Andrew Webber, Cambridge
This paper
considers Tykwer’s 1998 film Lola rennt in relation to the mythological
constructions which have been applied to Berlin in the twentieth century. While
Lola rennt appears to project a distinctly contemporary picture of life
in the new German capital, it in fact operates through a complex network of
mythical and historical references. A key part of this network lies in the
treatment of gender. I see the gender performances in the film as conditioned
by hysteria, which afflicts both male and female leads. This hysterical
conditioning is related in its turn to the histories and mythologies of German
and international film traditions, principally Sternberg, Fassbinder, and
Hitchcock. Gender in Lola rennt is understood as produced through
citational practices, after the model developed by gender theorist Judith
Butler, and the performance of Lola as a mythical fantasy of the new woman
running the new city is accordingly shown to be a continuation of old forms of
gender trouble in Butler’s sense.
One of the ways in which cities are
figured in consciousness and in ideology is through forms of myth. Berlin in
the twentieth century has been subject to a particularly varied range of
mythological constructions, both in terms of the radical political
contradictions and confrontations of its official history and the more
slippery, subcultural trends of its unofficial history. The mythology of Berlin
rests not least in its function as film-city, a one-time world centre of film
production and an ongoing site for film scenarios. The cinema has served as a
prime register of the city’s mythologies, from the Berlin films of the Weimar
period, through Riefenstahl’s Olympiad films, via Wilder and Cold War
thrillers, to the new Berlin films of the post-Wende period. Mythologies
always have a tendency to resist historical change, to posit themselves as
timeless, notwithstanding the evidence of history – in the case of Berlin the
transitory succession of empires which have contested control over the city in
the twentieth century. Berlin is a site of mythical projections, but also, and
in tension with this, its topography is intensely marked by the particular
processes of its history.
My discussion of Lola rennt,
the film which, more than any other, has put Berlin back onto the international
screen, will be focused on this relation between mythology and history, or more
properly between competing versions of history and mythology. Lola rennt
is a film which plays with the conventional stations and monstrous obstacles of
mythical quest structures, as ironically introduced by the voice of Hans
Paetsch, the narrator of fairy-tales as ‘Mythenverwalter’ (Töteberg 1998: 130).
It is an archetypal story-line produced with new means; as Tykwer has it: ‘LOLA
RENNT funktioniert nicht anders als die Suche nach dem Gral. Nur, daß es sich
bei unserem Gral um 100.000 Mark handelt’ (Tykwer et al. 1998).[1]
With its tortoise, its blind seer, its Cerberus, its Cyclops, its sirens, its
Charybdis, and its Circe,[2]
it is a film that is figured more particularly as a reconstruction of Classical
myth-narratives, not least as a latter-day mock version of Homer’s quest epic, The
Odyssey.[3]
While the film thus adopts a relation to a model form of grand narrative, it
does so in a way that is eclectic and synthetic; in Lola rennt the topoi
of archaic mythology are syncretized with a multilayered, fast-forward picture
of urban modernity.
Tykwer’s film emerges at a time when
a renewed version of the ‘junger deutscher Film’ is freeing itself from the
often morbid fixation upon history which was the legacy of the ‘Neuer Deutscher
Film’ of the seventies and eighties. The new German Comedies and Thrillers are
generally prepared to release themselves from the need to frame their pictures
with the historical attachment to the Nazi period and to follow more
international guidelines. To adopt and adapt the title of the earlier film
scripted by Tykwer, German film culture is now figured as ‘Baustelle’, as a
site of new constructions, and nowhere does this apply more closely than to
‘Baustelle Berlin’, where physical reconstruction operates in tandem with
ideological and socio-cultural reconstructions.
In Lola rennt, Tykwer
certainly releases his film from historicizing conventions. This is Berlin shot
in the style of a globalized media revolution and in the globally transferable
and readily exportable genre of the thriller. As we are reminded by the key
site of the ‘Deutsche Transfer Bank’, it is part of a global exchange of
bankable film productions, the bank heist being a key example of such
international currency. The film avoids the more obvious memorial sites of the
city, adopting instead a montage of unlikely angles on secondary postcard
settings and of more or less unglamorous local territory, recognisable as
Berlin to those in the know, but not in the established form of the
angst-ridden, post-Imperialist cityscape. It is telling that where landmark
sites are used for the film, they are appropriated as places of play, with Lola
running across the giant chequerboard of the Gendarmenmarkt and the museum
building on Unter den Linden transformed into a casino for Lola to play. And
the splits still inherent in the post-unification capital are effaced by Lola’s
cab-ride to the wrong ‘Grunewaldstraße’ on the Eastern side of the city;[4]
the East and its historical specificity is thus merely, perhaps playfully,
incorporated as a misdirected detour.
Notwithstanding the film’s
self-conscious, philosophical experimentation with spatial and temporal
framing, then, its fixation upon clocks and appointments, it in fact effaces
the political significance of time and place in order to retell a sort of new
Odyssey, a time-less story taking place, as the publicity booklet has it in
‘Berlin. Jetzt’. If Lola rennt is indeed, as Stefan Arndt of the
production company X-Filme claims, ‘der absolute Berlin-Film’ (Tykwer et al.
1998), then it is a Berlin which is largely freed of its history. Tykwer claims
that the historical experience of the late twentieth century is released from
its binding to the past or the future, that it is fundamentally ‘situativ’,
defined by contemporary situation; and in ‘Baustelle Berlin’, caught between
‘Moderne und Abbruch’, this experience is at its most intense: ‘Keine Stadt ist so synthetisch und lebendig
wie Berlin’ (Tykwer et al. 1998). The most politicised city of the twentieth
century is thus converted into a place open to the production of contemporary
spectacle, seen by Tykwer as a sort of film studio where anything goes. While
the mock-biographical entry for Lola in the book of the film tells us that she
has three ‘Vorbilder’, Pippi Langstrumpf, Madonna, and Sophie Scholl, it is the
fantasy powers of the first and the performance glamour of the second rather
than the historical political resistance of the third which determine her role.[5]
The unlikely trio are brought
together as a provocatively synthetic group of active female role-models. I
propose to approach the relation between mythology and history through the
particular aspect of the film’s treatment of gender, and its relation thereby
to the histories and mythologies of German and international film traditions. A
key question will be whether the image of girl power which Lola projects, on
the model of her ‘Vorbilder’, represents a historically specific emancipation
of the female role, or whether it is rather part of a more deep-rooted and controlling
mythology of the feminine, and thereby of a gender order which is anything but
free.
The incongruity of Lola’s role models
is characteristic of the styling of the film as a whole. Part of the film’s
appeal to the exchange values of international postmodernism lies in its
eclectic incorporation and recycling of styles and its foregrounding of the
idea of style, not least the international style of MTV and fashion publicity.
Like adverts or pop videos, Lola rennt formulates its aesthetic not
least by way of the free mixing of a variety of audio-visual media and methods
(incorporating standard 35mm stock, handheld camerawork, video, animation,
black and white, heightened colouration, graining, split-screen in seventies
Hollywood fashion, and postcards in the ‘Daumenkino’ style). As ‘ein
romantisch-philosophischer ActionLiebesExperimentalThriller’ (Töteberg 1998:
129), it makes an appeal to a wide range of generic conventions from cinematic
melodrama to interactive computer game and DVD. And it operates through the
citation of multiple filmic and other cultural references, as programmatically
introduced by the disjunctive quotations from the high-cultural poet T. S.
Eliot and the national football coach Sepp Herberger in the introductory
sequence. In its citation of film types and techniques it is designed as a
centennial showcase for the historical variants of cinema’s aesthetic
technology, from the laterna magica to the Domino Compositor.[6]
A key part of the film’s multilayered
citational network lies in the specification of the female protagonist. Apart
from her biographical ‘Vorbilder’, Lola also appears to ‘quote’ many screen
models; her identity as body and as cartoon is a confabulation of roles from
Marlene Dietrich to Lara Croft and Tank Girl. Lola is a compelling new screen
presence, but she is also a fabrication of styles, not least indeed a
hair-style, as indicated by the reductio ad absurdum of the credits
where ‘Lola’ is the name given to the protagonist’s patent hair-design. Lola is
thus also a ‘look’, set, along with the running gear, the Doc Martens, and the
tattoo, to become a fashion statement to be quoted by self-styling followers of
the film. Specifically, the Lola look seems designed to become a foundational
icon for the new Berlin. The picture of the running Lola has provided, in the
shape of Franka Potente, a frank and potent new figuration of the New Germany
at the millennium, in particular of a dynamic, reconstructed Berlin, and not
least Berlin as a city of film.[7]
One of the ways in which Berlin has
been figured as twentieth-century metropolis is as the sort of feminised figure
which is the focus of many metropolitan and state mythologies. Mythologies need
icons, and, as Sigrid Weigel (1987) has pointed out, the female figure is the preferred
form for the foundational, mythic image of states and cities. Weigel describes
how these mythologies typically project an ambivalent image of the feminine, as
monster or Babylonian whore on the one hand and succouring mother or virgin on
the other. Lola (like Tykwer’s other key female protagonists, Sissi from Der
Krieger und die Kaiserin and the eponymous deadly Maria) is figured as both
redeemer and criminal, child-like innocent and daunting femme fatale, and in
this she corresponds to the sort of ambivalence which Weigel describes. As we
shall see, the alluring surface of her film image incorporates darker aspects
of threat. My intention here is to twist Weigel’s analysis in the direction of
psychoanalysis, which leads us to understand the foundational mythical
structures of both personal and cultural development as marked by trauma. If
the ostensibly timeless and totalising structures of myth do indeed incorporate
a genetic core of traumatic experience, then their control over both personal
and cultural histories is destined to be neurotically distorted, specifically
to show symptoms of hysteria. This is the version of myth, hysterical at base,
which I would argue is at work in Lola rennt.[8]
When Tykwer describes the origination
of the Lola rennt project, he talks of an iconic image – the head of a
female figure caught running in profile – which provokes the film’s scenario
and comes to function as its leitmotif. Friedrich Kittler (1995: 228) has
pointed out that, as the etymology in both German and English bears out, the
‘Hauptstadt’ or capital city is conceived as the head of the body politic, and
in the figuration of Lola as the film’s template, the capital is rendered
energetic and mobile, endowed with a new physicality and style. The idea of the
frantically racing figure appeals to Tykwer as embodying the fundamental drive
of the cinematic: ‘Dieses Bild ist Kino: Bewegung und Emotion, kein anderes
Medium kann das so transportieren’ (Töteberg 1998: 129). Here, however, the
generically male function is appropriated for the female figure which is
designed by film convention to be waiting or pursued rather than in pursuit. As
Tykwer (1998) has it, women are suited to a more actively emancipatory role
than is conventionally their typecast lot: ‘Frauen sind für Befreiung einfach
der bessere Part – Männer sind da eher immer die Problemmacher’.
In practice, the film is
substantially shaped by its following of the body of Lola, running or halting,
panting and screaming, an energetic body which performs the impossible acts
which are required of it in the fantasy resolutions of the opening scenario.
The idea of free movement is always, though, reliant on the dialectical energy
that can be gained from resistance to it, from the freezing of frames, the interruption
of one narrative strand and form of technology by another, the impacts and
accidents which affect the circulation of people and traffic in the city. Lola
rennt at once projects a fantasy of speed which seems to emancipate it from
the heavy weight of Tykwer’s earlier films, and yet also interrupts the dynamic
with scenes of hold-up and accident which invest it with indications of the
sort of traumatic load which characterises both Die tödliche Maria and Winterschläfer.[9]
Here again, the road accident and the intervention of emergency services are
emblematic for the impact of trauma. And this sense of trauma is extrapolated
into the collisions or near collisions of bodies with bodies or other objects,
most dramatically vehicles and bullets, the smashing of the ambulance into the
pane of glass, and the near collision of the desperately running Lola with the
glass of the camera lens. Lola’s superhuman ability to shatter glass with her
scream and to talk to Manni through glass is countered by the threat of trauma
which glass represents as unseen obstacle. While the urban space of Berlin and
other metropolitan centres has been seen by Walter Benjamin and others as
programmed for the shock and collision of traffic and crowds, in Tykwer’s
production of Berlin as a semi-evacuated studio-city, these traumatic
coincidences are abstracted from the normal flow, their dangers highlighted.[10]
If the idea of the running figure
becomes a leitmotif for the film’s structural development, then the blaze of
red which is Lola’s hair has a more particular directive, signalling function
in what Tykwer calls the ‘Farbdramaturgie’ of the film (Töteberg 1998: 134).
The fashion statement of the ‘Lola’ look represents at once the physical energy
of this body and its attachment to danger. It is correlated with the
stop-and-go dynamics of the diegesis, as marked by the circulation of traffic
and by street furniture: the emergency vehicle, racing and braking, the
traffic-lights which signal a halt or are raced past. Lola appears as three-speed
colour machine, in the red, blue, and green of her hair and clothes, a
transmogrification of the iconic ‘Ampelmännchen’ into a new red-headed and
green legged body which runs against all traffic and pedestrian regulation,
halting traffic and pedestrians alike, hitching lifts, and provoking
collisions. The scenes in the bed are as if bathed in the stop-light, and
thereby lifted out of the helter-skelter dynamic of the film. As carnal scenes
of death as much as of love, coloured as if by the seeping bleeding first of
Lola and then of Manni, they are attached to the idea of the traumatic
accident, of a threat of total interruption which hangs over the myth of total
love. The red arrows which help to impel Lola’s race against time are thus
countered not only by the red lights, but also by the red spiral as an emblem
of the race of life into death.
Lola and her red hairstyle are
constructed in counterpoint to a whole series of the hallowed icons of the
city’s past. In filmic terms, this involves both the Maria of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis
(with Lola fashioned as an action doll and an animated ‘Wundermaschine’)[11]
and more especially the Lola Lola of Sternberg’s Der Blaue Engel. Both
of these embody the ambivalence of Weigel’s foundational female figures, as
redeeming angel and destructive vamp. If the iconic image comes first in the
origination of the film, then the name comes second. When Tykwer describes the
generation of the film out of the fascinating image, he fails to mention how
the figure was given its name (simply saying in the English commentary on the
DVD ‘it was there and I liked it’). Lola has many resonances, from the
precocious sexuality of Lolita to, inevitably, the vampish cabaret act of
Marlene Dietrich. Her performance of an action film form of femininity stands
in a complicated relation to a network of female performances which, after the
model of Dietrich, have adopted the name of Lola.
Dietrich’s Lola Lola, one of the
archetypal images of what Mulvey (1989: 19) has famously called the ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ of the female body on
screen, is an artist who, with her changes of costume and repertoire of stage
characters, performs the performance of femininity. Her performance on screen
is also a highly self-conscious performance on stage, a mise-en-abyme of
the film spectacle. It is a show based on artifice and add-on, showing and
hiding, fantasy wigs and pantomime costumes (such as the half-dress, which
reveals all when she turns round). It corresponds to the sort of performative
principle which Judith Butler identifies as the basis of gender identity, a
repetitive citation of acts over time in order to pass as male or female. At
the same time, Dietrich’s Lola Lola is a sort of drag act of femininity,
excessive and staged, an impersonation and in this akin to the other early
screen diva Garbo, as described by Butler (1990: 128) after Tyler: ‘Garbo “got
in drag” whenever she took on some heavy glamour part’. According to Butler (1990: 137), drag exposes the unnaturalness, the
arbitrariness, and the trouble inherent in all forms of gender performance: ‘In
imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender
itself – as well as its contingency’.
As an alluring figure of
performativity, a diva rehearsing an act (‘die fesche Lola’ performing the
seductive repetitions of her mechanical pianola), she is designed and destined
to be reproduced and replayed. The doubling of her name is programmatic in this
sense.[12]
Dietrich’s Lola Lola becomes the embodiment of the performance culture of
Weimar Berlin and is then reproduced in a whole host of filmic reprises from
Fassbinder’s Lola, to Visconti’s The Damned and Fosse’s Cabaret.
The Dietrich image as performative of a kind of fetishised hyper-femininity is
thereby ready to be rehearsed in travesty acts.[13]
It is primed to be subjected to forms of impersonation and gender-bending and
-blending in Dietrich’s own later films (notably Morocco) and in the
queer attendants and accessories of Fassbinder’s Lola, of Cabaret,
and The Damned, which expose the performance as camp.[14]
Dietrich’s performance of Lola Lola also turns the performance of the manly
Professor Rath (interpellated by her song as ‘einen Mann, einen richtigen
Mann’) into a travesty, donning a wig and playing a transsexualized cock laying
eggs. This suggests a model of performative agency for the female star which,
in line with Judith Butler’s analysis of gender performativity, serves to
expose trouble. This applies as much to Fassbinder’s empowerment of female
figures like the remade Lola as to Sternberg’s construction of Dietrich.[15]
While Lola rennt is seemingly
a film free of gender trouble of this kind, closer scrutiny reveals a
relationship to such models, and encourages a reading against the apparent
grain. Tykwer’s films seem to operate within a conventional binary and
heterosexually secured structure of gender, but this is in fact always open to
question. The focus in the opening scene on a collection of dolls can serve to
make us aware of the conventional binarism of gender construction, but the
presence of a Ken amongst the Barbies also questions the binary model. The
dolls embody the sort of gender prescriptions which are enforced in childhood,
and in their plastic nakedness highlight hair or hair-piece as a fetishistic add-on,
styling the play-body of childhood as adult. The collection of dolls echoes,
amongst other films, Fassbinder’s Petra von Kant, embodying the sort of
prescriptive conditioning and fashioning of gender roles which, according to
Butler, causes gender trouble. As fetish object, the doll embodies an excess
(here of femininity) which is produced by a traumatic lack; Tykwer’s
child-women and child-men, prematurely cast into the demands of adult gendered
identities, always seem to be in need of this kind of fetish.[16]
The childlike construction by Manni of Lola as ‘die beste Frau von allen allen
Frauen’ is an indicator of the impossibility of the fantasy of absolute
womanhood which is in play here.
Lola is a doll dressed for action: a
sort of hybrid of Ken and Barbie. As an exponent of girl-power, she is
constantly exceeding her conditioning as ‘Mädchen’, and thereby able to elude
patriarchal control, as when she escapes capture after the bank heist.
Conversely, the nicely named Manni clearly has trouble living up to his manful
role; in the scene in the telephone kiosk, he is reduced to a figure of
impotence and need, certainly no phone-box ‘Supermanni’, and it is Lola who has
to intervene in the role of animated super-heroic rescuer. Manni’s uncertain
masculinity is only emphasised by his role relative to the hyper-masculinity of
Ronnie and his gang; to use the parlance established by gender and queer
theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1991), this is a homosocial order of embraces
and corporal punishments between men. Indeed, the masculine world of uniforms
and muscled posturing in the film may be understood as a sort of drag, a
performance in which Manni struggles to pass.[17]
This same-sex drag act corresponds in this sense to the group of nuns which
Lola runs past; the nun in sunglasses suggests a sort of dissidence in the role
of the nun, a suggestion of the lure of disguise which has made nuns such
attractive models for camp impersonation.
Lola rennt appears to supersede the gender relations which were prevalent in the
Neuer Deutscher Film as much as in the Hollywood tradition, the objectification
of the female figure which, in its most extreme forms, works through a
melodramatic, hysterical fixation. It seems to offer a new brand of agency,
where being bound to her man is no impediment to the protagonist’s action
heroism. In fact, Lola’s construction is based on a complicated mythology. She
is the princess who saves rather than being saved, a female grail knight, a
Penelope who intervenes in her man’s mock-Odyssey rather than staying at home;
and more darkly she is Medusa with the evil eye which mortifies Schuster the
guard and freezes the words Lolalola which would style her as princess-doll
even as he speaks them, as well as the faith healer who brings him back to life.
Her activity is also, however, conditioned and driven by another version of
hysteria: ‘Das kommt nur sehr, sehr selten vor […] aber dann bricht die
Hysterie sich Bahn’ (Töteberg 1998: 119). The scream is the focus of the
conversion of hysterical panic into energetic intervention (Tykwer et al.
1998). Here, however, hysteria is also the condition of the male lead. He is
thus introduced in a state of physical disorder and emotional incontinence; as
the book of the film has it: ‘Manni hat sich heulend hysterisch geredet, wie
ein Wasserfall sprudelt es aus ihm heraus’ (Töteberg 1998: 22). While the film,
at first sight, seems to represent a redressing of conventional gender roles in
the late twentieth-century urban culture of Berlin, it also suggests that what
is being equalised is a struggle to overcome the shared, transgender condition
of hysteria.
One of the playful snapshot inserts
in the film shows the two bank employees finding happiness together in a
sado-masochistic relationship, with the telling clerk submitting to his
dominatrix colleague. This represents in an uncharacteristically camp moment
the potential for bending of the performative rules of gender which is more
subtly at work throughout the film. It offers the basis for another link in the
interfilmic chain, Lola und Bilidikid, E. Kutlug Ataman’s 1999 film
about Berlin’s gay and transvestite Turkish subculture, which more explicitly
stages acts of gender and asks questions about gender and sexuality in their
relation to other forms of identity prescription. In the climax of the film,
the young, gay Turkish boy re-performs the transvestite performance of his dead
brother, whose stage-name was Lola, in order to entrap their queer-bashing
tormentors. Lola’s trademark, and the symbolic object which prompts his brutal
outing to and from his family, is a red wig. It is a sort of gender performance
that can never pass, but provocatively draws attention to its own masquerade.
As this Lola performed a subcultural version of Dietrich’s cabaret artiste, so
his brother enacts a version of Lola rennt in his desperate race to
escape those in pursuit. The headline of the film’s review in the Stuttgarter
Zeitung (11 March 1999), which misspells the film’s title, also
misconstrues its dynamics: ‘Lola rennt nicht, sie tanzt als Transvestit’; in
fact, this Lola runs every bit as desperately as Tykwer’s. The film
which started with a cruising scene around the iconic Berlin figure of the
winged ‘Freiheitsgöttin’ of the ‘Siegessäule’, focuses on a different kind of
running for your life, and ends with an uncertain relation to the Berlin icon
of the victory of freedom. In all three films, the agency and power of the
female or feminized figure is conditioned, as so often in the computer games
which Lola rennt cites, by the controlling hand of male power and
fantasy, by the need to perform for the male gaze. This function is suggested
by the role of Lola as a more interventionist version of Echo to Manni’s
Narcissus: ‘Lola ist die Schutzfee, die den haltlosen, geliebten Narziß immer
wieder auf die Beine bringt’ (Töteberg 1998: 119).
This leads us to an interfilmic
relationship staged explicitly by Lola rennt. As Tykwer’s earlier film Winterschläfer
tells its story of traumatic amnesia with reference to Hitchcock’s Spellbound,
Lola rennt is organised around motifs from another of Hitchcock’s
narratives of traumatic psychopathology, Vertigo. The signature of
Hitchcock’s film is inscribed throughout the film, in the mise en scène
(especially the vertiginous return to the stairway in the three runs, which
appears to quote the return to the stairway of the mission in Vertigo),
in the iconography of the spiral, and, in particular, in the portrait on the
wall of the casino. According to Tykwer in his DVD commentary, the film’s
producer was charged with improvising a painting of ‘something from Vertigo’
to go on the wall, and followed the logical path of painting the portrait which
embodies Kim Novak’s fixation with the traumatic case history of Carlotta
Valdes. The copying of the portrait, drawing attention to the idea of the
simulacrum and its ability to fascinate and support the forms of impersonation,
the obsessive styling in the image of the other, which structure Vertigo,
also provides a nice index of the citational performances of femininity.[18]
What emerges, however, is a sort of dream portrait which condenses the image of
Carlotta with the back of Novak’s head, that is the object of her obsessive
attention with that of James Stewart’s character, John Ferguson, and, by
extension, of Hitchcock’s fetishistic filmic gaze.
The mocked up portrait represents a
combination of the emblematic spiral with the idea of the fetishized hairpiece.
The danger or emergency encoded in Lola’s ‘fiery red’ shock of hair is thus
linked to another sort of cinematic tradition: Dietrich’s make-over from Lola
Lola (with her femme fatale song ‘Nimm dich in acht vor blonden Frauen’) to the
Blonde Venus of Sternberg’s eponymous film, and more especially the blondes, or
more precisely, the blonde hair-does, which fascinate Hitchcock’s camera
throughout his career. These fabricated cinematic blondes are designed to pass
as natural, yet operate within a framework of intense theatricality and
(sometimes transgender) impersonation. Lola’s hair is styled for a heroine who
is designed to be natural, singing on the sound-track but never a stage-act,[19]
and yet it could no more pass as natural than the red wig of her cabaret artist
namesake in Ataman’s film. Lola’s ‘Lola’ hair-do challenges the artificial
blonde extravagance of her Barbies and yet still arguably functions as an
attachment to dolling up. The call of her neurotic, housebound mother, repeated
at the beginning of each run – ‘Lola, gehst du einkaufen? Ich brauch Shampoo’ –
and suggesting that the alcoholic mother is also a shampoo-addict, marks the
hold over the film of the need for styling.[20]
Tykwer claims in the English-language
commentary to the film that his aim was to make Franka Potente known to US
audiences. He thus follows a model of auteur directors fashioning and marketing
their female leads: Sternberg and Dietrich, Lang and his Maria (Brigitte Helm),
Hitchcock and Novak.[21]
Each of these director’s dolls, however, is based upon troubled forms of
performance, where hyper-femininity exposes itself as masquerading, as
stage-act or impersonation. In each case, too, this operates – as in Lola
rennt – in association with a form of hystericized performance of manhood
by the male lead.[22]
With Potente, Tykwer clearly wanted to create a new Lola who would redefine the
allure of the doll and her to-be-looked-at-ness. But the sweating, screaming,
tattooed Lola, with DMs for high-heels, showing her underwear in a less staged
fashion than Dietrich’s Lola, is nonetheless an intensely styled cinematic
construct.
At the same time, each of the films
represents through its patterns of repetition, re-enactment, and impersonation,
a potentially dire threat to both male and female identities. The spiral
hair-style borrowed from Hitchcock represents a danger that the film scenario
might spiral in on itself, that repetition might become a desperate compulsion,
that the quest-run might spin into free-fall, following the film’s effects of mise-en-abyme,
and indeed the model of Winterschläfer, by being projected into the
abyss.[23]
The recurrent effects of circling in the camerawork, and the circle or spiral
as iconographic motif, relate to a sense of post-traumatic disorder in Tykwer’s
protagonists, what he calls ‘Post-Schock’ (Kremski & Wulf 2000: 40).
Trauma creates compulsive structures of return in this way. Tykwer talks about
his desire to make a horror film, and the way that Lola rennt
incorporates gestures towards that genre (imitating for instance in the casino
scene, not only Vertigo but also the uncanny, zombie group shots of Village
of the Damned and House of the Living Dead). It seems that, no less
than in the order of gender, citational practices in film can gravitate from
the compulsory to the compulsive. The compulsion to repeat the repetition
compulsions of Hitchcock’s psycho-dramas can be said to expose a sort of
uncanny fixation, a horror film which haunts the controlled generic synthesis
of Tykwer’s film. The duplications, projections, and impersonations of his
films always have the uncanny potential of that classic horror figure, the Doppelgänger.
While the recursive structure of the film is conceived as a form of
re-birthing, it shares with the re-birthing of Winterschläfer or Die
tödliche Maria a threat of mortification, an uncanny sense of living death.[24]
The consuming spiral as emblem of that fixation retains a hysterical presence
throughout the film’s performance, a reminder of the traumatic accidents,
pursuits, and collapses to which the performative act may always be
susceptible.[25]
References
Butler, Judith (1990) Gender
Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
Doane, Mary-Anne (1992) Film
and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator. In: Gerald Mast, et al.
(eds) Film Theory and Criticism, 758-72.
Falcon, Richard (1999) Review of
Run Lola Run/Lola rennt. Sight
and Sound. November, 52.
Fassbinder, Rainer (1978) Gespräch mit Hella
Schlumberger. German Playboy, 4.
Garber, Marjorie (1993) From
Dietrich to Madonna. Cross-gender icons. In: Pam Cook; Philip Dodd (eds) Women
and Film. A Sight and Sound Reader. London: Scarlet Press, 16-20.
Kittler, Friedrich (1995) Die
Stadt ist ein Medium. In: Gotthard Fuchs et al. (eds), Mythos Metropole. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 228-44.
Kremski, Peter; Wulf Reinhard (2000) Werkstattgespräch
mit Tom Tykwer, Filmbulletin, 5, 33- 40.
Mast, Gerald; Cohen, Marshall;
Braudy, Leo (eds) (1992) Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings.
4th edition. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mulvey, Laura (1989) Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In: Visual and Other Pleasures. Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 14-28.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1991) Epistemology
of the Closet. New York & London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Sinka, Margit (2000) Tom
Tykwer’s Lola rennt: A Blueprint of Millennial Berlin. Glossen, 11,
<http://www.dickinson.edu/departments/germn/glossen/heft11/lola.html>.
Studlar, Gaylyn (1992)
Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of Cinema. In: Gerald Mast et al. (eds) Film
Theory and Criticism, 773-90.
Töteberg, Michael (1998) Tom
Tykwer: Lola rennt. Reinbek bei
Hamburg: Rowohlt.
Tykwer, Tom (1998) Interview for Süddeutsche
Zeitung, 20.08.1998.
Tykwer, Tom et al. (1998) publicity booklet for Lola rennt.
Weigel, Sigrid (1987) ‘Die Städte sind weiblich und
nur dem Sieger hold’. Zur Funktion des Weiblichen in Gründungsmythen und
Städtedarstellungen. In: Sigrun Anselm; Barbara Beck (eds) Triumph und
Scheitern in der Metropole. Zur Rolle der Weiblichkeit in der Geschichte
Berlins. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 207-27.
Biodata
Dr Andrew Webber is Senior Lecturer
in German at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Churchill College,
Cambridge. He has published widely on German literary culture in the modern
period and on both early and contemporary German film. His particular interests
are in questions of identity construction, especially with regard to gender and
sexuality. He is the author of The Doppelgänger: Double Visions in German
Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996) and is currently working on a cultural
history of the European Avant-Garde for Polity Press.
[1] In the sequence where Lola almost collides with the camera lens, Tykwer is quoting the same effect in the Hollywood version of this quest, Raiders of the Lost Ark.
[2] These presences are more or less oblique. Cyclops appears most explicitly in the name given by Manni to the jewel dealer; Cerberus would be the dog on the stairs who represents the first obstacle to Lola’s quest; the sirens are the urban version on emergency vehicles; Charybdis is the whirling spiral figure which runs through the film; and Circe is encoded in the book of the film, where in the first variation on the future of bicycle-thief Mike, the cashier at first ‘läßt sich nicht becircen’ (Töteberg 1998: 37) but then falls for his charms.
[3] Winterschläfer, with its manhunt organised around a scar motif, also refers to the primal mark of identity in The Odyssey. The idea of the mock-Odyssey is adopted from Bakhtin, who discusses the pantomimic, carnival performances of such mythical protagonists as Odysseus as forms of cultural dialogism, militating against the singular logic of master narratives.
[4] As Margit Sinka (2000: 4) has pointed out, none of the three streets of that name in Berlin are in the East.
[5] Tykwer talks of his films’ attraction to the childlike projection of imagination into reality: ‘Auch Lola agiert aus irgendeinem irrationalen Impetus heraus und macht sich wie eine Pippi Langstrumpf auf ganz kindliche Weise die Welt, wie sie ihr gefällt’ (Kremski & Wulf 2000: 35).
[6] Stefan Arndt describes the film as ‘eine Zusammenfassung der Wunder, die hundert Jahre Filmgeschichte entwickelt haben’ and Tykwer compares the ‘Ur-Kinohaftes’ of its dynamics to the laterna magica. Tykwer sees the synthetic use of the repertory of the medium as following the model of Méliès’ original box of cinematic tricks (Töteberg 1998: 131).
[7] The marketing potential of the Lola image was revealed in the attempt of the Berlin CDU to advertise the now deposed Regierender Bürgermeister Eberhard Diepgen in that image, running for the new Berlin. Tykwer had the ‘Diepgen rennt’ posters banned by court order.
[8] The review of the film by Richard Falcon (1999) may seem to make a somewhat incongruous judgement, when it describes it as setting ‘new standards for the cinema of hysteria’, but there is indeed a hysterical energy behind what he calls ‘its Teutonic version of cinéma du look stylisation’.
[9] Tykwer describes Lola rennt as a counter-model in this sense: ‘Winterschläfer war ein Film mit epischem Atem und Schwere, LOLA RENNT war eine Art von Befreiungsschlag’, but he also stresses that the formal exhilaration of the film does not make it less complicated, at least in a retrospective sense: it is ‘eine wilde Jagd mit Nachwirkungen’ (Tykwer et al. 1998).
[10] In Die tödliche Maria, Winterschläfer, and Der Krieger und die Kaiserin, the road accident is figured as traumatic in the sense that it embodies the return of a previous experience of trauma, a personal history which is psycho-somatically disturbed. Lola seems to have no such pre-history, though her father’s revelation that he is not her biological father belatedly introduces an archetypal form of childhood trauma.
[11] Tykwer describes Lola as a
miracle machine of her own creation, without the intervention of a magician
like Lang’s Rotwang: ‘Das Radikale an der Konstruktion von LOLA RENNT ist, dass
kein Zauberer auftritt, der das Wunder bewirkt und kenntlich macht, sondern
dass Lola selbst kraft ihrer eigenen Dynamik eine Wundermaschine aus sich
schöpft’ (Kremski & Wulf 2000: 35).
[12] The name Lola Lola, which is one of the ways in which the film departs from Heinrich Mann’s novel, marks an attachment to an older tradition. A key example for the performative femme fatale is the sphinx-like title figure of Sacher-Masoch’s story ‘Lola’, who embodies the obsessive interdependence of desire and death, pleasure and pain, which is the trademark of his narratives.
[13] While Mary-Anne Doane (1992: 766) describes the excessive femininity of Dietrich, Gaylyn Studlar (1992: 779) points out that her acts are arguably most notable for their androgynous quality. The understanding of the acts as already a form of the drag that came to imitate them allows for this contradiction to be squared.
[14] For a discussion of some of these developments, see Marjorie Garber (1993). Garber’s review of Madonna’s replaying of Dietrich has a special significance for the modelling of Tykwer’s Lola on Madonna.
[15] Fassbinder’s challenge to prescribed roles, and specifically to the social and cinematic ‘Objektfunktion’ of women, is profoundly ambivalent in its effects, always circumscribed by the performative imperative (melodrama, stage acts etc.). See Fassbinder (1978) for the director’s position on the objectification of women.
[16] In this, they bear a certain relation to the fetishistic voodoo doll that embodies the passion and the pain of Maria in Die tödliche Maria.
[17] According to his character profile in the book, Manni is a performer of ‘Shownummern’ (Töteberg 2000: 123).
[18] Carlotta Valdes was a cabaret artist before her marriage, and therefore seems set to prefigure a series of enactments of femininity in her image, extending to the mock impersonation by fashion-designer Midge in her version of the Valdes portrait.
[19] The stage-act genealogy, which stretches from Dietrich to Hitchcock’s Carlotta Valdes, does perhaps reach our Lola too. The book of the film reveals that her biological father was not a banker but a ‘Kneipenkönig’ (Töteberg 1998: 124).
[20] Manni is no less styled, with his tattoo, two-day shadow, and blond highlights. The inserts of snapshot fantasy futures for the minor characters are often in the style of makeovers.
[21] Tykwer is clearly concerned with the idea of film as auteurist text. He wants his films to have ‘eine eigene Handschrift’ (Tykwer et al. 1998), a signature which is recognisable from film to film, along with an acting ensemble and leading lady in the established style of the auteurs. In the DVD commentary, Franka Potente comments that, in the scripting of the bed-scenes, it is uncanny how naturally he knows the pillow talk of women.
[22] John Ferguson in Vertigo is not only subject to a hysterical fear of heights, but like Professor Rath, he is drawn into the fashion masquerade of his female counterparts, made to wear a corset for the correction of his post-traumatic disorder.
[23] The title sequence at the start of Lola rennt imitates the animation graphics of James Stewart’s dream in Vertigo; while the three sequences of Lola rennt run towards a happy ending with both protagonists alive, the three-part animation sequence at the start is engulfed in vertiginous darkness at the end of its final version. A tension remains between this programmatic pattern and the apparent resolution at the end of the film.
[24] Tykwer discusses his use of Doppelgänger figures and the structural principle of ‘Wiedergeburt’ in interview (Kremski & Wulf 2000: 36-9).
[25] When Tykwer describes the film’s chance-led dynamic as having ‘etwas unheimlich Filmisches’ (Töteberg 1998: 129), or the red bed-scenes being ‘unheimlich still’ (Töteberg 1998: 133), this resonates with the sense of ‘unheimlich’ as uncanny.