To call M a prescient movie feels reMdundant at this point. In 2016 when Trump was elected president, I was shell-shocked. But now, eight years later (just ten days ago) when it happened all over again, on the other side of reading dozens of history books, of indulging some of the greatest philosophers of our time, of reflecting upon the films of Chaplin and Wajda and Haneke and Fassbinder, I feel differently.
I’m not necessarily noting the inevitability of such an election – it’s no secret we romanticize authoritarian principles during times of hardship, that we yearn for immediate solutions to immortal problems born from Darwinian logic – when the “boogeyman” is loose, when the figure that lurks in the shadows disrupts society’s moral compass and forces your deepest survival instincts, we look inwards to something innate, to that barbaric impulse we’ve been told to suppress, and in waves we elect maleficent leaders who claim they will protect our children, the most innocent of all. These are merely the machinations of society – perhaps, at this point, the most predictable flutter of each doltish cycle humanity is forced to endure.
No, more than that, I am humbled by Fritz Lang’s assessment not of what’s seen, but of what’s unseen, of what we fail to recognize about ourselves. Which carries an ironic note of heaviness in M, a film, a piece of art that requires us to think beyond the words and images on screen, to consider both what we see and what we don’t see.
There is a desperation from society to attach identity to this invisible force, for we cannot exist in a space where evil doesn’t have a face – René Girard would argue Beckert represents the embodiment of societal fear, becomes the scapegoat through which we channel collective unrest, serves as a much-needed target for elimination – Hannah Arendt would show how the killer is the result of propaganda designed to simplify complex issues that have always and will always permeate society – Michel Foucault would make perhaps the most obvious and ironic point, that “the law” is reliant upon crimes for justification, that authoritarian rule depends on this interplay of visible and invisible forces that we never seem to recognize, which as a result eternally positions “the people” ten steps behind the very figures we elect into office. Beckert barely has a physical presence in the film until the melting pot of detectives (represented by the imposing police and the pure civilians and the dastardly criminals, who all seem to despise each other yet mirror one another other in their unethical surveillance and absolute lack of compassion) get close to this invisible force, this embodiment of evil that threatens their livelihood, their sense of order, and make him visible, make him known, and therefore make him extinguishable.
The mind-numbing truth that lies beneath this entire witch hunt is that Beckert isn’t even a person (this is a movie, after all), but instead a symbol of what we cannot control – no, a symbol of our inability to deal with what we cannot control – a force that will forever compel us to choose wrong in the face of right – the inevitable balancing act that society must perform, not because it makes sense, but because it’s beyond sense, because it’s part of our innate makeup as we individually fight our own internal battles between good and evil. Beckert is, indeed, just that: a symbol – a crucial component of art that so many misunderstand, or worse, actively choose to ignore, which therefore strips his ability to remain instructive to a society seemingly in a perpetual state of degradation.
This is the crux of Lang’s aesthetic, for Beckert both is and isn’t real, is both visible and invisible – he cannot be defined, yet he persists, causing massive existential crisis as society tries to make sense of the unfathomable – he is not seen by the people desperately searching for him but instead heard, instead sensed, by a blind man who isn’t prey to the political system’s machinations – he is right there on screen, practically breaking the fourth wall, telling us he cannot help himself, that he has no control over “this evil thing inside of me, the fire, the voices, the torment!” that this dark force follows him, pursues him in the shadowy streets, that he himself is this inescapable dark force, cannibalizing itself to god’s end – he is practically begging us to recognize him as the human condition itself, to show mercy to the undeniable, the inexorable, to what exists within us all, to use this piece of art as a chance to stop scapegoating and instead look within, to become more compassionate and loving towards others, towards ourselves.
Alas, we know what did happen, in this film, and what will always happen, throughout human existence: the people reject civility and opt for blood, for ugliness, for eternal division, while the faceless hand of the law steps in to exert its imminent order. I can’t tell if art is becoming less and less instructive on the human condition or if it was always this way – after all, Lang’s critique of Nazi Germany commented upon Stalin and Mussolini as well as Hitler, and would eventually comment upon Franco, upon Pot, upon Zedong, upon Hussein, upon Jong-il and Jong-un, upon Chávez, upon Marcos, upon Putin, upon – fuck, well, you-know-who.
Many of us understand: because art imitates life, life, in turn, imitates art – art is instructive because it shows us what is, more directly and penetratingly than any politician ever could. But there are so many more people who don’t understand this, who refuse to understand this, because it would require them to finally confront the beast within, to recognize that the problems that permeate our lives and threaten our children come directly from ourselves. M is prescient because of this moral reckoning we collectively refuse to acknowledge time and time again. This blindness makes art both defeating and empowering, both invisible and visible, both irrelevant and essential – those who are willing to confront themselves and the beast within are crucial to society’s balance, to keeping humanity from reaching the point of no return – we fight the impossible fight that must be fought until there’s no fight left to fight – not because it’s easy, not because it makes sense, but because we have to.
