The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

What makes a good story can be learned from a good sandwich. The bread is the plot: it holds everything else together, and without it there is no sandwich. It can range in quality from wonderbread to a nice focaccia from Panera or beyond. But if the bread is what's filling you up or giving the sandwich flavor, you're doing it wrong. Similarly with a good story, you need fascinating ideas to explore (the meat), characters you care about and identify with (cheese), good dialogue (dressing), and great artistry and atmosphere all around (the veggies).

The point of this allegory is that I recently decided to Netflix a number of movies I've been meaning to see for years, but never got around to. One of the first of these is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a silent film from 1920. Dr. Caligari was one of the first horror movies and one of the first to employ a twist ending, mostly because it was one of the first movies ever made.

The story is pretty straightforward by  today's standards. The mysterious Dr. Caligari brings his sideshow attraction, the somnambulist Cesare, to an exhibition / fair in a small town. Our hero, Francis, and his friend Alan go to see the show, and Cesare predicts that Alan will not live to see the morning, a prediction which ultimately comes true. A murder mystery! (not that mysterious) The twist ending is somewhat telegraphed, but only because this movie was so influential that it's been reused about 5,000 times by now. Suffice it to say that in the German Expressionist world of deep shadows and crooked doorways, not everything is as it appears.

But the plot isn't what makes this movie work, and it's certainly not the characters, who are all fairly one-dimensional. What makes this movie so influential is (to use my allegory) the vegetables. It's precisely the crooked doorways, twisting paths, and general visual aesthetics (plus some pretty creepy music) that have made this one of the most influential movies of all time. For example, I had always wondered why Tim Burton's version of Batman's enemy The Penguin (from 1992's Batman Returns) looked so jacked up freaky. After the first appearance of the character Dr. Caligari, I instantly thought "he looks kinda like Tim Burton's Penguin... Ooooh!" Actually, a lot of Tim Burton's work is influenced by German Expressionism in general, and by Dr. Caligari in particular. Remember the movie Edward Scissorhands? While Edward's leather costume is reminiscent of something else, his overall look is very much like Cesare, who is also a sympathetic, childlike, and somewhat haplessly destructive character.

So I liked the movie. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to see how a good story can be propelled with lots of atmosphere and a minimum of dialogue. I'm not a big fan of expressionism, but the ability of a movie like this to draw the viewer in (despite all the technical limitations) is impressive. The directors of our modern summer blockbusters would do well to take a few notes from director Robert Wiene's notebook.