Though no one seems willing to tell the truth about the city’s cholera epidemic, it would seem that Aschenbach is equally willing to put up with lies for what he considers a greater cause. Aschenbach is witness to one such demise as he tries not quite hard enough to leave the city by train. In a scenario akin to Jaws, the townspeople and proprietors insist that Venice is devoid of sickness so as not to jeopardize the local economy that relies heavily on money from tourism, even as people are falling dead on the streets. Aschenbach’s obsession with Tadzio grows as the number of guests at the hotel resort dwindle, causing the aging composer to suspect something terrible has befallen the city. While the film does provide commentary on the nature of desire and society’s distinction of what is shameful and what is natural within that realm, the film’s greatest contribution to the legacy of the original, and in fact its claim to autonomy, is its invention of a tactile visual language that embodies the ambiguity inherent within desire, its productive and destructive powers, and its relationship to the indifferent movement of history.īut wasn’t there always something that smelled of rot in the gaudy furnishings and extravagant dress-Aschenbach’s sober, rigid suits, the bloated gowns and dramatic veils of society ladies-of Visconti’s bourgeois characters, so decadent in appearance and yet sterile, and laughably repressed? A living, breathing lie, as it were, in a place that insists on deception for the sake of its livelihood. Some critics of the film, nevertheless, consider the film’s literalized erotic visualization to be a crude erasure of the novel’s pointed ambiguity. Of course the director himself was unusually open about his sexual orientation for a public figure working in the mid-twentieth century, so a sort of confessional metaphor for the experience of homosexuality in a society at odds with it isn’t exactly out of left field.
That Visconti would choose to accentuate the queer underbelly of Mann’s novel seems merely practical, speaking to the director’s interest in desire broadly speaking, not necessarily limited to the intermingling of bodies or the longing for such.
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