watching, reflecting, 30

i was gonna write a post about my birthday, about turning 30 and how terrible and beautiful i find it, but suffice it to say i really just don’t know how to honestly talk about that without making people more concerned about my mental well-being. so i want to talk about watching instead. specifically, watching CABARET.

i spent a large portion of my birthday crying, but for 2 hours of it, i got to watch one of the greatest movies of all time –– bob fosse’s CABARET –– in a packed theatre, and it felt like a pretty perfect way to wrap up the last decade of my life and kick off the new one.

my 29th trip around the sun, after all, happened to be a really big year of theatre –– not only did i made a new short film (to be released in the coming month or so) about the relationship between sports, theatre, and leftism, i even wrote and developed a short play for the first time in my life. it’s an abstract piece called FEEDS (pdf here) and i wrote it for an incredible company called public assembly in LA that you should check out and support whenever and wherever you get the chance. it’s a play about the genocide unfolding in palestine, and particularly, about the west’s complicity in it. it’s about how quickly we lose sight of humanity and empathy the more something horrible goes unchecked –– how we put blinders on to external suffering when our own suffering is at hand. i thought about CABARET a lot while i wrote that, as well. and perhaps it’s shallow to invoke the idea of complicity as if i myself am not complicit. of course i am. we all are. there is no easy opposition to the imperialist war machine. there is no easy solution to a genocide. there is no easy solution to the rise of fascism. but you remain complicit all the same.

the brilliance of CABARET, what i find so deeply moving about it, is how it portrays the rise of the nazi party in berlin in the 1930s, and who exactly is implicated in that rise. it is not a film about perfect bohemian art being shuttered and starved by evil fascist jackboots, or people slowly being turned towards the right by propaganda. no, CABARET works with the reality that fascist ideology does not take hold overnight because of some charismatic pied piper. it seeps in through tiny cracks in the societal façade until you’re waist-deep in it. you don’t give into fascism because you believe in it, you give in because it provides momentum in a stationary moment. MAGA doesn’t exist because americans are inherently evil (though there is a strong case to be made that the country itself IS)…it exists because late-stage capitalism and neoliberalism is failing to fix the cracks in the façade anywhere near as fast as it creates them, and the basement is nearly flooded.

the key to CABARET is not liza minelli’s sally bowles, or michael york’s brian. it is not any of the supplemental characters you see roaming the streets of berlin. it’s the character that you only see within the kit kat club itself –– it’s joel grey’s emcee. and it’s because you don’t see him outside the club that it is so. you have no concept of who he is offstage, he doesn’t hang out with liza after the show, we don’t watch him balance the bookkeeping. all you know of him is what you see, in every single song on stage –– he is there to entertain you. he is there to make you feel good. he is there to welcome you in. “leave your troubles outside.../we have no troubles here!” he’s just feeding off of the audience before him. he’s just putting on a show. and he’s delightful and charismatic. when he and liza duet about “money” you can’t keep your eyes off of him, and when he sings “two ladies” you laugh with him, with the audience. your troubles have been forgotten.

when he begins to sing “if you could see her,” you first remember that same kind of joy you felt via the other songs. that so far, the songs you see within the cabaret don’t really exist in time or space, they feel almost like interstitials for the main two plots. palette cleansers to prepare you for the drama to come. and how could you not feel the joy here, for god’s sakes, he’s singing about how much he loves a gorilla! the horror comes at the end, not just when he finally hits the song’s punchline (“if you could see her through my eyes / she wouldn’t look JEWISH at all”) but after it, when he softshoes and contorts his face in 20 silly positions, desperately thirsting for the applause and laughter that comes with it.

i’ve watched CABARET several times over the past few years as I’ve been writing and developing a feature film about the rise of what i keep referring to as indie-sleaze-fascism. it was something i first noticed immediately after moving to NY in 2021, this way that nostalgia for the early ‘00s seems to be drawing people away from any sort of real community, and in fact, may be abating a full-scale regression of empathy and care. the post-pandemic desire for a dirtier, messier, cheaper time was perhaps inevitable in ‘21 –– but the caustic irony, the nihilism, wearing anti-woke as some badge of honor…and now, the slow slide of the reactionary “leftists” as they begin to actively and outwardly embrace the reactionary right… this didn’t have to happen.

nostalgia provides a petri dish for fascism to grow, as CABARET deftly understands –– so many of the kit kat club’s songs feature costumes of an older, more rural germany. “i wish the kaiser was back. in those days we had order,” moans the landlady after an argument within the house. and in the only song that takes place outside the kit kat club, a rustic traditional outdoor lunch gives way to a nostalgic folk song “tomorrow belongs to me”...sung first by a hitler youth, and then, eventually, by dozens more in attendance. you can read the emotion it stirs up on people’s faces as they stand to sing, and how eager they are to join in the choir once they know it’s safe to do so.

two weeks or so ago, i saw photographs of people i was once friendly with as they attended an alt-right holiday party and happily took pictures with matt gaetz wearing a MAGA hat. these were some of the first people i met when i moved to NYC, when this wave of leftist-youthful-energy-meets-nostalgia (what was then self-identified as “dimes square”) was at it’s peak. at first, i found them friendly, silly, interesting…but within months, i felt like their posts, their analysis, their whole ethos, was borne and bred entirely of a self-centered narcissism. i watched one chain themself to meta’s headquarters in a sad attempt to “call out censorship” but was, frankly, just them trying to position their meme page as some righteous cause, to position themself as someone worth censoring. i couldn’t handle being adjacent to this –– not even for research –– you can only go to so many bad “poetry” “readings,” so many trite "film” “screenings,” so many edgily-themed brooklyn house parties where you watch a ketamine-addled tech billionaire hit on 22 year old barnard students before you realize that what you’re witnessing is not a scene, it’s a void. it’s waiting for something to fill it, for motivation, for purpose. it had filled that void with such a level of irony-pilled nonsense that it was inevitable one day that they would all wind up happily standing next to the worst people our country has to offer. they can pretend that they were there as a joke, but what was the punchline? they can’t answer that, because whether they like it or not, they were. and they will continue to be used because they too have simply become the void.

CABARET ends with a staggering sequence –– one of the greatest in film history –– one that ties all its many threads back up in one disarming, horrifying bow. the main plotlines resolved (brian travels out of germany, sally bowles stays to keep pursuing her dream, fritz and natalia have married), we are put back into the kit kat club once more, and the emcee talks to us once again:

EMCEE: Where are your troubles now? Forgotten? I told you so. Where are your troubles now? We have no troubles here. Here, life is beautiful. The girls are beautiful. Even the orchestra is beautiful. Auf wiedersehen [goodnight]...À bientôt [goodnight]...

the camera moves off him, slowly towards the funhouse mirror-esque metallic panel that the movie opened on as a drumroll sounds. at the beginning of the movie, this panel reflected a bunch of black suits, dresses, and formal wear. but now, as it comes into focus, you see a few different people who have been welcomed into the crowd too. the familiar, sickening, tan suits. the black and red arm bands. you see another. and another. there is no applause. the cymbal crashes. the movie ends.

you are the audience, fosse is saying. you’re standing waist deep in it, and you didn’t even realize. you had your blinders on, but you were there, and you’re reflected in this distorted image. what kind of suit are you wearing? does it really matter? when you put on the MAGA hat, when you play with reactionaries...who have you become? when you put the rose-colored glasses on, everything seems rosy. is the applause worth it? when you look into the mirror, who stares back?

we are complicit, perhaps unavoidably so, to an extent. but we don’t have to be idle. we don’t have to watch. we don’t have to participate. we don’t have to seek out the past for comfort. we can work to build something better. tomorrow belongs to us. fuck the fascists.