WINGS OF DESIRE
(Der Himmel über Berlin)
PARTS: ONE
TWO THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
For
years, I found the most troubling portion of Wings of Desire was the
climactic discussion between the soon-to-be lovers in the Esplanade bar near
the end of the film. It poses the most likely break in the spell that the film
achieves. The dialog in the bar, however, lies at the heart of the film, and
deliberately expresses a large portion of the film’s central argument. The dialog
brings this about within the story while speaking about the construction of
narrative on the part of characters within the film, and on the part of viewers
outside of the film's world, through a layering described in this monograph.
The scene amplifies and re-enforces the film's ultimate theme: Wings celebrates
the risk, the joy, and the critical importance of creating one's own life --
a narrative -- to fully live in our world. Marion's dialog in the bar, while
an invitation to Damiel to become partners in love, is also an invitation to
the viewer from the filmmaker to participate in the process of composing, inventing,
or, writing one's own narrative, one’s life.
How can a viewer reach the dialog in the bar with an understanding of its import? How can the film generate a willingness to reach beyond the world of the film and enter into a dialog with the film about the world beyond the frame – and to enter into a dialog with the world? As I have elaborated, Wenders uses very specific techniques in particular interludes to cast the necessary spell that can, by the final dialog in the bar, be triggered as if by a hypnotist.
Other interpretations of Wings of Desire are possible, of course. Some of these rhyme with the interpretations presented here. One example: Les Caltevedt asserts that
In archaic societies, the reliving of events through ritual by a community has a purpose: "To cure the work of Time, it is necessary to 'go back' and find the 'beginning of the World.'" Many myths continue from this point with a couple who will repopulate the new world (in some case a new sky [Himmel] is imagined also). This is how we are to understand the conversation between Marion and Damiel at the end of Wings.
However, I would point to the union being significantly more metaphorical. Assenka Oksiloff gets at this notion, as it becomes salient through the cumulative effect the work possesses. "If Wender's film is a synaesthetic rather than a purely visual machine, it provides us with a model the Gesamtkunstwerk [synthesis of the arts] that seeks to span the imaginary chasm between viewer and viewed rather than maintain the fiction of a self-enclosed (organic or technical) artwork."
Wenders has said that the real story of Wings of Desire begins after the movie concludes. The enigmatic "nous sommes embarques" ("we have embarked") hints at this notion, as does the "To be continued," which does not refer to a possible sequel (though there was one) but refers, rather, to the love story that likely occurs between Wings and Wings' nominal sequel. While the surface presents a somewhat conventional love narrative by the end of Wings, there is a subtext seeking to break through that makes reading the films final major scene in the bar as a conventional boy-gets-girl conclusion problematic. Other commentators have spoken of this "problem". For example, the German critic Wolfram Schütte infers an adolescent sensibility at work here, "in deren schiefer Emphase noch frühe erotische Verklemmtheiten nachwirken" ("in whose unsure phase early erotic fixations still have a lasting grip").
Such criticisms have been leveled against other passages in Handke's works -- for example, the soliloquies of Nova in Handke's play (directed by Wenders at the Salzburg Festival in 1982) Über die Dörfer (literally, Over the Villages).
This "problematic" nature of the scene in the Esplanade, however, is because the dialog is only marginally about a conventional love narrative. As Ruth Perlmutter notes:
What on the surface appears as a conventional plot device -- an angel in love with a human -- fuels a cinematic subtext: the camera is in love with the world it observes but from which it remains helplessly exiled. Underlying the sentimental story of an angel ready to swap his seraphic insubstantiality is the filmmaker's traditional desire to bridge the separation between the alienated viewer -- represented by the angel, camera, spectators, director -- and the viewed, or the alternative world within the film which represents the lived experience that Marion represents and offers to Damiel.
Don't rely on cinema -- or any other mechanism -- for your narrative, for your story. Learn what you can from it -- and then write your own story, take your own leap into the world, devise your own narrative.
As
noted, the Esplanade is one of the few surviving landmarks around the Potsdamer
Platz from the pre-WWII era. The Esplanade has a complex relation to the film,
in that its relation to Berlin history is pejoratively loaded. During WWI, this
was a scene of decadence on the part of the elite. Passers-by, ordinary Berliners
whose lives were being shaped by the hardships of wartime scarcities, could
glimpse palatial meals beings enjoyed inside where life seemed un-effected by
the scarcities that permeated every facet of most Berliners' lives. During the
Second World War, the bar in the Esplanade was a favorite, exclusive haunt of
high-ranking Nazi officials. In Wenders' film, the Esplanade is re-cast as the
place where a personal (and potentially societal) transformation of a more egalitarian
and hopeful nature transpires. The area around the Potsdamer Platz -- in whose
ruins, in which Homer seeks grand narrative, the narrative or Berlin, a lost
sense of place -- is the home (in the Esplanade) of the point where a new, more
hopeful (and loving) narrative or engagement with life is born.
Boy-doesn't-get-girl. "Girl" controls this situation. The words all belong to Marion, and she makes it plain that she can readily walk away from the situation:
It must finally become serious.
I've often been alone but I've never lived alone. When, I was with someone, I was often happy but at the same time it all seemed a coincidence. These people were my parents but it could have been others. Why was this brown-eyed boy my brother and not the green-eyed boy on the opposite platform. The taxi driver's daughter was my friend but I might as well have put my arm round a horse's neck. I was with a man, in love and I might as well have left him there and gone off with the stranger, met in the street.
Look at me, or don't. Give me your hand, or don't. No, don't give me the hand, and look away.
I think tonight is the new moon. No night more peaceful. No bloodshed in all the city.
I've never played with anyone and yet I've never opened my eyes and thought: Now it's serious. At last it's becoming serious. So I've grown older. Was I the only one who wasn't serious? Is it our times that are not serious.
I was never lonely, nor alone, nor with others. But I would have liked to be alone at last. Loneliness means: I'm at last whole. How I can say it, as tonight I'm at last alone.
I must put an end to coincidence. The new moon of decision. I don't know if there's destiny, but there's a decision! Decide!
We are now the times. Not only the whole town, the whole world is taking part in our decision. We two are now more than us two. We incarnate something. We are sitting in the place of the people and the whole place is full of people who are dreaming the same dream. We are deciding everyone's game!
I am ready. Now it's your turn. You hold the game in your hand. Now or never!
You need me. You will need me. There's no greater story than ours, that of man and woman. It will be a story of giants, invisible, transposable, a story of new ancestors.
Look, my eyes, they are the picture of necessity, of the future of everyone in the place.
Last night I dreamt of a stranger, of my man. Only with him could I be alone, open up to him, wholly open, wholly for him, welcome him wholly into me, surround him with the labyrinth of shared happiness. I know it's you.
Of course, Damiel has already answered Marion's call to make the decision to live life, to make decisions, to engage in the figurative intercourse with existence that Marion personifies in her soliloquy, in his own statement before making the final transition to a mortal state:
I'm going to enter the river. [An] Old human expression, often heard, that I just understood today. Now or never, moment of the ford. But there is no other bank, there is only the river. Forward in the ford of time, in the ford of death. We are not yet born, so let's descend.
And, if there was any question about the role of narrative in the life of humans, the film closes with Homer: "Name me the men, women and children who will look for me, me their story-teller, their spokesman -- for they need me more than anything in the world." Wings of Desire suggests that they need story-tellers so much that they should create stories themselves -- that, in fact, to truly live life is to write the story of one's life in a way that interacts with the rest of life.
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.