Metaphor Time with the Clown

The aspect of The Blue Angel that made the biggest impression on me was the motif of the clown. The first time he showed up, I was like, Whoa, that’s a little creepy. The next time, I wondered if there was a connection. When he kept returning to the scenes, I wondered if it was only Professor Rath that could see him. Was he a figment of his imagination? A subconscious ghost of sorts, foreshadowing his future?

So, obviously, when Rath himself became the clown, I had a fit. Metaphor time!

Madly curious, I searched the lovely JSTOR for other opinions, and came across this article by Geoffrey Wagner, which answered a lot of my questions.

He writes

“From the outset, in fact, the professor is haunted by the figure of the clown in the background, for he, the man of ideals, is himself a clown in the world of The Blue Angel.”

A-ha! So he became the clown as Lola, the 1930s rendition of Pandora, slowly destroyed him. This brought me back to thoughts from Ashley’s speech, in which she talked about the film Der Büsche der Pandora from 1929, in which Lulu’s sexual ambition and thoughtlessness destroyed lives around her, and eventaully her own. Lola was a bit luckier though, and escaped with her life.

Rath was insecure about the continued sexual nature of Lola’s work, and he was ultimately destroyed by that. The last lines that Lola sings in the film (no subtitles, unfortunately) are translated as “when a man burns in lust, who can find him salvation?”

Symbolic, no?
Wagner also makes the connection between Rath’s burning lust and his ripping off of the calendar days with a hot curling iron. So that explains the smoke then. And it only got smokier throughout the years, signifying his growing jealousy.

Let’s tie it all together, shall we? So because Rath was reduced to a sad, empty version of himself via Lola’s sexual prowess, and was forced to return to his hometown in such a state, he became the essential clown – the fool. He was humiliated, eggs were cracked onto his forehead, he watched as his wife hooked up with another man. He was ridiculed by all those he used to think below him. This degradation reminds me of the human perception of aura concept from Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” – he was happy when he believed himself a man of culture, not a fool. He was still cultured, but because of his new job as a literal clown, in combination with his lack of money and being supported by woman, he was a fool. His aura was corrupted.

The article connects the film to Kracauer’s beloved chaos theory with the following quote:

Thus at the beginning, when the professor first enters, the cabaret is shown as chaotic, almost surrealistic, with its whirling clouds, miasmic veisl, and shifting backdrops; at the end, when he is part of it, it is steady, and brutal in its clarity.

Wagner also goes into the topic of “sex and sadism, individual and social” as being the “main themes of The Blue Angel,” if you’re interested in reading more about that.