The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
Starring: Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt, Friedrich FeherWritten By: Carl Mayer & Hans JanowitzDirected By: Robert WieneRelease Date: March 21, 1920Rating: 5/5
Summary: When hypnotist named Dr. Caligari and his sleepwalking companion, Cesare, come to town, murders begin to occur and it's up to Francis to figure out just what is going on.
My Thoughts: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is far from scary, though in essence, it is a horror film. It doesn't use gimmicky jump scares, gore and guts and everything else that directors use in today's horror films to drive its point home. And while that is mainly because of the limitations in making movies in the early stages of cinema and the fact that these kinds of gimmicks hadn't been invented yet, it is because of these reasons that the film does what it does so well. Much like films like Gone Girl, Black Swan or Shutter Island, the fear lies in our own imaginations. The fear comes from the fact, that throughout the length of the film, everything we've come to know is all a lie and the person feeding us all the lies is none other than the main character themselves.
However, the aspect of the "unreliable narrator" is not a uncommon trope. In both literature and film alike, it's a trope used to trope to trick the audience because of their expectations of how they feel a movie will play out. It's a troupe used to expose the true nature of the human being we've come to know and as readers it's to us to decide whether or not their actions were justifiable or not. The unreliable narrator is someone whose words about the situation at hand, we cannot take at face value. This may be for reasons such as insanity, immaturity or lack of knowledge of the situation, but in end, they've duped us and it's that shock value from the "big reveal" that makes this kind of trope work so well in movies and literature. These people blur the lines between fiction and reality even within a fictional world because while the world they're in doesn't inherently exist, it comes to life, the more and more we get invested in the story. And the uneasy feeling comes from being told that what we know and believe to be real, is in fact, the complete opposite.
In The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Francis is our unreliable narrator. He and his friend who go to see Dr. Caligari and a sleepwalking man named Cesare who can see into the future. Francis' friend goes up to get his fortune told only to have the sleepwalking man tell him that he's going to die that night. And unfortunately, that's what happens. And this sends Francis off on a mission to find out who killed his dear friend. And the things is as we follow Francis in his endeavors, the idea that he could be behind the murders never comes to mind. How could the man we've come to know and root for be the catalyst behind this mind-boggling search? And what's where the fear sets in. We're distracted by the the mystery surrounding these murders and the bizarre, jaggedly designed, dream-like sets that we, too, were in a delusion of sorts. But there's always a time that comes where we have to wake up from the dream and face reality and this happens at the end of the film to Francis as he comes to realize it was he that murdered his friend and that insane asylum that he ran into in order to find the murderer is his home. And most importantly, that it's run by none other than Dr. Caligari himself. But while one must wake up and face reality, it's reality that drove poor Francis into the daze he's in, in the first place. He doesn't directly mean to lie to us, his version of the truth is skewed simply because he can't accept that he murdered his friend. Thus, he made up this story in his head to cope with the truth and that story in his head is the one we've been following. Francis believes he's not to blame, the sleeping Cesare is to blame for these crimes, but not really because he was asleep while doing so And in his head, he isn't to blame and neither is Cesare, that is until he realizes the truth. So, sometimes the narrator can't help but not tell the story objectively, they aren't deceiving us deliberately. They just can't help it.In Shutter Island, our main character Teddy (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a man who we follow as he and his comrade try to track down the murderer of his wife. However, like Francis, as we follow him, the idea that he could've murdered his wife (Michelle Williams) never comes to mind, even though it is the truth. In the end, it's revealed he killed his wife after she murdered their children and the insane asylum that he's been trying to track the murderer down at is his home. He's been living there and this delusion he's invented that there's a murderer to track is all a ruse in his mind to cope with his crime and the man who he's been investigating with is his doctor. Sound familiar? In both films, the fictional situation we're presented is what we see as reality no matter the fake actors, or fake, elaborate, bizarre sets, but in the end, these guys, Francis and Teddy, are mentally ill. Their crimes have scarred them to the point that they, themselves, have invented a safe haven of sorts that, like us, they perceive as reality when it is not.
However, some unreliable narrators are different. Unlike Teddy and Francis who are mentally ill and incapable of telling the truth, characters like Amy I(Rosamund Pike) and Nick (Ben Affleck) Dunne in David Fincher's Gone Girl get off in playing mind games. Amy's mind games, unlike Teddy's and Francis', intend to wound us and the people involved. Amy feels Nick has stolen her youth and money from her as well as the fact he's cheated on her, so her plot is to fool us, the police and Nick himself into thinking that someone (Nick to us and the police) did something to her. She omits details about their marriage and inputs others to make people believe that Nick was an abuser that ending up killing her and writes all about it in her diary, which one automatically believes because who lies in their own diary? In the beginning, they're this happy married couple and through the course of the film, things go from bad to worse and everything shifts as Nick goes from #1 Husband to #1 Murder Suspect. And Nick, in the beginning, writes Amy off as this annoying shrew, though the Amy we see from the diary seems sweet as can be, but that's exactly what Amy wants us to believe. Nick, however, only admits his true feelings about the situation at hand and the fact he was cheating. It isn't until half way through the film that we find out, though he's trying to prove to everyone that he's innocent of everything and that he is, in fact, the #1 Husband, when there are so many underlying issues he fails to bring up. And with both these contradicting views on what is what, we really don't know who these people are, what they did to each other and what they're really capable of. Was Nick an abuser? Amy wrote about him hitting her and it's even more compelling when we see it, but all of Amy's diary is seemingly a lie to indict Nick as her murderer. However, once they're in the house alone, he grabs Amy by the neck and pins her against the wall. Instead of inventing a lie that she lives in to escape reality, Amy invents a lie that her husband has to live in, so that while she drives off into the sunset and he ends up in prison. She's manipulating reality to suit her fancy and Nick does the same as he knows what he wants to be, however, he just can't quite get there, so it's just easier to make us believe he is who he says he is rather than actually attempt to change.
Wiene's story is that of a madman framed with huge, bizarre Expressionist sets to introduce said Francis' delusional mind, we just don't know it's all in Francis' head until the end of the film. The same goes for Teddy in Scorsese's Shutter Island. It's just that in Gone Girl, we don't know the extent to Nick and Amy's relationship or what happened before the day that Amy decided to make herself disappear, everything else about them is a blur. We just know they both have lied to us about what is going on. However, the unreliable narrator is still someone we can't trust. However, there's still some bit of truth in every lie and there's some sense of reality even in a fictional world.
