Live footage of Dames Nation as Sophie & Kate rummage through the storage closet of their hearts & minds to unearth the very best Babylon Berlin appeal factors for you
Greetings, once more, Dames Nation! This week’s special issue is another glorious collaboration between Dame Sophie & Guest Dame Kate Racculia. We are here once again as fans of the German noir/procedural/historical fantasia/dread machine Babylon Berlin. It feels like the truest Babylon Berlin experience to have too much to say. And we do have too much to say.
Last week, we considered the show through the lens of questioning the role of the police procedural in our culture’s decades-long support of actual police departments. This week, we wallow in how the show puts a variety of songs in our hearts.
We’ve broken down Babylon Berlin appeal factors for both current and future fans by developing some simple questions to help guide your discovery process. Because this is a time in which we all have needs, and Babylon Berlin is here to meet--nay, exceed!--those needs, right where they are. Let’s go!
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Do you need to watch women being ingenious operators within a system designed to chew them up and spit them out?
She’s got you there, bud.
Babylon Berlin has this theme locked all the way down. Protagonist Charlotte Ritter is, as Lester Freamon from The Wire would say, Natural Police. Her incredibly strong investigative instincts, combined with her ability to see people, often lead her to the best insights. An outsider in every way that matters to the Berlin Police Department’s powers that be -- dirt poor, living in a crummy tenement, using sex work to supplement her family’s income -- she turns being shut out of the old power structure into an asset. Women in this show have no real legal or political power - they’re nothing - but they’re constantly saying, “well, if I’m nothing, you won’t think anything of it if you happen to notice me sneaking into this train shed, but if you do, you’ll also think nothing of answering my saucy questions, because I’m just a pretty girl taking an interest in your line of work, so tell me about it, stud.”
Lotte moves cases forward better than anyone else on the homicide squad she fights her way onto, not that anyone but Gereon Rath particularly cares. Further, Lotte’s lack of interest in conforming to a specific system allows her to remain quite loving and considerate in spite of that system doing its level best to ruin her life.
If Lotte entices you, just wait until you meet Esther Korda Kasabian, crime boss’ wife and underappreciated script doctor, who saves the family bacon by rewriting the Expressionist cinematic mess/triumph whose set is the home of many of the murders in Season 3. Need more? You’re going to flip when you see the highly respectable widow/landlady Frau Elisabeth team up with Berlin’s own Paris Geller, Marie-Luise Seegers to uncover the German army’s continuing illegal attempts to rebuild their war machine. Chef’s! Kiss!
Do you long for extra-ness?
A drag king singing an absolute banger about dancing til the end of the world & then giving us A+ Thin White Duke vibes? In a murder mystery show? Why not!!
This show, friends, is Extra with a capital E, and threw in the XTRA for free. Babylon Berlin is a sheer feat of filmmaking and serial storytelling virtuosity, full of aesthetic daring and cinematic texture, costuming and set design. Music and movement and blood and neon. Weary detectives and green detectives and gangsters and corruption and artists. If it has the opportunity to swing for the fences, it swings for the stadium on the other side of town. The characters are layered (mostly! Alas, poor Helga), whether they’re sympathetic or vile; the plots are intertwined and run, thrillingly, over multiple seasons. The plotting and pacing on this show are truly bonkers, seeding things and calling back to them, dropping hints but not teasing or insulting the viewer’s intelligence. The experience of watching the show is outrageously entertaining. Here’s a freaking BRYAN FERRY musical number, and now--another tantalizing clue in the mystery of the “who made the blue film,” and now--oh, let’s peel back an onion layer of Gereon Rath’s wounded psyche, and now--holy shit is the Armenian serving that other crime guy...not fish?--and now: Lotte Ritter is full-on Jessica Fletchering her way into the Russian countess’s boho flat but is about to be CAUGHT--
This breathless, dizzying, dazzling pace goes on, and on and on (and as soon as one realizes that Tom Tykwer, the director who gave us not only Run Lola Run but Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, is involved, it makes sense). Babylon Berlin is much more pleasurable than I (Kate) thought it would be--unfairly, perhaps, knowing it was a period piece about Weimar Germany, and having seen slash had my heart broken by Cabaret a thousand times.
But then again, there’s beauty in a broken heart, and even in a feeling of impending fascist doom. There’s something outlandishly courageous and even weirdly comforting about watching people try to seek justice (if that even exists), solve mysteries, sweaty-dance and make art and mistakes and outmaneuver and double-cross one another and keep trying, just keep trying, to find a lost cause or yourself or another person worth believing in when the world is beginning to end all around you.
...it’s not not a 2020 mood.
Every time I see this gif, I now hear this Hanif Abdurraqib quote in my mind: “and maybe this is what it’s like to live in these times: the happiness is fleeting, and so we search for more, while the world burns around us.”
What’s your quarantine thirst level?
Incredibly, this is not a kissing scene. This is a being sad scene. WE KNOW.
Quarantine Thirst is a thing, and Babylon Berlin is the perfect watch during this, Our Most Unprecedented Time: it both stokes and slakes thirst, creating a perfect ouroboros of desire. It is the hunger and it is the feast. One of the show’s salient features is a desperate kind of sweatiness--drinking to numb but also to feel, dancing to forget, flinging your body at others professionally (or as an amateur, or as a former brother-in-law). But all of that simmering randiness is like a pressure release valve for the deep, deep ache down in the souls of its characters.
Whether you’re horny for the lost Germany that existed before the Great War, horny to get yourself and your sister away from your other sister’s shitty husband and your general impoverishment--or emotionally, physically, and intellectually horny for the equal you met at work, even though the strictures of your society and your pathological desire to break your own heart make it hard for you to accept that you are equals, and should just make out already--well, we go now to tape of our correspondents yelling excitedly at their respective tv screens:
Sophie: Lololollll I’m DYING! PUT YOUR FACES ON EACH OTHERS’ FACES YOU ABSOLUTE GOOBERS
Kate: LOLOL just DO IT. YOU WANT TO DO IT. WE WANT YOU TO DO IT. WHY ARE YOU HIDING YOUR LOVE AWAY SO HARD???
Sophie: ALSO WHO DO YOU THINK YOU’RE FOOLING. EVERYONE ELSE IN THE ROOM CAN SEE IT, EVERYONE ELSE BUT YOU!!! (I will see your Beatles and raise you a One Direction)
Kate: on brand, as ever!
Related to the previous question: Are you a person who thrives on a slow-burn romance as if it were a nutritional supplement?
This may be the most significant appeal factor for me (Sophie). I love a slow-burn, and all the ways it can be depicted on-screen. This show in particular does such a good job of planting seeds very early on -- right there in the first or second episode, we get the Babylon Berlin version of a meet-cute where Gereon & Charlotte collide exiting the paternoster lift and all their respective smutty photos and homicide photos scatter all over the floor so they get all tangled up sorting them out and apologizing profusely. In every episode after that, they’re sort of tap dancing delicately towards each other, then pirouetting away, but always slinging sidelong and backwards glances at each other. It is divine.vHow do they maintain it for 28 episodes so far? How will they keep it going in Season 4 (assuming we get new tv of any kind in 2021)? Don’t know, can’t wait to find out!
Do you enjoy hurting your own feelings?
Extremely Werner Herzog voice: why does regarding something so beautiful make this man so sad? Let’s watch 28 hours of TV to find out!
Obviously, it’s a murder mystery show, there are going to be dead bodies. The awful, wrenching twists of who dies, and by whose hands, put the viewer in an emotional place similar to what The Americans often achieved. Some deaths seem to come out of nowhere, others we know will happen before the characters themselves do, and because viewers are aware, from our vantage point 90 years later, of what’s coming historically, the show implicates us in the grisliness and grime, too. Our enjoyment of seeing the protagonists solve the mysteries is fully intertwined with the nauseous feeling of being trapped by historical inevitability.
As we discussed in last week’s issue, Lotte recognizes her and Gereon’s responsibility in the broader, corrupt justice and political system. Nobody has clean hands here. And we find it particularly interesting that it’s Lotte who is able to articulate this broader systemic insight thanks to having lived on the margins of Berlin society. She brings a totally different perspective, without which most of their casework would go unsolved!
Lotte can see things Gereon can’t, and he appreciates that! He just...can’t do it himself because of all the other stuff he’s so wrapped up in repressing, and because he’s clinging to a shred of belief in the system. Lotte has no investment in the system other than in finding ways to fulfil her dreams, get her little sister out of poverty, and maybe save some lives while she’s at it.
Readers can have some more gifs of beautiful people being beautiful, as a treat
We love a lady in a pink bow tie, and so does Professional Sad Fellow Gereon Rath
Hey, girl
[REDACTED]
Dancing the night away once more
Oh, so you want more? Ok!
We love & extol the greatness of Emily VanderWerff’s ongoing series of newsletters about Babylon Berlin, which she’s watching and discussing in two-episode batches with fellow smartypants fans. Start with the first issue & work your way through the series!
For an academic yet accessible approach to Season One’s cinematography and thematic treasures, please avail yourself of this series of Watch-Klatsch events from DC’s Goethe Institut, which they made available for free and have kindly archived on YouTube