The Turnings and Cinema

[pbrower2a]

This forum is intended to show how great or near-great movies express (wittingly or otherwise) the turning theory. This can be at any stage of the cycle or within an era itself. There will be plenty of war movies, Westerns, science fiction, romantic comedies, musicals, and even horror stories may be introduced.

Please restrict yourself, though, to certifiably good or great movies. These need not be American movies or about America. Because most of us do not make a habit of watching schlock, and most of us are more familiar with great movies (like Casablanca or Cabaret) or even good ones (Superman I) than bad ones (like Gigli , Howard the Duck, or Superman III or IV)... let's stick to the ones we are more likely to have seen that we have cause to remember for reasons other than "How awful!". Or, "Oh, I remember seeing a wristwatch under the toga!"

[pbrower2a]

Let's consider the last completed Crisis. As I see it, a Crisis results from a depraved "Degeneracy" (I need an antonym for Howe and Strauss' "regeneracy", and I think it fits well

What could be a more degenerate lead into a Crisis than this depiction of a sort of burlesque:

Quote: What good is sitting alone in your room?
Come hear the music play
Life is a cabaret, old chum
Come to the cabaret

Put down the knitting, the book and the broom
It's time for a holiday
Life is a cabaret, old chum
So come to the cabaret

Come taste the wine
Come hear the band
Come blow that horn
Start celebrating right this way
Your table's waiting

What could permitting some prophet of doom
To wipe every smile away
Life is a cabaret, old chum
So come to the cabaret

All sorts of stage permutations of the musical Cabaret are possible, but all of the culminate with the rise of you-know-what. Although Cabaret as a movie is not conventionally seen as a horror movie, t has some crucial elements: freakish characters, people doing nasty and depraved stuff as if they could not do otherwise, and bad things happening to innocent people. Of course we know from history the ultimate horror which needed not be shown explicitly. The only likable people in the movie are Jewish characters, and we know what will happen to them. If we don't quite get the message, we see the dead pet dog of the (Jewish) Landauer family being shown beaten to death.

(I understand that one stage version has the characters of the Kit Kat Club [the name of the Cabaret] in an epilogue in one final performance -- as they are about to be gassed in a murder camp).