DIETRICH DOMINATRIX ASSOLUTA

Thom Powers has made an excellent but spooky documentray on Marlene Dietrich which clearly shows that the icon was orchestrating her life, her image, herself as a calculated product conditioned by herslef to the very last.

 Ms. Dietrich’s contract, which she continues to refer to when the director asks her for more than the audio recording interview, states that she agrees to the documentary if her image isn’t recorded on camera – only her voice. At once point she even instructs her director on how to edit the film together by just using archival footage from her films and publicity coverage on her arrival to America. As  Dietrich explains how to cut the documentary without using any present day footage of her, the actual edit follows her instruction. There is no room for improvisation. Every line is carefully prepared by the dying diva.

No one messed with Dietrich. The lack of any signs of emotionality, empathy, regrets or human feelings in the frightening documentary adds to the picture of the Preussian stereotype of an overly disciplined, organized and controlling personality, meticulously staging her own life and, shortly before the end, callously stating her arrogant wiev of and genuine despice for her audiences. Her acid remarks and constant bullying of the director and the cameracrew is like a a giant feline playing with a bunch of small rodents and she is apperantly enjoying herself. People are stupid and gullible. Always have been and always will be. Dietrich´s megalomanic persona is directing her own swansong, and the artic connotation leaves you uncomfortable, to say the least. Her chosen isolation, once Jagger and Bowie, her last marionettes, escape her, leaves little room for any sympathy for the monster she has become, a chalk white made up ghost of the passed hidden behind curtains as heavy as bedcovers in her Paris apartment.

Garbo was the first to take the bold step of boycotting the omnipotent cinema companies and taking charge of her career on her own. Twenty years later the studios took their revenge and deconstructed her without mercy. Dietrich, besides her famous promiscuity, knew all there was to know about the high and mighty of Hollywood and had no problems to let them know that she would not be discreet unless they continued to allow her to appear on the screen.

Dietrich followed Garbos´s lead but was made of harder steel and managed to end her cinematic career with an excellent performance in ” The Judgement of Nuremberg”, after which, except for cameo performances, she entered the most prestigious stages worldwide as a phenomenal estradeuse, larger than life, enacting sentimentality and nostalgia with bravura but without investing even the slighest bit of her own emotions, carefully coregraphing each move or facial expression, which gradually became hardly visible because of the multiple facelifts.

No one expected her to hit any notes and yet, she accomplished a musical experience that surpassed most. Alone in the spotlight with no sight of the orchestra, dressed in a bodycolored diamond studded evening gown, she made sure that all attention was on her and that nothing was to distract the mesmerized audience. Her choregraphy was stolen from Zarah Leander, the Swedish born German mega star, and generations of skilled varietée singers of the legendary Berlin subculture her mentors.

To critisize her for her five meter white mink stola would equal critizising the love life of the Pope. She found her followers anserine but generous with their money and Dietrich like a penny or two.

Dietrich went through all the motions of love or at least the sexual aspects of it. She bedded most male leading men, directors, cameramen and the infamous Spanish Countess da Costa, the most well known and predatory lesbian of the era. The alleged affair with Garbo is, however, pure fantasy. Dietrich wanted to seduce and humiliate her worst competitor but Garbo was not game. Greta Garbo was scared witless by the butch Dietrich and an asexual, incarcerated in her own myth as the enchanting seductress she never was.

The only man Dietrich seemed to truly have fallen for was the rising star, Yul Brunner, who bedded everything on two legs, men and women alike. She was drawn to his sociopate persona and the challenge to defeat him at the game kept her going, but to no avail.

Dietrich was born and grew up at the fashionable Unter den Linden by her stern officer father and a mother she never even mentioned. The father died at a young age and Dietrich abandoned the family in scandalous circumstances to become a starlet at the German UFA studios where she landed her first part of significance as the plumb and nasal prostitute in ”Die blaue Engel”. She never mentioned her mother again. She had been an obedient child, that should suffice.

When flattered by the documentalist for her great courage to leave Germany and go into exile in the US shortly after the Nazi take over she replied laconically: ” It had nothing to do with courage. It was common sense. Who wants to live in a country ruled by a madman killing women and children?”

Like Riefenstahl she was as aware that the masses were easy to manipulate and she never felt any regrets to implement her insights. She played the good hearted whore to perfection in a long train of movies, only she was not that good.

Dietrich, in psychiatric terms, seems to correspond to the anonplastic personality disorder This means in every sense ” the world according to me”. Her Narcissist personality close to a psychopat disorder allowed her to disqualify everything and everyone who dared to contradict her understanding of the world and with a firm belief that she was the only one able to command it.

”Ordnung muss sein”. She left nothing to chance. The icon was an obssessive compulsive woman with a paramount need to stay in control with all the skill that it takes to convince people that she was in her right and, so I believe, very convincing of her grandezza. Her strict preussian bourgeois upbringing developed her psychological self to regard the world in black and white, a docotyme challeging world wihout any other shades or colors on the emotional and intellectual palette.

This omnipotent and dominatrix primadonna, eyes half shut and possibly the highest cheekbones in Hollywood history, was filmed in the contemporary chiaroscuro fashion which made her and a handful of other beautiful actresses look like ubermensch goddesses, unattainable, of outstanding stature and enigmatic beauty.

When natural beauties such as Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly entered the silver screen the assolutas´ golden days were over. The filters over the camera lenses were stripped off, the lights were turned on and the veterans had to crawl back into the shadows. A happy go lucky fifties apple pie infected euphoric decade sporting cheery Doris Day and an endlessly bathing Esther Williams had no room for the anemic Garbo nor the black spider Dietrich who belonged to an era full of anxiety, starvation, financial depression, chaos, misery and devastating wars. Goddesses were no longer needed. The horrors were forgotten and the sky had no limit.

Dietrich´s husky androgynous voice attracted all sexes. Her stage performances were equalled by no one and she was hailed as one of the greatest entertainers ever and rightfully so. When closing her act she usually turned her back at the audience, peeping coquettishly back at them over her right shoulder before her grande sortie. She couldn´t have loathed them more...

Douglas

2012