In the Flesh: Kafka

There’s always been something gay about Jeremy Irons, some quavering inner sissiness to his poshly gravel-voiced demeanor and roughened cut-glass features. His ability to radiate this uncertain inner fragility through any number of exterior personas serves him beautifully in Kafka, Steven Soderbergh’s 1991 thriller which transplants the famous author into a sort of melange of his own subject matter. The historical Kafka, tormented all his life by sexual fantasies, some of them queer, and what was probably body dysmorphic disorder, is defined in our cultural imagination by his alienation from the world around him, by his certainty that his existence was seen as a kind of pustule on the face of reality by his fellow human beings, and Irons captures that self-centered misery with perfect tragicomic precision. “Would you describe yourself as close with the deceased?” asks Inspector Grubach (Armin Mueller-Stahl) just after Kafa identifies the body of his friend Eduard. “No,” says Kafka, taken aback. “Yes. No.” He’s negotiating how he wants to be seen, but also how he sees himself in relation to others. Does he experience true intimacy? Does his paranoia preclude real connection?

A sense of cloying joylessness pervades every beautiful black and white frame of the film. Soderbergh takes clear inspiration from Hitchcock, especially Foreign Correspondent and Vertigo, as well as classic works of noir like Carol Reed’s The Third Man and bureaucratic dreamscapes like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, and, in an unlikely and genuinely startling visual twist, Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz. These eclectic visual keys come together seamlessly, threading the needle between homage and parody, sendup and replication. The bureaucracy under which Kafka lives his life is a Gothic labyrinth straight out of Borges or Saramago, an endlessly unfolding underworld of archives, offices, and institutional architecture. Its inhabitants range from the interfering chief clerk (Alec Guiness, darkly hilarious) to the smug and deluded Dr. Murnau (Ian Holm), Kafka’s distorted mirror image who, rather than channeling his feelings of alienation to the people via art, forces them to reflect it back at him via grotesque experimental surgery and pharmacology. He and Kafka are equally disconnected from reality, but where one flails for connection, the other strip mines all potential for it out of the world around him.

Kafka’s faintly effete helplessness, his morbid attachment to Eduard, his alienation from his father — Soderbergh tinges the film with an undercurrent of homosexual anxiety, and with an equally potent but obfuscated sense of Judaic mourning, best exemplified by Kafka’s entry into the ominous Castle via an empty grave in the city’s Hebrew cemetery. The price of access to power is learning that his people, to whom the real Kafka had a fraught sense of connection, are gone even from under the earth, not left to rest but spirited away to parts unknown like the living victims of the city’s secret police. In a melancholy echo of this discovery, just after the grave is opened Kafka requests that his mysterious friend Bizzelbek (Jeroen Krabbé) burn his manuscripts in the event of his failure to return from the castle. Perhaps the thought of those who come after him identifying with his work, finding the sense of connection and reassurance in his creations that he failed to achieve for himself in life, is too much for Kafka to bear.