The Damned (film)

[Anthony Simon]

This is not a film I have seen, but I think it is one that has made a substantial dent on my subconscious image of CDers. Below is a link to the amazon.co.uk page:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Damned-DVD-Dirk ... 911&sr=1-1

I do basically remember the advertising campaign and the kind of "vibe" that surrounded the film. This is neatly summarised in the tagline to the film poster and the image on the poster:

"He was soon to become the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany".

The poster image is that of Helmut Berger in Marlene Dietrich drag.

What this suggests is some dark horrible stew of emotions underlying CDing which naturally morphs into (or has an affinity with) Nazism. At least that's how I took it at the time. The way I came to think of "The Damned" was by trying to work out what my subconscious image of CDing was - the image of Berger dressed up was what came into my mind.

So...I was wondering what other people felt about this. I was around 15-16 when the film came out and (perhaps because of this) the imagery had a powerful effect on me. Did anyone else experience this? Do people feel that such an image might have played into the general way people view CDs?

Anyway, I've ordered the movie (which, as I said had its effect even without me seeing it) and Cabaret (also about the coming of Nazi Germany with an MC in drag).

[DonnaT]

Never heard of it before.

http://www.cinemagia.ro/trailer/la-cadu ... ilor-3686/

slow to load. I put on pause for a few minutes then hit play.

[April Rose]

I saw the movie. It was good but depressing. It didn't really have that much to do with cross dressing, other than that one scene. It was really more about old world rigidity and prejudice inadvertently leaving a fertile ground for nihilism and modernist moral relativism. Ultimately the two opposites resolve in the wort possible way.

[Absaroka]

I don't really remember it. I do remember seeing a double feature of Pappilon and Cabaret. Talk about depressing.....the last scene in Cabaret succeeds in being incredibly horrifying.

Cabaret is interesting in that it correctly portrays pre Nazi Berlin as a relatively open minded place with regard to sex and gender. This was were a lot of work in transexualism was done.

Zari

[Anthony Simon]

I've watched both of these films now. I think The Damned is the better film, really powerful and horrifying. Cabaret is a good film, which makes good use of the interchange between songs of entertainment in the "cabaret" and "real world" events leading up to that last scene.

The crossdressing in both is subsumed into some wider sensibility in the wider world. In The Damned, like April Rose says, there is the "anything goes" that is suggested to be the core base of Nazism. In Cabaret, it's the "divinely decadent" world of the "cabaret" and so (I suppose) the world of the Weimar Republic which preceded Nazism. To suggest that "decadence" precedes Nazism seems to imply decay precedes evil. The Damned seems to make a stronger statement - that the "anything goes" of men dressing up like women is, to some extent, an active preparation for the "anything goes" of Nazism.

It's not CDing - as people here understand it - in either film. The one crossdressing character in Cabaret is a transvestite prostitute - and the whole world of "cabaret" is a demi-monde. Apart from the early scene where Berger appears in drag, there's another (late) scene where SA Nazis put on a drag performance at an SA reunion. Performers and audience fall into each others' arms in a drunken debauch. Then other Nazis come along and massacre them (I think this is an evocation of "The Night of the Long Knives"). Because the Berger character turns into this demonic Nazi at the end, there is a definite suggestion - in terms of what happens on screen - that dressing up as a woman and being a Nazi are (or can be) contiguous.

At the same time, transvestism is not the core of The Damned. The Berger character is also a paedophile (as well as an Oedipal mother killer), utterly ruthless and deeply narcissistic. For me, the paedophilia is probably the core of the film - kind of the ultimate "damnedness" of it.

On the other hand, if you were one of the guys writing the "paraphilia" description of CDing for American pyschologists, you'd probably see the paedophilia of the Berger character and his CDing as entirely consistent things.