The Magic World of Orson Welles

by James Naremore

  The divergences between film and novel are most interesting in those areas where Welles and Kafka would seem to have something in common. For example, they are both fond of introducing fables or parables into the midst of dreamlike narratives, and Welles was naturally attracted to Kafka’s parable of the Law. In fact he has moved this little story to a place of honor at the beginning of the film, telling it in the form of a slide show illustrated by Alexandre Alexeieff’s “pin-screen” technique—a process whereby images are created from shadows cast by pins inserted into a mat. The drawings thus produced serve not only as an introduction to Kafka’s world but also as an indirect commentary on the nature of movies; one by one they are flashed on the screen, flipping upward like pages and then becoming shadowy, three-dimensional figures. We are shown a massive stone wall with an arched doorway resembling a primitive version of RKO’s art work on Xanadu while Welles’s voice begins to recite the parable offscreen. “Before the Law there stands a Guard,” he says, and with each successive statement another image flips upward, transforming the sentences into “shots.” A man from the country appears, begging admittance to the Law. But the guard cannot allow him past the door. Can he enter later? Perhaps, the guard replies. Timidly peering beyond the open arch, the man sees another doorway, the first in a whole series of entrances, each more august than the one before. Respectfully he waits, growing old in the process. Seasons pass, but the guard remains at his post. The old man tries bribery and obsequiousness, even making friends with the fleas in the guard’s fur collar in hope that they might have influence. Nothing helps, and when the old man nears death he asks the guard a question: Why in all these years has no one else come to the door? “No one else could enter this door,” says the guard. “This door was intended only for you, and now I am going to close it.”

  The tale ends on a note of cosmic irony and is a superb instance of an effect Welles was hinting at in Michael O’Hara’s account of hungry sharks or Arkadin’s story about the scorpion and the frog. But there is a crucial distinction between the way the exemplary parable of the Law has been used in the novel and in the film, and it is here that Welles’s particular viewpoint becomes apparent.

  In Kafka’s novel the story appears in the penultimate chapter, where it is told by a priest as a way of illustrating a “particular delusion” about the court. At the conclusion, Joseph K., who has been respectful and attentive, immediately deduces a lesson. “So the doorkeeper deceived the man,” he says. “Don’t be too hasty,” replies the priest. “I have told you the story in the very words of the scriptures. There’s no mention of deception in it.” Then for the next half dozen pages the priest and K. become entangled in an elaborate exercise in hermeneutics, a debate that might be read as a dizzying satire of Talmudic scholarship and literary criticism. “But it’s clear enough,” K. remarks. Not so, responds the priest, who lists various possible interpretations, alluding to several commentators and methodically undermining K.’s every effort to reach a judgment. “It is not necessary to accept anything as true or false,” the priest says at last; “one must only accept it as necessary.” “A melancholy conclusion,” says K. “It turns lying into a universal principle.” But K. can no longer really object to anything: “He was too tired to survey all the conclusions arising from the story, and the trains of thought into which it was leading him were unfamiliar, dealing with impalpabilities better suited to a theme for discussion among Court officials than for him.”

  The method is deliberately comic, the priest’s interpretation dissolving all meaning, leaving K. with an “explanation” as maddening as the court itself. Welles appears to have recognized this quality in Kafka’s handling of the parable, and in his final script for the film he tried to acknowledge it by having the narrator walk forward to the audience and make the following announcement:

  This is a story inside history. Opinions differ on this point, but the error lies in believing that the problem can be resolved merely through special knowledge or perspicacity—that it is a mystery to be solved. A true mystery is unfathomable and nothing is hidden inside it. There is nothing to explain. It has been said that the logic of this story is the logic of a dream. Do you feel lost in a labyrinth? Do not look for a way out. You will not be able to find it. There is no way out.

  In the completed film, however, the address to the audience does not appear, Welles remarking instead that the story we are about to see has the “logic of a dream . . . of a nightmare.” The parable of the Law is presented without comment at the beginning and then alluded to near the end, where Welles, in the role of the Advocate, begins to retell the story only to be cut short by an angry Joseph K. (Anthony Perkins). The painfully comic explications of the parable have also been excised, partly because they are talky and uncinematic, but also because in the last analysis Welles recoils from Kafka’s absurdist view of life. Instead we see Joseph K. walking through a church and into an empty theater where the court uses “visual aids” to instruct the populace. The Advocate flashes the Alexeieff drawings onto a movie screen, assuming the role of a court-appointed lecturer-cum-producer. Almost as soon as the slide show has begun, K. stops it, remarking, “I’ve heard it all before. We’ve all heard it.” The “we” links him with the audience, which in turn becomes a generalized human community. When K. accuses the Advocate of turning “lying into a universal principle,” he does so with anger and conviction, refusing to accept the connections between himself and the accused man in the parable. The remainder of the scene, invented wholly by Welles, serves not only to give K. heroic dimension but also to attack the presumably nihilistic vision that Welles senses behind Kafka’s work:

  K.: I don’t pretend to be a martyr. No.

  ADVOCATE: Not even a victim of society?

  K.: I am a member of society.

  ADVOCATE: You think you can persuade the Court that you’re not responsible by reason of lunacy?

  K.: I think that’s what the Court wants me to believe. Yes, that’s the conspiracy. To persuade us all that the whole world’s crazy, formless, meaningless, absurd. That’s the dirty game.

  PRIEST (entering as K. searches for an exit): Can’t you see anything at all?

  K.: Of course. I’m responsible.

  PRIEST: My son . . .

  K.: I’m not your son. (Exit.)

  Thus Kafka’s ironic, impersonal vision of despair has been transformed into a Wellesian morality play. An audience without prior knowledge of Kafka cannot be aware of the change, nor can it recognize this moment as an explicit criticism of the film’s source, but the effect is much the same in any case. The scene amounts to an attack not only on Kafka but also on certain tendencies in modern art that by the early sixties had spread widely into the public consciousness. It is in fact a revision or self-criticism of the film we have been watching, a sudden lifting of K.’s nightmare to the level of conscious analysis. At the very least, it reveals Welles’s ambivalence toward the abstraction and absurdity he has been trying to render, and it follows from this scene that he should have chosen to revise the end of Kafka’s novel. Instead of making Joseph K. die “like a dog,” he allows the condemned man to fight back.

  Joseph McBride has observed that a closer filmic approximation of The Trial is to be found in Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1957). The comparison is appropriate not only because Hitchcock provides a rough stylistic equivalent to Kafka but also because the story contains the same vision of petit-bourgeois character. Manny Balestrero, the protagonist of the Hitchcock film (played by Henry Fonda), is an innocent accused of crime, a good father and husband who sees his home collapse and his wife go insane under the weight of an impersonal legal system. When at the end of the film the “right man” is accidentally discovered, Manny shows only one expression of anger, which is directed at the criminal rather than at the court. “Do you realize what you’ve done to my wife?” he says to his look-alike, and then he thanks the police for doing a good job. Hitchcock, ever the cool craftsman, leaves us free to
interpret this scene ironically if we wish; nevertheless, he gives the impression that absurdity underlies ordinary life, that while “good citizenship” may be no guarantee against chaos, it is the only chance available.

  Such a view derives from the fact that Hitchcock, not unlike Kafka, remains a victim of the fears his film describes. Welles, on the other hand, is something of a patrician, a man who has always been more interested in the psychology of the oppressors than in the anxieties of the oppressed. He therefore stands outside ordinary life, vaguely contemptuous of the Manny Balestreros and the Joseph K.s. This may explain why he draws from Anthony Perkins a curiously mixed performance, making him a cross between a Norman Bates and a Promethean rebel.

  The scenes involving K.’s defiance of the court are improbable, given the Kafkaesque world with which the film begins; nevertheless, they are consistent with Welles’s description of himself (in an interview with Kenneth Tynan) as an “Edwardian” rather than a “modern” intellectual. He clings to the nineteenth-century belief that literature ought to hold out some hope for humanity, and, interestingly, his alterations of the original story imply a reasoning similar to Georg Lukács’s attack on Kafka in Realism in Our Time:

  Ought angst to be taken as an absolute, or ought it to be overcome? Should it be considered one reaction among others, or should it be a determinate of the condition humaine? These are not, primarily, of course, literary questions; they relate to a man’s behavior and experience of life. The crucial question is whether a man escapes from the life of his time into a realm of abstraction—it is then that angst is engendered in human consciousness—or confronts modern life determined to fight its evils and support what is good in it. The first decision leads then to another: is man the helpless victim of transcendental and inexplicable forces, or is he a member of a human community in which he can play a part, however small, toward its modification or reform?

  Welles is not, of course, a socialist realist like Lukács, even though the words he gives K. near the end of the film are very like the ones just quoted. His uneasiness with Kafka is an example of an internal quarrel that has grown up within liberal democracy and that conducts a battle within Welles’s own consciousness—a conflict between what Lukács would call “bourgeois modernism” and “critical realism.” On the one hand is the kind of art that submits to abstraction, to angst, to the notion that life is absurd; and on the other hand is the kind of art that, however much it may be influenced by the modernist tradition, retains an essential humanism. It is this latter view that Welles is trying to assert, despite the fact that it nearly breaks his film apart.

  Welles’s difficulty is created not only by his personal dislike for the novel’s conclusion but also by historical circumstances, some of which he acknowledged in an interview with Cahiers du Cinéma after the release of the picture. Explaining why Kafka’s original ending could not be tolerated in 1962, he remarked, “To me it is a ‘ballet’ written by a Jewish intellectual before the advent of Hitler. Kafka wouldn’t have put that after the death of six million Jews. It all seems very much pre-Auschwitz to me. I don’t mean that my ending was a particularly good one, but it was the only possible solution.” Kafka had created a nightmare vision of ordinary life under the Hapsburg monarchy, a society in which people are transformed into objects or “cases,” and where a vast, enigmatic bureaucracy envelops everything. In this atmosphere Joseph K. is arrested by a bizarre tribunal, tried, and then punished without even knowing the charge against him. At the end he watches the faces of two weird executioners bending over him, twisting a knife in his heart, and he cries out in despair, “as if the shame of it must outlive him.” The reference to “shame” is a crucial instance of the attitude Welles finds so troubling; it hints at K.’s guilt and masochism, his unconscious acceptance of the authority of the Law. By feeling this shame, by hoping in his last moments to find “the Judge whom he had never seen,” K. participates in his own dehumanization.

  As Welles has said, Joseph K. “belongs to something which represents evil and which is a part of him at the same time. He is not guilty of what he is accused of, but he is guilty all the same: he belongs to a guilty society, he collaborates with it.” Naturally Kafka’s vision of social alienation and sexual repression remained a valid artistic subject for Welles, who attempted to transform it into a symbol of “big brotherism” in the postindustrial age, but to leave K. a passive collaborator at the end of the film, he believed, was to suggest that Hitler was necessary, even to imply unconscious complicity between Kafka and the Nazis. Welles felt it necessary to insist that K.’s madness is not part of an abstract human condition, and in so doing he took a position far more hopeful than Kafka’s own. Kafka’s friend Gustav Janouch is supposed to have remarked once in conversation that modern bureaucracy and automation were “progress towards the end of the world,” to which Kafka replied, “If that, at least, were certain! It is not certain. . . . The conveyor belt of life carries you on, no one knows where. One is more of an object, a thing, than a living creature.” The ending of Welles’s film is therefore closer to Janouch than to Kafka; when K.’s executioners lead him to a pit in the ground and throw dynamite after him, he picks up the bomb and throws it back, the world ending with a bang rather than a whimper.

  Historically speaking, there were other good reasons for Welles to feel dissatisfied with the detachment and absurdism in modern art. By the early sixties the avant-garde had become qualitatively different from their predecessors. The cubist and expressionist paintings of the early modernists had created an environment for a later abstract expressionism, and the literary experiments of Joyce and Kafka had given way to Beckett and Ionesco. One notes during this period a steady loss of historical specificity in art and a consequent loss of social perspective. The awareness of time and place that had made Joyce’s Dublin and Kafka’s Prague such vivid settings had been replaced with a kind of literary no-man’s-land—a landscape of the moon. Lukács had described this phenomenon as a loss of “authenticity,” a retreat into abstraction that had resulted from the nuclear age and the Cold War. “As the crisis of modernism deepens,” he wrote, “critical realism grows in importance.”

  One problem with Welles’s adaptation of Kafka, however, is that it is less completely critical than it needs to be, and it lacks the “authenticity” of the original. In various ways Welles has tried to update the novel, making it a vehicle for contemporary social satire; for example, he introduces a giant computer into Joseph K.’s office, and he has K. speak out against the currently fashionable artistic notion that life is “absurd.” He even implies that the slavish court artist Titorelli (played by William Chappell but dubbed entirely with Welles’s own voice) has been influenced by trendy, abstract “action painting.” Yet, ironically, Welles’s film is a product of the very abstractionist tendency it has chosen to attack. Welles had in fact directed a stage version of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros in London in 1960, and the influence of “theatre of the absurd” can be found everywhere in The Trial. Consider the scene where K., having just returned home with a cake he has bought for Miss Burstner, encounters the crippled Miss Pittl (Suzanne Flon) dragging a heavy trunk along the ground. In an exceptionally lengthy tracking shot we see him walking along behind the woman, trying to help her. She refuses assistance and accuses him of being responsible for Miss Burstner’s eviction; on and on they walk together, holding a protracted argument. (See fig. 8.1.)

  Figure 8.1: K. encounters Miss Pittl.

  The landscape, filmed in Yugoslavia, is barren and filled with anonymous public housing. K. juggles his little white box, nearly skipping with nervousness and guilt, while the woman lugs away at the black trunk, her braced leg clanking heavily with each step. It is an eerie, darkly comic moment, which has no equivalent in Kafka; on the contrary, it has much more in common with the absurdist drama of Beckett or the early Edward Albee. Welles’s aim, here as elsewhere, appears to have been to establish the existentialist atmosphere of contemporary theater
while at the same time showing that absurdity is the product of a “guilty society.” Unfortunately he is never able to find a satisfactory dramatic realization of this aim as he had in thrillers like The Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil. The world he creates is altogether too artful; it is a nonspecific totalitarianism, a generalized “human condition” represented by those vast apartment houses; it has little concreteness, few vestiges of a real social context, and therefore the satire is blunted.

  To see how much difference there is between The Trial and Welles at his best, one has only to contrast the opening moments of the film with the interrogation of Sanchez in Touch of Evil. Both scenes take place in drab apartments, both are photographed in long takes with a distorting lens, and both are characterized by a surreal comedy. In both, public officials have forced their way into the most vulnerable areas of a man’s private life, police authority literally extending into bedrooms, where we see burly men examining Sanchez’s love letters or investigating K.’s relations with the lady next door. The earlier film, however, is clearly the more fascinating, and not only because it is more formally complex, with a more interesting group of players and a soundtrack that does not inhibit the acting. What is also missing in The Trial is some reference to an actual milieu. As K.’s landlady tells him, “With your arrest I get the feeling of something abstract.” In the opening scenes the dubbed voices of Hollywood-type police seem oddly out of key with Kafka’s Czech names, and Anthony Perkins’s distinctly American energy is set off against Jeanne Moreau’s European languor. A similar mélange of nationalities can be found, of course, in Touch of Evil, which was certainly not intended to represent “the real Mexico”; nevertheless, the crazy, nightmarish distortion of that film was an interpretation of a real place, and the various accents are wittily appropriate to the border town. In The Trial, by contrast, the setting has become nearly as generalized as the cast: the government architecture of Zagreb, intimating a gray, Iron Curtain socialism, provides background for the early scenes, but then the abandoned Gare d’Orsay in Paris is used for K.’s encounters with the courts of Law. Whereas Touch of Evil had been a dream about America, The Trial has become a dream about everywhere, and to paraphrase Andrew Sarris’s remark about F. W. Murnau, a film devoted to no place in particular cannot hope to represent everyplace in general.