M (1931)

If there’s one thing that Fritz Lang’s 1931 film M still teach­es us, it’s that beyond all else, film­mak­ers should strive to place images on the screen that he or she sin­cere­ly believes will have nev­er been seen before. An astound­ing hybrid of Bible-black film noir and a lithe take on Ger­man expres­sion­ist dynam­ics in which the shad­ows are lit­er­al­ly out to kill you, there’s nary a shot in this film which (still) doesn’t feel as fresh as a new-growth daisy.

Cer­tain­ly mar­vel at frog­gy Peter Lorre and his star­tling turn as Hans Beck­ert, a flip career child mur­der­er whose sick, slick method­ol­o­gy masks com­pul­sions over which he admits to hav­ing no phys­i­cal con­trol. And mar­vel too at the film’s con­sis­tent moral back­flip­ping and refusal to carve up soci­ety into neat enclaves of good and evil, sug­gest­ing that the thin blue line between order and anar­chy may be a self-gov­ern­ing myth to keep the under­class­es from revolt­ing. And mar­vel at the edit­ing which is used to com­pare and con­trast view­points instead of just idle par­al­lel plate-spinning.

But maybe M is a film most impres­sive for its agile coun­ter­point­ing and the way it deals in bru­tal ironies. On the evi­dence of the film’s first hour, Beck­ert is pre­sent­ed as an unhinged mon­ster, the exact pro­jec­tion of the public’s cat­er­waul­ing hys­te­ria. But it’s this image, and the sub­se­quent shat­ter­ing there­of, which makes the film so excit­ing and dan­ger­ous, as Beck­ert is lat­er reduced to a cow­er­ing freak, maybe even into a state of naïve and defence­less arrest­ed devel­op­ment which in turn gives him a taste of his own sick­en­ing medicine.

That’s per­haps not Lang’s inten­tion, though, as he remains beguiled by the process of mob jus­tice and not whether there is any ambi­gu­i­ty over Beckert’s guilt. Actu­al­ly, the ques­tion is real­ly whether such thing as mob jus­tice (and per­haps by exten­sion, democ­ra­cy) can abide to terms of lev­el­head­ed­ness, fair­ness and basic ratio­nal thought. That Lang makes no bones about the assailant’s mis­deeds makes the finale all the more pow­er­ful, ush­er­ing in sym­pa­thy for the dev­il and sug­gest­ing that the crowd will do any­thing in their per­son­al pow­er to put a col­lec­tive end to the per­ceived blights of society.

When I first saw this film in the late ​’90s, I wasn’t entire­ly tak­en by it due to its hys­ter­i­cal mode. How could one lam­bast hys­te­ria in a man­ner which itself came across as hys­ter­i­cal? Yet, the time is exact­ly right for a reap­praisal of M, as the points it makes could be applied direct­ly to the omnipresent echo-cham­ber of 140 char­ac­ter delir­i­um that is Twit­ter, a giant hall for friend­ship and joy, but also a place for bul­ly­ing and groupthink.

Though M was released at a time when the Ger­man peo­ple were start­ing to take note of the Nazi par­ty and their ultra-antag­o­nis­tic form of polit­i­cal manoeu­vring (to put it very light­ly), the film per­haps high­lights the vague fascis­tic under­tow of mod­ern social media plat­forms. That’s not to say that we’re all Nazis, more that democ­ra­cy and free­dom can eas­i­ly be mis­tak­en for sim­ply agree­ing with the reac­tionary ideas of your more artic­u­late and force­ful neighbour.