Ernst Lubitsch’s comedy Die Puppe (1919) centres around a mix-up between a woman and a doll. The film's male lead, Lancelot (Hermann Thimig), is afraid of women, causing him to choose a doll for a wife. He visits Hilarius (Victor Janson), an eccentric dollmaker who has just made a doll completely identical to his daughter Ossi (Ossi Oswalda). While Hilarius greets his customer, his apprentice breaks the doll and his daughter volunteers to take its place. However, Lancelot picks her out as the doll he wants to marry, and buys her. During the course of several escapades in which Ossi has fun while pretending to be a doll and Lancelot attempts to convince his family that she is not, Ossi falls in love with Lancelot. At last, when Lancelot finally regrets that she is not actually human, she convinces him that she is, and they walk happily out of the frame hand in hand.
Double Trouble
Sigmund Freud's essay 'Das Unheimliche' was published in the same year as Die Puppe; in it, he uses E. T. A. Hoffmann's novella Der Sandmann to explain uncanniness. Interestingly, both Die Puppe and Der Sandmann involve confusion between doll and human, but while Nathanael falls in love with a doll that he believes is a woman (Olimpia), the opposite is true for Lancelot. A similar opposition is that the doll/woman leads to Nathanael's death while in Die Puppe, the mix-up proves enlightening for Lancelot. Only by purchasing the doll, by attempting to live out his fear of women, does he become aware of his own foolishness. While Freud dismisses the image of the doll in his essay, preferring to focus on the fear of loss of eyes as the main source of uncanniness in Der Sandmann, his idea that uncanniness can be found in something which ought to have remained concealed but emerges or steps forth (‘hervorgetreten ist’) is easily applied to Ossi in Die Puppe. Throughout the film, Ossi is constantly choosing when to conceal her identity and when to reveal it, stepping forth or otherwise animating her supposedly inanimate body.
Das Cabinet des Doktor Caligari, also made in 1919, and containing another image of a doll, bears interesting comparison with Die Puppe. Cesare, a somnambulist seemingly under the spell of his master, Caligari, is a sideshow spectacle who, stepping trance-like out of a coffin-like box (very similar to the potentially sinister way in which Hilarius’ dolls step out and hop down from their stage), predicts the deaths of those in his audience and kills them in the night. To avoid detection by the police, Caligari places a dummy of Cesare in the box during the night. Cesare himself sometimes appears more like a puppet than a human, contrasting with Ossi, who refuses to be under anyone’s control. The character of Caligari can be compared to Hilarius in Die Puppe: they have both created dolls of those who are under their authority and seem to be obsessed with controlling another person’s identity and images. Although there are countless similarities between the two films, such as painted cardboard sets, fairground references, framing narratives and dolls being confused with humans, Caligari uses the double theme to evoke dread, death and threat rather than comic effect. The greatest difference between the two films is that Caligari is hailed as one of the canonical Weimar masterpieces, whereas Die Puppe has received little attention. This is most probably in some part due to the fact that Caligari deals with the tragedy of male identity in turmoil, whereas Die Puppe concentrates on an exploration of female identity. Criticism has overlooked Die Puppe and chosen Caligari in the same way that Freud dismissed Hoffmann's doll in favour of the Sandman figure. However, Lubitsch's film merits being taken seriously because it does not merely show threatened masculinity, but parodies it through comedy and fantasy, creating a particularly telling platform for the subversion of gender norms.
Unmasking the Masquerade
Die Puppe opens with Lubitsch taking pieces out of a toybox and assembling them into a miniature world, which then becomes, via a fade-out and fade-in, the diegetic world of the film. Lubitsch thus sets up the film as something completely fabricated and ensures his illusion of reality is always identifiable, often forcing the viewer to look directly at the illusion itself as the most important thing. The viewer's attention is thus drawn not to the doll that Ossi is pretending to be, but the pretence itself. In this light, the act of masquerade is central to the film. Sabine Hake, in her book Passions and Deceptions (1992), to date the only in-depth study of gender in Lubitsch’s early films, writes that Lubitsch's early comedies are able to be subversive only through being situated in the fantastic or farce and are not necessarily anchored to the mimetic, for instance using exaggeration to reassure the viewer that no 'real' boundaries are being crossed. Conversely, she also states that the exaggeration of gender roles in the films leads to 'their critical exposure through the means of parody.'[1] Ultimately, she argues that regardless of whether traditional gender roles are asserted at the end of a film, it is significant enough that boundaries have been transgressed.
In the light of Hake's theory that the doll and the female body are not one and the same and can be told apart, Ossi's first appearance on screen takes on greater significance. She shares the screen with her double: clearly, woman and doll are separable. Yet, because Lubitsch permits the viewer to see neither the 'original' in isolation nor the manufacture of the doll, there is no way of ascertaining completely which is the doll and which is Ossi. Therefore, the viewer can only speculate as to which version is the authentic original, and the existence of a 'real woman' is challenged. Ossi is enjoying herself in her mimetic act. Her delight also indicates a fascination with the possibilities of masquerade, as well as a desire to explore her own identity, which she undeniably does during the narrative. Her fascination with the doll also acts as a reflection of the female spectator: as Ossi looks admiringly at her effigy, the female viewer, looking at Ossi, sees her own image on screen and – through the double – the imaging to which the female body is subject. Therefore, in allowing female spectators to identify with Ossi and the liberation that she achieves through inhabiting and manipulating the role of the doll, the film has a potentially emancipatory quality.
In her book Alice Doesn’t, Teresa de Lauretis dismisses the traditional idea of a division between masculine gaze and feminine image in favour of a dual identification with image and subject which anchors the female spectator to the film and opens up more dynamic possibilities. Ossi represents an example of what de Lauretis has identified as the female spectator’s simultaneous 'double identification with the figure of narrative movement, the mythical subject, and with the figure of narrative closure, the narrative image.'[2]The first trait of Ossi's personality the viewer sees is that of defiance and rebelliousness when she refuses to smile and pulls a face instead. This exaggerated facial expression, the first of many, shows Ossi's inclination towards masquerade and performance. Impersonating the doll is therefore a way for her to exist as pure performance, freed from the constraints of being a woman in a patriarchal society. Ossi’s doll is centred, the lighting is focused on her, and she (rather than Ossi) is the subject of the looks in the shot (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Die Puppe (Ernst Lubitsch, 1919)
As the other characters continue to admire the doll, Ossi rises from her chair, leans on the windowsill and looks out and away from the scene. The camera cuts to Lancelot walking down the steps, identifying him as the object of her gaze, then cuts back to Ossi. This time the camera is positioned outside the window, as she looks out, looking intrigued and smiling (Figure 2). The shot provides a wealth of framings: the wall around the window, the window itself and the glazing bars on it all serve to trap Ossi in her place. Due to the clear absence of glass in the windows, the bars resemble more closely a prison cell than a house window, particularly since the background is completely black. Given the viewer's knowledge that a flurry of excitement is happening behind her, this background evokes a sense of absence, whileadditionally depicting Ossi as oppressed and isolated. There is nothing for the viewer to focus on but Ossi’s imprisonment in the mise-en-scène. Arguably, Ossi begins to formulate her plan for emancipation with this shot: she sees the man she wants and later the doll provides her with an escape route out of her house.
Figure 2: Die Puppe (Ernst Lubitsch, 1919)
In assuming the doll's identity, Ossi takes control of the masquerade. Her father's loss of control is paralleled by Ossi's disappearance from her father's house. Here it is clear that the masquerade as represented by the doll's image is a visualisation of control; but far from being trapped in the body of a doll, Ossi uses it to free herself from her trapped existence. Moreover, Ossi's exaggeratedly rigid face as the doll allows for the moments in which she is not performing to be identified more easily, and these moments show her almost always laughing, both out of sheer excitement and at having fooled other characters. In the foundational feminist text, Womanliness as a Masquerade, Joan Riviere concludes, after a case study of a woman who was acting overly feminine in a male-dominated field of work, that ‘womanliness therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it.’[3] Similar to Joan Riviere's patient, Ossi can be seen to justify her agency and activity by acting in overly feminine and doll-like ways. As well as being a visual marker of masquerade, the form of the mechanical doll can also be seen as representing the constraints of society. In this light, the fact that the doll breaks at such an early point in the film might be taken as evidence that the film means to challenge those boundaries. Furthermore, it could be an example of the sort of destruction of an outdated way of writing (or cinematically portraying) women which Hélène Cixous calls for in her essay The Laugh of the Medusa. In this case, Ossi’s exaggerated and spontaneous ‘human’ performances, compared with the stasis of the man-made doll, can be seen to represent a new, emancipated portrayal of women. Ossi is not adhering to the patriarchal narrative of how a doll ought to act, but is rebelling and writing her own narrative.
The film's self-awareness closes the distance between spectator and object. This closeness has the additional effect of making voyeurism, which always requires a certain distance from its object, harder to achieve. Furthermore, a barrier is placed between the male spectator and his identification with Lancelot, given Lancelot’s apparent aversion to women, which confounds the established model of the male gaze. Additionally, that Lancelot's wish is to seek refuge in a monastery might also indicate a fear of the sexuality of the liberated 'new woman', a fear of female sexual agency which resonates with Freud's reading of Der Sandmann. Lancelot's wish to marry a doll supports Riviere's idea of the necessity of the masquerade as a means to pacify the male because the female has transgressed patriarchal codes of conduct. The element which sets this film apart, however, and allows for it to be read subversively, is its constant parody of patriarchy and femininity, through exaggeration, comedy and carnivalesque laughter. It is also interesting to note that Lancelot begins life as a doll when he is taken out of Lubitsch's box in the opening sequence, whereas Ossi's situation is the opposite because she decides to take on the role of the doll and uses this to control the action of the film. Lancelot, on the other hand, has limited agency and is forced by his uncle to marry, albeit then finding a form of subterfuge to elude this requirement. Through this irony, Lubitsch is able to critique the misogynistic construct of the 'ideal woman,' rather than merely depict it. Lancelot's exaggerated feminisation, in terms of conventional gender roles, might be seen as necessary in order for a woman to be the stronger character, because it still upholds traditional heterosexual gender roles in its subversion of them. However, the film's comedy seems to undermine and ridicule these roles, whilestill acknowledging their stubborn existence.
‘Hilarius’ Patriarchy
Although the film contains misogyny, it is softened, perhaps showing that while it might be futile to live in a society without misogyny, there are ways in which its power can be diminished. In the doll shop, which according to its advertisement appeals directly to misogynists, the only options available for purchase seem to be one from the chorus line of threatening, ever-advancing dolls, or Ossi - none of the options seem to be submissive. Ossi's doll is completely unpredictable and unable to be controlled. For example, after he has brought her home, Lancelot attempts to undress Ossi, but she slaps him away, causing him to marvel at her capability of undressing herself. This example also shows Ossi's insistence on being the sole controller of her image. Similarly, the viewer is shown Ossi taking pride in her appearance and applying make-up, but when her father attempts to paint her lips, she is disgusted and removes it. Furthermore, she kisses Lancelot whenever she wants to: she is not only in control of her image but her sexuality too. She seems indecisive and impulsive, but always in control. When Lancelot tries to use her as a literal object (a stand for his hat and jacket) she demonstrates her activeness by repeatedly throwing away his jacket. Interestingly, she always chooses to keep his hat on, an image which shows traditionally masculine power as having been subverted. Here, the idea of a passive woman seems as far from reality as the film's fairy-tale elements. Yet, although female agency seems to terrify Lancelot, the film shows his potential for change and growth. By the time of his dream sequence at the end of the film, he has clearly changed his mind, and desires her to be a 'real' woman.
The character of Hilarius becomes more intriguing when viewed as a personification of patriarchy. As Ossi’s father and the creator of the doll, Hilarius can logically be seen to symbolise the older generation and an authority figure. Yet in every aspect, his character seems to be the one that is the most roundly mocked. In the first instance, his name is too close to the German word ‘Hilarität’ for his character not to already be viewed as clownlike. The naming clearly has a strategic function here, with the male characters set up as figures to be laughed at; Lancelot’s personality could not be further from that of his heroic namesake. Hilarius also has a comic appearance with a bizarre wig and moustache, and the chequered trousers of a harlequin clown. Further, his apprentice takes every opportunity to undermine the authority of his master. In one scene, he stands behind Hilarius and silently mimics his every expression and gesture.
The constant undermining of the patriarchal older male character by his apprentice could also suggest that there is hope for a future without these outdated values. Furthermore, while sleepwalking, Hilarius is completely powerless, just as he is when attempting to float his way to the monastery at the film’s ending: while Ossi has emancipated herself, Hilarius, and on a symbolic level, patriarchy at large, has become passive. Conversely, women in the film are much more active, as illustrated by the comically sped-up chase sequence, the effect of which, as a dynamic collective, is amplified when juxtaposed with the sedentary group of monks. Painted on the front of Hilarius’ shop are the dolls he sells but, interestingly, alongside them are men dressed as clowns: perhaps this is a comment that anybody wanting to purchase a doll instead of a wife is a fool, and that their needs will be met by a purveyor of dolls who is himself a clown. When Lancelot leaves the shop with Ossi, her father tells him how to look after her and says he will leave her in Lancelot’s hands in an amusing parody of the transfer of power from father to husband in marriage.
Laughter in the Face of Boundaries
Boundaries, and their dismissals, can be seen in abundance in Die Puppe. Significantly, monasteries are as a rule spaces which exclude women. Therefore, because Ossi is (accidentally) allowed to become active in that space, the film shows the ability of an emancipated woman to cross boundaries which she previously could not, and enter spaces previously denied to her. Furthermore, the monastery provides a space in the film in which Ossi’s rejection of being figuratively restrained is depicted literally. As she is being carried over the monk’s shoulder into the room where she is to be kept, she pushes him into the room instead, gleefully slams the door on him and thus redresses the gender imbalance. In the shot, the door is on the far left: with the door shut, the monk is forced out of the frame, and Ossi has the stage to herself once again (Figure 3).
Figure 3: Die Puppe (Ernst Lubitsch, 1919)
Comparison with the earlier shot of Ossi at the window demonstrates how, in the course of the film, Ossi has gained freedom. Further, the way in which she bursts into laughter after this scene can be read not only as joyful, but as a more subversive expression of the rebelliousness of femininity. Moreover, her body is positioned towards the camera (and the spectator) so as to share the laugh with other women, crossing the line between actor and audience and uniting them. Ossi uses her entire body in the laugh, clapping her hands together, throwing her head back, crouching down and slapping both her thighs. Such an exaggerated way of laughing means that even without the benefit of sound, Ossi’s outburst seems extraordinarily loud, and as a consequence powerful. As she straightens up, her facial expression changes as she suddenly recalls what she was doing and she turns and runs away: for a moment, then, her laughter stopped the narrative in a spectacle of hilarity as attraction. Additionally, as she uses her whole body for laughter, her body might be seen to become the site of female rebellion – the retributive laugh of the Medusa, in Cixous’ terms, while the body of the doll signifies the suffocating rigidity of the patriarchal order. Ossi is not allowing herself to be repressed: she is overflowing with expressiveness.
Joseph McBride notes how Lubitsch’s association with comedy has led to his films being devalued and dismissed as frivolous, with people having failed 'to understand what his satire is actually saying about sexual relationships or the immaturity of sexist figures […] who tend to receive their comeuppance from strong women along their paths to increased emotional maturation.'[4] In broad terms, Ossi’s laughter, irrepressibility and disruption of the rigidity of a male narrative can be seen to lead to Lancelot’s emotional maturation. In 1981, E. Ann Kaplan wrote that for Lubitsch, roles for women are 'largely comic devices depending on his audience's patriarchal assumptions, rather than part of exploring sex-role stereotypes.'[5] However, it is clear that comedy should not be dismissed as lacking investigative or critical power: the film should better be viewed as a lesson masquerading as a joke. It is of course true that the sexism that is bound up with the spectacle in Die Puppe would have appealed to some spectators, but it is the underlying satire and constant opportunities for multiple contradicting interpretations that arguably ensured its popularity among contemporary audiences. Furthermore, this film in particular seems, in the face of Kaplan’s statement, to highlight the inherent problem with trusting one’s assumptions and fitting characters into stereotypical roles.
Dancing into Liberation
Dance is used repeatedly in the film to show a sense of breaking free. Twice, dolls begin to dance on a stage within the mise-en-scène and then jump from the stage into the ‘real’ floor, indicating something of a transformative quality of this kind of performance. Through dance, the boundary between real and imaginary is traversable, with implications for the security of the cinema screen as ‘fourth wall’ between the architectural space of the film and its spectators in the auditorium. Via choreographic effects, the narrative can not only be suspended, but its direction altered. Ossi constantly expresses herself through dance. Her exaggerated, robotic dance movements when masquerading as the doll make it easier for the viewer to identify the other moments in the narrative where she is dancing as herself. During the wedding, Ossi dances when she thinks she is alone, in other words for herself, rather than for anyone else's pleasure. In deliberately breaking the rules governing the doll's existence, Ossi demonstrates a liberation from the etiquette associated with being a woman. The doll's body serves as a metaphor for the boundaries women can and cannot transgress. However, it should not be ignored that Ossi is always only able to transgress without consequences while people are not aware of her existence as an 'authentic' woman. In the monastery, the monks, instructed not to look at Ossi, furtively turn their heads towards her, but when she sees this, she looks back at them and mouths 'Buh!', scaring them into looking away again. This illustrates the 'ability [...] to acknowledge and return the look',[6] which Thomas Elsaesser has observed is a common trait among Lubitsch's female stars, rendering relations of power and control wholly unstable. The camera then cuts to a full body shot of Ossi, who, having scared away the male gaze, begins to dance in her doll impression again. The monks cannot resist and turn to watch again, and eventually begin dancing along. A subsequent shot then shows the monks dancing behind Ossi as though they are her backing dancers. No longer simply consuming her image, they seem to have been absorbed into the performance: yet again the boundary between reality and (theatrical) performance is blurred. When the abbot returns, the monks run away and out of the shot, but Ossi continues to dance, albeit less boisterously. In a shot-reverse shot, the friar looks down and a close-up iris shot of Ossi’s dancing legs is shown, in a way that might seem to be fragmenting her body for male consumption in classical cinematic style. However, the next shot shows him beginning to copy her dance and looking at her legs, indicating that rather than lewdly staring at her body, he is simply trying to understand and mimic the dance routine. In this way, film shows that multiple subversive interpretations of images and their spectatorial effects are possible.
Conclusion: The Power of Parody
Die Puppe depicts a world in which boundaries are places of transformation and liberation rather than constraint, and a world in which a woman can find ways of controlling her own image and body. The doll, serving as a visualisation of the psychoanalytical concept of masquerade, also functions as a way to explore what it is that makes womanliness artificial, an ambiguity which runs through the film and might cause the viewer to question their previous beliefs. Furthermore, comparison with other literary and cinematic dolls indicates that the film's effectiveness in its subversion is that it is able, through laughter, to parody misogyny rather than to enable, or indeed merely to show it. Ossi's laughter, despite her undeniably restricted situation, shows how it is possible, even in the role of a doll-wife, to be subversive. Finally, the fact that Lubitsch does not appear at the close of the film to complete what appeared to be a frame narrative, showing a final disregard for prioritising plot over image, implies that further subversion is a possibility: it seems that Ossi has broken free of the frame.
Further reading:
Cixous, Hélène, Keith Cohen, and Paula Cohen, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa,’ in Signs 1, no. 4 (1976), pp. 875–93.
De Lauretis, Teresa, Alice Doesn’t, (London: Macmillan, 1984)
Drux, Rudolf, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Der Sandmann, (Stuttgart: P. Reclam, 1994)
Elsaesser, Thomas, Weimar Cinema and After, (NY: Routledge: 2009)
Freud, Sigmund, ‘Das Unheimliche,’ in Imago. Zeitschrift für Anwendung der Psychoanalyse auf die Geisteswissenschaften V (1919), pp. 297-324
Hake, Sabine, Passions and Deceptions: The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992)
McBride, Joseph, How Did Lubitsch Do It?, (NY: Columbia University Press, 2018)
McCormick, Rick, Sex, Politics and Comedy, (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2020)
Riviere, Joan, ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade,’ in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 10 (1929), pp. 303-313
[1] Sabine Hake, Passions and Deceptions: The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch (NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 98.
[2] Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t (London: Macmillan, 1984), 144.
[3] Joan Riviere, ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade,’ in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 10 (1929), pp. 303-313, 306.
[4] Joseph McBride, How Did Lubitsch Do It?, (NY: Columbia University Press, 2018), 30.
[5] E. Ann Kaplan, ‘Lubitsch Reconsidered,’ in Quarterly Review of Film Studies (Summer 1981) pp 305-312, 306.
[6] Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After, (NY: Routledge: 2009), 209.