Cameras and Clowns

Abstract

If Lola is the embodiment of the claim to female pleasure, what does the male- positioned response to Lola look like? At first glance, it would seem to be best represented by Professor Immanuel Rath played by Emil Jannings in Sternberg’s The Blue Angel. If Dietrich is the Ur-Lola, Jannings is the “Ur-Rath.” Displaced from the severity and sterility of his classroom to the cabaret, Rath becomes the ludicrous dupe of his own desire. Just recall Rath’s first and second visits to the Blue Angel. At every threshold, behind every door, Rath runs into one clown or another. For all their visual prominence, these clowns scarcely figure in the plot. In fact, Sternberg takes great pains to stage these shots so that Rath seems to be staring at his mirror double, but without really registering it. Undoubtedly the clowns figure the unsuccessful and inadequate male response to Lola. And they foreshadow Rath’s decline into pathetic buffoonery.