Between a Rock and a Hard Face
.
“Rock” and “Roll” are here to sway
Scrambling up the compromised paths of the ‘Rock Walk’ in Torquay, my greasy boot soles slipping on the narrow wire grids holding down fractured limestone, I couldn’t help but woozily contemplate the instability of “rock” and its ambiguous and vertiginous relations with such tractions as “walk”.
The geology of ‘Rock Walk’, an ornamentalised cliff face now under refurbishment, is topsy-turvy. Older limestone sits on top of younger sandstone. A thrust once turned this world upside down. And it remains dynamic; in one part of the face a new fissure is secured by thick wire ropes, in another soft soils are driven through to secure anchors for new furniture.
Once a cliff directly abutting the seashore, ‘Rock Walk’ is now separated from the water by the banal traffic of a busy road. From that road’s seaward pavement the rock face comes across like a faded and dusty theatrical backdrop, a curtain of convenience. Closer up, within the confines of contractors’ temporary site walls, the face is impressive and symbolic. It is as much socially as geologically upside down: its remaining exotic plants and meandering paths masking the transformation from proletarian ‘Fisherman’s Walk’ to monarchical ‘Royal Terrace Gardens’.
Recent geological depredations of this seaside attraction parallel its change of social use to something defined by the authorities as “anti-social”: the publicly administered, chemically enabled, altering of consciousness; something paradoxically joyless. As it once stood in for the slopes of desert islands for Devon’s short-lived silent movie industry, so ‘Rock Walk’ has again become subject to the subsidence of its ordered use and bordered meaning.
“We’ve been rockin’ ‘n rolling in your arms,
Rockin’ and rolling in your arms,
Rockin’ and rolling in your arms,
In the arms of Moses.”
(The Camp Meeting Jubilee, 1916)
The “rock” of rock ‘n’ roll is a particularly active one. From late Old English “roccian” meaning ‘to sway’ and the Old Norse “rykkja” meaning “to pull, tear or move”, the word has always denoted a motion. In the mid twentieth century it was something less violently than ‘torn’, and something less gently than ‘moved’, from the recorded music of African-American religious culture - where “rockin’” referred to the embodiment of the moving force of the Holy Spirit – to the secular physicality of “my man rocks me with a steady roll”. Listening to the histrionics of the 1916 ‘Camp Meeting Jubilee’, it is not difficult to find some connection, particularly in their shared absurdities, between religious and sexual ecstasies; the motions and emotions accompanying loss of self in a god and loss of self in another person.
Sex is a sacrament. On the left-hand path of Vamamarga. Even in Christian doctrine as articulated by Oswald Reichel (only male occupant of A la Ronde). In his ‘Complete Manual of Canon Law’ (1896) an unconsummated (even though church blessed) marriage is deemed meaningless, while, a monogamous relationship between “man and courtesan” (without opportunity to wed) would be sacramental.
Always tracking that mutable, rolling “roccian” was another parole – hard and unyielding - from the obelisk of the Old English “stanrocc”, emerging in Middle English as a descriptor for broad geological formations. By the 16th century “rock” was commonly used across Europe as a metaphor for religious certainty.
There’s an oft-repeated canard heard on the far-shores of ‘pseudoscience’ that goes something like this: “those who triggered paradigmatic shifts in scientific understanding were often called ‘mad’ or ‘dishonest’ before their work found general acceptance. Therefore, as everyone calls me ‘a mad liar’ I must be on to something.”
It would be a mistake to allow such a transparent manoeuvre to obscure the genuine and painful marginalisation of scientists like Boris Belousov (whose papers on the discovery of a non-linear chemical oscillator – the B-Z Effect - were rejected, until, after his death, when graduate student Anatol Zhabotinsky re-ran his experiments), the mathematician Oliver Heaviside who careened about on a brakeless bike close to ‘Rock Walk’ and who is still better recognised in Tokyo than Torquay, or Alfred Wegener whose concept of ‘continental drift’ waited more than forty years after its publication to achieve acceptance.
Of course, Wegener was not the first to suggest that there might have been movement in the earth’s crust. The late sixteenth century Flemish cartographer Ortelius had observed that the shapes of the continents were suspiciously complementary, carved like pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle spread across a table. Drawing on the evidence of his maps, Ortelius speculated that the Americas had been "torn away from Europe and Africa ... by earthquakes and floods".
A model for Ortelius was to hand: biblical cataclysm. The earth’s crust bore the mark of the Flood. It is testimony to ideological mutability that when empirical study eventually overturned this dynamic, once-and-for-all Catastrophism, it could replace it with a similarly bounded paradigm: Uniformitarianism. The single event of the Deluge was ironed out and spread across all time – each moment like the last and like the moment to come, barely noticeable and identical micro-ripples achieving a uniform effect.
It would be easy to embrace the marginalisation of Wegener as one more run out for that familiar narrative: individual genius cramped by jealous, common mediocrity. However, there was a fundamental flaw in Wegener’s explanation for the ‘drift’ of continents: he depicted the Earth’s crust as having a universal, ‘finished’ form. In a subtle echo of mythic narrative, Wegener’s Earth was organically uniform before its catalytic disruption, an unidentifiable break up triggering a long and dissolute wandering. Wegener characterised the continents as fragments of a single source, sharing common properties, drifting rather than driven.
Only when geologists began to detect contradictory qualities in the Earth’s crust, some parts oceanic and others continental, did something like a credible dynamic hove into view. For not only was the crust uneven in its properties, but it had yet to complete its originary narrative; it was still becoming. Areas of the ocean floor were all the time generating new crust, cooling rock emerging from the fluid mantle, while elsewhere continental plates were in collision, one plate passing over another, returning the lower crust to the mantle. And rather than sliding across the sea floor like gargantuan stone cruisers, the fragmented continents were driven by and with the sea floor (or, more accurately, by the convection currents in the fluid mantle just beneath it).
When Alfred Wegener published his masterwork Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane in book form in 1922, it was only two years after his cousin Paul Wegener had released an equally seminal and mineral work: the silent movie film ‘Der Golem’. The film, Paul Wegener’s third (and only surviving) attempt at the Golem theme, is a thoroughly geological piece.
Where Wiene’s ‘The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari’ of the same year constructed an uneasy world from reeling geometry, Paul Wegener offered a vision of cultural stratification. His film begins with a silhouette of the roofs of the Prague Ghetto, appearing like an alpine pass outlined against a starry sky. As sunlight illuminates the Ghetto, it reveals houses like ravines and corridors like caves; the materials of their construction appear sedimentary. Leaning and looming buildings seem more dictated by continental drift’s mountain building than architectural plans.
In Wegener’s ‘Der Golem’ an effete imperial Christian court passes a decree to expel Prague’s Jews from their Ghetto. Rabbi Löw uses magic to create a clay monster, the Golem, to project the Ghetto. On a visit to the Christian city, the Golem saves the imperial court from the collapse of their palace and the Jews are “pardoned”. Meanwhile, Florian, the Christian messenger who conveyed the expulsion order, falls for and sleeps with Miriam, the rabbi’s daughter. When the rabbi’s famulus discovers this he flies into a jealous rage and re-animates the Golem who kills Florian and then, out of control, begins to torch the Ghetto. Rabbi Löw magically douses the flames. The Golem, still rampaging, escapes from the Ghetto, but is accidentally destroyed by Christian children.
While other classic monsters of cinema – vampires, Frankenstein’s creations and zombies – have an uncanny charm, a perverse seductiveness, there is something neutered and ridiculous about Wegener’s Golem, something that never quite overcomes absurdity to ‘win’ the viewer (this cannot be said about the version of the same character in Gustav Meyrink’s Golem novel).
When Wegener’s Golem finally bursts its social bounds it is less poignant than inane. Waddling, top heavy, stiff legged and topsy-turvy, the Golem’s clay features flicker through grumpiness, sorrow and discovery, all the time tortured by an outraged disdain for its own feelings, for the disturbance of its substance. It is abject, servile; its first task is to take a note to the grocers!
Two moments should change all this (but they don’t): the Golem’s uncontrolled rampage through the Ghetto and its accidental ‘death’. But the Golem’s death is no different from its foetal development – its face pummelled and squished by Rabbi Löw, who is no artisanal demiurge (public-maker) but as clumsy and childlike as his creation. There is neither art nor science in the manufacture of Wegener’s Golem, and neither ceremony nor meaning in its ‘death’. The Golem is a victim of its own childlike naivety. In a moment of viscous emotion it smiles at the Christian children and then suffers instantaneous rigor-mortis: a flick of the hand and a childlike and malevolent Id is suddenly snuffed out.
Vampires, zombies and Karloff monsters have their weaknesses, but those weaknesses are extraneous to the monster itself: the cross, the shot to the head, the mob (another monster). The unique feature of the Golem is that its death plug is there from its birth, its death plug is its umbilical cord. For this monster is never truly alive, but instrumental; driven by forces (of pressure and language), rather than itself a force. It is a terrifying and poignant vision of humanity as instrumental clay animated by, but without access to or possession of, the motivating force of a Spirit. It is more Gnostic than Kabbalah. Its animation comes from an evil spirit, Astorath who appears as a smoke-belching mask, a ‘special effect’ rather than an ineffable force.
As with Alfred’s ‘continental drift’ so with Paul’s film; at root they both believe in a fundamental, originary ‘clay’; a common ground, a universal material. But neither can convincingly animate their material. For universalism, paradoxically, is bounded, defined by its borders; it requires a secret binding. (The universalist ‘brotherhood of man’ is rarely an effective argument against racism; far more effective is the exposure of racism as itself secretly and hopelessly fractured even within its own terms.) So, Wegener’s Golem is dwarfed by the Ghetto’s walls and giant door; it is not a monster at all! It is a boundary. Its rampage does not break down the limits of the Ghetto but re-establishes them.
Where Wegener’s Golem is stiff and material, Florian (and the court he represents to the Ghetto) is insouciant, snooty and insubstantial, his affair with Miriam is thoughtless and without principle, its emptiness emphasised when Florian places his hand on Miriam’s breast exactly where the amulet that animates the Golem is placed. There is something mechanical in their ecstasy. When the two lovers awake from post-coital slumbers they succumb to horror, as if, only now, absurdly, do they become aware of each others’ “identities”: as if they had acted before as automata.
Wegener rejected the expressionist label, but the strangeness of the shapes of the Ghetto’s architecture conjure a similar anxiety. One that is doubled. Not simply by the film’s anti-semitism (which is sentimental and orientalist rather than supremacist), nor its purloining of Jewish ‘history’ as a kind of proto-cinema, but rather by its geological vision of a universal clay people-monster in servitude to authority and bounded to a single community. Where vampires and zombies split the world, opening up geo-illogical fissures, faults and thrusts in ideology, Wegener’s Golem re-establishes walls. This partly is ‘achieved’ by making the Emperor’s court, foil to the Ghetto, so completely unlocated, fey, stupid and insubstantial. The Ghetto is the only real place in the film: its uniqueness and essentialism is the means to its exclusion and limitation.
“In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false.”
(Guy Debord, 1967. Taken from Tamany Baker. )
There is a temptation to read ‘Der Golem’ through the lens of the Holocaust. To list its stereotypes. The narrative threat of expulsion, the fire that rages through the Ghetto. Nothing is obscured by such interpretations.
But there is another narrative here, about the doubleness of security; walls are returned to their solidity, doors are shut, fires are put out, the persecuted are ‘pardoned’ (!), boundaries and borders are honoured. In the final reel a racial binary is dramatically restated: a sweet blond child and an inert monster of clay. In a scene (later borrowed and inverted by director James Whale for his 1931 ‘Frankenstein’), the blond child destroys the Golem, grasping acquisitively at the magic amulet containing the vital parole that gives the monster life. (In another version אמת (truth) becomes מת (dead) when a single letter of the text within the amulet is removed.) The monster is returned to the fabric of the Ghetto, sans parole, sans the spirit it supposedly never had.
Not from the mise-en-scène – in story and symbol Wegener’s Golem is soulless. But Wegener’s intense and excessive performance as the monster suggest something else. He violently expresses its furious embarrassment at its sudden aliveness, at the intrusion of life into its clay, the painful clumsiness of its abrupt sensibility, anger at its containment in the mountain of its own physique, desire that desire itself frustrates. This monster is rampant with neuroses, somehow speeded up, vicious cycles turning like gramophone records, the crank in the clay… not robotic, but metamorphic.
Wegener the actor is at odds with Wegener the writer/director, and for a moment, as if the film become subject to a thrust, the object-actor comes out on top of the subject-director.
In the early nineteenth century ‘Rock Walk’ became a lookout point for naval officers’ families following and observing the Fleet at anchor in the bay (this is the origin of Torquay as a tourist resort). By the time the Dreadnoughts assembled just prior to the First World War the view was framed by palm trees.
In Michael Winner’s fine 1964 movie ‘The System’, Torquay emerges as a sexually exotic place, where sophisticated sexuality is communicated between the classes: the key venue for this transmission and reception is the Palm Court Hotel complex at the foot of ‘Rock Walk’ (now due to be demolished).
In the recessions of the 1970s and 1980s, the vibrant and confident ‘cheap’ end of the tourist trade fell away, common public spaces and entertainments shrank to almost nothing and the classes separated out. Imperialism returned in a new smoking mask.
Today, behind the blue boards of the contractors, a twisted and rusted bus shelter bears a fading legend: “White Power” and then a pseudo-runic symbol, scribbled in permanent marker pen rather than carved in stone or cast in the shape of steel ships.
Just as there is no purity of blood, so there is no integrity of soil. The arrow of time and the operation of entropy see to that. There can be no return for light or sound to the cosmic plasma. Even the fluid mantle below the Earth’s crust irredeemably cools.
The beauty of ‘Rock Walk’ (though it’s a headache for those responsible for it) is that it can no longer disguise its geological and symbolic volatility. Where it was once planted out with exotic plants and knitted together by the roots of numerous mature trees, today its crazed strata are revealed, punctuated by the stumps of old gaslight plinths, restraining wires, new rockeries and the remnant quartz and brain coral of surviving grottos. It is no longer a tourist artefact dressed with exotic properties, but part of a folding and crumpling crust. An artefact of the Sticklepath Fault.
“Rock” and “Roll” are here to sway
Scrambling up the compromised paths of the ‘Rock Walk’ in Torquay, my greasy boot soles slipping on the narrow wire grids holding down fractured limestone, I couldn’t help but woozily contemplate the instability of “rock” and its ambiguous and vertiginous relations with such tractions as “walk”.
The geology of ‘Rock Walk’, an ornamentalised cliff face now under refurbishment, is topsy-turvy. Older limestone sits on top of younger sandstone. A thrust once turned this world upside down. And it remains dynamic; in one part of the face a new fissure is secured by thick wire ropes, in another soft soils are driven through to secure anchors for new furniture.
Once a cliff directly abutting the seashore, ‘Rock Walk’ is now separated from the water by the banal traffic of a busy road. From that road’s seaward pavement the rock face comes across like a faded and dusty theatrical backdrop, a curtain of convenience. Closer up, within the confines of contractors’ temporary site walls, the face is impressive and symbolic. It is as much socially as geologically upside down: its remaining exotic plants and meandering paths masking the transformation from proletarian ‘Fisherman’s Walk’ to monarchical ‘Royal Terrace Gardens’.
Recent geological depredations of this seaside attraction parallel its change of social use to something defined by the authorities as “anti-social”: the publicly administered, chemically enabled, altering of consciousness; something paradoxically joyless. As it once stood in for the slopes of desert islands for Devon’s short-lived silent movie industry, so ‘Rock Walk’ has again become subject to the subsidence of its ordered use and bordered meaning.
Etymology
“We’ve been rockin’ ‘n rolling in your arms,
Rockin’ and rolling in your arms,
Rockin’ and rolling in your arms,
In the arms of Moses.”
(The Camp Meeting Jubilee, 1916)
The “rock” of rock ‘n’ roll is a particularly active one. From late Old English “roccian” meaning ‘to sway’ and the Old Norse “rykkja” meaning “to pull, tear or move”, the word has always denoted a motion. In the mid twentieth century it was something less violently than ‘torn’, and something less gently than ‘moved’, from the recorded music of African-American religious culture - where “rockin’” referred to the embodiment of the moving force of the Holy Spirit – to the secular physicality of “my man rocks me with a steady roll”. Listening to the histrionics of the 1916 ‘Camp Meeting Jubilee’, it is not difficult to find some connection, particularly in their shared absurdities, between religious and sexual ecstasies; the motions and emotions accompanying loss of self in a god and loss of self in another person.
Sex is a sacrament. On the left-hand path of Vamamarga. Even in Christian doctrine as articulated by Oswald Reichel (only male occupant of A la Ronde). In his ‘Complete Manual of Canon Law’ (1896) an unconsummated (even though church blessed) marriage is deemed meaningless, while, a monogamous relationship between “man and courtesan” (without opportunity to wed) would be sacramental.
Always tracking that mutable, rolling “roccian” was another parole – hard and unyielding - from the obelisk of the Old English “stanrocc”, emerging in Middle English as a descriptor for broad geological formations. By the 16th century “rock” was commonly used across Europe as a metaphor for religious certainty.
Loopy Fakes
There’s an oft-repeated canard heard on the far-shores of ‘pseudoscience’ that goes something like this: “those who triggered paradigmatic shifts in scientific understanding were often called ‘mad’ or ‘dishonest’ before their work found general acceptance. Therefore, as everyone calls me ‘a mad liar’ I must be on to something.”
It would be a mistake to allow such a transparent manoeuvre to obscure the genuine and painful marginalisation of scientists like Boris Belousov (whose papers on the discovery of a non-linear chemical oscillator – the B-Z Effect - were rejected, until, after his death, when graduate student Anatol Zhabotinsky re-ran his experiments), the mathematician Oliver Heaviside who careened about on a brakeless bike close to ‘Rock Walk’ and who is still better recognised in Tokyo than Torquay, or Alfred Wegener whose concept of ‘continental drift’ waited more than forty years after its publication to achieve acceptance.
Of course, Wegener was not the first to suggest that there might have been movement in the earth’s crust. The late sixteenth century Flemish cartographer Ortelius had observed that the shapes of the continents were suspiciously complementary, carved like pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle spread across a table. Drawing on the evidence of his maps, Ortelius speculated that the Americas had been "torn away from Europe and Africa ... by earthquakes and floods".
A model for Ortelius was to hand: biblical cataclysm. The earth’s crust bore the mark of the Flood. It is testimony to ideological mutability that when empirical study eventually overturned this dynamic, once-and-for-all Catastrophism, it could replace it with a similarly bounded paradigm: Uniformitarianism. The single event of the Deluge was ironed out and spread across all time – each moment like the last and like the moment to come, barely noticeable and identical micro-ripples achieving a uniform effect.
The Mediocrity of Genius
It would be easy to embrace the marginalisation of Wegener as one more run out for that familiar narrative: individual genius cramped by jealous, common mediocrity. However, there was a fundamental flaw in Wegener’s explanation for the ‘drift’ of continents: he depicted the Earth’s crust as having a universal, ‘finished’ form. In a subtle echo of mythic narrative, Wegener’s Earth was organically uniform before its catalytic disruption, an unidentifiable break up triggering a long and dissolute wandering. Wegener characterised the continents as fragments of a single source, sharing common properties, drifting rather than driven.
Only when geologists began to detect contradictory qualities in the Earth’s crust, some parts oceanic and others continental, did something like a credible dynamic hove into view. For not only was the crust uneven in its properties, but it had yet to complete its originary narrative; it was still becoming. Areas of the ocean floor were all the time generating new crust, cooling rock emerging from the fluid mantle, while elsewhere continental plates were in collision, one plate passing over another, returning the lower crust to the mantle. And rather than sliding across the sea floor like gargantuan stone cruisers, the fragmented continents were driven by and with the sea floor (or, more accurately, by the convection currents in the fluid mantle just beneath it).
Stone Tapes
When Alfred Wegener published his masterwork Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane in book form in 1922, it was only two years after his cousin Paul Wegener had released an equally seminal and mineral work: the silent movie film ‘Der Golem’. The film, Paul Wegener’s third (and only surviving) attempt at the Golem theme, is a thoroughly geological piece.
Where Wiene’s ‘The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari’ of the same year constructed an uneasy world from reeling geometry, Paul Wegener offered a vision of cultural stratification. His film begins with a silhouette of the roofs of the Prague Ghetto, appearing like an alpine pass outlined against a starry sky. As sunlight illuminates the Ghetto, it reveals houses like ravines and corridors like caves; the materials of their construction appear sedimentary. Leaning and looming buildings seem more dictated by continental drift’s mountain building than architectural plans.
In Wegener’s ‘Der Golem’ an effete imperial Christian court passes a decree to expel Prague’s Jews from their Ghetto. Rabbi Löw uses magic to create a clay monster, the Golem, to project the Ghetto. On a visit to the Christian city, the Golem saves the imperial court from the collapse of their palace and the Jews are “pardoned”. Meanwhile, Florian, the Christian messenger who conveyed the expulsion order, falls for and sleeps with Miriam, the rabbi’s daughter. When the rabbi’s famulus discovers this he flies into a jealous rage and re-animates the Golem who kills Florian and then, out of control, begins to torch the Ghetto. Rabbi Löw magically douses the flames. The Golem, still rampaging, escapes from the Ghetto, but is accidentally destroyed by Christian children.
Living Dead Clay
While other classic monsters of cinema – vampires, Frankenstein’s creations and zombies – have an uncanny charm, a perverse seductiveness, there is something neutered and ridiculous about Wegener’s Golem, something that never quite overcomes absurdity to ‘win’ the viewer (this cannot be said about the version of the same character in Gustav Meyrink’s Golem novel).
When Wegener’s Golem finally bursts its social bounds it is less poignant than inane. Waddling, top heavy, stiff legged and topsy-turvy, the Golem’s clay features flicker through grumpiness, sorrow and discovery, all the time tortured by an outraged disdain for its own feelings, for the disturbance of its substance. It is abject, servile; its first task is to take a note to the grocers!
Two moments should change all this (but they don’t): the Golem’s uncontrolled rampage through the Ghetto and its accidental ‘death’. But the Golem’s death is no different from its foetal development – its face pummelled and squished by Rabbi Löw, who is no artisanal demiurge (public-maker) but as clumsy and childlike as his creation. There is neither art nor science in the manufacture of Wegener’s Golem, and neither ceremony nor meaning in its ‘death’. The Golem is a victim of its own childlike naivety. In a moment of viscous emotion it smiles at the Christian children and then suffers instantaneous rigor-mortis: a flick of the hand and a childlike and malevolent Id is suddenly snuffed out.
Vampires, zombies and Karloff monsters have their weaknesses, but those weaknesses are extraneous to the monster itself: the cross, the shot to the head, the mob (another monster). The unique feature of the Golem is that its death plug is there from its birth, its death plug is its umbilical cord. For this monster is never truly alive, but instrumental; driven by forces (of pressure and language), rather than itself a force. It is a terrifying and poignant vision of humanity as instrumental clay animated by, but without access to or possession of, the motivating force of a Spirit. It is more Gnostic than Kabbalah. Its animation comes from an evil spirit, Astorath who appears as a smoke-belching mask, a ‘special effect’ rather than an ineffable force.
“golem” (גולם) means “rock” (mod. Hebrew)
As with Alfred’s ‘continental drift’ so with Paul’s film; at root they both believe in a fundamental, originary ‘clay’; a common ground, a universal material. But neither can convincingly animate their material. For universalism, paradoxically, is bounded, defined by its borders; it requires a secret binding. (The universalist ‘brotherhood of man’ is rarely an effective argument against racism; far more effective is the exposure of racism as itself secretly and hopelessly fractured even within its own terms.) So, Wegener’s Golem is dwarfed by the Ghetto’s walls and giant door; it is not a monster at all! It is a boundary. Its rampage does not break down the limits of the Ghetto but re-establishes them.
Where Wegener’s Golem is stiff and material, Florian (and the court he represents to the Ghetto) is insouciant, snooty and insubstantial, his affair with Miriam is thoughtless and without principle, its emptiness emphasised when Florian places his hand on Miriam’s breast exactly where the amulet that animates the Golem is placed. There is something mechanical in their ecstasy. When the two lovers awake from post-coital slumbers they succumb to horror, as if, only now, absurdly, do they become aware of each others’ “identities”: as if they had acted before as automata.
Wegener rejected the expressionist label, but the strangeness of the shapes of the Ghetto’s architecture conjure a similar anxiety. One that is doubled. Not simply by the film’s anti-semitism (which is sentimental and orientalist rather than supremacist), nor its purloining of Jewish ‘history’ as a kind of proto-cinema, but rather by its geological vision of a universal clay people-monster in servitude to authority and bounded to a single community. Where vampires and zombies split the world, opening up geo-illogical fissures, faults and thrusts in ideology, Wegener’s Golem re-establishes walls. This partly is ‘achieved’ by making the Emperor’s court, foil to the Ghetto, so completely unlocated, fey, stupid and insubstantial. The Ghetto is the only real place in the film: its uniqueness and essentialism is the means to its exclusion and limitation.
Truth or Friction
“In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false.”
(Guy Debord, 1967. Taken from Tamany Baker. )
There is a temptation to read ‘Der Golem’ through the lens of the Holocaust. To list its stereotypes. The narrative threat of expulsion, the fire that rages through the Ghetto. Nothing is obscured by such interpretations.
But there is another narrative here, about the doubleness of security; walls are returned to their solidity, doors are shut, fires are put out, the persecuted are ‘pardoned’ (!), boundaries and borders are honoured. In the final reel a racial binary is dramatically restated: a sweet blond child and an inert monster of clay. In a scene (later borrowed and inverted by director James Whale for his 1931 ‘Frankenstein’), the blond child destroys the Golem, grasping acquisitively at the magic amulet containing the vital parole that gives the monster life. (In another version אמת (truth) becomes מת (dead) when a single letter of the text within the amulet is removed.) The monster is returned to the fabric of the Ghetto, sans parole, sans the spirit it supposedly never had.
Yet we know it did.
Not from the mise-en-scène – in story and symbol Wegener’s Golem is soulless. But Wegener’s intense and excessive performance as the monster suggest something else. He violently expresses its furious embarrassment at its sudden aliveness, at the intrusion of life into its clay, the painful clumsiness of its abrupt sensibility, anger at its containment in the mountain of its own physique, desire that desire itself frustrates. This monster is rampant with neuroses, somehow speeded up, vicious cycles turning like gramophone records, the crank in the clay… not robotic, but metamorphic.
Wegener the actor is at odds with Wegener the writer/director, and for a moment, as if the film become subject to a thrust, the object-actor comes out on top of the subject-director.
truth, dead, sway, rock.
In the early nineteenth century ‘Rock Walk’ became a lookout point for naval officers’ families following and observing the Fleet at anchor in the bay (this is the origin of Torquay as a tourist resort). By the time the Dreadnoughts assembled just prior to the First World War the view was framed by palm trees.
In Michael Winner’s fine 1964 movie ‘The System’, Torquay emerges as a sexually exotic place, where sophisticated sexuality is communicated between the classes: the key venue for this transmission and reception is the Palm Court Hotel complex at the foot of ‘Rock Walk’ (now due to be demolished).
In the recessions of the 1970s and 1980s, the vibrant and confident ‘cheap’ end of the tourist trade fell away, common public spaces and entertainments shrank to almost nothing and the classes separated out. Imperialism returned in a new smoking mask.
Today, behind the blue boards of the contractors, a twisted and rusted bus shelter bears a fading legend: “White Power” and then a pseudo-runic symbol, scribbled in permanent marker pen rather than carved in stone or cast in the shape of steel ships.
Fault
Just as there is no purity of blood, so there is no integrity of soil. The arrow of time and the operation of entropy see to that. There can be no return for light or sound to the cosmic plasma. Even the fluid mantle below the Earth’s crust irredeemably cools.
The beauty of ‘Rock Walk’ (though it’s a headache for those responsible for it) is that it can no longer disguise its geological and symbolic volatility. Where it was once planted out with exotic plants and knitted together by the roots of numerous mature trees, today its crazed strata are revealed, punctuated by the stumps of old gaslight plinths, restraining wires, new rockeries and the remnant quartz and brain coral of surviving grottos. It is no longer a tourist artefact dressed with exotic properties, but part of a folding and crumpling crust. An artefact of the Sticklepath Fault.