Does Flaemmchen enjoy her typist day job? It seems not. Does she even enjoy the perks of her “hotel” job that come from closer acquaintance with her employers? Not as much as we might have hoped. But she has to look as if she does, in order to procure them — service and a smile: that’s the hotel industry. Flaemmchen’s ambiguity, which insists that any pretty girl can be bought for a night like a suite, is at the heart of the hotel’s glamour, even if it refuses to acknowledge she’s on the unofficial payroll. Like all the characters, she has to pretend not to be what she is not, but to be what she is.
Only Flaemchenn, who understands this play of surfaces better than most, can convert them into an act of generosity. “Dance with old Kringelein,” says the Baron. And she does, smiling, though the Baron knows she really wants to dance with him. What cruelty! How easily he acknowledges her hotel role. And Flaemmchen from that moment, recognizes herself as she is seen, just as Freud does in the mirror in the train bathroom. Accepting herself at face value, her hotel value (as Freud, outside his consulting room, appeared to himself as merely an old man), she goes upstairs to take up Preysling’s offer of a trip to glamorous Manchester. At that instant she becomes like hotel staff — doomed to hanging around in corridors, in lobbies — but her position remains ambiguous; she’s still not servant class
“Who are you really?” Garbo asks Baron Barrymore. No need to ask; we already know. Grand Hotel is a big-name picture, each actor performing what she, or he, does best. “There’s no ‘real thing,’” insists Crawford/Flaemmchen, only half joking, when Baron Barrymore rejects her for Garbo. Or so she must pretend, as her life (or her living) depends on it.
“I’m going to live!” boasts dying Kringelein, unaware that at the Grand Hotel, living is the last thing he’ll do. Living at a hotel is hard work. Leisure, which is not the opposite but the corresponding state to work, is a tough job, and no movie mentions work so much. Clerk Kringelein knows the price of everything, and isn’t afraid to point it out. This goes with a kind of naive impropriety. When he asks Flaemmchen, “Would you like to see my bathroom?” he is not being indecent; he’s merely impressed by its size, and style.
Everyone is a workaholic nowadays, even when they’re on holiday. Something’s got to give.
I have never lived in a hotel. It has always been work.
II
One cannot now live in a hotel — the economics are impossible. Once upon a time people did, though seldom in hotels like the Grand Hotel. They were women mostly, women without men: Katherine Mansfield’s heroines, and also her villains, their husbands elsewhere, for her villains were often married. Those were hotels for single women, in single rooms, for maids, and old maids, like Charlotte Bartlett in E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (she scarcely exists in the novel out of them). Hotels were the only place these women were served, had anyone to serve them. They were the only place they existed in public.
Nowadays hotels are for couples, a brief escape from their family selves, and, for single people, mostly only if they are on business, though they will be charged for the empty half of their double beds (perhaps some are paying for the opportunity to fill that space). Hotels are also the places couples look most uncomfortable. They go to hotels to discover their differences. They are altered, in this public space where, suddenly, they must both perform their value, and they sometimes discover that one of them has more value, though the woman must always wear her value on her sleeve. The man’s value is more often hidden, but may be guessed at, partly by looking at the woman he is with.
Sometimes you went to hotels for business. The hotels you went to were called business hotels, though you only spent your leisure time in them, and did your business elsewhere. The hotels I went to for work were called hotels for leisure. As a hotel reviewer, I sometimes took you to leisure hotels, but the fit was never right. What sort of marriage were we performing there?
In leisure hotels, you had to perform being a man, being part of a couple. As you didn’t enjoy this performance, hotel visits were seldom enjoyable, on my face across the table that expression I saw mirrored in yours, like chewing something you can’t get out of your teeth: a nothing-to-be-done face.
“How are you?” I said. You said:
“Sad, as I always am in transition.”
It is the only place I am happy.
All the things we hardly dared to do together.
III
I’m back in the vorhof, the vestibule, the only place, in Grand Hotel the movie, where we see the hotel staff.
VANEIGEM
The bourgeois no-man’s-land of exchange.
I have my copy of The Revolution of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem.
The lobby is where the exchange goes on, furtive. I am leaving the hotel (to go, where?). I don’t pay, also furtively; I don’t want the others to know I’m getting it all, apparently, for free.
(I enclose myself in embarrassing parentheses.)
VANEIGEM
Nothing moving, only dead time passing.
In a hotel, as in a hospital, I am not at home. I am required to do no home work. Ordinary things are done for me: cooking, shining shoes. I am rendered helpless. I have rendered myself helpless. I treat myself as I normally do others. It is, I suppose, a kind of self-othering. In a hotel I can get anything, anytime, but nothing I want, or need. It is a place where I am taught to become someone with desires, that is, someone whose desires meet what the hotel provides, on hotel terms — a hotel person. I’ve finally become someone, but I don’t recognize myself. Like Freud in his railway carriage, here I am one side of the mirror, and, (equally, but differently) on the other: “Hello.” In a hotel, I’m always searching for the reflexive verb. Could it be self-serving?
This desire to serve — is it selfless, or selfish? There are hotels where you can self-serve — a credit card in the door, you’ll never see anyone lower down the order than yourself. Now that’s a real isolation unit. It’s not for me. In a hotel, whether guest or staff, I relax in the presence of someone else’s authority. But what about the flipside: the servers (now that’s the name for an implement)? Service is a strong word. Things can be put into it, and taken out of it again. Something can be made to serve, as can someone, for the time being, in a hotel as it can at home, though it’s easier here; in a hotel at least you can get rid of your server with a tip, however awkward the tipping point.
It’s surprising how few of the stories in Grand Hotel concern the staff — apart from frontman Senff (Jean Hersholt), the servers are content to remain ghosts. Senff is an unsatisfactory character who seldom steps beyond the lobby, either into or out of the hotel. He remains at reception by the switchboard, which is as much of a character as he is, in this movie about switched connections. Only once, in the film’s opening scene, does Senff the ghost porter overstep a boundary, using a hotel line to call the hospital about his pregnant wife. Life happens (people are born) outside the hotel, especially for Senff, whose story never crosses any of the other strands of plot. His connections with the guests are purely professional and he is necessarily fooled by appearances; it’s part of his job. “I don’t believe it!” is his response to the revelation that the Baron is a thief. “I know people.”
Do I know what serves me, and is it the same thing I am serving?
What do the waiters look like when they take off their waistcoats, those black waistcoats with the multiple pockets like ticket pockets but longer, slanted horizontal? Do they look like stripped penguins? The pockets are laid flat against their abdomens. In them, they keep different denominations, but you cannot see the shape of what they will bring out, only that there are little slits in their sides, ranked like ribs, out of which and into which they can put surprising things. Permeability is a feature of abjection. It is the human made serviceable. The abject is what a hospital cannot treat, and maybe not even a clinic. Despite its holes, it insists on still existing. It keeps on going, just as though it were a person: self-serving, unpermeated, whole. The abject is also what we need to remain abject, what we desire to continue to exist to serve us; what we need to expel, pay off, need not to acknowledge as quite human — dress it up in what uniform you like.