When I first saw Cabaret, I don’t think that I really got it. This being the second time that I’ve seen it, I think that I get it now, but it hasn’t increased my appreciation of it very much. Between my two viewings of the film, I saw a theater production of the play from my university. I think that I liked that production less on the whole, but I have to say that although Cabaret “works” as a film, it probably was always meant to be a play. The musical numbers from the Kit Kat Club have genuine power on the stage because the emcee is talking directly to us. When he exclaims, “even our orchestra is beautiful,” the stage production’s spotlight pans to the orchestra that will play music all throughout the rest of the play. The experience of watching the play is deconstructed for us, and it reminds us that everything that we see will be part of the Kit Kat Club’s show. There is no reality here; it’s all part of the show. “Life is a cabaret,” goes the song that ends the production and show. I suppose that a different version of the film could be a deconstructive experience, like the play, but this one seems to shy away from that approach. Cabaret director Bob Fosse is one of the theater world’s best-known and best-regarded theater directors, but this film seems extremely a-theatrical. You wouldn’t know that Fosse did theater just by looking at the film. The picture has an intimacy with its characters. They aren’t seen as characters in a Cabaret skit, but as real people. I think that we are meant to relate to them and possibly even care about them. The film feels realistic, and of course realism goes directly against the grain of the musical experience. It doesn’t have the sort of direct power that musical spectacle has.

Watching the film, I thought at times of the underrated and sadly forgotten 1998 film from the former Yugoslavia, Cabaret Balkan. As the title indicates, Cabaret Balkan is in part inspired by Cabaret. It has an approach like that of the deconstructive Cabaret. An emcee is almost introducing stories to us, only they are just distantly related vignettes of life in Bosnia. There are no major characters in the foreground. That probably gets a lot closer to the heart of the original Christopher Isherwood stories that Cabaret was based on than Cabaret itself does. Cabaret Balkan talks about what is going on in the former Yugoslavia. It milks the absurdist humor of the war-torn Balkans through the stories that it is telling. One of the major problems with Cabaret, both play and film, is that the stories and skits that they tell are presented as a distraction to the evil going on in Germany. “Here, life is beautiful,” the emcee tells us as he explains that it is cold outside and possibly everywhere else aside from the Kit Kat Club. The goings-on in the Kit Kat Club are sordid and depraved, and perhaps the point of the film is that as we are conditioned to enjoy what goes on here, we can be conditioned to enjoy the depravity of Nazism. All fine and good, I know, but consider that we cannot be drawn into enjoying the skits at the Kit Kat Club.

This is a very significant flaw in the play. The skits are enjoyable, but in enjoying them we are implicated into tolerating Nazism. We are supposed to ignore the skits and search the corners for what is going on in Germany. Even stickier is the story told in the film. The story in Cabaret with Sally Bowles and the Brian and Maximilian characters is bologna, you understand. The film ties them into the skits at the Kit Kat Club directly. The musical numbers comment on the action (the most obvious example being a song about a menage a trois when Sally, Brian, and Max are all hanging out with one another, and we learn later sleeping with each other. Come to think of it, all the interludes are that obvious). And so, of course, the story is part of the bread and circus of the Kit Kat Club. At the very least, these characters are largely a part of the Kit Kat Club culture. For the most part, what is going on in Germany does not have any direct impact on their lives. Except for the two Jewish characters, of course, everyone in the film is fairly easily able to ignore the rise of Nazism.

The film begins and ends with the same song introducing us to the cabaret. This life is so meaningless that it is able to come full circle. The Brian character comes to Berlin and then he leaves. Life goes on for his lover Sally as well. These characters don’t do much to stop the rise of Nazism (for a short while Brian has a modestly quiet rebellion against the Nazi party, but it passes) because they do not feel that it affects them. We barely see the rise of Nazism. We see a dead dog being thrown onto a Jewess’ porch, and a man being beat to death. We also see a few swastikas. But for the most part they occupy the background while the banal and insignificant story absorbs the foreground. What we as viewers and I suppose inhabitants of 1930s Berlin should be looking for are the flashes of the changing Germany. What we should be ignoring is the plot. In short, the film is about everything except itself. I know that I am making the film sound challenging, and I suppose that that is a virtue. But at some point in the film you get hungry for more… I don’t think that I would say simplicity, but how about clarity?

It’s very easy to look at the film from the wrong angle, in which case it doesn’t work. Perhaps the premise won’t work as it is anyway. Fosse’s approach is a bit of a mixed blessing. The skits at the Kit Kat Club are not directed towards us generally. He juxtaposes them with other events in the film, showing that he won’t let them exist simply for their own sake. He also folds in shots of the patrons laughing at the show, taking the audience out of the equation. There is something detached and tasteful about the treatment. Like Fosse is saying that he is just going to portray these things, he’s not going to enjoy them or let us enjoy them. This approach is more sensible than the alternative, but it is also considerably less powerful. It's impossible to get exhilarated by watching these numbers. They look like work, not play. The treatment of the story is also a mixed blessing, but in the exact opposite way. Somehow what happens to these people really seems to matter. Sally Bowles is one of the most obnoxious people that I have ever encountered. We learn in the film that she can apparently work herself to orgasm just by screaming. She screams a lot. The most obnoxious thing she does in the movie is try and seduce Brian and, upon being refuted by him, wonder aloud if he’s gay. Think about that with the genders reversed and you may better understand what is so obnoxious about it. The real reason that Brian shouldn’t sleep with her is because that would just encourage her to keep hanging around. (Of course Brian really IS gay, which leads to a number of alarming thematic developments later on in the film.)

I never really bought the romantic relationship, or even more basic, the friendship between Sally and Brian. I just could not understand what he saw in her. My hatred of Sally would be more functional in the deconstructive interpretation. I would not have to sympathize with her, and the alien qualities of Brian’s attraction towards her would be easy to assume. I’d realize that you know, life is a cabaret old chum, and well, this is all meaningless. I think that Fosse, and for that matter actress Liza Minnelli, are being too direct. They make Sally human and sort of complex. She knows that she isn’t much and is just trying her darnedest to prove that she doesn’t know it. In this aspect, Cabaret “works” when it probably shouldn’t.

The most exhilarating sequence in Cabaret is tellingly the singing of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” An effeminate blonde teenage boy begins singing the song in exactly the voice that you would expect an effeminate blonde teenage boy to possess. He’s at a picnic and it’s a very sunny day, and so everyone there begins to sing it. The catch is that the teenage boy is wearing a swastika on his armband. At the end of the song, he puts on his cap and does a Heil Hitler. That little thing that he does at the end, it could possibly get a bad laugh. It reminds of a recruitment ad for the U.S. armed forces. I am especially reminded of one where we zoom out of a photograph of a child to see that it is on the control panel of a jet driven by an Air Force pilot, while the song “All Through the Night” plays on the soundtrack. The “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” sequence is cornball, but part of the reason that it works so well is because it is cornball. It has a direct, non-ironic impact. It was so effective that the song was enthusiastically embraced by the neo-Nazi movement. This is the only moment that the film really believes in Nazism. It is perhaps the only time that it doesn’t have a detached semi-cynical glare. This is the only moment in the film where we can genuinely enjoy ourselves.

What is the most problematic about the sequence is that it doesn’t really make much sense unless it is sarcastic. One of the first things that I would think the Nazis in the “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” number would do is clean the homos out of the Kit Kat Club. The sort of “decadence” that is going on there is an enemy towards Aryan purity. Life isn’t beautiful in the Kit Kat Club; it’s beautiful in the Leni Riefenstahl universe. That is really the place that you want to escape into. This dichotomy between Nazism and the Kit Kat Club universe is never really addressed. The problem is, interestingly enough, that the film hates both Nazis and gays and wants to try to work the two hatreds into the same moral system. The thing is, the Nazis hated gays too. They were very strict moralists. Because the film features gay characters at all, you have to dig slightly to see the anti-gay slant.

The gay Brian character is a good man, which is precisely why we wonder why he is hanging out with people like Sally Bowles or why he is hanging out in the Kit Kat Club. He looks straight-laced and conservative. Probably not scary enough to be a Nazi, but certainly alien to the freaks of the club. The reason that he is in Berlin is to finish out his doctorate of philosophy, but I think a bigger part of it is that he is a gay man who feels displaced by his sexuality. He feels that he can find his place, so to speak, in Berlin. In an early scene he encounters a transvestite at the urinal next to him. He is surprised, but also a little delighted. I’m reminded of an anecdote told by one of the surviving munchkins in The Wizard of Oz. He talks about how he got on a bus to go to the studio or something, and saw more little people then he had ever seen in his life. That is when he knew that he was in Hollywood. I think that Brian has that same sort of feeling. He has no grounding or experience in gay culture, so when he encounters it he is fascinated by it.

Brian had given up on women, but Sally Bowles, of all the damn people, converts him over. His heterosexual relationship with Sally is representative of a mature sexual relationship whereas his homosexuality (well, all homosexuality) is lustful and depraved. There is a scene in the film where he gets Sally away from her flirting with a customer. She replaces her company with that of a transvestite, and they both laugh about the little con that they just pulled. He is leaving his homosexuality where it belongs, in the Kit Kat Club seducing customers. When Max enters the equation, Brian’s sleeping with him is a sort of infidelity towards Sally as her sleeping with Max is an infidelity towards Brian. They are finally brought together again when Sally announces that she is pregnant. To Brian, a heterosexual relationship is meaningful and important. A homosexual relationship is lustful, and sort of shameful. When Sally has an abortion, enraging Brian a little and throwing away their life together, I don’t feel that it proves to Brian that a relationship with a woman would not go anywhere, just that a relationship with this woman would not go anywhere. Sally is frightened and realizes that she would not make a very good mother. She feels, maybe even knows, that her place is in the cabaret. But I think that this really is what Brian wants. The film’s values are in going straight, so to speak. It doesn’t show us a single loving or meaningful homosexual relationship.

You could argue that Brian is speaking on behalf of himself, not all gay men. It’s a good argument, but I don’t think it does much to soften the blow. I’m not sure that I am offended by Cabaret’s anti-gay slant. I praised these sort of attitudes in last year’s carefully calculated Far From Heaven, not as much because it is righteous -- I sincerely feel that it is not -- but because it is fascinating in its density. The problem is that it doesn’t gel with the Nazi stuff, and the strings begin to show. The Kit Kat Club is complacent with Nazism; it is not an institution rebelling against it. Cabaret is a brilliant film built upon a rotten and weak foundation. At its core, I think that the whole play is flawed. Cabaret Balkan did it right, but that film is of course just an homage or a work in the same key. Writing about the film, I am reminded of an observation that I think that I heard from Richard Corliss. They used to make bad films a lot better. I do not feel that Cabaret is a good film. But they really haven’t made bad movies like they used to.