Die Buchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box), 1929. Directed by G. W. Pabst, written by Pabst, Joseph Fleisler, Ladislaus Vajda and Frank Wedekind. Starring (and how!) Louise Brooks, Fritz Kortner, Francis Lederer, Carl Goetz, Krafft-Raschig, Alice Roberts and Gustav Diessl.
Now available in a handsome DVD from The Criterion Collection.
She was a girl from Cherryvale, Kansas, that Louise Brooks. Beautiful, just beautiful. Look at her face: that’s a look that spans the ages, my friend. Girls from the 20s, girls from the 40s, girls from the 60s, 70s, 80s… well, they lose their lustre over the years. Some look plain silly. Not Brooks. Famous for that shiny black hair, but it was her smile, that smile that just melts your heart. Innocent, really innocent. I guess in real life, she was a joy, a headstrong, opinionated joy. So many men and women hated her, but those who adored her, well… My God, I’d say she was an angel, but, the way she lived, fire and sex. Maybe she was a devil. If she’s the devil I’ll take hell.
I first saw Pandora’s Box at some sort of college get together. I was mopping floors. This is what I did to keep the pen alive, I used to say. Janitor at night, tried to write in the day. Best work I was able to land were some lousy football stories about distant high school heroes. Worthless stuff, absolutely worthless.
I thought I was just a normal guy, you know? A man with dreams, a bit cultured, maybe, someone who could see and appreciate good movies and plays and music. Definitely not an obsessive. In fact, I used to laugh about those movie buffs and comic book nerds, anyone that had a passion that turned them into glassy-eyed, Dorito-eating munchkins. They used to have this University film club, and those fellows would come out of their parent’s basements to go all starry eyed over Woman in the Dunes or one of those dull Bergman epics.
One evening, they decided to show Pandora’s Box. I’ll never forget seeing the poster, and thinking, hmmm, she’s cute. I just figured it was something along the line of Cabaret, some weird movie from the 70s trying to replicate the past, make some statement about Vietnam or Watergate.
The movie begins, with some scratchy LP providing the music. I decided to take a break from waxing the halls, and I check into this seat. Figure I’ll take a nap. I’d been working my tail off, driving three hours to see one football team beat up another, coming home, writing my article for the shithole paper up north, then heading to the campus where I had the distinct pleasure to clean the floors of the learned. I settled in my seat to take a nap, thinking that when something big and bright goes on the screen, I’ll wake up, finish the job. That’s when I saw her.
My Lord, it starts right away. There she is, in that white dress, and that hair, that beautiful hair. She’s got a bottle tucked under her arm. Gin or something. There’s an old man there, with a big, silly moustache. He’s the meter reader, and she’s giving him some looks. And here’s the thing those foolish kids didn’t see: the girl wasn’t some harlot, some black widow luring poor men to their doom, no, my God, no. She was pure, in the sense that what she wanted was love. She would stare at these men, as if to acknowledge some kind of holiness in them, and then she would smile and just break your heart.
All this, in the first few minutes! I couldn’t stop watching. Lulu, as Brooks is called, is having a stormy relationship with this respected publisher, who’s got her cooped up like a bird in this apartment. Lulu is also followed around by this hideous old man, who pimped her as a child, who probably fucked the poor dear, who she, at one point, refers to as her father. There’s this brute of a man who follows the old man around, hoping to score something off Lulu. And then there’s the publisher’s handsome son, who loves her, and his friend, a woman, who is in love with this vision as well–she was, Louise liked to say, the first on-screen lesbian. Everyone wants to possess poor Lulu! And like a girl traipsing through the garden of Eden, she doesn’t see anything wrong with loving everyone.
Physical love, but it was still love. No matter how ugly the man–and some of those boys are ugly monkeys, wretched creatures, fiends of the gutter who just wanted to touch the heaven of Louise Brooks–she wanted to love them. To dance, to swoon, to be held.
That’s why I thought she was an angel.
There’s a murder in the movie. Louise holding a gun like it’s everything rotten in the world, and that’s true–guns are the antithesis of what she is, of love. She goes on the run with the son of the publisher, the son of the man she killed. Lulu is convicted, and then the men in the courtroom, locking arms, surround the girl and hasten her escape. In this city, in this courtroom, these men, beaten, ugly, full of tobacco and cheap liquor, well, for once in their miserable lives, they’re going to get near something beautiful, something angelic. And they help her flee.
But Lulu will not see a happy end. No, I’m wrong: she will finally fall in love, with Jack the Ripper of all people, dying at his hand. So perhaps she did find what she was looking for.
When I stumbled out of the auditorium, I was stunned, just stunned. I hated those students and film buffs then, talking, talking, talking, or laughing. I wanted to beat them over the head with my mop, tell them to be quiet. Upstairs, I worked in the blessed silence, with the lights off, only the warm glow of the exit signs to see if I was really even cleaning the damn floors. But it left me to my thoughts–of the girl from Cherryvale.
There was very little on video and DVD back then. Not much now. Amazingly, I bought an old projector, just to see if I could find some more pictures of hers. I made a trip to Rochester, New York, where she used to live, to the Eastman House, where many of her films are shown. It’s funny, you know, I’ve sort of lost my ability to write the garbage I used to write, so now all I can do is grunt labor. I flex my skills as an unpaid scribe on Louise Brooks sites, fan newsletters, etc. I consider myself the best of that lot, though that’s not saying much.
You’d probably say that I am a wreck. Look at me, though, I keep myself groomed, fit, and I do reckless things, because Louise would have liked that. I jump off railroad bridges into rivers, run shirtless in the winter, that sort of stuff, healthy, manly, I guess. She liked bold, confident men. But she never let them use her–she ran from Hollywood! Later, she became a writer. A girl who loved her solitude. Who loved to smile. Who loved to… well, to put it poetically, to love and be loved.
Men behave badly around her because it is her shining light that illuminates our depravity.
I try to keep a grip on this. I get out, go on dates, and no, I don’t think of Louise Brooks while I’m making love to another woman. You can’t make any money being an expert on her, and that’s not how I’d describe this feeling, this need to learn more about this lovely woman.
I take that back. I am not an expert, for who can really plumb those depths? No, I’m an admirer, a student, a gazer at the heaven of Louise Brooks. I know that I will never quite understand her.
Sometimes, in the late evenings, I wonder if I haven’t gone crazy. But then, I’m not hurting anyone. And I think of that smile, the back of her neck, her way of acting that seems to haunt every actress through history (look for it!), and I smile and am feeling good again. Louise did exactly what she wanted to in her life, from loving cheap stunt men who stabbed her in the back to ignoring the piles of money the big studios promised her. Just to dance, to keep her pride, to be in love.
She is beautiful. If there’s a heaven that is at all honest, she will be an angel. Again, that might be hell. I’m not certain.
