Liza Minnelli: Where are your troubles now?
Life Is a Cabaret
IN Cabaret, THE world is about to end. But in the Kit Kat Klub, it might as well not exist. ‘Where are your troubles now?’ Grey asks the audience after another bawdy, gut-busting tune: Forgotten! In here, life is beautiful…1
The song the audience have just heard is ‘Life is a Cabaret’, the singer is Sally Bowles — played in the film by Liza Minnelli. In the song, Sally tells a story about a friend she knew in Chelsea who did whatever she liked and never thought about tomorrow. Elsie lived in a tiny rented room and died alone. At her funeral all the decent respectable folk from the neighborhood snickered self-righteously; ‘Well, that’s what comes of too much pills and liquor’.2 But this is not the moral of the story. The moral of the story is: Elsie from Chelsea is a hero. Why? Because life is pointless, work is futile, love is fleeting, and the world is steadily marching toward the brink of war. Again. So why not kill yourself with booze and pills? Why not sin, and sin proudly? At least you’ll enjoy yourself while you’re here. All you respectable folk can do what you like, says the singer, her voice starting to tremble, her eyes starting to pop.
At this point, Liza Minnelli’s performance takes on an almost religious intensity, as she sings us through Sally’s epiphany, the means by which she has learned to transcend her meaningless life and the world’s meaningless collapse.
Now, as the MC says, life is beautiful. Cabaret is not just about distracting yourself from the threat of social collapse with a bit of harmless fun. It’s about learning to see life aesthetically. It’s about seeing the suffering of the world turned into a song, and then beginning to understand that the song is not only a consolation for suffering — it justifies the suffering.
If this sounds a little Nietzschean, it ought to. Cabaret — the style, and by extension, the movie — owes a great deal of its character to Nietzsche. German cabaret began with Baron von Wolzogen’s Überbrettl in 1900. Brettl is the German word for the ‘little boards’ upon which the cabaret performers plied their trade — Wolzogen attached the Nietzschean prefix, über, to his company name, to show that, while the boards might be little, the ambitions of his new cabaret were anything but. The Nietzschean overtones, as Peter Conrad explains in Modern Times Modern Places, were absolutely intentional. ‘The Berlin cabarets, explicitly invoking Nietzsche as their founder, encouraged the uprising of rude, savage nature against anaemic society.’5 The German cabaret was intended as a place where one could sin boldly, and reflect on suffering with the mocking laughter of the ‘higher man’. The high romantic irony of Bowie’s ‘Time’, Kander and Ebb’s ‘Life Is a Cabaret’ and Lou Reed’s ‘Satellite of Love’ (which Bowie produced), all retain this Olympian perspective — a residue of the cabaret’s original manifesto — which is crucial to their appeal.
In the brief period of optimism preceding the crash of 1929, Brecht and Weill re-imagined the cabaret as having a constructive social function. Cabaret during this time took on a strong left-wing flavour. But the presence of Nietzsche in the cabaret’s history explains why the genre tends to appeal to those with an aristocratic, rather than a democratic attitude to life and art. In Stardust, Tony Zanetta remarks on Bowie’s superior attitude to his audience at his first Ziggy shows — so different from the ‘I’m just a regular guy like you’ image cultivated by the Californian bands of the day. Bowie, says Zanetta, ‘projects an upper-middle class patrician quality, and seems impressively elegant.’6 This aristocratic quality in Bowie made it very easy for him to slip into the role required of him in a song like ‘Time’, that of the aloof observer to whom suffering is merely a form of play. It also made him an important reference point for those who were caught up in the energy of punk, but unable to relate to its democratic ideals. The Clash used to invite their fans, en masse, to sleep on the floor of their hotel rooms after shows. Siouxsie and her Banshees were having none of it. ‘I mean, no!’ laughed a horrified Steve Severin in Simon Reynolds’ ‘Rip it Up’…, ‘we’d let them stay out in the rain!’7 When Siouxsie says that the only thing she and he friends looked down upon was suburbia, she echoes Nietzsche’s horror at ‘the mob hotchpotch’. ‘Oh disgust! Disgust! Disgust!’ wrote the most un-democratic philosopher in 1884.
In 1972 Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and Bob Fosse’s Cabaret were ideal companions. Both offered a view of a society on the brink of collapse, and both suggested an aesthetic view of suffering as the solution. Both end heroically — the world is shown to be cruel, dangerous and corrupt, but the hero takes the stage for one more song with a great ‘nevertheless’. Liza Minnelli’s ‘Life is a Cabaret’ and Bowie’s ‘Rock and Roll Suicide’ both insist that tragedy will redeem us and justify our suffering. But where Ziggy Stardust ends with a grand flourish of strings and a decisive ‘home’ chord, Cabaret strikes a more ambiguous note.
‘Where are your troubles now?’ asks the MC. ‘Forgotten!’ We have to admit he’s right. The singer has stood up on stage and said ‘yes’ to life — to all of life. In doing so, she has become that thing that Nietzsche could never have imagined (because he was scared of women) — a superwoman. Here is a woman, we think, who cannot only cope with madness, death and societal collapse, but actually enjoy it — even laugh at it. We imagine, as we watch her, that we might be that brave and that bold. And here, in the cabaret, where everything is permitted, it seems possible. To be always a yea-sayer, to take the worst that life can throw at us and laugh at it.
But as Nietzsche knew, being a yea-sayer is not the same as saying ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’ or ‘it’s all good’. To know whether you have what it takes to be a superman or superwoman, you have to be able to grasp suffering on an endless loop, you have to be able to swallow the notion that the war you have just lived through will be followed by another, and another and another. Now, as the MC goes backstage to wipe off his make-up, Fosse’s camera pans around the bar, and our new aesthetic attitude to life is put to its most gruesome test. Refracted through the prism of a whisky glass, we can see a group of men in brown shirts with red armbands sitting in the corner of the bar. Life, Fosse seems to be saying, will not be beautiful much longer. Can you say yes to World War Two?