I knew why I love taxis, yes
subways are only fun when you’re feeling sexy
and who feels sexy after The Blue Angel
well maybe a little bit
— Frank O’Hara
It’s Marlene Dietrich’s birthday today.
When I interviewed Dan Callahan about his book The Art of American Screen Acting, we discussed Marlene Dietrich. He has been obsessed since college, and also obsessed with trying to put her into words. What exactly is she doing. Why does she get the effects she does? HOW does she do that? Movie magic, okay. Collaboration with Josef von Sternberg, a director absolutely OBSESSED with her, obsessed to the point of emotional torture. Okay. He set her up properly so she could be perceived. But she’s DIFFERENT from other stars of her day (well, they were all different from each other. Now, so many “stars” have a sameness to them. They can interchange roles. Back in the day, though, you couldn’t put Barbara Stanwyck in a Greta Garbo vehicle. You couldn’t swap out Marlene Dietrich for Katharine Hepburn. Or Irene Dunne. These women were all versatile – Stanwyck perhaps most of all – but before all of that, they were individuals. They were “themselves”, at least personae-wise. I call them “thoroughbreds of personality”.)
At any rate, I think Callahan’s chapter on Dietrich in his book is a major piece of writing, very important, and essential to contextualizing Dietrich, since he comes at it from a performance standpoint. He refers to her as “postmodern”. Almost like it’s all a big joke, and the joke is on us. It’s all a put-on, a gag, and we are the only ones taking it seriously. (“I never ever took my career seriously,” Dietrich said.) But don’t take my word for it. Read his book.
Here’s our interview. It’s a doozy.
And just for fun, here she is with John Wayne. Their affair was crazy and on his death bed he – a man who loved sex – admitted she was the best sex he ever had. I mean … obviously.
Marlene Dietrich was one of the great sexual personae, to borrow Camille Paglia’s phrase, and remembering Paglia’s idea that all the great movie personae were (and are) androgynous, an idea Dan discusses as well. Dietrich was openly bisexual (“Sex is much better with a woman, but then one can’t live with a woman!”) and didn’t see the big deal about … any of it, really. This set her apart from American audiences and America in general (see the quote in the header).
There is the woman and then there is the actress, and there isn’t quite as stark a division in any of the other great classic stars as there are in Dietrich. She talks about how “the legs” were used in film, or “the body”, and she is referring to herself. It just had nothing to do with her, in her mind. She talked about Josef von Sternberg like he was a tyrant, but also as the man who made her. She just did what he told her to do. He told her to count to herself during pauses. So there she is, looking all mysterious and glimmering with intrigue, when all along all she’s doing is thinking “One … two … three … four …”
I think it was Steven Spielberg who said that the camera loves nothing more than to watch a person thinking. And the trick is: it honestly doesn’t matter WHAT you think. As long as you are thinking SOMEthing other than “How am I sounding? How am I doing? How do I look?” Those are actor thoughts. Think ANYthing.
So Marlene Dietrich counted silently in her head and audiences have been enraptured for 80 years, wondering what the hell she’s thinking. That’s movie magic.
The Blue Angel
by Allen Ginsberg
Marlene Dietrich is singing a lament
for mechanical love.
She leans against a mortarboard tree
on a plateau by the seashore.
She’s a life-sized toy,
the doll of eternity;
her hair is shaped like an abstract hat
made out of white steel.
Her face is powdered, whitewashed and
immobile like a robot.
Jutting out of her temple, by an eye,
is a little white key.
She gazes through dull blue pupils
set in the whites of her eyes.
She closes them, and the key
turns by itself.
She opens her eyes, and they’re blank
like a statue’s in a museum.
Her machine begins to move, the key turns
again, her eyes change, she sings.
—you’d think I would have thought a plan
to end the inner grind,
but not till I have found a man
to occupy my mind.
Marlene Dietrich’s screen test for The Blue Angel
“I’m not an actress — I’m a personality.” — Marlene Dietrich
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