Grasshoppers & Nazis: Bob Fosse's Cabaret

 Liza Minelli, Michael York, Joel Grey, Fritz Weppert. Dir. Bob Fosse, Warner Bros., 1972

Once upon a time in the '80s, I wrote a paper for a college English class deconstructing the fable of the ant and the grasshopper, coming down on the side of the grasshopper with both feet. The grasshopper, I argued, is humankind's wanderlust, its irrepressible need to go new places and meet people and have adventures with them (or at least drinks), to be in and of moments, to laugh and feel good and not worry, and that, I argued, is the best of us. We need the grasshoppers to remind us life is beautiful when it is lived. 

Back then, I hung around with grasshoppers, though I'm not sure I was one. The real grasshoppers I knew took to the air and seldom, if ever, returned. Their adventures took them everywhere but back to Short Vine Street, Cincinnati, anytime between 1987 & 1993. I loved to hear their wild tales when they did alight there again for a few days, but I had to make sure I had a home fire burning. I needed to know where I was sleeping. I wanted a home base a little too much to ever take to the skies with my 'hopper pals. 

The irony is I lost my home base five times without taking off for adventures. Maybe I ought to've gotten in one of those cars leaving Perkins' for Golden Gate Park. I lost whatever I might have lost on the road, anyway. An ant looks back.

Sally Bowles is a grasshopper. I think almost every girl I knew between 1986 and 1992 who thought she modeled her life on Edie Sedgwick was actually mirroring Cabaret's Sally Bowles. I think almost every young, beautiful, & doomed ingenue I've seen in movies since 1972 takes at least a little from Bowles, the beautiful loser, the girl in the middle of every crowd who always feels as if she's all alone, the free spirit whose relentless chase of the good times mirrors her chase after the absentee parent, usually Dad, who knocked a hole in her heart. 

Bowles is pure archetype. Every hooker with a heart of gold, every Edie Sedgwick, every Lindsay Lohan, every young, beautifully broken starlet in history and in contemporary fiction, owes Isherwood's Sally Bowles.

Sally's relationship with Brian (Michael York), a young Cambridge scholar, and their companion/enabler, the Baron Maximilian von Heune, reminds me of young women I knew around Clifton in the late '80s and early '90s. I watched these grasshoppers flit from scene to scene, always on an arm, always fabulous, always beautiful and free. Like in the fable, though, and in the film, winter, aka morning aka reality, always comes again. Grasshoppers have to either learn to be like ants, like York's Brian, ultimately more content and comfortable with hearth, home, and security in England, or take to the skies and find another warm green place in which to be forever young and beautiful. 

Most of the grasshoppers I knew could no more be ants than I could be they. They took to the skies, found the next amazing scene, the next beautiful group of people, man. Not all the grasshoppers I knew landed in warm green fabulous places. Maybe they kissed a semi's grille. Maybe they landed in Florida in time for the worst cold snap in 50 years. 

Maybe flying and leaping and forever on to the next cool scene grew tiring. Maybe the fabulousness started to feel like work. Maybe the glamor turned out to be Woolworth's makeup and dollar store glitter. Whatever, they didn't make it. They're not still out there in the sun being beautiful and amazing and cool. By the end of Liza's stunning, stirring performance of the title song, we know she's unlikely to land safely for much longer, herself. The Nazis are inevitable as winter, and her ticket out of Berlin says goodbye at the train station. Sally Bowles can only be Sally Bowles, grasshopper, Sally Bowles, fabulous star.

Nothing gold, not even Sally Bowles, can stay. 

These days, I think that paper was absolutely right and a load of horseshit 10 feet deep. The ant probably has the "better" life in having the safer one. Most of the people I knew in those days survived and had kids and sometimes got married and sometimes got married to other people later on, and their kids are mostly young adults now, or about to be, and the day-to-day, domestic lives they've fashioned look, to me, as adventurous, and far more rewarding, than my own forever-15 adventures. Most of the beautiful grasshoppers, the ones I couldn't take my eyes off, the ones whose lives looked perfect to me, are dead, addicted, or simply gone - no one knows where. Whatever spirit of spontanaeity and freedom and irrepressibility they brought to the world, the world rolled on, and rolled over them. My friends and I, dull, safe, practical ants, continue. We win, right?

Right?

I mean, I guess, but thank fuckin' God for every Sally Bowles who goes out there and shakes it against the dying of the light. Thank God for all the beautiful, free, glorious grasshoppers who make this safe, responsible life colorful and crazy and interesting for a time. Thank God for every single Sally Bowles, for electing to share her beautiful tragedy with us all as art, even if it means her destruction. 

I don't want to say "Thanks, gals, for always taking one for the team," but it's the free spirits, the gorgeously reckless, the grasshoppers, who burn bright against the engulfing blackness, who remind us life is more colorful, more vibrant, more alive, than the prevailing paradigm. They light a way forward, by kamikaze runs into light bulbs. Life as an ant is safer. "Better." It would be unending black tedium without the grasshoppers, though. 

This is what Cabaret evoked. I don't think it synopsizes or describes the story particularly well. It doesn't discuss the difference between a musical and a film with songs, pointing out how the songs in a film like Cabaret serve as meta-commentary on what we've just seen and are about to see. There's no rapt commentary on the film's mindbendingly disturbing centerpiece, "Tomorrow Belongs to Me," which crystallizes the full conformist horror of Nazi Germany in approximately three and a half minutes of beerhall singalong-song. I do not linger on how every "freakscene" of which I was part was semi-selfconsciously modeled on either Cabaret or the '20s Paris of Midnight in Paris (which I also just watched) or both, with a dash of Merry Prankster for acid. 

Lastly, I do not lavish praise on Liza Minelli, whom I never really appreciated back in the '70s. That she had talent was obvious, but what I saw her do and knew about her didn't speak to me. Until now. A movie writer, like a woman at a singles bar, knows within minutes if a movie's got a chance in hell. Within two minutes of watching Minelli's Bowles, I said, aloud, "Oh, I like her." When Minelli lays into "Life is a Cabaret" at the climax, she and Sally Bowles owned me, heart & soul. It's a startlingly great performance. Liza Minelli never got anything quite this good again. 

My essay about grasshoppers and ants and tragedy doesn't really get into any of those and it seems to me a thorough writeup ought to. Cabaret is an amazing film, yet more evidence of the visionary genius of the late Bob Fosse, and that should be stressed in a writeup. Grasshoppers, ants, and kamikaze lightbulb runs were what Cabaret drew from me, however, so the essay remains. Stet. I am sorry if anyone felt shortchanged by my thoughts about insects.