The thing is: What am I allowed? If I don’t need anything in particular, what am I allowed to want? What should I do with this blank hotel opportunity for which I’ve worked so hard? Can I only see myself in what I want, and can I only want something when something else goes wrong?
When you’re not here, sometimes the problem doesn’t seem to be you. It doesn’t seem to be you at all.
Perhaps this is only ordinary unhappiness.
9 HOTEL MARX
“To put it metaphorically: it is entirely possible that a diurnal thought should act as the entrepreneur for the dream; but the entrepreneur, who, as they say, has the idea and the drive to put it into action, can do nothing without capital; he requires a capitalist with the necessary outlay, and that capitalist, who provides the psychical outlay. is a desire from the unconscious.”
Cast:
Freud:
a psychoanalyst
Dora:
a teenage girl
Kringelein:
a clerk
Gruskinskaya (Garbo):
a star
Raoul Vaneigem:
a philosopher
I
I went to my doctor, and described my symptoms.
My doctor said, “You’re not depressed, you’re oppressed.”
But then, she was not a therapist.
We used to watch old movies together, you and I. It was one of the things we didn’t fail to do. When there was something wrong with what was in front of us, which was surely not the same as what was real, we watched movies. That they were old movies helped: anything over was better than anything current. They were always on repeat, and always free. We could watch them over and over again, catching them at non-times, in the middle of white afternoons. As we withdrew further into the movies, the more we leant toward the things in them, until we could recognize ourselves in them, or thought we could. We watched movies from the era when, and the places where, people lived in hotels, and many of the movies were about hotels, more than were about homes. A hotel is easy to recreate on a sound stage, because it looks just like a set. A hotel is a dream and must avoid the disappointments of the actual, but it requires something physicaclass="underline" an entrepreneur to provide the furniture for desire. And it is made of both human and inhuman materials.
An evening alone in hotel world: On the inedible room service menu, a list of hermetically sealed in-hotel channels. I look for something that will square both our moods: the hotel’s and mine. The biggest category is “fantasy and adventure,” candy-colored: nothing I do here will matter. There are also video games; this hotel’s less for playboys than for boys who like to play. I look for a hotel movie. When I type “hotel” I don’t know what language I’ll get: hotel is the same word round the globe. I find Grand Hotel (Goulding 1932). I’ve seen it before. Its black and white matches my room’s theme but the Grand Hotel doesn’t remind me of any hotel I have visited. In the opening centrifugal spin around its circular reception desk, shot from above, more guests come and go than in the lonely lobbies where I have lingered. To make himself heard, dying clerk Kringelein (Lionel Barrymore) must shout into the lobby’s public telephone about the most private things: “HE SAYS I WON’T LIVE MUCH LONGER!” You’d imagine the hotel bar and ballroom were the most popular spots in town, yet Greta Garbo went there “to be alone.”
“A private room with a bath!” demands Kringelein, who has come to the Grand Hotel to spend his last pennies. He demands a more impressive room, and finds exclusivity is the long climb to the loneliness of the fifth floor. Even there, privacy is always being invaded. Typist Flaemmchen (Joan Crawford) catches her employer Preysling (Wallace Beery) in his bath, and jewel thief/Baron (John Barrymore) climbs from balcony to balcony, peering through each window in search of an easy mark. I want to be alone!
Privacy is the Grand Hotel’s most expensive luxury, but to be served is to be known. In her suite, Grusinskaya’s (Garbo) gowns spill out of her cases. You can see everything, but there’s nothing to get a grip on. The eye slips off furnishings of blurred satin. Everything is white: her dresses, her sheets, her delightful body, her pearls, but she is the only character that is never alone. Watched by her maid even when asleep, she exists only in front of an audience. There is no privacy in the Grand Hotel.
The movie’s a “portmanteau” piece: a suitcaseful of stories, interrelated but distinct. And they are stories of disconnected people. None of the people in Grand Hotel are married, or, if they are, their wives, their husbands are absent, or they are escaping them, just like in the German Pension. Perhaps there are no stories to tell about marriage, or they are too difficult to tell. Family is a private matter, kept at home behind closed doors like a case of syphilis, a case of hysteria. Disconnection is a hotel tragedy, but also its opportunity. None of the guests understands anyone else’s troubles: There are frequent mistakes — of identity, of meaning — that allow stories to happen, but they are stories like jokes: they deflect. Where there is no privacy, there is no possibility of connection.
Something about the entire movie fails to connect: so many stars, all playing a different style and genre. It’s funny because it’s a Hollywood film set in Berlin, but filmed on a California sound stage barely into the sound era. All the actors are speaking English, but some with fake (or real) European accents. Garbo plays a Swedish-accented Russian; Beery, playing a German, talks to Crawford, also playing a German, but his voice is mitteleuropa, whereas hers is pure USA. And all the performances are different. Lionel Barrymore’s a ham, but then he’s playing one — a stage drunk, his silent-movie gestures too large for the screen — it’s impossible to draw a line between the performance and the part. Joan Crawford, who was never a silent star like Garbo, is subtle, physically contained, wordy. John Barrymore (the Baron) is a blank-faced matinee idol, but Wallace Beery (Preysling) is understated, naturalistic, though he’s playing a bumptious bore. Garbo, playing dancer Grusinskya, doesn’t look much like a ballerina and she’s never seen dancing, but it doesn’t matter a bit. On stage, we’re told, she’s a “natural,” but she can only wow the audience when inspired by the “real thing”: love. She’s unaware that, offstage, she’s pure performance.
GRUSINSKAYA
I can’t dance tonight.
But she does. She always does.
“You’re entirely different from what I expected,” says Presyling when he finds Flaemmchen’s performance as a sex object is just as formal as her performance as a typist. Flaemmchen, the ambiguous stenographer who also poses for “art studies,” is the butt of the film’s sexual jokes and double meanings. She’s constantly mistaken for a prostitute, and no wonder: she’s always telling us what she’s worth (“I got ten Marks for it,” she says of her magazine centerfold). From the same social class as Kringelein, they are both earners of “little pennies.” Everyone needs so many of these pennies to pay the hotel bill but, while they gain it, they must pretend not to be working. The leisure industry’s a factory floor. What does a hotel cost per minute? When you get the bill it’s the extras that bring you down. Sometimes it’s breakfast; sometimes it’s the WiFi. Sometimes it’s things you don’t even know you’re enjoying.
KRINGELEIN
(On the lobby telephone)
Every minute costs 2 marks 90. I want to explain, but I must do so quickly, it costs so much.