Mulholland Drive: Magdalena at the grave

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Mulholland Drive: Magdalena am Grab is a story by Patrick Roth from 2002. A radio play adaptation was made in 2014.

overview

The focus of the story is the Easter scene from John's Gospel , which takes place as a drama rehearsal in an empty house on Mulholland Drive near Los Angeles. In the line-by-line re-enactment of the encounter of the risen Jesus, portrayed by a young director who is also the narrator, with Mary of Magdala , played by a colleague, the two discover an omission in the Bible text that holds a secret.

content

An unnamed first-person narrator reports how, inspired by Pasolini's Bible film The First Gospel - Matthew , he rehearsed a scene from the Gospel of John as part of his class with Hollywood director Daniel Mann : the famous episode of Magdalena, Joh 20.1-18  EU who goes to her Lord's grave on Easter morning and becomes the first witness to the resurrection. The unknown, "exotic" Italian Monica Esposito takes on the role of Magdalena, three other acting colleagues are provided for the part of Jesus and the two angels who guard the grave. The rehearsal site is an empty villa on Mulholland Drive, the former home of a famous magician who ended his career with an outrageous number: He sawed his daughter in half and had her two parts erected to the left and right of the stage as if to a memorial. The audience was asked to touch the split halves on the bloody sides, then the show was over. "No restoration" - the young woman was not reassembled.

Under the impression of the disturbing story, they arrange to meet for a rehearsal the next evening in the former house of the magician. The director worries about Monica, who seems depressed and sad to him. Spontaneously, he decides to follow her car towards the Santa Monica Mountains. The scene from Hitchcock's Vertigo , in which James Stewart aka Detective John "Scottie" Ferguson chases after the object of his guard, a suicidal young woman (Kim Novak), comes to mind. The young woman's name is Madeleine (Magdalena), and he follows her to a grave. During his shadowing drive, the director becomes aware that he is reading the features of the divided wizard's daughter into Monica.

At home he goes back to the job; Reading aloud, still under the impression of the chase, he decides to limit the Magdalena story to the recognition that is told in Jn 20, 11-16. Every single step should be replicated analogously to the six verses. He notices that the recognition scene is based entirely on the crying of Magdalena. But what if Monica couldn't cry during the rehearsal? Ultimately, it is the tears of Magdalena that - similar to the touching music of Orpheus at Aornum in Thesprotis - open the entry point, namely dissolve the concrete, unalterable fact of death. According to the director, tears can mediate between the worlds, "the living and the dead". Before falling asleep, an earlier visit to the revered actress Ingrid Thulin comes to mind. When asked about her technique of crying, Thulin had let tears flow instead of answering.

On the evening of the following day, Monica is already waiting on Mulholland Drive and escorting the director into the supposed house. A spiral staircase connects the gallery with the lower-lying living room, which will be converted into a rehearsal stage. The cone of light from a floor lamp on the floor marks the scene of the action, Monica's silver belt, which she puts across the circle of light, marks the threshold into the interior of the grave and the director's jacket, seven paces behind the belt, shows the location of the two angels on. You start rehearsing without your colleagues who don't show up for the whole evening. The director sets the sequence of Magdalena's movements and Monica speaks the lines assigned to them, which she reads from the manuscript. In the course of carefully re-enacting the six verses of the Bible, the director and actress get more and more drawn into their roles, and the game suddenly becomes serious.

An uncanny dynamic unfolds the closer the two get to the core of the scene. Monica is excited and trembling all over; she falls to her knees, but falling is just an excuse to warn her partner. "HE IS HERE" she scribbled on the manuscript. The two act under the “burning eye” of an invisible third party, whom the director imagines as Monica's jealous husband, “some madman” who can “break loose” at any time. The danger in the back forces you to be extremely mindful and concentrated. In the fearful, tense atmosphere, Monica discovers what the director has missed: The Bible text has a gap - a verse is missing: Magdalena faces Jesus, whom she takes to be the gardener at this point, but the text demands that she herself turned after him. Everything suddenly seems “twisted” - something is wrong with the text, the basis of the sample. Monica's face is "twisted in pain", she is crying.

At the moment of greatest confusion, Monica walks past the director / Jesus - against the text. Her passing completes the missing verse, she now stands with her back to Jesus / the director. Now calling Jesus, the verse that follows, also makes sense. Jesus calls the woman by her name - "Maria" - and she turns to face him. Jesus and Magdalena stand facing each other and Magdalena says: "Rabbuni": When you walk past, recognition follows: Magdalena recognizes the risen One in the lost Beloved. Recognition occurs not only outside, on the stage, but also inside, in the subjective experience of the actors - under the eye of the ominous "other". He represents the "Deus absconditus", the "unknown god" who appears in many cultures in the symbol of the eye. The narrative is thus essentially about the experience of a numinous man.

Design and structure

Mulholland Drive: Magdalena at the grave is told in retrospect, from a time gap of twenty years. The text has features that connect it to the previous story Meine Reise zu Chaplin : the autobiographical first-person narrator, the milieu of the film and the central motif of recognition . The subject of the narration in both works is an emotionally overwhelming experience that lies in the past, which is brought back into the present through the narrative, and re-enacted. Like My Journey to Chaplin , Magdalena begins at the grave in medias res , with a jump to the 1980s. The central event, the drama rehearsal, unfolds in the middle of the text. This is followed by a six-page epilogue in which the narrator draws the essence of the narrated event.

Embedded stories and memories of the narrator prepare the main plot that begins in the second part. The vertigo reminiscence as well as the memory of the conversation with Ingrid Thulin introduce the theme of the dissociated feminine, which is hauntedly dramatized in the story of the magician and his daughter. The connection between the two episodes is also established in the setting, which is identical and not identical, as is clear from the last sentence of the story: "So I don't know whose wizarding house Monica took me to."

The torn up magician daughter corresponds with the mysterious figure of Monica. She is not only perceived as exotic, she is also exposed, isolated, like the sorcerer's daughter in her dismembered state is exposed without protection. Nobody in class has an address or phone number for Monica; immediately after the rehearsal it disappears from the life of the narrator without a trace. Unlike the magician's daughter, who is completely passive, Monica takes on a mediating function in cooperation with the director: She leads into the house and into the scene, she draws attention to the reality of the "other", which is not immediately may be watched. After all, it is she who discovers the lost Bible verse, the skipped sentence that contains a hidden, essential truth that is worked out in the concluding remark.

The Magdalenian Second

It is noteworthy that the scene in Jn 20, 11-16 was never performed. Experienced physically, namely in the concrete re-enactment of the text, the event has deeply impressed itself in the memory, has "grown further" over the years and has become an inner experience. Once more the narrator approaches the omitted verse - the sentence that hides Magdalena's passing. For him it becomes a symbol of the present relationship between man and God: “[They] no longer see one another. Stand apart. "

In the situation of separation, the search for the lost center and the possibility of passing it is saving. Only Magdalena's failure causes the god to turn, provokes his calling and turning to himself. The narrator understands the recognition itself as a change, a baptism and a resurrection : “She [Magdalena] is transformed by someone who no longer knew him [Jesus], who was only looking for the dead, who was 'dead' to him, transformed into one who recognizes him - 'gives birth' to him for the second time: for only here, in the eyes of this bodily seeing woman, does he come into the world, now as a risen one. "

This fourth turn in the entire course of the Easter narrative, in which the relationship between man and God is re-established in Magdalena's search and failure, is captured by the narrator in the image of Magdalena's second . It denotes a “complete change”, because Jesus too is changing from a dark, alien God who does not reveal himself to a God who relates to man and wants to be seen by him. “From a total aloofness, divorce, separation and turmoil of both God and man, of matter and of spirit - there is a turn, yes, turning towards both: one is now in the eye of the other. The one recognized contained in the one. "

expenditure

  • Patrick Roth: Mulholland Drive: Magdalena at the grave . In: Patrick Roth (Ed.): In the valley of shadows. Frankfurt poetics lectures . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 2002, ISBN 3-518-12277-0 , pp. 77–111 (paperback edition suhrkamp 2277.).
  • Patrick Roth: Magdalena at the grave . Insel, Frankfurt a. M., Leipzig 2003, ISBN 3-458-19234-4 (Insel-Bücherei No. 1234.).
  • Patrick Roth: Mulholland Drive: Magdalena at the grave . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2007 (audio CD).

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In the first publication of the story, the location is explicitly named in the title: Mulholland Drive. Magdalena am Grab , in: Patrick Roth: In the valley of shadows. Frankfurt poetics lectures . Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp, ​​2002, pp. 77-111.
  2. ↑ Patrick Roth: Magdalena at the grave. Frankfurt a. M., Leipzig: Insel, 2003, p. 13.
  3. ↑ Patrick Roth: Magdalena at the grave. P. 23.
  4. ↑ “My journey to Chaplin brings to mind / repeats [...] an experience that was once inscribed in the soul, fermented inside and is alive up to this point in time. Via 'Encore' that single print is supposed to be transformed, i.e. H. assimilated to the consciousness in order to get on the track of the underlying meaning. " Michaela Kopp-Marx : " Prose should make you see. Patrick Roth and the film ”. in: Contemporary literature. A Germanic yearbook. 13/2014, pp. 227-253, 234.
  5. ↑ Patrick Roth: Magdalena am Grab , p. 44.
  6. ↑ The family name "Esposito" reinforces the characteristic of the stranger and the other to an exposure: (Latin) exponere = to expose; the name was in Italy of the 18th / 19th. Century given to abandoned children.
  7. ↑ Patrick Roth: Magdalena at the grave. P. 46.
  8. ↑ Patrick Roth: Magdalena at the grave. P. 47.
  9. ↑ Patrick Roth: Magdalena at the grave. P. 50.