Cynical Cinema

The Tin Drum opens with a child doing a voiceover, relating the history of his family, starting with his grandparents.  It is a child’s-eye perspective of this family, which sets up the child’s-eye perspective of the rest of the movie.  There are some seriously creepy in-the-womb shots of the child who is speaking, and the tone of the film is surreal and creepy beginning to end.  After the history, the movie begins at this child’s third birthday.  His mom has promised him a tin drum for his birthday, and he is thrilled.  But his elation is short-lived, when he witnesses his family doing some decidedly creepy things at the dinner table during his birthday celebration.  His mom is sleeping with both her husband and her cousin, and they are all aware of the bizarre three-way relationship.  All of them except the young boy.  When he unwittingly witnesses evidence of this bizarre and creepy sexual arrangement, he equates this behaviour with being an adult.  And he resolves, then and there, to never become an adult.  In fact, he decides to stay three years old for the rest of his life.  He fabricates a fall down the stairs to give his family an explanation for his stunted growth, and then that’s it.  He never grows again for the rest of his life.

As his family becomes increasingly worried about his lack of growth, he becomes fixated on his tin drum.  The child, Oskar, soon discovers that he has the ability to emit an ear-piercing scream that shatters glass.  Which leads to some creepy scenes, like the one where he busts the teacher’s glasses right into her eyes, and the one where he busts the formaldehyde jars in the doctor’s office, and lizards and baby fetuses sprawl all over the floor.  The world inhabited by little Oskar is a bizarre one, but since it is always shown from the perspective of a child, as he never ages, we constantly get a child’s-eye view of this world.  A world which seems surreal, but one with which we are all familiar.  That of Germany in the 1930s and 40s.  Oskar and his family live in rural Germany, and as Oskar stops growing, the country begins to grow like crazy.

Then, of course, Hitler shows up.  And the Nazis.  And Oskar, still three years old, continues to beat his tin drum, breaking one after another and getting new ones from the kindly old Jewish toy store owner down the street.  As the world gets crazier and crazier, Oskar’s drumming continues, as though he is the loud, angry, but completely unheard conscience of the whole world.  When his drumming fixation and stunted growth took root, it was a protest against the perceived evils of his own family and his own situation.  Now, his actions take on a more broad protest, and yet one that seems to be more and more voiceless as the Nazis take over.  There is a surreal scene just before the war, where Oskar’s parents take him to a circus, and he sees a midget show.  He later meets the midgets, who take him to be one of their own.  He explains his situation to them - that he has just decided not to grow.  And when he meets these same midget performers during the war, he will be a changed little boy. 

David Bennett played Oskar when The Tin Drum came out in 1979, and he was actually 12 years old, although he is playing an eternal three-year-old in the movie.  He was cast primarily for his eyes, which are some of the most intense eyes ever put up on the screen.  Once you see The Tin Drum, Oskar’s eyes will stay with you forever, and you will agree with me that they are the most memorable eyes on a character in a movie, more even than Bette Davis.  They are so expressive that they can convey Oskar’s most terrified, most evil, and most wounded emotions when he has no words with which to explain these feelings.  In the end, there is a strange war going on inside Oskar, the war between the three-year-old in a three-year-old’s body, and the 20-year-old in a three-year-old’s body, who still clings to a tin drum like it’s a safety blanket.  Because although he stays three the whole movie, his mind has raced ahead of his body, and he begins to be a seriously conflicted character during, and following, the second world war.  The sexual thoughts of a sixteen-year-old, or a twenty-year-old, with the emotional and physical maturity of a three-year-old.  This leads to some scenes that are so creepy that they are pretty hard to watch.

It was these scenes which created a censorship controversy when the U.S. government waged a war on The Tin Drum in the late 90s over it’s supposed child pornography content.  Watching the movie, one can see where they freaked out.  In particular, one scene between Oskar and his naked babysitter in a changeroom at the beach.  In fact, every scene with that babysitter, whether it involves Oskar or not, is creepy.  And although there are two ways of looking at it - the boy looks three, but in fact he is seventeen - the whole point of these scenes is to create a startled and freaked out reaction from the audience.  And I certainly had that reaction.  There were a few scenes in this movie that I watched, desperately trying not to be offended, peeking out from between my fingers like a particularly nasty horror scene when I was eleven, but I found myself not being offended, as such.  Just creeped out, as I was supposed to be.

There are many almost-unwatchable scenes in The Tin Drum.  The grossest scenes come right in a row, in the middle of the film, when Oskar’s father uses a decapitated horse’s head to fish for eels, and pulls the thing out of the water with the eels crawling in and out of holes in the head.  It’s one of the grossest things I have seen in a movie, ever.  And I just watched Automation Transfusion, when a zombie rips a fetus out of a pregnant belly and bites it.  After witnessing the fishing practice, and then being forced to eat the eels, Oskar’s mother goes a little nuts, and begins to gorge herself on fish - she can’t stop eating it, and the insinuation is made that she is losing her mind to the point where she tries to feed Oskar like birds do, vomiting the fish into his mouth.  Thank God the film makers spared us that scene on film.

I know, this doesn’t sound like a movie anyone would want to watch.  I just want to warn those with a sensitive stomach that perhaps this isn’t for you.  But The Tin Drum IS worth watching, and is a magnificent film.  This is the first German movie to win a Best Foreign Film Oscar, and the co-winner (along with Apocalypse Now) of the Cannes Palme D’Or in 1979.  It’s a fairly surreal, brilliantly shot tale of instinctive rebellion against a disgusting and horrible world.  The fact that Oskar never ages means that we see the rise of the Third Reich through the (basically) innocent eyes of an impotent three-year-old, the same three-year-old that saw his parents’ transgressions through the same eyes.  It means that while a Polish post office is under seige from the Nazis, we are more worried about Oskar’s drum than we are about the death and devastation going on around him.  A powerful, unsettling movie, this remains one of the great achievements in the history of German cinema.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 11:11 am and is filed under Ilse Page, Charles Aznavour, Ernst Jacobi, Tina Engel, Fritz Hakl, Mariella Oliveri, Otto Sander, Andrea Ferreol, Berta Drews, Emil Feist, Helmut Brasch, Gerda Blisse, Roland Beubner, Heinz Bennent, Katharina Thalbach, France, Volker Schlondorff, Germany, 1979, Foreign, War, Poland, Yugoslavia, Angela Winkler, Daniel Olbrychski, David Bennent, Mario Adorf, West Germany, Classic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.