#3: M (1931)
directed by Fritz Lang
written by Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou
starring Peter Lorre, Otto Wernicke and Gustaf Gründgens
The scene I remember most from Fritz Lang’s M is not the scene where the shadow of Peter Lorre talks to a little girl on the street. It is not the scene where Lorre cowers in fear of an angry mob, all baying for his blood. It does not, in fact, feature Peter Lorre at all, despite the film basically existing to be his star vehicle. Rather, the scene I remember most comes early on in the film, during which a kindly old man, asked for the time by a girl on the street, is accused by a passer-by of harassing the child. The old man protests that he has done nothing but answer an innocent question, yet his outrage draws a crowd around him. Rumours spread that this man is the child murderer they have been seeking for so long, and they are just short of calling for a public lynching when a policeman finally appears and rescues the man, while the gathered mob hurl abuse at both.
It’s easily the most harrowing scene from the movie, partly because it feels like it could happen in real life. M depicts Berlin at the cusp of the 1930s (notably, when the most pressing thing on people’s minds was inflation rather than National Socialism), but honestly it doesn’t feel like a far cry from the city I live in today: a bustling city, throbbing with energy and shady intrigue; yet underneath the surface, I also feel unhappiness, paranoia and exhaustion. It did not take much for the old man to find himself surrounded by people baying for his blood — Hong Kong people are a little more reticent to take the law into their own hands, but the anti-ELAB protests a few years ago showed just how easy rumours and anger could spread.
Now, this is not one of those blogposts where I wring my hands and cry “oh, if only we were back in simpler times!” But those times of paranoia did do a number on my head, and it makes me curious about the effects of paranoia in this film, too: how easily it grabs us by the nerves, how effortlessly it infects one another. Because M is, above all, a film about paranoia’s corrosive effects; everyone suffers from it, from the hunter to the hunted.
In some aspects it’s obvious: the child-killer being used as a boogeyman for playground taunts; the parents watching their children from above and shouting at them to stop singing — even before Hans Beckert appears onscreen, the tension is already there, filling the streets, passing from person to person. Later, as the search for Beckert reaches fever pitch, the public hurl accusations at one another, while the police lash out at the vaguest hint of a clue, barging into seedy underground bars — which you might recall, is not the natural haunt of a child-murderer — just so they can do something about the paranoia of the public. (I’m reminded of the fact that Fritz Lang originally wanted to call the film Murderer Among Us before the Nazis thought it was a reference to them and got upset — but then, they were always experts in public paranoia.) Even the hardened criminals searching for Hans Beckert aren’t immune: stopping a fellow crook from simply busting in a door, one of them seethes “what if the door’s wired? Do you WANT to notify the police?” Distrust is rife, even between those with a common cause.
It’s a mark of how good this film is at creating an atmosphere of fear that the paranoia seeps out of the screen and into our souls. M wastes no time in telling us the identity of the culprit — the baby-faced young man played by Peter Lorre practically leeches grotesquery and sleaze — but that doesn’t make it any better; instead of worrying about who the monster might be, one starts worrying about when this monster will strike again. The mere presence of this man is enough to disturb us. And as Hans Beckert stalks the streets of Berlin, we can’t help but notice just how desolate everything is, too: perhaps a side-effect of a child-murderer walking the streets, but this doesn’t feel at all like the capital of Weimar Germany at all. In the 1930s, Berlin was the most bustling city in Europe, yet none of that energy is apparent in M: instead it appears seedy, unkempt… and impossibly fake. One can’t help but wonder: what on Earth happened here? What on Earth could happen here?
But the most fascinating thing for me is how the predator himself also succumbs to that same paranoia. Because Hans Beckert suffers from it too: he is the only person who really knows who the identity of the child-killer is, and yet he’s just as jumpy, just as frightened as the rest of them. Throughout we observe him haunted by the knowledge of his own deeds, and worried about people finding him out. He is a monster, yes, but somehow he feels extremely human as well — witness the moment where he dashes into a café and is unable to sit still, terrified that he’ll be caught at any second. Later, when we catch sight of him hiding in a building from the underworld figures baying for his blood, he is curled up in a corner, sweat pouring down his face. He has no idea whether they know about his hiding place, yet at that moment I found myself curiously unable to will on the crowd; such is everybody’s paranoia that one can’t help but fear what they might do to him. He has been swept up in what he helped create; without the need of an angry mob, he is already suffering for his crimes.
It’s tempting to think that all this was a reflection of the times that were to come: after all, Hitler’s election as chancellor was less than two years away, and the public pandemonium of the Berlin scenes has eerie echoes of the frenzied book-burnings and parades that would come to define Germany’s next decade-and-a-half. Yet should we be blaming Nazis for stuff that was already there? As M demonstrates, the conditions for mutual distrust, for the loss of faith in law and order, those were already present way before Adolf Hitler ascended to the Chancellery. I don’t think that Hans Beckert’s final plea that he “cannot help himself, have no control over this evil thing inside me” holds any sort of water, yet I think the criminals’ subsequent readiness to tear him to pieces is revealing: rather than face up to their own paranoia and the part they’ve played in spreading it around, they prefer to dig in deeper, to surrender themselves to it. Perhaps we let paranoia take over our lives not because everything or everyone around us is inherently threatening, but because it’s easier to pass on the fear, act according to our basest instincts, than tackling the root causes that can turn a community into a powder keg in the first place.
Next time: That age-old question — “what do you want?”
Inkpot Shuffles in the Twilight 