Allegorical, profane, ridiculous, and
surreal, The Tin Drum describes the
bizarre life of a character who magically stunts his own physical growth at the
age of three because he finds the world of adults repulsive, then becomes first
a medical curiosity and later a freak-show attraction who travels with a group
of performing dwarves. All of this material is set against the backdrop of the
Third Reich’s rise to power, because The
Tin Drum—adapted from the Günter Grass novel of the same name—is about
politics as much as it’s about childhood, disappointment, fantasy, and other
themes. Lavishly produced and sprawling across a 142-minute running time (never
mind the latter-day director’s cut that runs even longer), The Tin Drum is challenging at best, impenetrable at worst. It’s a
marvel that the picture earned widespread acclaim, including the Oscar for Best
Foreign Film of 1980 and the Palme d’Or at the previous year’s Cannes Film
Festival, because some vignettes contain the sort of grotesque weirdness that one
typically associates with, say, the films of David Lynch.
For instance, what is
there to make of the elaborate birth scene that begins with shots of a fully
grown boy flopping around a special-effects vision of his mother’s womb, and
then continues with a roller-coaster-style POV shot hurtling from the womb,
through the walls of a mother’s vagina, and into the waiting hands of a kindly
doctor? Or how about the gleefully disgusting sequence in which the
protagonist’s father walks along a shoreline and discovers a decapitated
horse’s head that’s filled with squirming eels? Just for good measure, the
protagonist’s mother stands nearby, vomiting onscreen as the father happily
extracts eels through the horse’s mouth and eye sockets, and in the next scene,
the father decapitates the live eels before cooking and eating them.
Anyway,
the title refers to a beloved toy that the story’s hero, Oskar, is given on his
fateful third birthday. He pounds the drum day and night, even as he inevitably
transitions from childhood to adolescence and adulthood. Through actions,
dialogue, and voiceover narration, Oskar conveys contempt for the behavior of
“normal” Germans, as represented by his father’s enthusiastic participation in
the Nazi Party and his mother’s affair with her husband’s brother. Oskar
searches in vain for like-minded individuals until he meets the wise,
middle-aged dwarf who runs the performance troupe; sensing Oskar’s specialness,
the showman makes an attraction out of Oskar’s drum-playing as well as Oskar’s peculiar
superpower, the ability to break glass simply by shrieking.
From start to
finish, The Tin Drum is loaded with
heaviosity, metaphor, satire, and symbolism, so admirers and scholars can
undoubtedly spend inordinate amounts of time unpacking the implications of the
film. I must confess that I’m not among the film’s admirers, and whether I’m a
scholar is for others to say, so I will instead remark that my attempt to
consume the picture as pure narrative was not enjoyable. The movie is so brisk
and strange that it commands attention, but the absence of accessibility and
warmth created problematic opacity, at least for this viewer. Given that the
picture is shot through with betrayal, despair, and tragedy, I’m comfortable
acknowledging that The Tin Drum represents
the sophisticated delivery of worthy literary material. As to what any of it
means, or why the experience of watching the picture should be deemed edifying,
I’m at a loss. Like those eels the protagonist’s father extracts from a rotting
and waterlogged carcass, this movie is an acquired taste.
The
Tin Drum: FREAKY
No comments:
Post a Comment