Damiel, in his descent, does not choose one thing in particular. Certainly he chooses to engage in a greater degree of sensory interaction with the world. He also chooses to engage in a far greater degree of social interaction. Damiel chooses mortality, as well. He desires to be with Marion as a human, but his longing to experience humanness from the mortal side was expressed in the scene in the BMW dealership, long before he first encountered Marion. The catalyst for his fall is Peter Falk -- the first human he chooses to seek out after the fall whom we know he observed while an angel. Compañero.

The Falk "character" is particularly interesting, because he is a former angel -- though Damiel does not realize this until after their first (oblique) encounter. "I can't see you, but I know you're here." The convincing greeting (and his statements that follow, about the simple pleasures he enjoys) may owe something to his character's abilities as an actor. The irony between Falk's profession and Damiel's desire -- Damiel speaks against pretense -- accentuates the variety of desires that have wings in Wings. Falk clearly relishes pretense -- both in his choice of profession and in the manner he chooses a hat to wear on the streets of Berlin.

More than anything else, however, Damiel chooses "choice". He chooses agency. He chooses consequences. He chooses to live. In harmony with one of the film's key conceits -- a variation of that expressed through Homer -- Damiel chooses to tell his own story, to write his own narrative, to create his own life. This is precisely the kind of choice that Wenders wants the viewer to be encouraged to make by experiencing Wings of Desire.

Wenders begins his first treatment of Wings with a quotation from Rilke's 8^th Elegy. Equally as important as the cosmology of the Elegies, however, is the general sense in Rilke's work of crafting one's self. As Ruth Perlmutter describes it: "Rilke's exhortation, 'You must change your life' along with his view of art as the therapeutic route to self-recreation, is the same message as Wenders' evangelical notion that cinema can make it possible to be 'born again.'" The line "Du mußt dein Leben ändern (You must change your life)," appears at the end of Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo," a poem in which witnessing art -- and being witnessed by it -- brings about the call to make a change or a choice.

Commentators have pointed to several of Rilke's Elegies as key sources for excavating Wings. For example: Perlmutter quotes from the 9^th, David Caldwell and Paul Rea cite the 2^nd, Alice Kuzniar analyzes the 7^th and 9^th, Les Caltvedt draws out specifics from the 4^th, Charles Helmetag mentions the 4^th and 8^th. The fourth elegy speaks to a view of childhood that Handke and Wenders express both through the place of children in the story and, specifically, through the poem that Damiel composes through the film:

Oh hours of childhood,
when behind each shape more than the past appeared
and what streamed out before us was not the future.
we felt our bodies growing and were at times
impatient to be grown up, half for the sake
of those with nothing left but their grownupness.
yet were, when playing by ourselves, enchanted
with what alone endures; and we would stand there
in the infinite, blissful space between world and toy,
at a point which, from the earliest beginning,
has been established for a pure event.

At the same time, the poem is, in large measure, a dark accounting on the human condition. Love is bound to fail ("Aren't lovers/ always arriving at each other's boundaries?--/ although they promised vastness, hunting, home.") A father is inevitably disappointed with his grown son, who carries a recurring sense of the dead man's unrest:

You, to whom life tasted
so bitter after you took a sip of mine,
the first, gritty infusion of my will,
Father--who, as I grew up, kept on tasting
and, troubled by the aftertaste of so
strange a future, searched my unfocused gaze--
you who, so often since you died, have trembled
for my well-being, within my deepest hope,
relinquishing that calmness which the dead
feel as their very essence

By the time of the seventh elegy, however, a transformation has occurred and a celebration emerges. This is akin to the point in Wings where Damiel's poem moves from celebrating childhood (and denigrating adulthood), and shows a link between the two points in life -- an adult experiencing life with a childlike grace or gaze.

Not wooing, no longer shall wooing, voice that has outgrown it,
be the nature of your cry; but instead, you would cry out as purely as a bird
when the quickly ascending season lifts him up, nearly forgetting
that he is a suffering creature and not just a single heart
being flung into brightness, into the intimate skies. Just like him
you would be wooing, not any less purely--, so that, still
unseen, she would sense you, the silent lover in whom a reply
slowly awakens and, as she hears you, grows warm,--
the ardent companion to your own most daring emotion.

Not only has the tone brightened, but the metaphor of engaging joyously with life, as if with a lover, resonates deeply with the central conceit of Wings, where the love relationship between Damiel and Marion can be read as a metaphor exhorting an active, loving, creative interaction with life. This personal agency is the critical link between the potential for joy -- "a sense of being" -- and achieving/experiencing it:

Truly being here is glorious. Even you know it,
you girls who seemed to be lost, to go under--, in the filthiest
streets of the city, festering there, or wide open
for garbage. For each of you had an hour, or perhaps
not even an hour, a barely measurable time
between two moments--, when you were granted a sense
or being. Everything. Your veins flowed with being.
But we can so easily forget what our laughing neighbor
neither confirms nor envies. We want to display it,
to make it visible, though even the most visible happiness
can't reveal itself to us until we transform it, within.

Perhaps the most closely aligned of Elegies is the untitled fragment that did not become part of the ten elegies proper. Here one finds praise of the urban world. "Now shall I praise the cities, those long-surviving/ (I watched them in awe) great constellations of the earth." Rilke celebrates the everyday world in this fragment. But, more importantly, he personifies "life" as a woman with who he is inevitably drawn into an ultimate relationship -- as Damiel is, in the Esplanade, where Marion personifies something very similar to Rilke's (female) "life":

Let no one say that I don't love life, the eternal
presence: I pulsate in her; she bears me, she give me
the spaciousness of this day, the primeval workday
for me to make use of, and over my existence flings,
in her magnanimity, nights that have never been.
Her strong hand is above me, and if she should hold me under,
submerged in fate, I would have to learn how to breathe
down there. Even her most lightly-entrusted mission
would fill me with songs of her; although I suspect
that all she wants is for me to be vibrant as she is.

It is in this fragment that we find an echo of the character Homer's questions about an epic of peace: "Once the poets resounded over the battlefield; what voice/ can out shout the rattle of this metallic age/ that is struggling on toward its careening future?" And provides an answer that Homer does not hit upon, but that Wings as a whole, suggests: "And indeed it hardly requires the call, its own battle-din/ roars into song." Finally, however, the crux of the celebration of the world and interaction with it contains a poignant reminder of the intersection of creation, agency, responsibility, and consequence:

... Let him whose soul is no longer startled
and transformed by palaces, by gardens' boldness, by the rising
and falling of ancient fountains, by everything held back
in paintings or by the infinite thereness of statues--
let such a person go out to his daily work, where
greatness is lying in ambush and someday, at some turn,
will leap upon him and force him to fight for his life.

Roland Barthes's work -- especially S/Z -- provides an interesting reference point for processes involving agency and interaction. Rilke treats "life" as a woman; Wenders models his ideal viewer's interaction with Wings on the relationship he depicts between Damiel and Marion, itself a metaphor for the relationship between a person and the world around her. Barthes speaks of texts (Wenders' film is one) residing along a continuum between the "writerly" (scriptible) and the "readerly" (lisible). The writerly text lacks a "narrative structure, a grammar or a logic" that is open to many types of construction by the reader (or, in the case of film, the viewer). The readerly text offers a definitive meaning for itself -- what might be called the conventional viewer's expectation regarding classical (Hollywood) cinema and narrative. Wings attempts to position itself as more of a writerly text. This happens on the surface, in the film's earlier angelic portions, where largely non-narrative techniques are employed. The viewer is invited to engage in active interpretation. As the film moves to an apparently more readerly mode (as the love story gains salience), two reactions are likely. First, the viewer may instinctively cling to the readerly exposition. At the same time, however, the viewer is still in the mind set of a writerly text -- meaning that the viewer adopts a somewhat more writerly stance than might otherwise be applied to a readerly text.

This writerly stance towards the readerly-like love story is necessary. On one level, much of the dialog in the bar is simply too "weird" to be a readerly text. Having primed the viewer to approach Wings as a writerly text, the viewer is more readily able to uncover meta-textual content in Marion's speech in the bar. One key meta-text is that life can be most fruitfully engaged when doing so as if in a loving relationship with a writerly text. That is, one's process of writing one's own life story, in the context or interaction with the rest of life, the rest of the world, is heralded. Succinctly stated, the means of communicating one of the key meanings within Wings (actively engaging in a relationship between viewer and film) is also one of the key meanings one can ferret out from the film itself (actively engaging in a relationship between oneself and the world). The discussion between lovers in the bar implies that writing one's own life, while an act of self-definition, should be engaged in as if participating in a relationship -- as if in love with the world, with the "other" in which one is engaged in the process of creating oneself.

Though he doesn't speak of it in Barthes' terms of "writerly" and "readerly," Wenders is aware of the tension between the two.

For Wenders, the notion of "images" is directly associated with non-narrative, documentary, and essay films -- in opposition to narrative, feature films. Wings of Desire becomes a subversive exercise in that is uses the desire for (born from expectation of) narrative to achieve several goals. In the context of the narrative interlude, the love-story, the viewer is encouraged to approach the film (and the world) as if it were all "images" (not part of a prepared story) and create of it (in it) the story one wants to create.

Wenders recognizes the human desire for stories/narrative. Interestingly, his equation of "stories = God" is quite like some criticisms put forth by Jacques Derrida, and recalls Nietzsche's Zarathustra's "God is dead."

Wenders is not arguing against stories, per se, but placing caveats in front of their celebration. In Wings, this argument becomes more meaningful and moving than elsewhere in Wenders' oeuvre. Wings is a call to the viewer to rend herself from any particular story and, instead, to engage in the "play" of crafting a story from the vast variety of possibilities offered in the world. There is also the latent call to do this in a manner in which the "play" takes place as if between two lovers -- one's self and the world -- since the conceit the film employs is that of a love story.

This "call to interaction" is deliberate on Wenders' part:

This call to action is perhaps the most profound level on which Wings becomes political. There is certainly a political element to the associations with German history that are peppered throughout the film (the Nazi past, the divided Berlin). And, for Wenders, all filmmaking is a political act, in that it is an expression of the filmmaker's attitude toward the world. Speaking with Peter Jansen, Wenders said, "Maybe not everyone will want to believe me; but I believe that each 'take' in a film also makes visible the other 'take' on things of the man or woman who is responsible for it. Each 'take' shows you what's in from of the camera but also what's behind it. For me a camera is an instrument that works in two directions. It shows both the object and the subject. That why in the end each 'take' shows the 'take' of the director."

Wings might be considered Wenders most political film, in the sense that it champions choice (which can be a critical component of change). The insistence on exercising human agency could be seen as a call to work against the situation Louis Althusser has described in which individuals are "interpellated" by society's ideological superstructures. In Wenders' construction, "entertainment" in film is what props up the status quo (by implicitly not challenging it).

Of course, Wenders does seek a particular kind of change, in his "roundabout" manner of showing a vision of a positive direction for individuals in the direction of a better world:

These essays are copyrighted © 1999 - 2001 by Nathan Wolfson (nathan underscore wolfson at yahoo dot com). Quotations from other sources are copyrighted by those sources, as indicated in the Notes and Bibliography. All rights are reserved.