Siegried as "Squash": Chapter 5 Part 2 of
THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA
by James Whitlark, Ph.D.
SIEGFRIED (1923)
In such books as The Cooked and the Raw, Levi-Strauss argues for an analysis of myth into dichotomies (e.g., civilized and primitive), which the arts from ancient folk tales to modern works attempt to mediate, i.e., to squash. Because of the need for rapport with an audience’s resistances, the arts mediate cautiously, particularly conservative ones such as the film Siegfried, which has its own secondary gain in self-division. Scripted by the melodramatic Thea von Harbou and directed by her equally excessive husband Fritz Lang, it charges folk-tale dichotomies with intense energy, which can only be maintained by a divided psyche that keeps trying and failing to rejoin. Emblematic of this division, the virtuous characters swagger in white (with a little black patterning), the wicked in black (with a few touches of white). Associating any reconciliation of these with treachery is Gunther in gray.
Establishing the nature/nurture dichotomy in the first scenes, the camera cuts between the tall, handsome Siegfried (by essence good) and his evil teacher, the dwarf Mime, capped with a grotesque wig, face contorted, body flabby and weak. In that exaggerated style of acting encouraged by Lang even more than most directors of silent movies, Mime, the master smith, staggers, overcome by envy. After forging the perfect sword, Siegfried proves its preeminence by slicing a falling feather. The antagonists enter a stone smithy combining elements of cave and giant tree (natural) with Macedonian fortress (ancient culture). The dwarves wear skins. A fractal character, Siegfried stands between this primitivism and the civilization of medieval humanity—a potential mediator. (The same actor played a comparable role as Freder in Metropolis).
In Wagner’s version of the story, the dwarves represented Jews, Siegfried the Germanic race. Although von Harbou ostensibly based her plot on Hebbel’s 1861 play, much of the public would, because of Wagner, have seen racist allegory and thus condemned mediation between them as contamination. Not surprisingly, Hitler loved the movie. Perhaps not coincidentally, Von Harbou herself became a Nazi.
Her script begins when, from a dwarf, Siegfried hears of the castle of Kriemhild. Its misty battlements fill the screen, with its court attending mass. A cinematic iris slowly closes on Kriemhild and opens on Siegfried still among the dwarves. The two scenes contrast not only primitivism and civilization but also pagan myth (the dwarves’ origin) and Christianity.
Fallen in love with Kriemhild without literally seeing her, Siegfried
stands entranced. This follows a convention of medieval, Christian, chivalric love,
as in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parsival. The ecstasy of Siegfried testifies
to his spiritual nobility, the dwarves’ laughter to their (heathen) crudity. As with
any depiction of a protagonist in trance, the scene may incline the concentrating
audience to identify with his trance-fixed observation, particularly since they see
(in an iris) what he is imagining. Certainly, such an invitation to dream suits as
an introduction to the particularly fabulous action that ensues.
Dragon
Treacherously, Mime tells Siegfried that the path to Kriemhild lies through the Woden
Wood, which is actually in the wrong direction and almost impassable. Reference to
the chief Teutonic deity Woden makes the pagan ambiance explicit. Within the wood,
Siegfried encounters the giant Fafnir, appearing in the form of a dragon. Seldom,
however, do these two occupy the same shot. Instead, the camera alternates between
them, framing Siegfried, for instance, against the beauty of the waterfall, as if
the combatants represented separate worlds that come together only with difficulty.
After slaying the creature, though, Siegfried begins to join with it by drinking
its blood—the beginnings of an amalgamation that at first seems wonderful. Connecting
nature and humanity, he understands the language of a bird. It instructs him to bathe
in the dragon’s blood, which makes whatever human skin it touches invulnerable.
According to prophecy, only a god could survive the wood. But Siegfried
is no longer fully human. Like the Germanic gods, he can be killed (a lime leaf kept
the blood from coating him wholly), but this simply means that mediation between
the non- or superhuman and human is problematic and temporary.
Celestial Sun
In sacred stories, a dragon and a solar deity are sometimes antithetical, e.g., the
serpent that swallows (eclipses) the sun; Apollo who kills the Python; and the Christ
of Revelation as Son/Sun against the dark Dragon. A minstrel singing of Siegfried’s
exploits describes the hero as “Beautiful as the sun.” Siegfried’s and Kriemhild’s
white robes link them together as figures of light. His exploits have been in the
dwarves’ Mist Land and dark caverns, where he acquired a great treasure and the ability
to assume any form, including invisibility—typical attributes of a mythic trickster-mediator,
able to be all things to all people. His rival for these powers, the king of the
dwarves loses and returns to his origin, stone—immobility. The other evil characters
move slowly, brooding. In contrast, Siegfried is manically frenetic, casting jewels
to the people, chattering with animals, or skipping about with a ridiculous smile
on his face. Under Lang’s direction, the incomplete squash he represents brings ephemeral
energy but not wisdom, for he agrees to help wicked Gunther, King of Burgundy, win
Brunhilde, Queen of Iceland.
In a land of mist and darkness like that of the dwarves, a solar
aura momentarily flares, and a sea of flames dies down, allowing Siegried’s party
to reach Brunhilde. She learns of this through Norse runes cast by her resident witch.
The latter is modeled on Frigga (a Norse goddess turned human servant in Hebbel’s
Siegfrieds Tod). Frigga tries to argue Hebbel’s “Brunhild” (a convert to Christianity)
into resuming the old faith (Hebbel 1901, 4:47). In the movie, however, Brunhilde
does not object to rune-casting and thus identifies herself as pagan. She also has
magic power—the strength to leap across a courtyard and throw a massive bolder, but
except briefly by Siegfried’s impersonating Gunther, he remains separated from her
and her primal power. Indicative of another failure, as they leave for Burgundy,
they cross a plank supported by Burgundian soldiers standing in the water. The scene
echoes an earlier one, where Alberich’s massive treasure was borne by dwarves chained
to it. Thus Siegfried has become a new Alberich, a new oppressor of the masses and
his occasionally tossing them largesse is hardly a satisfactory mediation.
The Treasures of the Chthonic sun
Siegfried’s success (however limited) has depended on secrecy—the self-contradiction
of his being a sun in darkness. Discovering his deceit, Brunhilde grows angry while
Hagen is beginning to fear Siegfried’s popularity with the people. Hagen tricks Kriemhild
into marking the vulnerable spot on Siegfried with a cross. A fatal spear pierces
him there.
As if seeking some “anchor” of national unity (or at least a large government subsidy), apparent conservatism and patriotism dominated German cinema during the period. “Fritz Lang’s Destiny (1921) achieved a truly medieval folk tale quality with its story of a young girl who bargains with Death for the life of her lover. The medieval element turns up again and again…in Paul Wegener’s Golem (1920), in von Gerlach’s The Chronicle of the Grieschaus (1923), in Paul Leni’s Waxworks (1924) and in Pabst’s The Treasure (1924). The Nibelungenlied, that symbol of the heroic life of ancient Germany, was conjured up in two films by Fritz Lang, Siegfried and Kriemhild’s Revenge (1924)” (Knight 53). Nonetheless, traditionalism is more apparent than real. A number of the examples (such as Golem) are visions not of old glory but of gothic horror.
Siegfried and its sequel Kriemhild’s Revenge constitute a reductio ad absurdum of a medieval sensibility that placed its faith in blood as the paradigmatic interconnector. During the middle ages, (forced) marriages cemented political unity as the atoning blood of Christ tied man and God. In Siegfried, however, blood always fails. In the conflated Christianity and paganism, the former provides ceremonies (mass, marriage, funeral), but it guides no one’s actions. Presumably, the only baptism Siegfried has ever had is from the dying dragon, and that blood bath is incomplete. Siegfried perishes because of a cross, but not the Cross. He becomes blood brother to Gunther, who betrays him. Despite marriage ties, treachery marks the interrelationship of Brunhilde, Gunther, Kriemhild, and Siegfried. Kinship turns to gore in Kriemhild’s Revenge. Neither paganism nor Christianity holds the volatile opposites together.
To Hebbel, Christianity was merely one “mythology among other[s]…” (Hebbel 1892 2:287; Periam 200). Siegfried pays even less lip service to Christianity. Hebbel proclaimed, “Poetry is my religion” (Hebbel 1890, 1:141). In the movie, a central section purportedly comes from the lips of a troubadour, and the rest of the film is so in tone with it, that the whole resembles an epic. As Hebbel said of his own “Nibelungen,” the movie “depicts the victory of Christianity over heathendom” (Periam 99)—but in both the result appears less “victory” than a lament that unity is no longer possible. The golden sun of consciousness no longer lies hidden in the unconscious darkness and the treasures of their union are lost.
Betrayed to the giant/dragon by his treacherous guardian and united to the blood of his first kill, Siegfried has undergone a partial “squash,” but, according to the film, during the equivalent of a childhood trauma. Perhaps this is one more reason for the Siegfried’s integration being incomplete and unstable. Whatever the original reasons for Siegfried’s legend being a tragedy, the movie is the product of a 1920s when the wildly accelerating pace of economic expansion and modernization generated a mood of unease. Perhaps even more important, cinematic verisimilitude was sufficiently crude as to prevent it from presenting an idealized past with conviction. Although the latter twentieth century was not a much-more secure period, its cinema had made sufficient advances in technique so that such movies as Dances with Wolves can offer the ideal as an imaginary center of existence to be visualized with surreal vividness.
Continue to THE BIG PICTURE Chapter 5 Part 3
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