Ah!' and 'Oh!' and 'Hey!' instead of 'Yes' and 'Amen'.
This
dialogue begins as a lyrical testimony to the ways in which man's spirit must
break through the pragmatic weight of everyday life. The train conductor who
shouts "Tierra del Fuego!" and the man who sends his farewell letters
each with a rare stamp from his collection are both in some way refusing to
recognize the limits of mundane life. But by the dialogue's end the focus has
shifted in the other direction. Damiel's yearning for the weight of the world
brings him to make almost equally lyrical evocations of what he imagines human
life to be like. "To have a fever.... Finally to *suspect*, instead of
forever knowing all." In this dialogue, in its contrast between the two
kinds of yearning, human and angelic, the film affirms a new kind of
spirituality, one that is paradoxically both material and spiritual, an
affirmation of the necessary and permanent tension between the two: the
meaninglessness of the one without the other.
One of the motifs through which
Wenders develops this tension is that of falling. We've always imagined that
transcending the limits of our earthbound lives meant rising up: all that is
banal or merely mortal would be left behind if we could only take flight. First
we would fly like the birds, escaping the clutches of family and the law,
crossing over walls and borders. Who could pursue us? Then, taking this
imagined flight further, we might literally succeed in ascending to Heaven, in
this way crossing over from time into eternity, and leaving death behind on the
surface of a fallen, corrupted earth. The dream of flight and its concomitant
fear of falling is incarnated in the figure of Marion (Solveig Dommartin), the
once-aspiring trapeze artist who's about to give her very last performance. The
small-time circus Marion works in is going to close down for lack of money. She
knows very well she'll have to return to waitressing: her dream of rising up
through her art was a delusion. But there is more that nags her before her last
night: trapeze is a dangerous art, and what if, her very last time above the
crowd, she should lose her composure and fall and break her neck? Along with
her coming fall from the ideal life as a circus artist, there is also the possibility
of a literal fall, one that is frighteningly material.
The angel Damiel, in his growing
desire to fall into humanity, becomes more and more fascinated with Marion. We
see her through his eyes and hear her thoughts through his ears. Eventually
Damiel truly falls from his angelic state and comes together with Marion. What
does it mean that the film's last scene shows Marion again practicing trapeze
while Damiel, erstwhile angel, holds the rope that anchors her to earth? She
didn't need to renounce her art after all. A new balance between heaven and
earth has been established, a balance which, this time, is effected through the
love between man and woman. Wenders charges theological speculation with
romance, with Eros, as he charges this particular love story with a very
particular cosmic significance. There is no love story like it, in film or
literature, that I know of.
Falling. Scenes of falling are
everywhere in this movie, but it is only Damiel's falling for Marion that is
simultaneously a kind of transcendence. The other cases of falling include auto
accident, film stunt (a fake sort of falling), suicide (a young man leaps from
a building) and the angel Cassiel's pathetic attempt to experience what that
suicide must have been like. Having been unable to prevent it, he's led to a
confused empathy: he will repeat the young man's suicide by himself falling
from Golden Else's shoulder atop the Victory Column. But Cassiel is both
immortal and weightless: his fall can be nothing like true suicide. (Interestingly,
it seems uncannily like the stunt fall we witness on the film set, or like
those hundreds of stunt falls we've seen in those hundreds of action movies.)
Cassiel seems to be the all-around
professional angel: the angel as mid-level management. In each instance he
lacks Damiel's grace and sympathy. He is closer to abstract intelligence and
further from creative, living being. In the same meeting with Damiel quoted
above, we learn that what most attracts Cassiel to the idea of falling is the
possibility of experiencing evil. Cassiel, as angels go, is in a more
Luciferian mode, more in the mode of the angel as we classically understand it.
Is Damiel, then, in a mode closer to Christ?
Wenders nowhere underlines the notion
that Damiel might be somehow Christlike. The only way we may think of him as
Christlike is in the sense rendered by a rewritten, pared down John 3:16:
"For Damiel so loved the world that he gave his eternity in order to be
with man." This, if you consider it, is quite pared down indeed. But
Damiel certainly is more Christlike than Cassiel, if only because he is more
human; he is animated more by love than by whatever it is that animates
Cassiel.
Love, transcendence, human history,
mortality: these themes taken up by Wenders give his film a potentially epic
character. Not epic in the Hollywood sense of large-scale
war-movie-cum-love-story, but epic in the traditional sense of a story about
foundations: *the* story of the heroic struggles that defined us. The theme of
epic story is made explicit here through the character of the despairing old
storyteller, the old Berliner who is at the same time a kind of would-be Homer.
His criticism of the world around him is familiar enough (familiar to me at
least: most of his words could have come from, and probably already have come
from, my own mouth). According to him, the possibilities of wonder, of
storytelling, are finished: men have become both too sophisticated and too
impoverished through their scientific knowledge; they've lost the world through
their destructive know-how.
Where
are my heroes? Where are you, my children? Where are my own, the dull-witted,
the first, the original ones?... Name me, Muse, the immortal singer. Who,
abandoned by his mortal listeners, lost his voice. How, from being an angel of
storytelling, he became an organ-grinder, ignored or mocked. Outside, on the
threshold of no-man's land.
The
no-man's land he wanders are the dead zones and nearly dead zones bordering the
(still standing) Berlin wall. He is looking for the location of the Potsdammer
Platz, which has been effaced by the changes brought about through the war and
then the division of the city between East and West.
Wenders' lamenting Homer is a figure
for many of the modernist (still fundamentally Romantic) critics who see our
advancements as alienating us further and further from what is more
authentically human. It is a complaint that found a first great exponent in
Rousseau and one that has defined us ever since. But this kind of lament is
implicitly criticized by Wenders. For in the very same city where the old
storyteller wanders distraught there is occurring "a story of new
ancestors"--namely the story of the fall of Damiel and his love for
Marion. And if I love this film so much it is because Wenders, in this regard,
is nearly convincing. I'm almost brought around to believing that, yes, it is
possible to tell stories about the modern world that might matter to us as much
as the ancient stories mattered: those, say, of Adam and Eve, or Odysseus.
Marion had dreamed of a man in her
sleep, a man who came to her. In fact it was Damiel who, in his angelic form,
was lying in her bed by her side. When Damiel finally falls, a day or two
later, he comes to the pub where Marion goes to dance. He comes to find her, only
her. But it's she who approaches the bar where he's waiting. The two turn to
each other and Marion, recognizing the face from the dream, begins her
monologue about how, finally, things are getting "serious". Along
with the dialogues between Damiel and Cassiel, I find Marion's monologue the
lyrical high point of the film. She speaks it just inches away from Damiel, a
man she'd never before seen in the flesh; she speaks it with halting
confidence, a frankness and softness that mean he is only to listen, to hear
from her mouth the meaning of their new love. I'll finish this essay by quoting
the monologue in full:
It's
time to get serious.... I was often alone, but I never lived alone. When I was
with someone I was often happy. But I also felt it's all a matter of chance.
These people are my parents, but it could have been others. Why was that
brown-eyed boy my brother, and not the green-eyed boy on the opposite platform?
The taxi driver's daughter was my friend, but I could just as well have
embraced a horse's head. I was with a man. I was in love. But I could just as
well have left him there, and continued on with the stranger who came toward
us.... Look at me, or don't. Give me your hand, or don't. No, don't give me
your hand, and look the other way.... I think there's a new moon tonight. No
night is more peaceful. No blood will be shed in the whole city.... I never
toyed with anyone. And yet, I never opened my eyes and thought: 'This is
it.'... It's finally getting serious. So I've grown older. Was I the only one
who wasn't serious? Is it our times that are not serious? I was never lonely.
Neither when I was alone, nor with others. I would have liked to be alone at
last. Loneliness means at last I am whole. Now I can say it because today I am
finally lonely. No more coincidence.... The new moon of decision. I don't know
if destiny exists, but decision does exist. Decide. Now we are the times. Not
only the whole city, but the whole world is taking part in our decision. We two
are more than just two. We personify something. We are sitting in the People's
Plaza, and the whole plaza is filled with people, who all wish for what we wish
for. We are deciding everyone's game. I am ready. Now it's your turn. You're
holding the game in your hand. Now or never. You need me. You will need me.
There's no greater story than ours. That of man and woman. It will be a story
of giants. Invisible, transposable. A story of new ancestors. Look. My eyes.
They are the picture of necessity, of the future of everyone on the plaza. Last
night I dreamt of a stranger. Of my man. Only with him could I be lonely. Open
up to him. Completely open, completely for him. Welcome him completely into
myself. Surround him with the labyrinth of shared happiness. I know it is you.
Eric
Mader-Lin,
January 2002
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