The Master of the House

Carl Theodor Dreyer's (1925) TheMaster of the House is a tightly focused domestic melodrama so deliriously excessive in its effects as to seem luridly comical.  Nothing if not domineering in his style, Dreyer clearly controls this material and strait-jackets our attention, and, so the emotional peculiarities presented by the film are certainly intentional -- the director drives the material to the brink and, then, pushes it over.  The spectacle so exceeds its rather desultory narrative justification that we are left with this question:  what does this piece of lurid hysteria really mean?  Dreyer adapts a 1919 play, apparently a big hit on Copenhagen's equivalent of Broadway, a comedy called "The Tyrant's Fall."  The plot involves a brutally cruel and peremptory husband who relentlessly bullies his wife and their two children -- there is a third child, a babe in arms, lurking around the edge of the story, but she is used mostly for comic effects in the second half of the film.  The movie divides into two acts.  In the first part, the husband, a failed optometrist sarcastically taunts his meek wife, tormenting her with every resource at hand -- in this half of the film, Dreyer meticulously documents women's work, household drudgery involving laundry, cooking, and child care:  he keeps the camera close to the action and the scenes involving domestic labor have a surreal vividness -- it's as if we have never seen work of this kind so carefully documented. The husband's abuse would be grotesquely comical if it were not so realistic in some of its details.  (The movie is replete with images of violence -- close-ups of angry faces, howling children, raised fists.)  In the second half of the film, the harassed wife flees the household.  The vicious husband now suffers torment at the hands of his old nanny, a malign-looking granny who crows that she has "severely beaten (him)" when he was a boy and won't hesitate to punish the erring husband now that he is a man.  This old woman, nicknamed "Mads" (her name is Mrs. Madsen) is an alarming figure; she is as relentlessly sadistic as the husband, a sinister squat apparition scowling from the edges of the frame, continuously supervising the husband's torment.  Mads uses all the elements of female drudgery to punish the wicked husband -- in a classic role reversal, he is forced to bend and stoop under freshly washed garments hung in the parlor of the family's two-room apartment, scalds his hands trying to cook, and, finally, has to change the baby's wet diaper.  The sinister Mads causes the husband to believe that his wife is unfaithful to him and, finally, threatens to thrash the weeping man with a long stick.  The husband offers to endure a "beating" if his wife will be returned to him -- instead, Mads makes him stand in the corner of the parlor like a truant child, hands behind his back as she engineers the film's climactic reconciliation.  All of this is staged with exemplary and savage conviction:  the furnishings of the tiny apartment all play a role in the action and the film is claustrophobic in an almost harrowing way -- the few scenes shot outside the apartment's two squalid rooms are like a breath of revivifying fresh air.  The acting is exceptionally skillful if grotesquely caricatured -- the cruel husband is not merely indifferent to his wife and rude, he is a monster with glittering, cold eyes and a reptilian profile.  The meek wife is slumped in a posture of humiliation -- she seems scarcely human in her avid willingness to endure her husband's insults.  And the avenging Mads is almost supernaturally cruel and relentless; she is like one of the torturers in Dreyer's next film, the scarifying Passion of Joan of Arc.  Ultimately, the film resembles one of Douglas Sirk's domestic melodramas from of the fifties or, even, more closely Fassbinder's sado-masochistic duet for slave and master, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.  Dreyer suggests that marriage is a relationship governed by power -- who shall be Master and who shall serve?   The movie is more than proto-feminist; indeed, it pushes a feminist agenda into the realm of delirium.  The final image of the film is a heart-shaped pendulum, swinging back and forth, an image, it seems, of the sinister oscillation of power from one extreme to another.  There is joy in being a tyrant and, it seems, equal pleasure some times in being the victim of tyranny.