One way to explain Mac Allan’s rather unheroic presence in the final frames is to refer to what Ernst Bloch in 1929 called the “engineer’s anxiety”: the engineer’s fear of unleashing through technology—like the magician’s apprentice in Goethe—uncalled-for powers.39 This fear results in a desire to see technological projects undone rather than crowned as spectac-
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ular triumphs. Reminiscent of Bloch’s inventor, Mac Allan is an engineer paralyzed by self-doubt. Struck by anxiety, he escapes into melancholy. He views technology as magic and thus disavows the monstrousness of his initial visions. In the last sequence Bernhardt’s science fiction thus turns into a melodrama in order to assure the spectators’ identification with the film’s unheroic hero.
But Mac Allan’s final melancholy exceeds Bloch’s notion of anxiety, for what Mac Allan’s last appearance simultaneously conceals and reveals is nothing other than the costs of metallization, the price of his attempt to protect patriarchal authority against the fascist engineer’s own anxiety about (female) sexuality. Mac Allan becomes melodramatic because he must concede that his bias for male self-affirmation and instrumental reason culminates in a Pyrrhic victory: the construction of the tunnel required the symbolic and physical demise of Mary, Mac Allan’s wife, who died in an accident when she tried to enter the tunnel. If male authority succeeds in the end of The Tunnel, it does so only because it had to go to the extreme, namely, to erase the very difference that patriarchy needs to sustain its operation. In contradistinction to the self-congratulatory gesture of all the others—the workers, the foremen, the radio reporters—Mac Allan’s melancholy encodes the unsettling, albeit repressed, insight that such a victory is no victory at all (fig. 7).
Nazi feature films often base their images of ecstatic community on highly misogynist narratives: “Crucially and consistently, the projected weak images of women form the basis of signification for many Nazi films, reflecting a vulnerable and ultimately paranoid order . . . Nazi cinema goes far beyond the institutionalized sexism of Hollywood movies and the way in which the classical narrative recuperates even the strongest women in the male discourse. Nazi cinema does not leave it at simple recuperation, though; women are to be overcome, indeed sacrificed.”40 The Tunnel provides a curious variation of this denial of femininity, offering a narrative of male camaraderie reminiscent of Klaus Theweleit’s study on male bonding after World War I.41 In contrast to Theweleit’s potentially homophobic argument,42 however, I suggest that The Tunnel requires the viewer to conceive of homoeroticism not as a necessary corollary of collective techno-bodies and their (proto)fascist politics but rather as a disposition shaped into a highly regressive fantasy by both Mac Allan’s diegetic and the film’s metadiegetic technologies of power. In accord with a long tradition of linking homosexuality and fascism, the film stages homoeroticism as a desire for repression: the homosexual’s desire in the final analysis desires the end of desire, an annihilation of the desiring body.43 The liminal space of the
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Figure 7. The engineer’s melancholy: Paul Hartmann as Mac Allan in The Tunnel.
Courtesy of Filmmuseum Berlin—Deutsche Kinemathek.
underground allows for the articulation of what cultural conventions censor above ground, and the film ends up casting a carnivalistic release from censorship and inhibition into an even more effective structure of control.
Exploiting homoerotic desire, Mac Allan’s tunnel project stages a supreme male fantasy. It pictures women as self-marginalizing and self-repressing.
They willingly sacrifice their own lives to protect men from the threat of femininity and otherness. Like many other Bernhardt films— German, French, or American— The Tunnel presents an image of woman scarred with the wounds of self-denial.44 Remarkably enough, Mary knows even better than Mac Allan that she poses a risk to the engineer’s projects; therefore, in a gesture of utter subordination she silences her own voice and arrests her own desire. Neither her body nor time is on her side.
Already known for his depiction of claustrophobic spaces and enclosed interiors— of orphanages ( Die Waise von Lowood [The orphan from Lowood], 1926), army posts ( Das letzte Fort [The last fort], 1928), mills ( Die letzte Kompagnie [The last company], 1929), or railway cars ( Die Frau, nach der man sich sehnt [The woman one desires], 1929)—Bernhardt de-
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picts Mac Allan’s subway as a niche of male comradeship. His tunnel is a site at which the spectacle of modern technology appeals to and instrumentalizes homoerotic desires only in order to overwhelm the individual with a regressive utopia. Machines, muscles, and marching tunes meet here to overcome phobias concerning female agency. Whereas sexuality above ground remains transmuted into cathartic rituals, Mac Allan’s underground opens a space in which men may enact their desire to break free from compulsory heterosexuality as much as from any possible dependence on the female as other and as mother. Mac Allan and his working armies dig ever farther through the dirt, not to connect the two continents but to pursue their dream of male self-procreation through technology, a dream that establishes male identity as a completely autonomous system of desire and signification but that ultimately only reproduces already given structures of power. Mac Allan’s enterprise, in other words, enables homoerotic desires only in order to promote a phobic erasure of difference and alterity.
It hardly needs mentioning that in Mac Allan’s underground, the imagery of displaced intercourse (the phallic drilling devices) intersects with the desire for a regressive reunion with a self-constructed mother (the womb of the tunnel). Both moments culminate, ironically but not surprisingly, in the ultimate materialization of male self-procreation, accomplished in the final sequence when the European worker appears in the vaginal opening to welcome the American crew—a striking image of male technological self-birth, of clean and safe sex indeed. Although it may seem claustrophobic, then, the underground actually delimits a space of shelter and escape, a site at which emancipation from everyday repression coincides with acts of regression. Woman has to die so that the tunnel, so that fascist solidarity and male redemption, so that technological progress may live.
But then again, who does really live down in Bernhardt’s tunnel? “Your grief is not so important,” Hobby comforts Mac Allan after Mary’s death.
“Your life no longer belongs to you.” The Tunnel cloaks the various practices of work, spatial appropriation, domination over nature, and erasure of difference with a rhetoric of heroic self-sacrifice and duty: what counts is not the individual but the project, not particular interests or pleasures but the larger vision of the tunnel, the digging male collective. “Every work,”
Mac Allan once declares in front of his working armies, “is a battle, and there are casualties in every battle, in the mines, on the oceans, in the machine halls in the cities. There is no life without danger.” Resolute words here try to recontain what the film’s images fail to deliver. Fierce speech is meant to reanchor the body in space so as to mask the film’s many layers of displacement and projection. Danger and death, Mac Allan wants his workers
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to believe, constitute the most valuable force of any human existence; he who rules over the moment of danger, he who overcomes his own body and desire, deserves all authority and sovereignty.
d i s t r a c t i o n a n d c r ow d c o nt r o l On the opening day of the New York subway on October 27, 1904, the city’s police commissioner revealed to the public an unforeseen use of the new transportation system. What had been anticipated in decades of public discussion as a triumph of urban sanitization, safety, and speed suddenly emerged as an effective vehicle of crowd control.45 For the police commissioner the subway’s main achievement was not simply to alleviate dreadful traffic conditions and to obliterate the proverbial foul air that prevailed in the overcrowded cars of surface transportation. Instead, the police commissioner hailed this new technological device as an instrument to contain future social uproar, one in fact that “is going to absolutely preclude the possibility of riots in New York. . . . [For if] a riot should break out at any time now we could clear the road and send out a trainload of a thousand men, dropping as many of them off at every station as necessary, and have an armed force in Harlem in fifteen minutes.”46 Just as Haussmann’s Paris boulevards had prevented the building of barricades, the New York subway—in the eyes of the police commissioner—provided a new technology of power, inaugurated to increase control over the urban masses.
Produced at the threshold of the Third Reich, Curtis Bernhardt’s The Tunnel similarly rendered the underground as a perfect technology of power— one, however, that by far surpassed the New York commissioner’s vision of unrestricted police mobility. The film and its rhetoric of sacrifice and mobilization extended the imperatives of crowd control to the realms of fantasy and distraction. It integrated cinema’s sights and sounds into a seemingly natural harmony so as to align perception and coordinate sentience from above. Reckoning with what in 1933 was left of Weimar’s fascination with America, with the appeal of American speed, technology, and mass culture, The Tunnel thereby inaugurated Nazi cinema as a site of domestication, incorporation, and transformation. Transporting the past into the present, the film coaxed the viewer from silent to sound film, from Weimar Americanism to Nazi sovereignty, from Hollywood to Germany.
It provided generic pleasures with the intention of precluding the organization of experience in self-regulated and socially specific public spheres.
One of the many multiple-language versions that German film studios produced during the 1930s, The Tunnel fulfilled urgent ideological func-
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