My latest flash of GOP déjà vu came unexpectedly, while I feasted with friends in a tiny Italian village. As we ate, the television unspooled a 1955 German movie dubbed in Italian. The only face I recognized was Romy Schneider as the title character, “Sissi,” who was — as best I could guess — princess of Austro-Hungary. I tried to ignore the TV. But the sheer spectacle, in vibrant, tear-inducing Agfacolor, kept pulling me back into the charming, although completely incomprehensible life story of the woman I later learned was Elizabeth, Empress of Austro-Hungary from 1854-1898.
The film, “Sissi,” lacks two elements whose absence works together to attain a sort of transcendent tedium rarely seen in non-German cinema. The film, as far as I could tell, has no dramatic tension. Its shimmering characters float through velvet-draped rooms in a silken castle atop an inaccessible mountain. They are beautifully, elegantly, opulently oblivious to any events that might be going on in the outside world— which is the movie’s other absent element. The universe is a sound stage steeped in luxury.
In “Sissi,” the richest .0001 percent of the people in the empire have no physical or social contact with the subjects they’re supposed to be in charge of, except for a handful of blank-faced servants who rush off-camera as quickly as their legs can carry them.
Were there poor people in Austro-Hungary in the19th century? Was there hunger? Was almost everyone illiterate? Was there injustice? Did as many as half of newborns die before reaching the age of three? Did the royal family of Franz-Joseph tax the poor, and squeeze tradesmen, to underwrite their masked balls, their boar hunts and their psychosomatic ailments? Was Austro-Hungary the corrupt relic of Europe’s parasitic feudal past? Was Austro-Hungary, in fact, the reactionary cesspool of incestuous aristocracy and lese majesté that triggered World War I, annihilating a generation of young men and spawning the bad seed that became Adolf Hitler?
Well, probably. But who knows? From this movie, you couldn’t get a clue that there was carbon-based life anywhere in Austro-Hungary outside the castle — where every room was pretty and everyone was happy. And why shouldn’t they be happy? These folks had so much money and power that they never had to think about money. They were so high up the mountain, in the upper rooms of the tallest building in the empire that, even if they looked out and saw ordinary people, those people seemed like ants.
As I watched director Ernst Marischka’s idyll of good-old-days Austro-Hungary, it occurred to me that my very own countrymen have been working tirelessly, over the past 30 years, to turn America into the same movie. Indeed, Republican progress toward re-creating the court of Franz-Joseph in the land of the free is outright awesome. Although the U.S. has never really been a model of financial equality, we are now the second least-equal democracy on earth, just behind Switzerland. We stand on the brink of creating our very own crowned and castled upper crust, suitable for filming.
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