Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice, as well its 1971 film adaptation by Luchino Visconti, is at its heart a story of obsession. The book is a brief glimpse into the life of a German writer, Gustav von Aschenbach, who with little fanfare decides that he needs a vacation. He makes his way to Venice to rest amongst the international guests of the Hotel de Bains beachside resort. There, he notices a Polish family, among them Tadzio, a fourteen year old boy. He notes, with some surprise, the boy's "perfect beauty":
"His face recalled the noblest moment of Greek sculpture-pale, with a sweet reserve, with clustering honey-coloured ringlets, the brow and nose descending in one line, the winning mouth, the expression of pure and godlike serenity"
From that moment, the young Tadzio occupies Aschenbach's every waking thought. He watches the young boy play on the beach, crosses paths with him in the hotel hallways, and even begins following the family throughout the corridors of Venice. Meanwhile, a mysterious plague from the East is making its way through the city, much to the frustration of its authorities who rely so heavily on foreign tourism.
While coming to terms with his own mortality and debating the nature of beauty, Aschenbach's fascination with the young boy turns to obsession, crisis, and then total delirium. As a consequence of eating some contaminated strawberries, the German falls victim to the outbreak and unceremoniously dies on the beach.
Despite its short length, the novella offers a deceptively in-depth consideration of classical philosophy and its relationship to twentieth-century ethics, taking to task the likes of Socrates, Plato, and Nietzsche. Personally speaking, it's one of my favourites. The film however, much to my frustration, tows that delicate line between what it is (a very good film) and what it could be (a great one). While the reasonings for this are varied, they generally lie in Visconti's choices in a director, both in how he attempts to convey the film's themes through manipulatively emotional backstory, and his construction of character.
The character Gustav von Aschenbach is written as a sort of case study, a personification of the struggle between two opposing forces: the Apollonian and Dionysian, as established by Friedrich Nietzsche. In the simplest terms, Apollonian refers to the rational, the consistent, and the harmonious. This is the state in which Aschenbach begins the novel; while the Dionysian is chaotic, emotional, and intoxicated, exactly how Aschenbach will eventually find himself after repeated encounters with Tadzio, his "foreign god". As Aschenbach undergoes this metamorphosis, he conducts a number of internal dialogues in which he considers the writings of Plato and his philosophy of beauty. As such, the novella is extraordinarily internal, which allows Aschenbach's ideas of morality to progressively become skewed and irrational as he finds himself in a constant cycle of self-affirmation. But this is a film, and voice over is a tricky business. Thus, Visconti externalizes much of the novella's philosophical points by offering Aschenbach a backstory, one which ultimately deconstructs the essence of his character so carefully illustrated by Mann.
First and foremost, Visconti's Aschenbach is not a writer, one who can fashion his art in privacy, but a composer and a conductor, where public performance is essential. His internal dialogues of philosophy instead happen in flashback between himself and a student, indicating him to have at least something resembling a social circle. In the book, there is no such student. Aschenbach's philosophy is wholly his own. These scenes not only add unnecessary length to the film's runtime, but remove the audience from the steadily building tension of the main story.
Perhaps the film's biggest difference of all, he has a living, breathing wife. In the novella, Aschenbach stoically reveals that his wife died many years ago after the birth of their daughter, a daughter with whom he now has little contact. In the film, his daughter is shown to have died young, and he and his wife are depicted in an devastated state of mourning. Of course, any parent would experience such emotions, but it is important to his character that we never see him in such an emotional state prior to his first encounter with Tadzio. Truthfully, it doesn't really matter where Aschenbach's wife and daughter are, or if they're even alive. What matters is that Aschenbach, for as long as we know him, is alone. It is this very loneliness that allows his mind to flourish as greatly as it eventually does, and why it is so susceptible to the influence of the senses:
"A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man."
Visconti seems much less concerned with differentiating between who Aschenbach is and is not prior to his arrival in Venice. In fact, he gives him a totally alternate reason for visiting Venice in the first place. Visconti shows us that Aschenbach's decision to travel comes after an emotional breakdown as a consequence of a failed musical performance. Mann's Aschenbach, on the other hand, decides to travel to Venice as if he were deciding what to have for dinner that night. Mann establishes the logic and rationality by which Aschenbach lives his life, which ultimately makes his behavioural decisions later on in the book to be all the more jarring.
No stranger to controversial subject matter, Italian director Luchino Visconti seems the perfect choice to direct an adaptation of the novella. Two years prior, Visconti had directed the first of his unofficial "German Trilogy", The Damned, the story of a wealthy industrialist family who become increasingly morally bankrupt as their financial success grows. The film deals with and portrays such taboos as homosexuality, incest, sexual abuse, and fascism.
In several aspects as a filmmaker, Visconti does a fine job. His principal actor, the effortlessly dashing Dirk Bogarde, perfectly slips into the role of an awkward, anxiety-ridden Aschenbach who strives to uphold a set of societal expectations. The other star of the film's production is cinematographer Pasqualino De Santis, whose shots of Venice are at times literally breathtaking, capturing the magic of the aged city before the epidemic of over-tourism. Venice, in the hands of Pasqualino, appears as if a dream. The technical precision and artistry of the film are only amplified by the use of Gustav Mahler's diaphanous Adagietto from his fifth symphony, which at once encourages Aschenbach's state of romantic delusion and threatens to waken him from his dream.
The cause celèbre of the film's production was the casting of Tadzio, a character who, according to Mann, warrants divine description, e.g.: "What discipline, what precision of thought were expressed by the tense youthful perfection of this form!" To find the perfect actor for the role, Visconti travelled around Europe, eventually finding himself in Sweden, where he visited a number of schools to find a boy with that perfect look. This process was captured on film, where Visconti appears to be unimpressed as literally hundreds of young boys are paraded in front of him. Then, in a luxury hotel suite in Stockholm, Björn Andrésen enters the room. "Beautiful", says Visconti, "ask him to undress" he tells a translator. Andrésen, only 15 years old, is shocked by the request; but with no adult present with his interests at heart, he complies.
This event, highlighted in the 2021 documentary The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, is chilling to the viewer and the now adult Andrésen, who has nothing positive to say about his experience working on the film or with Visconti. His story of childhood stardom is about as bad as it can get, resulting in a life of addiction and experience with abuse. This can be largely attributed to how Visconti, after the film wrapped, essentially fed Andrésen to a pack of hungry wolves. In footage of the film's premiere press conference at Cannes, Visconti nonchalantly comments on the teenager's looks and unintentionally provides a prescient commentary on culture's perverse fetishization of youth:
"He was even more beautiful back then. He has aged now. He's too tall now. His hair's too long. He was a more beautiful boy back then. . .He is fifteen now. . .no, sixteen. He is very old now."
One can't help but wonder, given this throw-away line, if Visconti actually ever read Death in Venice. If he did, he appears to have completed misinterpreted it. This shallow, frankly creepy, celebration of Andrésen's looks eerily imitates a similar thought by Aschenbach, as he fantasizes about Tadzio being trapped in eternal youth by way of a premature death:
"'He is delicate, he is sickly,' Aschenbach thought. 'He will most likely not live to grow old.' He did not try to account for the pleasure the idea gave him."
Visconti, it would appear, self-identified with the worst parts of Aschenbach. As such, his Tadzio is nothing like that created by Mann, and is instead an utter fantasy of willing victimhood. It is no doubt that this revisionist portrayal would contribute to the suffering underwent by Andrésen in the following years.
In the novella, Aschenbach thinks about, looks for, and watches Tadzio constantly. Just the thought of an interaction become his raison d'ètre. Part of what makes Tadzio so attractive to Aschenbach is the boy's utter oblivion. He is a child, after all. Mann describes Tadzio, as a result his aristocratic upbringing and good manners, often walking with his eyes downcast. In the odd occasion where their eyes do meet, Aschenbach experiences something like a frenzy.
"The grey-haired man was overpowered, disarmed by this docile, childlike deference; with difficulty he refrained from hiding his face in his hands."
But these connections are rare, and any indication that Tadzio is purposefully reciprocating these exchanges is made evident to the reader as Aschenbach's delusion, or simply a coincidence that he blows out of proportion. The reader knows, as Aschenbach has already stated, how his longterm isolation has skewed his perceptions of reality:
"Sights and impressions which others brush aside with a glance, a light comment, a smile, occupy him more than their due; they sink silently in, they take on meaning,"
Under the direction of Visconti, however, Tadzio's participation in Aschenbach's delusion is presented in earnest. Consider this moment, halfway through the book, when Aschenbach unexpectedly finds himself in an elevator with several youths, including Tadzio:
"Someone spoke to the lad, and he, answering, with indescribably lovely smile, stepped out again, as they had come to the first floor, backwards, with his eyes cast down. 'Beauty makes people self-conscious,' Aschenbach thought."
In the film, however, this scene plays out with fundamental differences, indicating a director's vision that is out of line with the source material. The elevator makes it to the second floor, and Tadzio steps out, backwards, as Mann describes, but rather than cast his eyes downward, he looks at Aschenbach with an unflinching confidence.
In Mann's pages, these rare looks from Tadzio are precious. To Aschenbach, they indicate the presence of the divine on earth. Visconti, however, diminishes these looks of their significance by having Tadzio look at Aschenbach, and by proxy the viewer, with alarming regularity and a sense of total self-awareness. Not only does this significantly remove tension from the film's story, it casts Tadzio as complicit, even scheming, in what ought to be a one-sided delusion.
"Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous-to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd."
In another one of the film's more questionable sequences, Aschenbach finds himself alone in the hotel lounge with Tadzio, who sits at a piano, playing "Für Elise". Once again, under Visconti's direction, Tadzio is aware of his admirer, and he looks back. This is juxtaposed by a flashback in which Aschenbach visits a sex worker, whom he encounters also at a piano, playing the same piece of music. It's unclear if anything actually happens between the two, as Aschenbach is shown to be rather nervous, hardly able to even look at the young woman. No such scene exists in the novella. Visconti, perhaps not trusting the audience's ability to derive meaning from subtext, lays out Aschenbach's sexual confusion plainly and clearly, meanwhile objectifying the character of Tadzio, and therefor Andrésen, far more severely than the book ever intended. Knowing what we know now of Andrésen's experience, this scene and its implication feel, in the truest sense of the word, "icky".
The film's final act brings to the forefront the sickness that has been lurking in the film's background. An outbreak of cholera, from the east, has taken hold of Venice. While those with a special interest in Venice's economy deny the threat, the city begins to slowly decay in tandem with Aschenbach's state of mind. He knows of the danger, and contemplates telling the unaware Polish family, but decides against it, as this would reduce the precious time he has with Tadzio.
Here, Visconti masterfully illustrates the eerie vacancy of a disease-ridden city, images which predictively echo the state of the metropolitan world during the COVID-19 crisis just a few years ago. One might compare the emptiness of these almost apocalyptic tableau's to the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, whose unique style married the surreal with the neoclassical (see below). The tranquil walkways are literally on fire as the citizens aim to ward off disease, and still, in a state of near-delirium, Aschenbach follows the young Polish family and gets closer and closer to his angel of death.
With the disease looming and the city empty, it feels and looks like the end of the world, but Aschenbach has other things on his mind. In an attempt to appeal to his idol, he gets a makeover. Now, his once grey complexion pops with bright and uncanny colour. Rather than looking younger, he appears antiquated, like a painted statue whose pigments are destined fade with time and neglect. His appearance is a vulgar, bastardization of of youth. Says the barber, admiring his handiwork:
"And now the signore may fall in love as soon as he pleases."
Aschenbach is sick. Before, in the early stage of his infatuation, he ate a handful of contaminated strawberries, consuming the forbidden fruit that opened his mind to this state of dreadful knowledge. Sickly in body and mind, the gentleman makes his way to the beach. He has just been informed that the Poles are leaving that afternoon, and he hopes to make his final moments with Tadzio worthwhile. He reclines on his beach chair, and watches his muse in a pure state of childish oblivion.
Tadzio walks pensively towards the water. In this moment, he is in silhouette, free from the definition of the human form. He approaches a sandbank, and stops, the water at mid-calf resembling an amputated statue from antiquity. He looks back at us, perhaps at Aschenbach, perhaps at his mother, perhaps at his friend, then looks back out into the shining abyss of the Adriatic Sea. He raises his hand, and points at something, or nothing. Perhaps the direction of Tadzio's gesture is without significance. But the East, towards which Tadzio is pointing, has lingered underneath the story from the beginning. Dionysus, that ever present god of irrationality and cause of Aschenbach's emotional distress, has origins in the East, brought up by nymphs in a faraway land, and thought to have travelled as far as India in his adult form. Tadzio too is from the East (in the sense that Poland is geographically east of Germany), as is the disease that ultimately claims Aschenbach. Holding this position, like a god trapped in a sculptor's cast, Tadzio has reached ultimate beauty. Aschenbach is so overtaken by this perfection that it kills him, both liberating him from his anguish and giving himself wholeheartedly to the hands of chaos.
The film's finale is perhaps the only true instance of Visconti wholeheartedly deferring to Mann's creative vision and composition of character. The two artists, over half a century apart, finally meet in the middle to bring to life an image that is so enigmatic, so alluringly impossible to define, that it almost makes up for the director's otherwise failed attempt at an adaption. The film's lowest moments are a product of the director's addition, such as the flashbacks, change of backstory, and self-interested manipulation of Tadzio. Certainly, Death in Venice is a frustrating film, within which there appears to be something close to a masterpiece.
PAINTINGS BY GIRGIO DE CHIRICO (1888-1878)
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