In contradistinction to the opening of Kellermann’s novel, Bernhardt’s The Tunnel immediately marks its futuristic world as one deeply familiar with various mechanical means of sound transmission. After a complex series of high- and low-angle montage shots of Manhattan the film’s first sequence confronts us right away with the issue of voice recording and audio transference. In order to spy on the illustrious society invited by Mac Allan to the roof garden of a New York hotel, the journalist Harris installs a microphone in one of the garden’s plants. Harris’s efforts recall the strategies of early sound film technicians, who prior to the invention of postproduction sound recording had to hide their mikes all over the set. Ironically, however, Harris’s transmission channels get cut off when Mac Allan begins to disclose his tunnel project. The banker, Woolf (Gustaf Gründgens), discovers the bug and places a fan in front of the microphone. Much to the dismay of Harris, Woolf thus produces undifferentiated noise instead of marketable sensations. Subsequently, microphones and radios reappear in scenes similarly marked by sensationalism and a ruthless commodification of spoken language. Witness Mary (Olly von Flint), Mac Allan’s wife, pulled in front of a mike to comment on the approval of the project; and witness Hobby (Attila Hörbiger), who is snatched by a radio reporter in the tunnel and forced to deliver a statement immediately before the final rendezvous of the American with the European crews.
Radio microphones in The Tunnel connect the main characters to the commodified world of mass information and sensation. Telephones transmit functional messages in repeated states of emergency. Over and over telephones sound an alarm, relate surprising news, immediately stir panic, or launch uncontrolled emotions: when Mac Allan, Hobby, and Mary are informed about the approval of the project; when Mac Allan learns about a flood in the tunnel while attending a party; when Mac Allan uses a phone to broadcast the sabotage activities instigated by Woolf yet fails to warn the workers on the front line because the telephone wires have been cut; and during the prologue in Manhattan, when we see reporters knock violently on three telephone booths occupied by their fellow journalists.
Rudolf Arnheim’s 1936 essay Radio is instructive in accounting for the use of communication technologies in The Tunnel and their role as media expressing urgency and threatened reality control. In this essay Arnheim emphatically embraces the electric media of aural communication because they allow for an exploration of the “effects of pure sound.”28 Radio’s focus on acoustic expressions reverses what Arnheim considers the unfortunate separation of music and speech in modern civilization. Radio reinstates the poetic materiality of spoken language. To be sure, inextricably bound to a
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certain here and now, aural media, according to Arnheim, fail to give adequate representations of movements in space. Yet such limitations are actually the media’s unique strength. They provide a sense of closeness virtually unknown in all other forms of art and mass communication: “The wireless addresses those millions not as a mass but as individuals. It talks to everyone individually, not to everyone together . . . , as if ‘à deux.’” 29
According to Arnheim radios deterritorialize human communication and at the same time set up new zones of intimacy. In effect, aural media—
properly used— can shape new democratic communities that are based on the principle of polyphony. Shrinking space, radio enables new networks of cultural exchange. As a result, Arnheim argues, the wireless might even redraw the borders of traditional nation-states as it undermines nationalist strategies of polarization, strategies that primarily rest on “a certain distorted caricature”30 of the other as enemy.
Arnheim’s theory of radio culminates in a humanitarian redemption of liberal individualism. Bernhardt’s The Tunnel, in contrast, presents media of aural communication in the context of what Herbert Marcuse in 1934 called the battle against liberalism in the totalitarian conception of the state.31 The Tunnel depicts telephones and radios as flawed and unsettling means of exchange. They effect emotional destabilization, signify critical losses of control through spatial, and hence visual, deterritorialization; they promote the transformation of human communication into a meaningless spectacle, a commodity. Denigrating the efficacy of wireless oral exchange, The Tunnel rejects Arnheim’s utopian vision of radio on at least two planes.
First, in contrast to Arnheim’s portrait of aural media as instruments for an exploration of the poetic side of language, The Tunnel’s project of picturing a community of working bodies relies on a primarily instrumental view of language. Where Arnheim wants the radio to play with the materiality of language, The Tunnel pictures a process of social homogenization that requires both the commanding voice and the visual presence of Mac Allan. Instead of polyphony and poetry, monologue and strategic modes of address mark The Tunnel’s practices of speaking and listening. Language here is mostly antilanguage. Unless spoken in the imperative, words are feeble and misleading. What counts are resolute actions and gestures of submission alone. Instead of exploring the noninstrumental and mimetic sides of language, The Tunnel champions the direct force of the speaking image and visualized voice rather than the humanist openness and intimacy of aural media.
Second, whereas Arnheim insists on privacy, The Tunnel invokes new forms of collectivity in which the individual male body merges into an
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all-encompassing labor machine. Bernhardt’s telephones and radios, although populating a futuristic world, are clearly figured as outmoded technologies of the age of individualism; they are carriers of single voices. What they bring to the fore are forms of bourgeois identity that are on the verge of losing or have already lost their authority and authenticity: telephones and radios connect emotionally unstable, corrupt individuals. According to Arnheim the radio addresses its listeners as individuals, not as a mass. The Tunnel, by contrast, stigmatizes media of aural exchange only to hail cinematic audiovision as a mode of address that overcomes bourgeois concepts of individuality, interiority, and emotional authenticity. As I will detail in a moment, The Tunnel accomplishes this stigmatization of aural media by displaying bourgeois privacy as a messy and—underneath its surface—
highly dangerous sphere, governed by unfulfilled female desire that threatens paternal authority. Mouthpieces of the bourgeois subject, radios and telephones carry the hazards of domestic life and emotional interiority into the open. Film and newsreel shows, on the other hand, help contain the threat of sexual difference and repressed emotionality, of sensationalism and commodification, and they most efficiently cast the individual in the mold of a new male community, in the cast of industrial sameness and fascist mass politics.
Arnheim understood the shrinkage of space through aural media as a means of exploring new forms of communication and bridging cultural gulfs. In Arnheim’s view the radio promised a progressive mediation of collective and individual identities; it undid reified polarities and enabled the mutual interpenetration of the global and the local. Radios stretch spatial relations and diversify cultural experiences. Bernhardt’s denigration of radios and telephones, by way of contrast, is part of a discourse that rejects Arnheim’s utopia of cross-cultural contact and replaces it with an imperialist vision of spatial appropriation and cultural segregation. In The Tunnel radios and telephones decenter the body and impose the fear of flowing into dissipation. They blur the protective boundaries of the armor-plated subject as much as of the nation-state. Only the natural integration of voice and image helps maintain a clear sense of physical identity, of who is a friend and who a foe. Only the putative immediacy of cinematic audiovision can suture the individual body into the fascist collective.
In 1933 Hans Traub ranked sound cinema as the second most important means of transporting language and propaganda to the masses, anteceded only by the führer’s unmediated voice itself. Film “is full of surprises in the rhythm of emotional intensification and displacement”;32 therefore, it can disseminate the spoken word much more effectively than radio or print
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media, which arrest rhythm in static expressions. The use of radios and telephones in The Tunnel conforms to Traub’s formula. Pictured as a technology far superior to the wireless, the audiovisual wonders of film constitute a perfect instrument of engineering emotions and commandeering space. Although in the final breakthrough sequence sound brings the Weimar fascination with America home to Nazi Germany, the film’s phobic representation of radios and telephones, by way of negation, celebrates the self-assertion of body and body politic as a prime value. Fascism needs the other, yet it is always afraid to recognize itself in the other’s features.
In The Tunnel German fascism successfully snatches cinema away from Hollywood, leaves America with its emasculating radios and silent films, but nevertheless—as I will detail in the remainder of this chapter—remains constantly threatened by what might amount to a monstrous return of the repressed.
m e n , wo m e n , a n d t h e j a r g o n o f au t h e nt i c i t y As it presents the underground as a world of technological wonders, The Tunnel sustains a form of technophilia that opposes the paradoxical technophobia—the technological discourse on the dangers of new technologies—
expressed in most science fiction productions. Conventional science fiction films tend to stress the danger of machines and invoke traditional values as antidotes to the fear of mechanization.33 They pit the realm of the human against technology, nature against culture, feeling against reason only to obscure the fact that the figure of nature itself might be nothing other than a cultural construct, an ideological device that authorizes existing inequality. Even highly modernist and self-reflexive texts have often failed to resist technophobic inclinations and their denial of historical agency. In Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) social harmony becomes possible only after the threats of dehumanization and the alleged regime of the machines have been defeated. Lang’s final tableau of social reconciliation restores proper demarcations between culture and nature, feeling and reason, human body and machine yet leaves everything the way it has always been.
Welcoming the triumph of instrumental reason over nature, The Tunnel clearly departs from the ambivalent technophobia depicted in Metropolis.
Bernhardt’s film does not seem troubled by a dehumanization of the body or a humanization of the machine. It renders the worker’s arm a corporeal extension of the hammer drill, the screen of the cinema an extension of the spectator’s retina. Yet this peculiar blurring of nature and culture is far from releasing emancipatory potentials and unlocking spaces of autonomous
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human agency. Bernhardt’s film construes the underground as the site of a concerted functioning of the human body, one that integrates the individual into an all-encompassing labor machine. Using the human body as an architectural element,34 The Tunnel foreshadows the dehumanization of the individual body in Leni Riefenstahl’s notorious images of Nazi parades. Down in Mac Allan’s tunnel metallization takes command. Cinematic and industrial machines of (re)production project the image of the human body as a prosthetic device. They fuse human being with machine rather than to enable any exchange of parts or functions. “Within this economy of identification,” as Jeffrey Schnapp explains in a somewhat different context, “machines stand for an ideal: not that of a body without fatigue or of a society without alienation, but instead the distinctively fascist ideal of constant exertion and fatigue coldly resisted . . . in other words, metallization.”35
The visual style of The Tunnel mirrors this quest for anaesthetic dehumanization. Hoffmann’s camera remains detached throughout the film—
in stoic distance, never touched by anything, never attempting to assume the perspective of the protagonists or to reveal inner thoughts and visions.
The camera thus underlines what is at the core of The Tunnel’s ideological project: the transformation of bourgeois subjectivity into what Ernst Jünger called the “type,” a metallized body machine whose “gaze is calm and fixed, trained to observe objects which are grasped in conditions of high speed.”36 Like Jünger’s type, Bernhardt’s workers have learned how to assimilate to the technological orders of the day. Domination and reality control, self-discipline and the repression of passion have become second nature for them. Whatever might trouble the male above ground loses its grasp in the tunnel. Dehumanization, for these workers, offers salvation from the contingencies of life. It subjects spontaneity and sentience to the imperatives of total mobilization, and it replaces the challenges of the real with a curious utopia of technological self-birth and self-armoring.
But why, then, Mac Allan’s final forlornness, his downcast eyes after the climactic breakthrough? Why his psychic absence and speechlessness in the last scene? Do these signifiers simply express the melancholia of a rapidly aged engineer?37 Or do they evidence Mac Allan’s powers of repression and the bad conscience of a pioneer who has employed expansive human resources to carry out stubborn fantasies?38
