M: Murderers, Monsters, Men, & the Masses
FADE IN: Germany, 1931. Sound is just coming to motion pictures. It’s the eve of fascism and there’s a premonition of paranoia in the air. Since World War I, the country has been terrorized by a few serial killers, including the Vampire of Dusseldorf and the Wolf Man of Hanover for their treatment of their young victims. A film titled “The Murderer Is among Us” is questioned by a pro-Nazi producer, then reduced to a single letter and cleared upon the explanation that it’s merely a mystery thriller about hunting down a child murderer.
Paranoia is less about what you do see than what you don’t see, and what we don’t see in M is what happens to the children. One of the first lines of dialogue is between two mothers complaining about their children singing a song about the murders that have been happening. One says, “As long as we can hear them singing, at least we know they're still there.” Yet the children disappear from the story quickly. Their murders are off-camera, and just like Fritz Lang’s use of sound off-camera—a whistled leitmotif and hurried footsteps—it creates tension and doubt around the mystery instead of the dead. Who is the murderer? Will he be caught before it’s too late? Do we root for the hunters or the hunted? As the film goes on, the children fall further out of sight and out of mind. In their absence, we are engulfed in an ever-complicating narrative of what it means to be a monster…
Vampires and werewolves and organized crime, oh my! Germany in 1931 was no stranger to monstrous murderers, and M is the product of several historical truths. Two prolific serial killers, Peter Kürten and Fritz Haarmann were guillotined in 1925 and 1931 for their reputations as monsters, but the practice of beheading them goes back to the werewolf trials of late medieval and early modern Europe. Accused of cannibalism and witchcraft, like the German farmer Peter Stumpp, the condemned were vulnerable members of society tortured into confession. The terrified masses and judicial system could have created as many monsters as they killed. M begins as a witch hunt led by the city’s criminals, which is based on the infamous Ringverine, the organized crime at its height during the Weimar Republic whom the Nazis promised to eliminate as part of their political platform. Then when the criminals finally catch the suspect, they create their own version of a werewolf trial.
Mensch oder Monster? Human or a monster? What, or who, does ‘M’ refer to? The final trial sequence of M complicates everything we thought so far about which characters are justified. The criminals seem the most protagonistic and make the most progress in catching the suspect before he can kill again. The suspect says they have no right to just kill him—for him killing is a compulsion, and he never remembers committing the act. He demands to be handed over to the police, but the criminals are certain he would plead insanity and just kill again. They claim the right to judge him because as criminals, they are all experts in the rule of law. The suspect, however, argues that they are worse than him because they’re proud of being criminals. He argues that he compulsively must commit murder and would stop if he could, while the criminals are choosing to.
After the suspect shares how he feels like he’s hunting himself, that he wants to escape but he can’t, he both sounds more monstrous than ever and at his most sympathetic. He is like a werewolf—victim to its own transformation. The criminals take it as a confession, but the “defense counsel” for the suspect argues that no one has the right to kill a man who cannot be held responsible for his own actions, least of allthe masses who have their own crimes to answer for. The “prosecutor” himself is wanted on three accounts of manslaughter. Indeed, when the police arrive at last and break up the trial, they all raise their hands in surrender.
FADE OUT. It’s been almost a hundred years since M released in Germany. Film has changed drastically in the last century, far beyond the introduction of sound, but perhaps other things haven’t changed so much. Many citizens of the world today watch nervously as political turmoil brews mistrust between neighbors. Anyone could be the “murderer” of what they think the future should be.
M’s final image isn’t of the execution of justice, of either the murderer or the criminals. It’s of a mother. The matter is before a court of law now, but “This won’t bring our children back,” she says. “One has to keep better watch over the children!” She speaks not to anyone in the courtroom, but to us, the viewers. Throughout the entire film, our eyes are on the chase: the thrilling system the criminals organize, the clues the police piece together, the chalky white ‘M’ marking the suspect’s coat… We are focused on revenge, not the children who were killed. But they are the future. Justice isn’t organized crime removing an obstacle to their operations or the police appeasing a paranoid public—at least, that’s not what it should be. M shows us how fear erodes our ability to identify the humanity in each other and distorts our ability to determine what justice should be. It leaves us wondering if everyone wouldn't have been better off remembering who it was all for.