The Magic World of Orson Welles (41 page)

Figures 8.3–8.6: Recurring use of doorway imagery in
The Trial
.

The “next room” in
The Trial
always suggests a repressed psychic horror—either a forbidden sexual desire, as in the case of Miss Burstner's apartment, or a hidden guilt, or a fear of retribution. Every entranceway portends some kind of shock; when K. crosses one of these he commits a psychic transgression as well as a literal one, and his anxiety inevitably increases. In the concluding scenes, however, his entrances and exits become more purposeful, reflecting his transformation into an angry, more active character. Near the climax, after he has witnessed the debasement of the Advocate's client Bloch (Akim Tamiroff), he leaves the room by defiantly breaking down a locked door. At the conclusion of the film the inhibiting walls and boundaries have become more fragile, at last yielding to an open space.

Perkins's movements through doors and ultimately into a field indicate the progress of his character; he does not actually get anywhere, but he does change. The film has begun with K. having all the respect for officialdom that his accusers could desire. He arranges his life methodically, he cowers before his boss, and he acts like a martinet to underlings in his office. He somewhat unsuccessfully fights back sexual longings, all the while boasting of his efficiency on the job. “Don't be surprised if you hear any day now that I've become Deputy Manager of my department,” he tells his cousin. “Why, all I've got to do is apply those same abilities to this case of mine.” His every conscientious effort to defend himself against the court makes him more and more a cog in the system of institutional horrors; even his complaints about the violation of his “civil rights” result in his becoming a guilty, frightened witness at the torture of low-level policemen. Gradually, however, he begins to show flashes of anger. Standing before an old man who waits patiently outside the courts of Law, he becomes testy and aggressive: “I'm under arrest [also]. You don't see
me
putting up affidavits. What makes you think this kind of thing is necessary?” He even commands respect from the court's guard, a weakling who regards him as a kind of hero. At the end of the film K. continues to insist, “I've got to catch up on my work at the office,” but he has become progressively more defiant, finally dismissing his attorney and sneering at the authority of the court.

If K. never becomes a sympathetic character, he is at least given a chance to assert himself. And as K. becomes bolder, his accusers visibly weaken. At first the police are bullies and Advocate Hastler is a demonic presence; indeed Welles has devised a typically theatrical entrance for himself: rising from a bed like a baroque exaggeration of all the invalid father figures in Kafka, he removes a hot towel from his face, steam floating in little clouds around his head. As usual, however, Welles tries to convey a softness and vulnerability behind the powerful façade. He makes Hastler into a childish, sometimes rather funny villain—for example, when he confides to K.'s uncle Max (Max Haufler) that there is a hole in the floor of his room at the court: “Not quite big enough to fall through, but if you stumble into it you find yourself with your leg hanging down into the corridor below—the very place where all your clients have to wait.” He pats his mistress on the bottom with all the ostentatious but somehow charming vulgarity of a Hank Quinlan, and he mischievously hides under the covers of his bed in order to play sadistic tricks on visitors; he puts on a show of authority, making his client Bloch humiliate himself while K. watches, but the display only makes K. more determined to rebel. The same ineffectiveness is seen in all the other legal officials; in the final episode, for example, the executioners do not even have the strength to put a knife into K. and are last seen running in fear from their own dynamite. At best, Welles suggests, the court's power over its cases is dependent upon the cooperation of the accused.

Figure 8.7: Hastler rises from the bed.

But K.'s progress through the labyrinth leads him to only a partial release from frustration, only a pyrrhic victory. Moreover, even though he becomes an angry member of a “human community,” he is less fortunate where women are concerned. His qualified moral triumph is obtained against what appears to be a purely masculine institution, a bureaucracy that is concerned with the abstractions of the “Law.” It is worth noting, however, that females always hover at the edges of this institution, and they represent an unresolved conflict. Repeatedly they offer K. favors or comfort, their charms luring him away from obsessive preoccupation with his “case.” In K.'s own offices and in the archives of the court, one occasionally notes prim ladies with their hair fastened in buns and their dresses buttoned to the neck, but just outside, K. encounters a whole gallery of more fascinating, threatening types. First there is Mrs. Grubach, the maternal landlady; then Miss Burstner, the prostitute; then Irmie (Naydra Shore), K.'s cousin from the country; then Hilda (Elsa Martinelli), the hausfrau who washes and sews outside the courtrooms; then Leni (Romy Schneider), who acts as nurse and sexual companion for the Advocate. As a group, they seem to prove the Advocate's notion that a defendant in a trial is always more “attractive” than ordinary law-abiding citizens.

“It can't be a sense of guilt,” the Advocate muses, trying to explain why his own mistress likes to seduce his clients. “We can't all be guilty, hmm?” Yet the officials of the court are as driven by secret desires as K. himself; thus the Law books have dirty illustrations in them, the official proceedings are interrupted by perverse sexual byplay, and the examining magistrate lusts after the guard's wife. Everywhere the rigid structure of the Law seems threatened by Eros, the women often becoming sinister manipulators of the higher authorities. It is typical of Welles, in fact, that the males who are connected with the law and the public world of social responsibility are weak, disorganized, and even impotent. Throughout his career one finds the same theme recurring—weakling fathers like the elder Kane or Minafer being set off against strong, dominating women, and the legal structure (as in
Touch of Evil
) being undermined by sexual passion. It might be said that the typical psychological difficulty of Welles's protagonists lies precisely
in the futile attempt to assert masculine control, to pass out of infancy and sexual chaos, to identify with a “father” who is ultimately not strong enough.

As a sign of the threat women embody in
The Trial
, Welles usually poses them at the other side of a doorway or a subtle visual barrier. Notice, for example, the compositions in the four shots reproduced in
figures 8.8–8.11
. In the first, K.'s cousin Irmie stands outside the glass partition of his office while K. talks with the deputy manager; K. wrings his hands, trying to ignore her. Meanwhile his boss gives a wry look and makes an insinuating remark: “We'll have to keep an eye on you, old man.” In the second shot, Hilda pulls up her dress to show K. her new stockings. “Do you wanna see?” she says, but the shadow of a crossbar in the foreground suggests that K. is psychologically forbidden to look. In the third, Leni holds out a key that opens the door to the Advocate's house, but at the same time she stands behind the bars of a partition. Finally, we see one of the urchin girls outside Titorelli's room, peering through a slat in the wall. Images like these, which contain both an invitation to contact and a prohibition against it, help to illustrate K.'s divided consciousness. They also turn the women—who are not so much characters as enigmatic objects of desire—into potentially dangerous creatures. By provoking K.'s desire to transgress, the females stimulate guilt, anxiety, and hostility. He attracts them, but he is also irritated and fearful, uncertain whether they are influential parasites—like the fleas in a guard's coat—or an actual menace to his “case.”

The more K. becomes angry at the court, the more appealing he becomes to the women, who have been arranged in an increasing order of aggressiveness. Mrs. Grubach, dressed in curlers and housecoat, plays the role of a respectable matron, so devoted to K. that she becomes jealous of Miss Burstner; Miss Burstner, in turn, allows K. a free kiss despite her need for sleep and her wish to be left alone; Irmie trails K. around and remarks that “cousins get married”; Hilda says that K. can do with her “whatever you want”; Leni fixes K. in her eye from the moment he enters the Advocate's house, luring him into a room piled with tons of papers, where, after swaddling him in a judge's robe and lying down amid the chaotic residue of legal “order,” she tries to seduce him; finally, a horde of teenagers—the mirror image of cousin Irmie—chase K. up a spiral staircase, pulling at his coat and squealing in sexual frenzy.

These women are slightly different from the ones in Kafka. They are wittier, usually authentically attractive, and lacking in what Walter Benjamin called Kafka's “dirty voluptuousness.” We see Leni spreading her hand to show a web of flesh between the fingers, but on the whole Welles seems either unwilling or unable to provide a truly Kafkaesque imagery of sexual unhealth. (In any case Romy Schneider is altogether too beautiful for the character she plays.) On the other hand, Welles has echoed Kafka by making the women in K.'s world become more unpleasant and threatening as they become increasingly erotic. At first they are only mildly annoying, but they become associated with a mounting perversity and violence as the nightmare deepens. Mrs. Grubach's smothering solicitude angers K., who unsuccessfully tries to close a window shade in her face; the promiscuous Miss Burstner throws K. out of her room when she suspects that he has committed a “political” crime; Irmie embarrasses K. at his office and follows him around the streets; Hilda brings him face-to-face with a terrifyingly sadistic law student who picks her up and carries her away; Leni, a vixenish woman with a “physical defect,” deceives and manipulates K., at one point trying to seduce both him and the client Bloch at the same time. In the most frightening scene of all, the swarm of urchins gather outside Titorelli's garret, peering at K., reaching through cracks in the walls to pinch him, begging to be let inside. Titorelli calls them “dirty-minded little pussies” and threatens to punish them with an ice pick. When K. leaves the garret, he first tries to avoid the girls by taking an exit that leads him into the court; realizing the futility of this course, he goes back the way he came, running a gauntlet of squealing females who chase him through an obviously symbolic sewer.