There is a German film by Wim Wenders called “Wings of Desire”. The title is a bit of a salacious interpretation of the German “Der Himmel Uber Berlin”, which is more like “Heaven Over Berlin”, of course.
It’s about two angels who observe people going about their humble little lives. The two angels, Damiel and Cassiel, can “hear” people’s thoughts. One of their favorite places in the library (an incredibly beautiful building in this film) where people think (aloud, to them) about regrettable actions, disappointments, loss. It is suggested that their awareness of these thoughts provides some kind of comfort to people.
One of them, Damiel, after watching some people who have a real passion for things, like acrobatics, or smoking, or coffee, decides that he wants to become human. Cassiel warns him that he will have to give up his immortality. Damiel believes it might be worth the sacrifice. He wants to know what it is like to be constrained by time, to have to relish every moment as if it might be your last, because it could be your last.
I ran across this film in a motel in Orangeville one night long ago. My wife had gone to sleep and I was channel surfing. I hit this black and white movie and here is what I saw: Peter Falk on an airplane sketching some of the passengers with a pencil and pad. The “angels” high over Berlin. Peter Falk acting in some film. Peter Falk playing Peter Falk acting in a film. Peter Falk buying a coffee as one of the angels comes closer to watch. Peter Falk saying, in a line that just blew my mind, “I can’t see you but I know you’re there.”
Explain the contrivance of this film to me? It made no sense, but it was beautiful. Of course I continued to watch and it has become one of my favorite films of all time.
It is one of the most sublimely beautiful films I have ever seen. It altered my perception of drinking coffee for months afterwards.
There was, of course, a terrible, terrible American remake called “City of Angels” set in Los Angeles and starring Meg Ryan as– ready for it?– a brain surgeon. Nicolas Cage is the angel who wants to love her.
For mass American audiences, most of the poetry has been removed in favor of cheap, mawkish emoting, contrivance, and antiseptic middle-class moral ambiguity: we wish to be titillated with suggestive possibilities without ever being mortally offended by the idea that someone might actually act on those feelings. The kind of stunted emotional state that produces beauty pageants for tykes, mischievous nuns, professional wrestling, by the kind of people who get hysterical when it is revealed that Michael Phelps smoked pot.
Why is anyone even concerned, in the slightest, about the fact that Michael Phelps was photographed smoking marijuana? Marijuana is no more or less harmful or truly immoral than most alcoholic beverages or fast foods or high performance automobiles or skate-boarding.
What if someone had posted a picture of him eating a Big Mac instead?
What if Meg Ryan had taken a sublimely beautiful German film and turned it into a trite, shallow, grasping little Hollywood contrivance? What if there was a photograph of Meg Ryan doing just that? Shouldn’t she be banned from all Hollywood movies for fifty years for that crime?