Wings of Desire revisited

Belle-Alliance-Platz, Berlin

I first saw the movie Wings of Desire when it came out in Australia in 1988. I was immediately hooked on the premise of invisible angels sporting ponytails and long coats hanging out on trains and at libraries comforting humans in emotional distress. The whole movie captured my imagination, the philosophical ideas usually expressed in voiceover, the melancholy of a divided city captured in black and white, the seemingly unhealable scar of the Wall, the tireless compassion of the angels, the poignancy of angel Damiel’s longing to become corporeal so he could be together with the trapeze artist Marion, and the coolness of the Berlin underground music scene.

Sometime afterwards, I can’t remember how long, but I suspect it was on TV, I saw the movie again. By that time, the Wall had fallen and while West Germany and East Germany had reunited, I was disappointed to find that the magic of the movie had evaporated. It was as if I was watching a different movie altogether. It dragged and dragged and I don’t think I even made it to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ performance.

When the movie recently screened on free-to-air, I felt compelled to record it on USB and investigate the decades-old mystery of why my former intense liking for it had turned sour. One of the themes of the movie is eternity versus time. Had the movie withstood that test? Was it the movie, was it me or was it both?

Before I began watching, I looked up the German title of the movie, which is Der Himmel über Berlin, translating as The Sky over Berlin or Heaven over Berlin. This title seemed more apt to me than the English version because it refers to the angels’ true home being heaven and the fact that while Berlin was divided into West and East at the time, the sky itself wasn’t divided.

The angels in the movie were able to tune into people’s thoughts which susurrated like tinnitus in the atmosphere. Angels tuning into my thoughts while I watched the movie would have been subjected to a barrage of thoughts along these lines, I don’t want to do the cleaning tomorrow. It always takes too long. Should I enter that literary competition? Will it be a waste of time? Are there still bodies buried under Central railway station from when it was a cemetery? How long is this movie? When is Nick Cave coming on? A comforting angelic hand on my shoulder would have been nice, but an angelic hand to do the vacuum cleaning would have been even more welcome. Unfortunately angels can’t deal with matter.

As the movie progressed, I couldn’t help wondering if particular angels were assigned to particular cities and who the Sydney angels would be. And if there were Sydney angels, would they wear their hair in ponytails and their coats long too?

While much of the movie was familiar to me, surprises emerged as I watched. I’d forgotten that the Peter Falk character was once an angel and I’d also forgotten Homer, the elderly story-teller. These characters now stepped into the foreground for me.

The Peter Falk character was taking part in a movie about Berlin under the Nazis where Hitler had had a double. This movie might have been quite interesting to see, especially if Peter Falk had been playing Colombo as a time-travelling detective, but as far as I know, this movie doesn’t exist.

Homer walked through a world which had once existed and had long been destroyed, the Potsdamer Platz of his youth, once brimming with people, cafés, tobacconists and department stores, now reduced to an overgrown wasteland. He remembered how, ‘banners appeared and the people weren’t friendly anymore.’

I was also struck how the children of West Berlin played outside in Berlin’s icy streets and wastelands unsupervised. It’s rare these days, at least in Sydney, to see groups of children outside on their own making the suburban streets their playground.

Just like the second time I watched this movie, I kept on waiting for Nick Cave to appear. I expected him to appear much earlier and for much longer, possibly because I’d mixed him up with defunct Sydney band, Crime and the City Solution, who I also enjoyed watching. In any case, Nick Cave was only on right near the end and not for long enough.

By the time Wings of Desire ended, I hadn’t solved the mystery of whether it was me or the movie at fault for why I longer appreciated it as much as I once had. My feelings for the movie are now divided between liking and disliking, a combination of sweet and sour. I appreciated at it as a visual meditation on Berlin and its history. It also struck me the third time around how strange it is that two Australian bands somehow epitomise 1980’s West Berlin.