Cabaret / House of Leaves, part two
Part two (see part one for warnings):
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No excuse huh? Guess I’m just another bastard abandoning XXXX woman and kids for a big adventure. I should grow up, right?
HoL, p. 389.
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“I am never ever ever going in there again, darlings,” says Sally, tears tracking black-flecked trails down her face. “There’s nothing down there, nothing at all.” She shudders, blinks. “I felt like Krazy Kat in the cartoons, darlings. Nothing making sense.”
Clara frowns, obviously more than a sheet or two to the wind. She knocks back another gulp of vodka and passes the bottle on to Sally.
“Your rich professor, though. This will perk up his interest, I’ll bet.” Clara grabs the bottle back, sticks it up between her legs. Sally cackles.
“Clara. I haven’t found him yet. Do try not to count your chickens, dearest one.”
“Chickens?”
They are sitting out in front of the stage, somewhere around where the black corridor should pass. But there is only dusty sunlight, coming down from the door, [a smell of watery disinfectant, lye and beer and soap. Piss too, as I recall]. The light catches the telephones on the tables, the chipped fake cherries in Clara’s black hat.27
[They told the story to the compère, the Bowles Manuscript reports. He listened with thin lips and eyes as flat as slate. Then his eyes snapped back to black-button brightness, sharp with mischief and something like anger, if you looked close enough.
He folded himself down into a seat, thin as old silk eaten through by bright chemical dyes.
“Golden boys and girls all must, I suppose,” he said, conspiratorially, to Sally; smacked his lips.
She nodded breezily.
“Lash arte o esperanza,” said the compère, to himelf.] [sic]
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[...] tropos is at the center of “trope” and it means “turn.”
HoL, p. 150.
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The shot pulls back, leaves them still in the sunlight muddled around the grimy tables, the greasy plush chairs.
“Cut,” says a voice. “Where’s Chad?” says someone else [Chad Navidson played Dieter. It was never planned as a speaking part]. People hustle out from behind the camera, start adjusting Sally’s makeup. An extra in spruce field grey uniform wanders by.
[The Bowles Manuscript reports that, after Sally and Clara’s abortive exploration, they had pushed a heavy dark wardrobe, rolling easily enough on little black-beetle wheels, over in front of that open door, and made straight for the bar, Clara’s face stark bone-white under her florid greasepaint.
Before they moved the wardrobe over the entrance, however, they could see that the corridor was now lined from end to end with doors, all tightly shut.
And once they’d moved the wardrobe into place, they heard behind the wood a bang, and then another. Then faster and faster, bang, bang bang bang bang, like a little boy running a great thick stick along park railings.
The sound of every single door along the passage banging back on its hinges, opening wide.
It was then that they realised that Dieter was nowhere to be found.28
Knocking back their vodka by the bar, however, they heard him shouting, muffled, just behind the wall. A long way off, though, as far as they could tell. And there beyond the wall the empty toilets, graffiti and chipped porcelain and piss.
And nothing, no-one else.
They stayed to work that evening. Outside, there was marching in the streets.29]
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“It’s kind of scary. [...] Like you stop thinking about something and it vanishes. [...]”
HoL, p. 126.
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[“I live at the end of a five and a half minute hallway,” Sally sang that evening, quickstepping her way through the song, hands flat out at her hips, tight black hair spangled with glitter and grease.30
She worked the room between numbers, cradling the table telephones between shoulder and ear. Oh do you see me here, dear. Oh, no, you must guess. Can’t you tell me from my voice, you big strong men at table ten?
Only once she picked up a ringing phone on silence, at first, not even the record-spin buzz of the wire. And then, far distant, the sound of shouting, then another sound, a cry.
Sally sniffed, plucked at the beaded lattice of her bodice with cigarette-yellow fingers, nicotine in every dry tight whorl, green nails.31 She made eyes at a fat man with velvet lapels, a gold swastika in the plush folds of his ascot. Sipped at her thin red cocktail, champagne and red wine: Turk’s Blood.32
Slipped off her shoes at the end of the evening, twitched a note out of her garter.
“I’m getting out of here,” she said, the white face of the compère behind her, Mitzi and Clara shrugging on their coats. “And, darlings, I ain’t never ever coming back.”
That’s when the doors slammed shut.]
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[...] blinking out of the darkness, two eyes pale as October moons, licking its teeth, incessantly flicking its long polished nails, and then before it can reach - [...]
HoL, p. 506.
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That’s when the tape goes straight to black and white, half way through Sally turning her face up to a makeup assistant’s hovering powder-pad.
You can hear it on the soundtrack, too, the growl. Everyone looks up. A runner drops a tray of coffee mugs, and we see at the corner of the frame - the only time he comes in shot at all - the director’s face, a blur of worried white.33
It is quite clear no-one knows where the sound is coming from. Until there is a knock, quite distinct. One, two, three times, from the back of the stage. The camera pans round, raggedly, to follow it, catching the edge of the set, a glimpse of chairs and wires beyond the borders of the Klub. And then the blackness, at the far back of the stage. The wisps of steam from the spilled coffee, from people’s mouths. The cold. Most of them must have assumed the refrigeration unit in the tunnel set next door had gone on the blink, because they barely moved.34 Sweet Californian sunshine just outside the hangar and they stayed and raised their eyebrows at the dark. The knock comes once again.
[And it comes now, behind the breezeblock, the mahogany. One two three, except of course I removed the breezeblock long ago. I shoved the sideboard back; no mean feat for a man of my age, I can tell you. The door is open, open to the stairs.]
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‘Well, listen ... Once, when I was very small, I was lying in bed at night. It was very dark and very late. And suddenly I woke up and saw a great big black hand stretching over the bed. I was so frightened I couldn’t even scream. I just drew my legs up under my chin and stared at it. [...]’
Isherwood, The Berlin Novels, p. 376.
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The Kit Kat Klub shows the actors looking querulously at the technicians, still mostly back behind the camera. In black and white, the scene looks suddenly authentic, despite the odd cameraman in windbreaker and jeans. A seedy club in 1930s Berlin, clientele interrupted mid cocktail by a riot outside.35
The knocking becomes a fusillade, far too fast for any human hand.36 An almost continuous sound, fast as film-frames flicking past the eye, as a weight from a snapped pulley, rocketing down.
Sally stands up, wrinkles her nose. Turns to the camera, tapping long impatient nails on the rim of her glass.
It’s at this moment that the floor begins to tilt.
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This door was so heavy that I had to push it open with both hands; it closed behind me with a hollow boom, like the firing of a canon.
Isherwood, Berlin Novels, p. 426.
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[The Bowles manuscript relates they tried the front door first. The door to the grotty urinals, the front window, high up at street-level, all of two feet wide in any case. Barstools bounced off the glass like rubber, and on Sally’s second swing, darkness came shuttering neatly down beyond the panes. Their breath began to mist.
It was only then that they made for the backstage, crowding into the fusty dressing room. The lights were on. Shining across the velvet and the net, the nylon and the coarse brown carpet, framing the mirror like warm yellow pearls grown deep in vast fantastic oysters, ready for the stage.
Both doors of the wardrobe were open wide, inside them nothing but a sharp black drop.
They pushed past to the back door, rattled its leather curtain to one side. Behind it came the smells of the side street, rain and damp paper, piss. At their backs, wood crackled and snapped, as if in a bonfire. The wardrobe was twisting inwards, flying out into the dark in a barrage of planks and splinters. The floor began to slope towards the void. Sally wrenched the door open.
And behind it was another passageway, pitch black.]
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"Okay. What do you want to play?"
"I don't know," she shrugs. "Always."
HoL, p. 73.
--
Unfortunately we have no way of knowing just which cameraman was filming at the close of The Kit Kat Klub. Whoever he may have been, he kept on writing - filming, I should say - until the end.
As the knocking stops and, stumbling out of the dark, comes Chad, Dieter’s gangling young actor. The floor rights itself; people pick themselves up from amongst the tumbled set dressings.
Chad walks out to the edge of the stage.
“I found some stairs,” he says: the last clear words on the tape.
The camera zooms in towards his face, his open black mouth.37
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"hallways."
HoL, p. 73.
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The floor jerks once again; there is a terrible clatter, some sharp screams. The film blurs and stills, hooked now on some protrusion on the floor. It’s tilted down: the wide frame of the stage, below it now, is visible. It is quite clear the floor has tilted a good ninety degrees.
We only see one person fall into the dark. What takes up most of the frame is Sally’s face.38 She must have been thrown against the camera, and hung on, for there she is, too close for focus, white skin and great dark eyes, the lens fogging just slightly with each breath.39
She tightens her lips, opens her mouth [in slow motion, it is apparent she is about to scream].
And then the lights go out.
[Sally went first, feeling her way down the passageway. The Bowles Papers do not record when she first realised that no-one was following her.]
The tape continues, however, for half an hour. In public screenings of The Kit Kat Klub, this final section, unrelentingly black, is usually excised. If a concession is made, it usually means the inclusion of the brief section where we hear a sigh, or possibly a very distant howl.
[The stairs are open. Open as your soft thighs, my Max would say. It never was the same, after the war. I have a printout of that Sally’s face, the last frame of the film, The Kit Kat Klub. I am not sure how well I remember my first Sally’s face. It’s hard to tell with all that makeup, anyway.
I shall go down the stairs now. But I said that before.]
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The dread of doors that won’t close is something everyone knows from dreams. Stated more precisely: these are doors that appear closed without being so.
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, L2,7, p. 409.
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[Sally hummed to herself, thinly, in the dark.40 Her feet found the stairs.
The others, spilling out into the back alley, rain and peeling bills, hammers and sickles and swastikas painted splashily over the walls, did not realise at first that Sally was not there. They turned back, when they did. An empty alley, a solid, wet brick wall, no door at all. Behind them, blinking in the rain, the sign, The Kit Kat Klub. Blue neon, going on and off and on.
Around the front, the windows were gone, too. The door was there, tight shut.
They heard her singing then, inside the walls. A voice fattened with smoking and with fear. It receded into silence, or, perhaps, it stopped.
And they walked away, Clara first, then Mitzi and the compère, heads bowed down, faces still thick with greasepaint, their footsteps slapping through the Berlin rain.]
Behind them, the doorknob, big and brassy as a jaffa orange, slowly turns. The door swings open, open on the stairs.41
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1 See Fyodor Dostoyevsky, ‘White Nights’, in Notes From Underground (New York: Signet Classics, 1961), p. 21: ‘A dreamer, if you want me to define him, is not a real human being but a sort of intermediary creature. He usually installs himself in some remote corner, shrinking even from the daylight. And once he’s installed in that corner of his, he grows into it like a snail or at least like that curious thing which is at the same time and animal and a house - the tortoise.’ See also Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1999) I4,5, p. 221: ‘“To dwell” as a transitive verb - as in the notion of “indwelt spaces”; herewith an indication of the frenetic topicality concealed in habitual behaviour. It has to do with fashioning a shell for ourselves.’
2 Gerald Manley Hopkins, ‘The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air we Breathe’, in The Poems of Gerald Manley Hopkins, ed. W. H. Gardner and N. H. Mackenzie, p. 96.
3 See G. H. Mutlin, ‘Though a Glass Darkly: Dialect in Translation in the ‘Bowles Manuscript’’, Intricacies 23, 1998, 65-79, and H. R. Munroe, ‘Girltalk: Sally Bowles’ Broken German’, in Reshaping Femininities, ed. G. Brookes (London: CR Schuster, 1995), pp. 124-89.
4 ‘Too bad dark languages rarely survive’: Mark Z Danielewski’s House of Leaves (hereafter HoL) (London: Random House, 2000), p. 89.
5 See H Fetlin, ''Angels with plump black cheeks’: Colonial and Postcolonial Discourses in The Kit Kat Klub’, Diaspora 22 (2003), 14-55.
6 ‘Have you ever worn a maid’s outfit?’ HoL, p. 357.
7 ‘She could have laid this world to waste.
Maybe she still will.’ HoL, p. 502.
8 ‘Paglia: How would I describe it? The feminine void.’ HoL, p. 364.
9 For ‘drapery’, see HoL, p. 119. For ‘jewelry box’, ibid, p. 349. See also ‘The place is like a power-station which the engineers have tried to make comfortable with tables and chairs from an old-fashioned, highly respectable boarding house.’ Christopher Isherwood, ‘Goodbye to Berlin’ (1939), in The Berlin Novels (London: Random House, 1992), p. 260.
10 A. L. Chakravarti, ‘Doorway to Expressionism: Down the Rabbit Hole in Black and White’, in Film Strip 14 (1983), 71-112.
11 ‘To construct the city topographically - tenfold and a hundredfold - from out of its arcades and its gateways, its cemeteries and bordellos, its railroad stations and its ..., just as formerly it was defined by its churches and its markets. And the more secret, more deeply embedded figures of the city: murders and rebellions, the bloody knots in the network of the streets, lairs of love, and conflagrations.’ Benjamin, The Arcades Project, C1,8, p. 83.
12 ‘The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle-class.’ Isherwood, The Berlin Novels, p. 243.
13 ‘What becomes of such things? How could they ever be destroyed?’ HoL, p. 244.
14 ‘That blank stare, permanently fixed on some strange slate bare continent’: HoL, p. 267. See also HoL, p. 319, for ‘grave’. Compare the meditation on stone that opens Gustave Meyrink’s 1915 The Golem (New York: Dover Publications, 1976), ed. E. F. Bleiler, p. 3: ‘This image of the stone that resembled a lump of fat assumes ever larger and larger proportions within my brain. I am striding along the dried-up bed of a river, picking up weathered, worn flints [...] black, with sulphry spots, like the petrified attempts by a child to create squat, spotty monsters. I strive with all my might and main to throw these stone shapes far away form me, but always they drop out of my hand, and, do what I will, are there, for ever there, within my sight. Whereupon every stone that has ever played a role in my life rises into existence and compasses me round.’ Compare Jan Svankmajer’s short film, A Game of Stones, 1965. And see also George Herriman, ‘Krazy Kat’, May 16th 1926, in Krazy & Ignatz, ed. Bill Blackbeard (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2002), p. 85: ‘It is only sandstone, Mr Mouse - and so, but a baby, a mere child of age - shaped by the nimble fingers of nature in a moment of play - ‘
15 For underground lighting, see Ralph Ellinson, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1995), p. 7: ‘In my hole in the basement there are exactly 1,369 lights. I’ve wired the entire ceiling, every inch of it. And not with fluorescent bulbs, but with the older, more expensive kind, the filament type. An act of sabotage, you know.’
16 Some of the following details are likely to reflect the ‘Bowles Manuscript’ rather than the staging of The Kit Kat Klub.
17 ‘More than likely no one will ever learn whether or not the stories about the well and Karen’s stepfather are true.’ HoL, p. 348.
18 See HoL, p. 467.
19 [A detail from the Bowles Manuscript, naturally. Not that Sally ever sat through a horror movie in her life, as far as I’m aware. She was too good at capitalising on those scary moments, throwing herself into [elided] arms.]
20 ‘Cimmerian dark’: HoL, p. 98.
21 Money money money money money money
Money money money money money money
Money money money money money money
Money money.
22 ‘The darker side of whim’: HoL, p. 150.
23 ‘[...] a bottomless abyss that is the linguistic equivalent of Lyell’s open-ended stratigraphic column.’ Rosalind Williams, Notes on the Underground (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2008), p. 49.
24 ‘[...] remarkable propensity for structures that convey and connect’: Benjamin, The Arcades Project, E2a,4, p. 125.
25 ‘There is a land that I heard of / Once in a lullaby'.
26 ‘[...] a symphony fills space as well as time. More people than Erich Mendelsohn have experienced music as a series of structures, which grew and collapsed and reformed again according to a logic not available to an architect.’ Robert Harbison, The Built, the Unbuilt and the Unbuildable (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1991), p. 162. Compare Goethe, ‘I call architecture frozen music.’ Letter to Johann Peter Eckerman [March 23, 1829], in Esther Newhost, ‘Music as Place in the Navidson Record’, in The Many Wall Fugue, ed. Eugenio Roxch & Joshua Scholfield (Farnborough: Greg International, 1994), p. 47, in HoL, p. 123.
27 See G Laricci, ‘Semblance and Simulacra: Faking it on the Berlin Stage’, Impersonations 22 (1984), 44-63.
28 See Y Leung, ‘Little Boy Lost: Silent Dieter and The Kit Kat Klub’, Impersonations 23 (1985), 55-91.
29 ‘It is easy to make this spot disappear, thanks to the flaws in the rough glass of the window: the blackened surface has merely to be brought into proximity with one of the flaws of the windowpane, by successive experiments.’ Robbe-Grillet, ‘Jealousy’, in Two Novels by Robbe-Grillet, trans Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 95.
30 See HoL, pp. 512-14.
31 ‘The way she moved. Those perfect angles she’d make with her wrists. Her beautiful long fingers.” HoL. p, 323.
32 See H. Fetlin, ‘Bloody Trenches: Scheherazade on Stage at the Kit Kat Klub’, in Cinema Today 67 (1992), 102-54.
33 See G Levy, The Authorised Biography (New York: Danton, 1998), and R Yokohama, Reflections on a Memorable Man (Tokyo: TGI Publishing, 1982).
34 See G Baranski, ‘Special Effects in The Kit Kat Klub’, Modern Cinema 45 (1978), 23-75.
35 ‘For instance, at a performance of Dr Caligari the other day, a shadow shaped like a tadpole suddenly appeared at one corner of the screen. It swelled to an immense size, quivered, bulged, and sank back again into nonentity.’ Virginia Woolf, The Cinema, 1926,
36 ‘[...] sounding alot like an old projector’: HoL, p. 501.
37 ‘‘“Covered” - is that the right word? My tooth is the whole gold, Doctor.’’ J G Ballard, The Crystal World (London: Flamingo, 1993), p. 58.
38 See J Zdanowicz, ‘Don’t Look Now: The Kit Kat Klub and the Infectious Gaze’, in Screen Languages 8 (1983), 44-78.
39 ‘One of the - often unspoken - objections to photography: that it is impossible for the human countenance to be apprehended by a machine.’ Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Y4a,4, p. 678.
40 See HoL, pp. 416, 476.
41 One. One two. One two three one two three -