Reminiscing about my research days in Hamburg and also about the weekends and nights I had spent there in the years before already, I got this idea again about the Reeperbahn being this place of darkness, a place of the unconscious, of dreams and nightmares coming true...a place with a noir atmosphere, in which we leave the world of reason and enter an animalistic world of instinct that drives us forward, into places that we normally wouldn't go, but somehow trigger something in us that's been lying there, slumbering deep down...a world of the unfamiliar, the strange, the unknown, which is exactly what makes it interesting, seductive...it is the fact that we don't understand it, yet we are so fascinated by it...
It reminded me of films like Lynch's Lost Highway or Blue Velvet - a film digging into the underbelly of heartland America and showing us the its dark side while at the same time letting its main character discover his own inner instincts, needs and unconscious that drives him forward and leads him to places that he cannot grasp. Another story that comes to mind is Scorsese's Shutter Island, of which I am reading the script and book at the moment, also showing this scene of a crime while at the same time digging into the deepest subconscious feelings, dreams and nightmares of its main character. What I also found in this regard while researching the life of actor Hans Albers, was the film The Blue Angel (1930) starring Marlene Dietrich as seductive vaudeville singer Lola. Here as well, a very strict school professor gets lured into a world unknown to him and succumbs to his primal feelings by falling in love with Lola. Thus, he loses his reputation in society and ends up as a clown in the vaudeville act, which brings along his eventual demise.
If you're interested in watching The Blue Angel, I found it on google here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2030824078300409918&hl=en#
Also the song by Marlene Dietrich that incorportates the essence of the film, amazing:
In short, what I'm trying to describe here, is that I am truly fascinated by this world that I cannot grasp, that may always lead and has lead me already to places that I didn't understand not only in the outside world but also within myself - a world that gives me goose bumps, that creeps up my neck and makes me feel afraid and fascinated at the same time - gives me the feeling I want to run away and dig into it more simultaneously...
There are a couple of famous characters in film that come to mind when I think about this. Hopefully, mentioning them will give you a bit of a better idea of what I am talking about:
1. The Joker (The Dark Knight) - the interrogation scene - BRILLIANT - also we never know exactly hye he is the way he is, which makes his evilness even more powerful...
2. Frank Booth (Blue Velvet) - the character representing a world of the unconscious:
The way Frank disappears at the end...creepy!
3. The man at the party (Lost Highway) - still creeps up my neck whenever I watch him:
(This scene is actually part of the Top 10 creepiest movie scenes, a guy gathered together on youtube - AWESOME :) !!!)
4. also, Michael Myers (Halloween, the original one): In the first film, what is so fascinating about him is the fact that you almost never see him walk into the frame or leave. Mostly, he is either there or he is not! Which gives him an almost supernatural quality and thus makes him even more frightening...
All these characters, I don't understand them, but this is exactly why I am so fascinated by them. I believe that if I did understand them actaully, they surely wouldn't leave such an impression.
Another thing in this regard that comes to my mind is a nightmare that my girlfriend has told me once about, which has this same creepy but fascinating quality:
She was standing in a cue at one of the counters in a bank. Suddenly, a group of men dressed in black and wearing these black filter masks came running in and she found herself in the middle of a robbery. While everyone lay down on the floor, she managed to head towards a staircase and began to descend into what she thought must have been the vault area. Down the stairs, however, she found herself walking along this long dark corridor that appeared to have no end. It was like all of a sudden she were in this rundown building. There was mold everywhere. Then she heard a weeping and began to follow the noise. She passed a couple of doors until she reached one that was open. Inside a bare room, she saw a little boy sitting on a bunkbed and crying. She hurried towards him and took him in her arms, trying to comfort him. Then another noise - it was a constant low breathing, Darth Vader-like, just as if it came through a filter mask. Slowly and constantly, the breathing grew louder until one of the robbers appeared right there in front of them in the doorway and saw them. He turned towards them and approached them slowly. Desperately trying to find something to defend herself, my girlfriend started looking around and on a night stand she finally found this test tube. She grabbed it and when the man reached her and tried to assault her and the boy, she began to beat the guy desperately with this test tube. She beat him, kicked him and punched him until the man began to let go of them and it felt like he gradually lost his power. Simultaneously with losing his power, it also appeared as if he began to shrink. And he did...he became smaller and smaller and smaller...until he was so small that my girlfriend was able to put the test tube over him and trap him this way, but the man shrank more and more until he had disappeared completely. Embracing the little boy in a big hug in that bare, mold-infested room, she woke up eventually...
Just writing this down still makes me shiver...
Here's a picture made by Otto Dix I found on the web that totally reminded me of this nightmare:
To sum up, all this stuff that I have been writing about in this post, the red light district in Hamburg also has always had this quality of the strange and unfamiliar to me. It has this dark, noirish quality to it...maybe this will also be part of my eventual story.
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