Death In Venice: The Impossibility of Dying on Film

Thomas Mann’s brief masterpiece, Death in Venice, begins, as the name nearly suggests it ought, in a stonecutter’s shop—in a graveyard minus the bodies. We meet its protagonist, Achenbach, whose name means “river of ash,” strolling among the tombstones, a daydreaming, heavily rational, sickly man, who after deciding he is due a vacation is met by a figure whom scholars have suggested is Hermes (Death). Achenbach’s decision to take a vacation, followed by a brush with death, begins the book’s pairing of the Apollonian ideals of reason and restraint against Dionysian abandon and sensual intoxication. Though Hermes is the first of many Dionysian specters introduced in the novel (Hermes was himself a follower of Dionysius) all are portrayed in human forms; we see him here as a man who leans upon a cane but peers with angry eyes from beneath his straw hat. Before Achenbach embarks on his trip, however, we learn in chapter two that he is one of, if not the, preeminent writer of his time. His works are testaments to Apollonian virtue, tomes espousing reason, perseverance, and emotional and mental fortitude. His credo, we are told, is “see it through.” We will soon see this phrase deconstructed,  however, as its dual-nature is revealed; the conventional kernel of wisdom—perseverance—is turned on its head, at which point “see it through” can be taken to impel one to actually give in to temptation. 

Achenbach arrives in Venice, sees a handsome Polish youth named Tadzio, and begins his struggle with the noxious air of the city along with his inner battle between Eros and Logos. In chapter three we see Achenbach’s resolve start to wane as he becomes preoccupied with Tadzio. He begins to give himself over to his flowering obsession as his health continues to decline, and he earns a smile from Tadzio (arguably) in return. By the end of chapter four he has no desire to return to his former self, notably donning a straw hat—the headdress again alludes Dionysus’s mythical regalia. With his fever-dream in chapter five he finally descends completely into a Bacchanalian hell, becomes elatedly and wantonly intoxicated by his admiration for Tadzio, abandons both reason and pride, and dies. We are left to wonder if once he has left the stonecutter’s shop where he soon after meets Hermes, Achenbach is, philosophically at least, a specter himself. Throughout the full length of the book Mann consistently blurs the line between literal and metaphorical death while making a sharp delineation between reason and sensuality, suggesting that for his protagonist the death of reason is a death of the Self, concomitant with Achenbach’s literal demise. Time is slowed down, and we witness through the novel’s progression a man passing from one world to the next.

Turning now to the film: Too often, perhaps, audiences demand that a film stay “true” to the novel, and in some ways this request may have become tired. Yet if we can imagine for a moment seeing this picture having not read the book first, the real question to be considered here is not “Does this film stay true to the novel?” but, rather, “Can this film survive without it?”. I cannot see how. Before I give the impression that Luchino Visconti’s directorial talents are completely wasted on this picture, let me remark that the film is, indeed, beautifully shot (and Dirk Bogarde’s talent on the screen cannot be ignored either). Comparing the relative contents of the movie against the book, and observing the visual rendering of what Visconti was able to mine from the novel, one first marvels at his ability do so much with so little. But the very next thought is, “Why would he take on a project forcing him to do so little with so much?” Perhaps Visconti was forced into a box, albeit a visually stunning one, where much of the truly interesting work is left on the page. The claim, then, is not that the film’s director did a bad job realizing Mann’s book; it is that he had a nearly impossible job given the nature of this particular, highly introspective, novel. From here on out, however, I will leave the issue of whether Visconti was forced to make the choices he did due to the difficulty of his subject, and I will focus only on the ineptitude of the choices themselves, having already given him some defense.

To mark the extreme difficulties placed upon this film one need not go much further than its opening sequence. In the first few moments alone we have culled chapters one and two of the book outright (let’s remember there are only five); we have changed Achenbach from a writer to a composer, a small detail that achieves formidable results by robbing Achenbach of his life’s work; we have neutered the Hellenistic underpinnings Mann so carefully laid in the book’s overture and throughout; and in so doing we have created in our protagonist a blank canvas that—without a manual of instruction, namely, Mann’s book—we viewers have no idea how to fill in. The utter lack of philosophical and psychological background that results is something that will have to be endured through the remainder of the film, and, as I have already pointed out, we are only yet at the beginning.

On skipping chapters one and two and the lack of mythology: Due to the opening exposition which has gone missing from the film, the Classicist themes that Mann set out to tackle, and which help  to make his novel so rich, are fully given up. We do not set the stage for the mythological entrances that permeate the book, and while the film tries to trespass into the surreal—doing so most successfully with the elderly dandy on the boat approaching Venice, who portends with the line, “Our compliments to your pretty little sweetheart”—the film is never fully able to achieve the right result. The appearance of the mythical ferryman, Charon, falls totally flat. During their exchange Achenbach comes across as completely and needlessly haughty, which is to be expected since his reluctance to give himself over to death and his eventual acceptance of it are both lost as we are introduced instead to a bumbling oarsman who seems only to be going the wrong way. Mann gives us the internal dialogue in which Achenbach opines that it would be a delight if the ride would last forever, a line that is delicious considering the themes we have read thus far but which is thematically and literally absent from the film. Instead we watch a puzzlingly mirthful rowboat captain making the awkwardly sexual suggestion, “I row you good.” Is this foreshadowing? Is Achenbach being confronted with his latent homosexuality? We will never know.

On Achenbach becoming a composer and the lack of internal dialogue: Presumably Visconti’s decision to turn Achenbach from a writer into a composer was made in order to give the audiences of film the ability to experience his character’s art. Though the choice to model Achenbach upon Mahler is clever and clearly shows that the novel’s background had been studied (Mann reputedly modeled Achenbach’s physical appearance—and that alone—on Mahler), we ought to ask what we have gained from the exchange but pretty music. The change in Achenbach’s vocation deflates the theme of a man’s reason compromised by lust—since a composer, while he certainly may be erudite, is not the preeminent intellectual and the proponent of mental fortitude that Mann’s protagonist was. (The importance for Mann here is the entire purpose of bothering to introduce Achenbach’s corpus to us, in great detail no less, to begin with.) In short, a writer can uphold Apollonian ideals through his work, but a composer cannot in any literal sense. The change refocuses the story more fully on the theme of infatuation, since instead of the undermining of reason through lust we have only the arousal of lust alone. Because of this trade-off nothing truly vital to our main character is wagered, and thus nothing is lost. And the differences that result are stark. The Achenbach in Mann’s book becomes defeated existentially and dies only after surrendering his soul; the Achenbach in Visconti’s film becomes unbearably horny and dies of a cold. (Though, to be exact, it was likely cholera that did him in.) Due to this and to the lack of internal dialogue, nothing half so dramatically interesting happens when the Achenbach of film descends into sensual miasma.

As a result, the film has no tension except that which one gets from watching a mustachioed gentleman eying a handsome young boy from across floral centerpieces—ogling from just above drawn newspapers, and peering around each corner as the film stalks from one scene to the next. As viewers, we are only treated to punctuations of the unrelenting leering with occasional interjections which Visconti must have felt were obligatory in order to follow what was left of the book's original plot. Let me be clear: the objection to the film's rendering of Achenbach's forbidden infatuation is made on artistic grounds, not morally provincial ones. What are we to think about your main character's mind if for more than two hours you do not tell us! Even having read the book, viewing the film still leaves one disconnected from Achenbach's psychological evolution. Without the book's rich interior to guide us, what did Visconti expect us to do during these scenes, if not to laugh? Or yawn.