So, a couple of weeks ago, I was reading "Stone Soup" with one of my classes. I really like this story, in large part because it remains ambiguous. In fact, it was only five or six years ago that I realized the moral was widely supposed to be something along the lines of:
Cooperation can work wonders, if you can just get it started.
Well, gee whillikers. You see, for the fifteen years or so prior, my interpretation (though the fifth-grader wouldn't have put it quite this way) had been more like this.
If you don't learn to distinguish essentials from inessentials, you'll be swindled out of your essentials.
But what a wonderful irony, to hold the two in parallel! Having just watched Wings of Desire yet again, I especially appreciate how a cynical seducer and a guide to a better existence can be one and the same. And in election season, it might be worth bearing in mind what ya get by combining the two mottos.
Ah, well, you can have a bit of my garlic, I suppose.
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4 comments:
Huh. A better existence, I guess. If better also means still more seduction, with more pitfalls, and a creeping, confusing awareness of both.
Well, you sure can't hover around the library all day, helping everyone appreciate their books.
Speak for yourself! I can if I want.
Seriously though, would you believe it? I have also just recently viewed this film again (last week in fact).
I suppose the indication of Colombo's cynicism is in the fact that he breaks out the same routine for every angel he comes across right? (and when I write "Colombo" I'm thinking of the distinct syllables and exaggerated long "o" sounds when the name is used by the three young Berliners who recognize him in passing).
"I can't see you, but I know you're there ... companero."
If you know he says this once he seems benign, even wise and admirable. If you know he is saying it all over the place he seems, if not sinister, than at least, as you note, cynical, and cynically seductive.
Also there is the reaction the second time he breaks out with this spiel, as the angel Cassiel seems almost contemptuous, or at the very best, determinedly unaffected. This helps to indicate Colombo's cynicism.
But here is the twist, I think: the gorgeous trapeze artist Marion, right? At the Nick Cave/Bad Seeds show, in the buttonhole with Damiel waxes just like Colombo in many respects. She tempts us with her bit on the joy, th e curative power of plunging in to a significant encounter, the way Colombo goes on about scratching an itch, filling his lungs, warding off the cold in his hands.
We know that Marion is earnest, that she ponders life deeply, that loneliness plagues her, we've been privileged to hear her thoughts throughout the film; but we don't know that she has not spoken just like this before, or that she will not speak just like this again. In fact she is so lyrical, so compelling, how can her speech not be rehearsed in some sense?
Would that make her cyncial? Maybe, but probably no less earnest ... which might also be said of Colombo. All this would probably support your argument, and suggest something about the condition of the will: that there is room for cynicism and earnestness in the same harness, pulling together toward the same destination - erasing isolation, scratching an itch.
I think I have something else to say about "Wings of Desire."
What if you consider it from a sort of metaphorical perspective?
I want to stop thinking that I am reading the minds of others, only trying to sympathize with them without quite touching them or hooking up with them. I want to wear something bright and garish, jog up and down the street, up and down the stairs, feel my bones and muscle at work while they still work, quit living in the past and the future, the "ewigkeit," and laugh and love right now. Hook up right now. I mean now.
That would be the metaphorical take, yeah?
They aren't really angles ... they are just trying, but not hard enough, to be human. What does that suggest about Colombo's cynicism?
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