One of the most distinctive features of the Weimar-era tribute musical Cabaret (with music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, and book, based on the writings of Christopher Isherwood, by Joe Masteroff; the 1972 film version was directed by Bob Fosse) is that every song is diegetic and serves a purpose. In fact, most songs, whether through lyrics or staging, offer a commentary on fascist aesthetics and politics. More importantly, they show both the characters and the audiences how easy it is to slip between satire, indifference, and complicity and how seductive these aesthetics might appear.
As literary scholar Steven Belletto writes,
The most overt example of how the film treats fascist aesthetics takes place at a beer garden outside of Berlin. The main characters, Sally Bowles and Brian Roberts—a bisexual British doctoral student, a stand-in for author Christopher Isherwood—travel through the German countryside with the wealthy baron Max von Heune. A hungover Sally is asleep in the car, so Brian and Max have a drink in the crowded, bucolic beer garden of the guesthouse. Initially, instrumental music is playing, but once the band dies down, a fair-haired youth starts singing, countertenor-like.
“At first, the shot is tight on his face, and the singing is crosscut from the crowd reacting with interest,” writes Belletto. The song begins quite innocently as a pastoral idyll. As it progresses, though, a sense of dissonance mounts, and the camera moves from the youth’s face to his clothing, revealing a neckerchief, then a uniform, and then the Nazi armband.
“It turns out that, whatever beauty it may possess, the song’s real function is to consolidate the crowd and marshal them into one uniform voice,” explains Belletto. The song seamlessly shifts from a pastoral ode sung by a soloist to a chilling nationalist plea—Oh Fatherland, Fatherland, show us the sign—uttered by the entire crowd at the beer garden.
“This scene demonstrates a signal feature of fascist aesthetics identified by contemporary theorists,” writes Belletto, “that fascist art, such as it is, absorbs difference by encouraging the fantasy that the individual can achieve complete identification with the collective.”
There’s more complexity to the performances taking place in the “aggressively stylized” Kit Kat Klub, the cabaret where Sally and a character known as the Master of Ceremonies perform. Do they simply generate a critique of fascist aesthetics? Do they do so by showing us, rather than telling us? In fact, while, in its Weimar-era decadence, the Kit Kat Klub does stand in opposition to the culture and style signifiers of National Socialism, it also shows how easy it is to slip into extremism.
In the first place, “it’s clear from the film’s opening shots that one way to take the Kit Kat Klub is as an aesthetic space removed from the political scene,” Belletto writes.
“Outside it is windy, but in here it is so hot. Leave your troubles outside,” sings the Emcee in the opening number “Wilkommen.”
In the stage version, Sally proposes that “the Kit Kat Club is the most unpolitical place in Berlin.” But to read the club as “unpolitical” is to make a profound mistake, Belletto explains, as Sally’s remarks speak more about her own obliviousness to the shifting political landscape. In the film version, there is a seemingly fancy-free scene in which she encourages Brian to scream at the passing train, and she is framed with her back to a political poster. In her closing number, “(Life is a) Cabaret,” Sally explains the reasoning behind her hedonism.
“Sally’s argument for sex and liquor is born not of an oppositional stance to the real world of war and politics, but of an indifference to it,” writes Belletto, who also extends this interpretation to the actual locale of the Kit Kat Klub. “In its disregard for anything but beauty and fun, the argument goes, the Kit Kat Klub reproduces the decadent logic of fascism.”
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The Emcee’s numbers, by contrast, are characterized by ambiguity, irony, and uneasiness. In fact, the Emcee usually shifts between escapism, mockery, and commentary. In one musical number, he’s decked in Bavarian regalia, and he performs the “Slaphappy” dance, in which he mimics the Bavarian Schuhplattler dance. While he routinely slaps the ensemble dancers’ behinds as part of the farcical performance, his Bavarian costume directly channels the Nazi’s pastoral idealization of Germany’s Alpine regions. Additionally, while he’s performing, two brownshirts are brutally beating the club’s owner for refusing them entry.
Later in the movie, in the cane-dancing-heavy “Tiller Girls” number, the Emcee’s in drag and at first indistinguishable from the other girls onstage. As the number progresses, he and the female dancer remove the floral adornments from their hats to make them look like helmets and brandish their canes as if they were rifles while marching in goose-step. The change is perfectly integrated into the performance.
“Although the Emcee’s intentions are ambiguous enough to remain obscure, once again the issue of perception is foregrounded: what looks like a Tiller Girl costume from one perspective can look from another like a stormtrooper uniform,” writes Belletto. At the end of the number “If You Could See Her,” where the Emcee romances a gorilla, the ends the song with the line “She wouldn’t look Jewish at all.”
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“The film audience is left wondering whether the song is endorsing a version of fascist aesthetics or mounting a critique of such aesthetics,” explains Belletto. “To read the Emcee straight is to see him pandering to the changing tastes of the Kit Kat Klub audience—tastes dictated, as we will see, by Nazi politics and aesthetics.”
Despite the variety of interpretations that ultimately depend on a specific director’s vision, “Cabaret both confirms the sense of those cultural historians who see political critique at work in these venues and suggests that aesthetic form itself can erode fascist fantasies,” writes Belletto. “But the feeling of uneasiness that such aesthetics can induce is a symptom of their larger challenge to the inviting face of fascism.”
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