Russell Alt
Mary Ann Doane: “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space”

The way in which Lang employs “voice-offs”—defined by Mary Ann Doane as “instances in which we hear the voice of a character who is not visible within the frame” (376)—establishes “M” not so much as a space in which the phantasmatic bodies of the characters are fleshed out through the mapping of voice onto image (although this does occur to some extent), but arguably anchors the film more broadly as a phantasmagoria.  To begin, however, certain concessions need to be made.  Firstly, “M” does not transition fully from silent cinema to a “talkie”.  According to Doane, “the stylized gestures of the silent cinema, its heavy pantomime, have been defined as a form of compensation for that lack [of speech]” (373).  Beckert and Lohmann, for example, are emblematic of that long tradition in the ways they move, interact, and facially emote.  Secondly, the soundtrack to “M” is admittedly sparse.  Lang seems to eschew superfluous sound in favor of silence and minimal background noise, i.e., he uses suggestive techniques to hint at an aural reality the audience would recognize (car horns, bells, whistles, knocking on the door) without being overt.  Therefore, the sound (diegetic/non-diegetic dialogue, background noise, or otherwise) actually present in the film lends itself especial importance in any analysis.

Specifically, though, it is the voice-off in “M” that refuses to adhere nicely to Doane’s argument on the articulation of the body and space in the cinema.  So what is Lang up to?  During the Littfasssäule scene in which we “see” Beckert for the first time, his body cannot be substantiated through his speech alone (“Du hast aber einen schönen Ball…”).  For us as observers overhearing the interaction between Elsie and Beckert, Beckert has no corporeal reality in a literal sense, only a physical irreality.  He appears as a silhouette and a phantom, even a specter of contagion, otherness, and death.  In his murderous guise, we, like the city of Berlin, cannot “see” Beckert (a fact reiterated later by the blind street vendor who “spots” Beckert and clues in the teenage youth).  Doane writes, “the voice-off deepens the diegesis [and] accounts for lost space” (378).  Furthermore, “the [invisible] character can easily be made visible by a slight reframing which would reunite the voice and its source” (379).  Lang precludes the slight reframing as a viable opportunity.  Not only does the camera in “M” not function as a wholly omniscient and omnipotent presence (as discussed in earlier seminars), but if the Littfasssäule scene had been shot from the likely perspective of Elsie, Beckert again would have appeared masked and silhouetted, surrounded by the bright source of light, rendering him an indiscernible dark phantom.  And it seems the space Beckert inhabits certainly does deepen the diegesis, but not in a conventional manner.  Because of his ostensible “invisibility”, Beckert does not initially add so much spatially to the film, hinting instead at another possible linguistic realm.  We, with Beckert and the city of Berlin, cohabitate at the level of language.  But at the end of the film Beckert refers to die Stimmen (the voices) in his head—to which we become indirectly privy—that compel him to murderous ecstasy.  It is his eerie and disturbing opening line addressed to Elsie that joltingly leads us into another space, another dimension—namely, Beckert’s own mental (ir)reality that he himself describes during the kangaroo court.

Two other instances of the complex voice-off worth mentioning are Frau Beckmann’s call to her daughter (“Elsie!”) and the disembodied hand that grasps Beckert’s shoulder at the end of the film (“Im Namen des Gesetzes…”).  Doane discusses briefly Luce Irigaray’s claim “that patriarchal culture has a heavier investment in seeing than in hearing,” and that the voice often implies a “feminine specificity” (384).  This is telling in several regards.  It explains, for one, the difficulty that the police and the mob (all men) had in systematically tracking down Beckert, relying on sight instead of audio-lingual clues.  (Again, it is worth noting that it was Beckert’s whistling which ultimately gave him away.)  Secondly, there is an implicit theme of feminization surfacing throughout the film.  If the voice can be located within a “feminine specificity”, this lends credence to the stereotypical feminized appearance of Beckert whose voice and language are presented as elemental to his character.  On a different yet related note, Frau Beckmann uses her voice to call to her daughter in the hope of locating Elsie.  Instead of walking through the streets or to the Gemeindeschule to seek Elsie out, it is the voice instead of the eye Frau Beckmann trusts (Frau Beckmann’s feeble attempt at looking down the stairwell notwithstanding).  But how does the “hand of the law” figure into this process of feminization?

Doane writes further, “to mark the voice as an isolated haven within patriarchy, or as having an essential relation to the woman, is to invoke the specter of feminine specificity, always recuperable as another form of ‘otherness’” (384).  The law figures into the fold as an “Other”.  It cannot give respite to the mothers nor exact the desired revenge on Beckert, yet it is the specter of the law that acts on behalf of the mother-specter (i.e., Frau Beckmann as representative of the other mothers) in combating the conflated specter of the murderer.  But Beckert himself admits that the mothers “haunt” him daily.  In essence, though there are singular characters who are seemingly fleshed out in the phantasmatic visual space via the voice, “M” is rife with allegorical and metonymical allusions/delusions/illusions, phantoms and specters that refuse corporeality.  The voice itself, therefore, and especially the disembodied voice, stands for Other(ness) not easily articulated in a somatic discourse concerning Lang’s first “talkie”.