Queens Don’t Make Revolutions
“Touch my lips to yours, like you do on Earth!”
In 1924 Yakov Protazanov dreams of Vertigo. Or maybe of Metropolis-Vier um die Frau. Or maybe just Soviet Socialist Republics…in space—his film from that year, Aelita, despite its stolid form is over-delirious with future possibilities.
A mysterious, indecipherable message is received by radio operators around the globe, but only a great Soviet engineer, one who has dreams of Mars and Martians, posits the absurd theory that maybe, possibly, it’s a message from outer space. It is difficult to understand why his head is in the clouds—he’s just married a beautiful girl and he seems in charge of terrific mechanical works for the great Soviet. Nevertheless, he dreams—during the day, surely, as we never see him asleep—of Mars and its beautiful, vamping Queen. Mars here is represented via Constructivist sets, cellophane and cardboard costuming and a preference for a kind of airy concreteness—ancient-like, spacious sets of granite, windowless openings, tall lines of wires and panes of glass—and seems appealing simply because its inhabitants are clearly human and its stylings so much more pristine, vivid, and, dare we say, chic, than the 1921 in which the film is set.
Back on Earth, 1921 is the reality, one including a crypto-capitalist counter-revolutionary who pimps out his wife to procure jewelry while he swindles extra food rations, attends secret underground balls, and, to inspire the film’s melodrama, endlessly smooth-talks our great engineer’s young wife, inspiring in our hero a He Knew He Was Right-level of pathological jealousy. And so: our hero fights off jealousy in his Soviet reality while escaping to dreams of a different kind of woman, a wealthy, undersexed, Earth-obsessed Queen on an alien world. The cutting is beautiful: the engineer dreams an entire other film and film world, as if the filmmakers thought that perhaps, for audiences, their contemporary melodrama too boring—why not contrive a way to suddenly cut to abstracted decadence? Yet, in the dream, on Mars, the Queen uses an amazing multi-paned sculpture, a Martian telescope, to spy on Earth and long to escape her life and join its world. Somewhere, in space, these two gazes—that of the dreamer, that of his dreamt Queenly astronomer—meet and there must be some kind of utopia.
That’s all in my head, however. What the film proceeds to do, after the man’s jealousy leads to a violent extreme, is allow him to doff a disguise, build a spaceship and fly into space, along with the film’s comedic element, a hilarious, rat-like aspiring detective whose ambition is admirable but will stoop to counter-revolutionary collaboration to get his means; as well as the requisite proletarian-Soviet-soldier everyman—as our effete, dreaming hero is, let’s admit, too aristocratic to be fully a protagonist of the people. On Mars, he tries to capture a new romance—or is it a recapturing of the same one as on Earth?—while the soldier discovers the Martian masses are being held in slavery by the elites. (The scenes of “oppression” are less about exploited slave labour and instead eerily evoke images of Holocaust crematoria, immobilized, nearly nude bodies thrown down shoots, indiscriminately piled on one another, and then shelved in oven-like recesses.) So Mars is discovered as just another Earth (shades of Żuławski’s sci-fi totalitarian allegory, On the Silver Globe), with 1:1 relationships not just of oppression but also of love. Our engineer even relives the tragic confrontation he had his wife again with the Queen, just as the freed Martian workers swarm and throttle the planet’s Elders. As in Vertigo, fantasies are projected into realities that are projected back into fantasies and it becomes impossible to decipher which came first.
Remember, this is still but in the engineer’s head. Which is hardly a it’s-all-a-dream narrative disappointment. Instead, we see pictures of the fantasia the Revolution inspired; an almost dangerous fantasia, because, as the soldier remarks (in the dream), he helped build Republics and now he’s just laying around. Aelita sees the heat of revolutionary fervor dissipating to the fading warmth of dreams (and dreams turned around and made grand by cinema); the supposed reality of the film is but the banality of the corrupt and corrupting capitalist neighbor, the bourgeois misunderstandings of a jealousy melodrama. Only a message from outer space re-inspires the delirious possibilities of new worlds to explore, upset, conquer—a socio-political aspiration inextricably tied, by our romantic engineer, to infatuation and lust. In a severe contradiction but no doubt one required for such a disquieting use of wish-fulfillment—our hero is essentially allowed to kill his wife, bed the Queen of Mars, and inspire a revolution—the engineer at the end renounces his real-world dreams of building a spaceship to travel to Mars. But who needs a spaceship in the real world when you can always build one in your dreams?
By Daniel Kasman