The Damned

THE DAMNED   **1/2

Luchino Visconti

1969

IDEA:  A prominent industrialist family in Weimar Germany is torn asunder when the Nazis rise to power on the patriarch's birthday. 

BLURB:  The Damned is a cousin of such deliriously nasty familial melodramas as The Little Foxes and Written on the Wind; like those texts, it proceeds from the idea that social ills are bred within the structure of the dynastic patriarchal family, and perpetuated via nepotisms that, when combined with the naked greed of capitalism, seek to derange the world at large. The primary difference in Visconti’s lurid, frequently strident soap opera is that it deals with the ascent of the most abhorrent of all modern evils: Nazism. However, The Damned proves less interested in delineating the movement’s fruition than in dramatizing the toxic complicity, psychopathology, and political opportunism that fuels any malevolent regime. The microcosm is the Essenbeck clan, a wealthy industrialist family ensconced in the aristocratic privileges of Weimar Germany. A viper’s nest of animosity, sexual perversion, and moral sloth, their hasty self-destruction, accelerated by the influence of a Nazi relative, is the allegorical descent of Germany itself into the bowels of insanity. Visconti plays up the Oedipal drama that ultimately grants scion Martin, and by extension the SS, control of the family’s manufacturing power; juxtaposed with the massacre of gay SA members in the film’s most memorable sequence, it’s easy to interpret in the queer Visconti’s vision an indictment of state power’s connection to heterosexual, hereditary capital. While little about The Damned is subtle or even refined - whether it’s the overuse of zooms or a narrative structure that builds in fits and starts - the film still has an intermittently chilling power, especially when it reins in the shrillness to stare silently aghast into the abyss.