First suggested by a patron following my episode on The Zone of Interest last year, Luchino Visconti's 1969 melodrama The Damned - set during the rise of dictatorship in thirties Germany - provides a suitably apocalyptic conclusion (for now, at least) to my two-year $5/month tier Films in Focus podcast. Based on patron polls conducted every couple months, I recorded a dozen episodes on films which often followed troubled protagonists trying to figure out themselves, and the world, against a backdrop of socially fraught circumstances (call this "the Fire Walk With Me effect"). Of course, to label Martin von Essenbeck (Helmut Berger) a "protagonist" stretches may associations with that term. He certainly is no hero; aside a few key exceptions like the put-upon anti-Nazi couple of Herbert (Umberto Orsi) and Elizabeth Thallmann (Charlotte Rampling), the film is almost entirely stocked with schemers, cowards, and outright fascists, and yet Martin still emerges as perhaps the worst of them all. Nor does he fit our usual conception of an active central figure; although his illicit desires and self-indulgent actions drive the narrative, it is other characters who manipulate him into or out of the place that they want him. Having inherited his grandfather Joachim's (Albrecht Schoenhals') shares of the family's steelworks following a staged assassination, Martin finds himself in a three-way tug of war. This involves his conniving mother Sophie (Ingrid Thulin) and her lover Friedrich Bruckmann (Dirk Bogarde) who want Martin to serve as an impotent figurehead for their ambitions; his cousin once removed Konstantin (Reinhard Kolldehorf), prominent in the SA paramilitary division of the Nazi Party, who wants to retain his executive control by sidelining Martin completely; and his other cousin once removed, the SS officer Aschenbach (Helmut Griem), who maneuvers various actors in a game of thrones which could tighten the Party's grip on this important industrial firm while also offering Martin a source of ego-stroking pride as well as an outlet for feverish, fetishistic revenge.
This is the plot of The Damned; however, the impression it creates has as much to do with the saturated, operatic quality of its visual flourishes and the darkness of its sexual psychology as with the intricacy of its narrative mechanics. This is especially true during the film's idiosyncratic dramatic centerpiece, a re-creation of "The Night of Long Knives" in which the once-central SA stormtroopers were betrayed by Hitler and slaughtered en masse by the SS and Gestapo amidst a drunken orgy at a country resort. Around here, the film's second half tips into a more intense, brooding, hot-blooded, and exaggerated pitch reminiscent of other Visconti films of the time. Indeed, this discussion encouraged me to dip back into my own Visconti mini-retrospective of sixteen years ago, when I reviewed The Leopard, Rocco and His Brothers, and Ludwig after big-screen viewings in Boston - The Damned very much incorporates elements of all three from its vision of a patriarch presiding over a dying world to its dysfunctional family portrait driven by jealous rivalry to its vision of decadent depravity in the midst of a ruling class' decline.
I'm also re-visiting past work - while setting up a future project - for the sake of the $1/month reward, offering another narration script for the upcoming Mirrors of Kane video series in a continuation of last month's trend. After next month's Twin Peaks Conversations episode, exclusives will be put aside in favor of advances for both tiers, while I work on finally finishing the four big projects behind the scenes in 2026: Mirrors of Kane, and Lost in Twin Peaks, the TWIN PEAKS Character Series, and Journey Through Twin Peaks.
What are the November rewards?
