This is a report I wrote for a literary analysis class. Got an A-.
Kafkaesque. The word has entered the modern vernacular, even among those ignorant of Kafka himself. It is often used to describe a film’s visual style. This seems ironic as Kafka never made a film or even a painting. Yet his use of nightmarish literary imagery as well as his bleak subject matter and absurdist humor.
Though many filmmakers borrow Kafka’s storytelling elements, many to great success, few have actually based films directly on his stories. The only truly noteworthy vision seems to be Orson Welles’ The Trial, which is widely ranked among Welles’ best. It tells the story of Joseph K, a Jewish bank clerk who is placed under arrest without charge and psychologically tortured in a kind of legal limbo until his execution. Welles stays true to Kafka’s original plot most steps of the way, although his death is handled slightly differently. In the book, K’s final thoughts betray his naiveté and complacency in his belief that world must somehow sort itself out in a just way:
“As he looked round, he saw the top floor of the building next to the quarry. He saw how a light flickered on and the two halves of a window opened out, somebody, made weak and thin by the height and the distance, leant suddenly far out from it and stretched his arms out even further. Who was that? A friend? A good person? Somebody who was taking part? Somebody who wanted to help? Was he alone? Was it everyone? Would anyone help? Were there objections that had been forgotten? There must have been some. The logic cannot be refuted, but someone who wants to live will not resist it. Where was the judge he'd never seen? Where was the high court he had never reached? He raised both hands and spread out all his fingers.‿ (Kafka, 60)
Even in his final moments, K clings to the hope that a higher power, be it a court, a judge, a friend, or a light flickering in the distance, might feel sympathy for his plight and assist him. Instead he finds no salvation, and his final words reflect his ultimate revelation about the truly wild nature of the world: “Like a dog.‿ (Kafka, 61)
Welles takes a fair amount of artistic license with this scene. In both versions, K is expected to turn the knife upon himself but refuses. According to Kafka, this refusal is yet another act of indecision, another expression of his inability to control his own fate. He attributes this to a loss of strength and will on K’s part, saying “He was not able to show his full worth, was not able to take all the work from the official bodies, he lacked the rest of the strength he needed and this final shortcoming was the fault of whoever had denied it to him.‿ (Kafka, 60)
In Welles’ version, however, K’s refusal is an open act of defiance. He reclaims his humanity in his final exclamation of “You’ll have to do it! You’ll have to kill me!!!‿ His death is not that of a dog, but of a man. Welles’ version of K, portrayed with perfect nuance by Anthony Perkins, finds honor in death that eluded him in life, while Kafka’s found only shame. (Bloom, 67)
What could account for Welles’ refusal to let K perish in disgrace? While watching The Trial, one gets the sense of two autobiographical inputs: one from Kafka and another from Welles. As Kafka noted in his letter to his father, he is extremely timid and weak, while Welles has a notorious reputation for being strong-willed, even a prima donna. As a young man, he was one of the most promising creative talents in the world, a renowned actor and director who participated in countless stage and radio productions with his company, The Mercury Theater. His radio adaptation of H G Wells’ War of the Worlds was so convincing it actually had thousands of listeners fleeing their homes in terror of Martian invaders. His debut film, Citizen Kane, remains perhaps the most celebrated film of all time. After that, however, raising money became increasingly difficult, and on film after film, he was forced to sacrifice artistic control.
“After ‘Citizen Kane’ (1941) and ‘The Magnificent Ambersons’ (1942, a masterpiece with its ending hacked to pieces by the studio), Welles seldom found the freedom to make films when and how he desired. His life became a wandering from one place to another. Beautiful women rotated through his beds. He was reduced to a supplicant who begged financing from wealthy but maddening men. He was never able to find out exactly what crime he'd committed that made him ‘unbankable’ in Hollywood.
[…]
“The ending is problematical. Mushroom clouds are not Kafkaesque because they represent a final conclusion, and in Kafka's world nothing ever concludes. But then comes another ending: The voice of Orson Welles, speaking the end credits, placing his own claim on every frame of the film, and we wonder, is this his way of telling us The Trial is more than ordinarily personal? He was a man who made the greatest film ever made and was never forgiven for it.‿ (Ebert)
Welles creates an extremely formalistic interpretation of Kafka’s work, making extensive use of low key lighting, high contrast, and manipulated perspective to create a dream world both aesthetically pleasing and psychologically oppressive, as if the setting were K’s own subconscious (or Kafka’s? Welles’?).
Although much is left to say about this masterpiece, it is only one example of Kafka’s influence on the medium. Although there are few direct adaptations, his work contributes to many different works in many different genres.
Strangely enough, Kafka’s best known work has never seen a screen adaptation, or at least not one to have made any kind of public impression (not one I could find). “The Metamorphosis,‿ however, has seen screen interpretations in other stories.
Perhaps the most obvious example would be iconoclast director David Cronenberg’s 1986 remake of The Fly, which tells the story of a scientist, Seth Brundle, whose intellectual obsessions lead to his ultimate downfall when he accidentally transforms himself into a monstrous vermin. The story is fairly similar to Kafka’s although it ends where Kafka’s begins, with complete physical departure from humanity, and while Samsa’s metamorphosis is swift, Brundle’s is slow and graphic. This difference exposes the underlying horrors and how they differ between each work. While Kafka finds horror in the family’s reaction to Gregor’s new identity, Cronenberg exploit’s the horror of the transformation itself.
In both versions, the transformation takes place or begins to take place in the bed. As Kafka’s famous opening sentence explains, Gregor transforms in his sleep, while he is in a helpless and complacent state reminiscent of his waking life. Brundle, on the other hand, is in bed with his lover when she first notices several thick strong fibers growing from his back. Because his metamorphosis is first noticed during the natural and therefore uncivilized act of sex, it sets up Brundle’s de-evolution into the wilderness of his own narcissistic desires. It’s no accident that he’s naked, stripped from the trappings of humanity, when he inadvertently initiates his change.
When The Fly was first released, many interpreted it as allegory for the growing AIDS epidemic, but Cronenberg cited a more universal disease as his main inspiration, old age. (Henderson) The fact that Brundle’s change begins during sex could also imply a kind of adolescent development. At first, he finds himself unusually strong and graceful (a change of pace as his previous personality and physicality were not too far off from Kafka’s). He discovers he now has the ability to climb walls. He becomes reckless, self-absorbed, and increasingly violent, at one point mutilating a man’s arm to impress a woman. But before long we see his strength give way to complete deterioration of the mind and body. His flesh begins to rot, and body parts begin to fall off. His lover, who is now secretly carrying his child, is dismayed when he tells her to leave him alone for her own safety as he feels his rationality give way to pure horrific instinct beyond his control.
“You have to leave now, and never come back here. Have you ever heard of insect politics? Neither have I. Insects... don't have politics. They're very... brutal. No compassion, no compromise. We can't trust the insect. I'd like to become the first... insect politician. Y'see, I'd like to, but... I'm afraid, uh... I'm saying... I'm saying I - I'm an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over... and the insect is awake. I'm saying... I'll hurt you if you stay.‿
In these lines can also be read a commentary on civilization in general, that civilization is an idealized dream of dumb animals trying to disguise their own savagery. Cronenberg explores these themes in most of his work, but perhaps to greatest effect in his most recent film, A History of Violence, a film which, like “The Metamorphosis,‿ exposes the fragile structure of a family when a father’s past is brought into light. In each of the works so far, we see a failure of civilization to provide structure to a chaotic universe, each time in a different form: The Trial in the form of law, The Fly in the form of science, “The Metamorphosis‿ and A History of Violence in the form of family.
The Fly too addresses the failings of the family unit in two of the most horrifying scenes in cinematic history. The first sees Brundle’s lover dreaming herself in an emergency room, giving birth to their child. She pains to guide the child into the world, only to reel in terror at the realization that she’s given birth to a larva. As in Kafka’s letter to his father, we see how the flaws of the father figure lead to flaws in the next generation. There is some difference here though, as Kafka’s problems result from a failure to take after his father and Brundle’s own problems are projected physically onto his offspring, who takes after his father in the worst possible way.
The second instance comes shortly after, as Brundle kidnaps her in the hopes of merging with her and the unborn child that they could live together happily in the same deformed body. They are rescued in time though, and Brundle, like Samsa and it could be argued K, is sacrificed for the wellbeing of society.
At one point, there was apparently a project underway for a film adaptation of “The Metamorphosis‿ by director David Lynch, but budget and technology forced his script to remain in pre-production. It’s little wonder that Lynch would take such interest in the story as he’s already made two films that closely resemble Kafka’s story.
The first is a short film called “The Grandmother,‿ which cuts back and forth between live action and animation as it tells the story of a young boy in an abusive home. His conception took place during violent and savage sex in the middle of a field. His parents are rotten, animalistic creatures incapable of kindness or even speech. They sit hunched over meal tables with bitter looks on their face and never communicate. The only word in their vocabulary is “muck,‿ which they shout maliciously at the boy when he is near. The boy plants a seed in his bed and it grows out into an old woman, his new grandmother, who provides the tenderness his immediate family denies him.
Here, as in “The Metamorphosis,‿ a timid son is forced to endure self-loathing and hardship as a result by his parents and is forced into his room to escape their torment. There are several differences, though. First, the Samsa family always remains sympathetic to some extent. They do their best to deal with Gregor’s change, but are understandably repulsed by it. This family, on the other hand, are filtered purely though the child’s perspective. He sees them as incoherent, viscous beasts who enjoy torturing him. It doesn’t occur to him that his grandmother might be a cause of their savagery. She’s his creation, not the other way around, and she’s there to serve his need for compassion. The second difference is the reason for the protagonists to be trapped in their rooms. Gregor has no choice but is forced there by the violence of his father and locked in. The boy, on the other hand, is free to come and go as he pleases, but he would rather recoil into a private fantasy world than face the harsh realities that await outside.
Lynch’s other version of “The Metamorphosis‿ is his feature film debut. Eraserhead tells the story of a man, Henry, who discovers he’s fathered a premature baby which resembles a worm. He finds out about this at dinner with the parents of his ex-girlfriend who insist they get married for the sake of the baby. “Mother, they’re not even sure it is a baby!‿ shouts the daughter in an attempt to ease her mother’s insistence on marriage.
They do end up marrying and moving in together to care for the baby, but their child is so utterly grotesque they can barely stomach looking at it. It makes torturous noises that resemble a baby’s cries but somehow remain completely alien. Henry’s wife Mary suffers from post-partum depression and leaves for days at a time to stay with her mother. Henry, forced to go back to work, is often left to care for the child on his own, but he is nervous and timid, unable to play the role of a strong father. When Mary’s father asks “Well Henry, what do you know?‿ he hesitantly responds “Oh I don’t know much of anything.‿
What’s so interesting about this version is that the point of identification is not the deformed child, but the neglectful father, and it is he who most resembles Kafka’s archetype of weak complacency and nervous despair. Like all the protagonists listed so far, Henry is trapped by the expectations of those around him, but to an even greater extent than Kafka’s characters. They are on some level at least free thinkers who are capable of acting out on one’s own. Henry’s only act of defiance to his circumstances is his affair with his dark-haired neighbor, but even in this case, he was acting out of what was expected of him in any given situation. He even takes a passive role within his own imagination, envisioning a woman in his radiator who sings and dances for him, assuring him that “In Heaven, everything is fine.‿
Perhaps the best recent example of Kafka’s influence on filmmaking is 2005’s revenge epic Oldboy from Korean director Park Chan-wook. It follows the physical and psychological trials of former family man Oh Dae-su in his search for revenge after his fifteen-year imprisonment. When the movie begins, Dae-su is a mess, a drunk buffoon who finds himself locked in a police station during his daughter’s birthday. He’s married, but he hits on other women without remorse. Later that night, he is kidnapped and locked in a cell that resembles a cheap hotel room.
Unlike the other characters discussed so far, Dae-su is the antithesis of Kafka’s protagonists. While all our other subjects repress their impulses in some way, shape, or form to behave in a way that pleases those around them, Dae-su is impulsive throughout the entire film, even as he changes. Perhaps it is for this reason that he falls the farthest in the end.
His imprisonment stretches from months to years. He never sees another human in person during that whole period. His only company is his television. Every day he is fed the same spinach dumplings. After he learns that’s he’d been framed for the murder of his wife, he starts to go mad, hallucinating that ants are crawling out of his skin. When someone later wonders why he’d see ants of all creatures, it is concluded that because ants travel in groups they ease loneliness. He starts to fill up notebooks with everyone he’d ever wronged in the hopes of narrowing down possible captors and is shocked to learn how sinful he’d been throughout his life.
After some time, he focuses his aggression and trains himself for revenge, but before he manages to escape, he is inexplicably set free. In his search for his captor, he tracks down the location of his prison and finds himself facing twenty goons by himself. This groundbreaking fight scene is as symbolically relevant as it is technically impressive, and although Kafka never wrote a scene remotely like it, his fingerprints are all over it. A single shot that dollies back and forth, impartially following the action as fate dooms Dae-su, but he refuses to accept it. The attack is relentless, but so is Dae-su. Even after a knife is lodged in his back, he continues to fight with an almost superhuman endurance. And then, when the ordeal seems to have finally ended, another twenty people line up to continue the fight.
Dae-su later learns the identity of his captor, a wealthy businessman with a weak heart who calls himself “The Lonely Prince In A High Tower.‿ He is motivated by vengeance for a minor remark Dae-su made in his youth which had repercussions beyond his knowledge. The man’s vengeance finally instills in Dae-su a sense of guilt and self-loathing far beyond anything even Kafka ever addressed, and Dae-su cuts out his tongue and offers it as penance.
Kafka’s works and those influenced by it deals chiefly with man’s inability to shape the world around him or within him. Kafka could not help fearing his father, just as his father could not help being abusive. Gregor Samsa was at the mercy of his family and Joseph K was at the mercy of the courts. In such works, the defiance and complacency meet the same ends, and all our trapped. How ironic it is then to consider that a man with such views would end up inadvertently shaping an entire century’s worth of art and literature.
WORKS CITED
Bloom, Harold; Modern Critical Interpretations: Franz Kafka’s The Trial; Chelsea House Publishers, NY; 1987.
Ebert, Roger; “The Trial;‿ Chicago Sun-Times, IL; 2/25/2000.
Henderson, Eric; “The Fly: Collector‘s Edition;‿ Slant Magazine; 10/4/2005.
Kafka, Franz; The Trial; Translated by David Wyllie; Project Gutenberg eBook; 2003.
Kafka, Franz; “The Metamorphosis;‿ Translated by Stanley Corngold; Norton & Company, NY; 1996.
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