Wilder Still

Sometimes you think that all film scholars are grumpy people with chips on their shoulders about not getting the respect they feel they lack

And then you read Gerd Gemünden’s delightful book on Billy Wilder: A Foreign Affair: Billy Wilder’s American Films (Berghahn Books, 2008).

Good cheer, wit and irony are the by-products of watching a Billy Wilder movie, and Gemünden does not spoil anything with his light, fast, smart analysis. As the title suggests, Gemünden shows how Wilder brings an immigrant’s perspective to Hollywood, the foreign affair is not in Berlin but LA. Not only does Gemünden compare Wilder to Adorno in SoCal exile, he sustains the juxtaposition across the book, so that the academic heavy-weight reader starts recognizing the cultural critique in Wilder’s fast-paced success.

Wilder’s Weimar Berlin career has always loomed just over the horizon in my mind. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to find an archival trove of early, early movies, screen plays from Wilder in 1920s Berlin. Gemünden carries that idea into the famous Hollywood films. We will surely never be able to download Wilder’s early screenplay credit Der Teufelsreporter: Nebel in der Grossstadt. Wilder and Gemünden assure us that it is crap, but I always want to believe that there is a dissertation’s worth of urban modernity in that film.

No need for such fantasies, Gemünden finds that same sensibility in Wilder’s American movies. More than Adorno, Gemünden’s argument seems motivated by Georg Simmel’s essay on The Stranger—that alien figure who resides amongst us, knows us perhaps too well and never quite stops being other. The outsider as insider does not just have to write Minima Moralia, he can also direct Marilyn Monroe.