Freegans rummage through garbage for food. Such scavenging might be expected in a scene from Preston Sturges’s Depression era masterpiece Sullivan’s Travels, in which a film director intent on making a movie about real life descends a little farther into the great melting pot than he had meant to and almost succeeds in getting his goose cooked.
Freeganism—a neologism created from the words “free” and “vegan”—emerged in the prosperous, go-go years of the ‘80s and ‘90s, when food was so plentiful that stock market profiteers and hedge fund managers regularly tossed it over their hedges. The desire to save, recycle and prevent waste came amidst the kind of prosperity in which waste was looked on as a form of social elevation, and the pragmatic values upon which America’s particular brand of capitalism was based were openly flaunted in favor of a more magical notion of entitlement.
There may have been a thousand years of Rome, but the American Empire now looks like a wobbling giant, a Gulliver pierced with arrows by hordes of Lilliputians, ready to be tied up like a roast. Now, Freeganism has turned from philosophy to survival tactic. Indeed, prosperity seems far away in these times of recessive inflation. The paralysis of our banking system calls up memories of the Weimar Republic. The shadow of death haunting the urban population in Fritz Lang’s expressionist masterpiece, M, mirrors the dread of an anemic culture.
, which by the way have no monopoly on either humor or grotesquery, as evidenced in Lang’s effort. A B-girl named Lucy Chapman (Deborah Green) is burned with cigarettes, tortured and murdered. Gloria Grahame’s character Debby Marsh has half of her face burned off and gets her vengeance by reciprocating the favor on her thug lover Vince Stone (Lee Marvin). But there is no shortage of one-liners, sometimes of an uproarious nature, amidst the bleak landscape. Walking into Glenn Ford’s hotel room, Grahame comments, “Say, I like this, early nothing,” and says that her scar-face is “not so bad…it’s only on one side” and that now she can look at the world “sideways.” Grahame actually acts as the soothsayer, the drunken Tiresias of the film, popping out with aphorisms while defying gravitas. Of course the greatest influence on Fritz Lang’s work in The Big Heat is Lang himself. You don’t have the shadows of M
; in fact, the film, and in particular a timeless scene in a nightclub called The Retreat where mobsters hang out, is full of light. But it’s a glaring light, the cosmopolitan light of Metropolis
, which is recalled in one character's soliloquy, set against an iconic cityscape of towering skyscrapers that juxtapose cozy images of corruption with the juggernaut of impersonality.
