irrational numbers
by
Douglas Messerli
Volker
Schlöndorff and Herbert Asmodi (based on the fiction by Robert Musil), Volker
Schlöndorff(director) Der junge Törless
(Young Törless) / 1966
In
his first film, Young Törless of
1966, filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff takes Robert Musil’s 1906 novella and
subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, interconnects the actions of the
characters with the behavior of Prussian Germans and Austrians not only in
World War I, but in the Nazi Germany of World War II.
Basini may be an unlovable braggart, who
acceptance of a subservient relationship with Reiting leads him to petty thievery,
but he has done nothing serious enough to bring down the wrath of his fellow
students—particularly the passive dismissals of Törless, who, in his often
over-sensitive and intelligent questioning of his lessons concerning the use of
irrational and imaginary numbers in his mathematical lessons, might just as
well have fallen into Basini’s position.
If at first, one might think of Musil’s
work as being related to other studies of rebel students caught up in unthinking
and uncaring systems such as Jean Vigo’s Zéro
de Conduite and Lindsay Anderson’s later If…, Schlöndorff makes it clear that, in fact, these beastly
behaving students are not at all rebelling against the system in which they are
entrapped, but use that system and its often implacable and inexplicable values
to justify and support their “experiments” on their fellow beings.
Yet I agree with critic Timothy Corrigan,
whose essay accompanies the Criterion DVD of this film (and who was a former
colleague of mine at Temple University) that for Schlöndorff, at least, Törless’
passive participation in the group brutality is not the message of the film.
Nonetheless, he is the only one who does
escape the institution that will help to create the generations of future
monsters who will come to kill irrational numbers of their own kind. And, in
that fact, he quite evidently will not participate in the Weimar and Nazi
worlds. Törless, a bit like Proust’s Swann—the subject of a later Schlöndorff
film—will more likely turn to the past as a model for his behavior, escaping into
the world of the belle époque—an already dead
world—rather
than embracing to the raucous brutality of Post World I and World War II.
The film ends, indeed, with the handsome
and precocious young escapee, smiling into the face of his well-bred,
beautiful, and somewhat aloof mother, suggesting, perhaps, that Törless is
likely to grow into an effete being, saved from the brutality ahead by his
refusing to even recognize it.
Los Angeles,
November 9, 2015
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