When I was a kid, one of the things my mother never stopped talking about was the 1960s. But her 1960s was a different 1960s from the one all the stereotypical boomer burnouts remembered. Oh sure, there was some overlap: fancy hairdos, hippies, free love, the Vietnam War (and protests thereof), brand new kinds of music to strike fear into the hearts of conservatives. But my mom's version of the 1960s was orders of magnitude more paranoid; she was a big believer in the idea that around every corner was a vast leftist and/or Satanist conspiracy. To her dying day, she believed that John F. Kennedy was killed because he knew something about Lyndon Johnson's communist sympathies, and that the Vietnam War was to protect financial interests in Indochina that happened to belong to Lady Bird Johnson. (Yes, I know these two beliefs don't gel together... that's conspiracy theories for you.)
As twisted and strange and contradictory as her worldview was, it's not hard to see where she got that kind of paranoia: the 1960s were a paranoid decade. The Cold War was entering a dangerous new phase, social unrest was reaching a boiling point, and it was getting easier and easier to spy on people. We can see that paranoia reflected in the films of John Frankenheimer: The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May, Seconds; Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove and Sidney Lumet's Fail Safe; Peter Bogdanovich's Targets; the Harry Palmer films (and, in a more campy fashion, the James Bond films); TV shows like Danger Man, The Prisoner, even The Twilight Zone; all of these represent some level of anxiety over things like government conspiracies, unknown threats, the terror of nuclear annihilation, the fear of the unknown, of the Other, of exposure. But, as cynically apt as these films and shows may be, few hold a candle to Orson Welles' The Trial, a monument to the fear, uncertainty and doubt that must be felt when the relentless machinery of an uncaring government bears its terrible apparatus upon an ordinary citizen.
The Trial began as an unfinished book by Franz Kafka. Reflective of the political situation in Europe on the outset of World War I, it told the story of Josef K., an ordinary man who is placed under open arrest — that is, he is free to go about his normal life so long as he makes himself available for the investigation — for charges that are never explained to him and must navigate a legal system that seems opaque, byzantine, and uncaring. In its original context, it paints a vision of an absurd sort of totalitarianism amidst the Great War and, by some interpretations, the monstrous antisemitism that lurked in the heart of Europe, a message that felt all the more prescient after its posthumous publication in 1925, a year after Kafka's death.
When Welles picked up the story in 1960, a great deal had happened. The trauma of the Holocaust cast a pall over Europe; the post-war world was one where authoritarianism didn't go away with the execution of Mussolini, or the suicide of Hitler, or the hanging of Tojo, it just rebranded. The Eastern Bloc became a jumble of paranoid surveillance states where saying the wrong thing could get you in deep trouble; America, for all its supposed freedoms, relied on not only state apparatuses but social ones to stamp out anyone deemed too commie, too egalitarian, too feminist, too queer. Associating with the wrong people got you blacklisted; being openly gay got you fired if you were lucky, often murdered.
None of this actually factors into the story of The Trial. Filmed partially in France, partially in Yugoslavia — a nominally Communist nation but independent from the Soviet sphere of influence, and something of a soft dictatorship under Josip Broz Tito — but placing an American actor (Anthony Perkins, in what might be his best role, Psycho be damned) in the lead role, The Trial has a somewhat European vibe yet could be anywhere. Much of the film was shot in the cavernous interiors of an abandoned Paris metro; these scenes serve to make the city Josef K (played masterfully by Perkins) seem sprawling, labyrinthine, and curiously futuristic in its industrial decay. Its combination of crumbling 20th century infrastructure and European antiquity gives it an almost cyberpunk edge, yet one utterly stripped of any real national or political identifiers. If I were to make a genuine guess at where it might be set, perhaps it's down the road from Alphaville; or perhaps it's Nuevos Aires, the fictional city-state that serves as backdrop for several of Brendon Chung's games. Or maybe, given the Central European aesthetics, the labyrinthine, almost non-Euclidian nature of the city, the infuriating personalities of the people who live in it, the sprawling institutional absurdity, and of course the
dreamlike progression of the plot (with Welles even admitting in the opening minutes that the film represents a nightmare)... maybe it's 1960s Yharnam, yes?
And yet this doesn't make it not a stark commentary on the world as Welles saw it in 1962. Josef is an up-and-comer, anxious yes, nervous yes, but in a good position at work and aiming for a promotion, who rages against the way the system gaslights him, delivers an impassioned speech to a packed courtroom that laughs at him, sees through the bullshit his monstrous, bedridden lawyer (played by Welles, who seemed to enjoy playing bad people) tries to feed him, and yet is utterly powerless against a blind, idiot legal system that has chosen to crush him seemingly at random. Almost nobody he meets is sympathetic to his plight, except perhaps his young cousin, a budding criminal herself; everyone seems to want something from him, yet in return they're unwilling to give him the only thing he wants: answers.
The psychosexual perversion of the system and the society built to serve it is plainly obvious. We can see this in the way that no fewer than three female characters (played by some big names!) practically throw themselves at a largely disinterested Josef; Perkins was gay and struggled with his homosexuality, and Welles, knowing this, took advantage of it to insert another layer to the film, a fear of exposure, of having one's secrets cracked open... and punished. We can see it in the way the Advocate, monstrous and toadlike in his bed, forces the tiny, timid, middle-aged Bloch to kiss his hand and beg for information about his case. We can see it in the way the detectives who initially arrest Josef are forced to strip and be beaten in a closet for vaguely unspecified trespasses that Josef supposedly accused them of, but clearly didn't intend such a result. We can see it in the way Josef must wade through a crowd of naked people, mostly elderly, holding numbered signs and standing outside a building that seemingly represents Josef's first formal entrance of The Law as embodied by a labyrinthine city that he must navigate. (If you think this also has shades of the Holocaust, you're not wrong.) It's even in the way the film ends; rather than being strangled and stabbed "like a dog" by two executioners in a gravel pit outside of town as in the film, Josef is made to take his shirt off and lay on the ground as the two executioners silently deliberate on who will stab him, before loses his patience, forcing them to use dynamite, leaving him laughing defiantly as it explodes, leaving behind a mushroom cloud.
The Trial is an old story, but it's simultaneously a very modern one, one that continues to resonate in our current moment. The Eastern Bloc, including Yugoslavia, are all gone now. America has changed, too; and yet, in some ways, it still remains very similar. The American legal system remains a trap designed to ensnare and destroy people, particularly those who are the wrong skin color or the wrong gender identity. At the beginning of the film, Welles narrates "Before the Law," a parable Kafka wrote as a companion piece to the novel, in which a man stands at the gates of the Law (which could be variously interpreted as society, justice, or an understanding of the legal system) but the gatekeeper will not let him enter; sitting day by day, for years, waiting for his turn to enter the gates of the Law, he finally asks the gatekeeper, why is it that though everyone seeks the Law, he's never seen anyone else enter the gates. The gatekeeper explains that nobody else could have entered these gates, these gates were only for the one man. As the man dies, the gatekeeper closes the gates. It's intended as an allegory for Josef's plight, in which he tries to gain understanding of the legal system that proposes to destroy him, and yet there is none to be had, and anyone who might be offering such understanding is lying. So, too, are we as ordinary citizens trapped outside the Law.
This is Welles' best film. It almost didn't get made, if not for
Welles discovering that abandoned metro late one night when he found out
his previous shooting location had fallen through. It's a showcase of
his genius as filmmaker, a kind of legal dark ride through a series of
absurdities. Everyone Josef talks to misunderstands him or gaslights him
or both; every conversation he has is darkly comedic in their ability
to confound and frustrate him. Perkins is great, taking on a character
who in the original text was more mild-mannered, and turning him into a
kind of detective, tracking down a mystery in which suspect and victim
are the same man, manufactured by the system to justify its own
existence. It is the quintessential film of the early 1960s, an arthouse
film noir psychological thriller that is neither American nor European
yet also both at the same time, a vision of paranoia and the horrible
realization that we are all trapped in a machine.
My mom would have hated it.
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