the origins of this blue angel
In college when I was taking a film class, I opened one of those books that existed before the internet, a compendium of famous people born on each day of the year. We had just screened The Blue Angel, in class, and there, on my very own birthday page, was Marlene Dietrich. She of the vertiginous cheekbones and the intense eyes.
Marlene Dietrich, with chair
I'm not at all sure that the film communicated its primary message to my adolescent self. It held a critique of Weimar society as it tipped towards the Third Reich, sure. But that critique moved through depictions of a nightclub and a cabaret singer that were both wilder and more controlled, at the same time, than anything in my known universe. I had lived abroad for a year and traveled on night trains without a chaperone. I was so young and immature that I thought this made me worldly. It did not. SoThe Blue Angel brought my young self up short. It depicted a world I could not quite grasp, and I was fascinated by my inability to understand it.
My lovely film professor showed me the power of angle and POV, in her perfect French accent. I might have become an exclusive film nerd, instead of a general media obsessive, under different circumstances. Instead, I looked up enough info about Dietrich to make myself feel I had some cred, and then, when I logged onto my command-line internet communities and early email software, I began using a new avatar: blue angel or if that was taken this blue angel or this.blue.angel, always lower-case. This was when one could be anonymous in many communities online, and that felt safer. For a few years my site at thisblueangel.com was not connected openly to my name. A different era.
Sometimes people would ask me if I was a fan of the Navy flyers, and I would scoff and say, no, of course not, it's a reference to the Sternberg Dietrich film. Dietrich's Lola gains power over a professor, an arrogant moralistic man, using her feminine wiles, but she’s clear that this power does not make her free. He wants so badly to control her that she’s able to harness the intensity of his interest and channel it back over him, as if she were able to pull his tie over his shoulder and through his teeth and use it as a bridle. She seems to channel something much more sinister and effective than prettiness or charm. And I found her remarkably un-pretty at the time. Looking at her pictures now, I don't know how I reached that conclusion. Maybe it’s because she was so flinty. Lola uses his desire against him, but she isn’t people-pleasing. She didn’t seem to need to act pretty.
When there's time for further research, I'll rewatch the film, and then sketch the wider genealogy of chair-ography that links Lola's power to the patriarchal forces that imprisoned Britney Spears.
For now, I leave this here to explain the longtime title of my blog.
