Life is a Cabaret, Old Chum.

It seems hard to imagine a musical, of all things, taking place during 1930's Germany. And, in fact, if it had been about anything else, the film would have been tasteless, tactless, and morally void. However, when push came to shove, Bob Fosse created a film that was not only beautiful, but communicated something very core to the human experience. He showed us what it means to live, to die, to cope, and to understand great tragedy and injustice. His film illuminates the human response to travesty, something felt by everyone who walks this earth.

Cabaret, as its title suggests, revolves around the activities of a nightclub dancer named Sally Bowles. This American girl meets a British writer, named Brian, near the start of the film, and falls in love with him, something not impeded by his later confession of homosexuality. She continues to pursue him as he is sharing an apartment with her, though she makes sure to keep her advances low-key. Eventually he caves and begins a romantic and sexual relationship with her. They also befriend a rich man named Max von Heune, who, one evening, invites them both over for a party. Their relationships are all ambiguous, and we find out later that both Sally and Brian had sex with Max.

At first she and Brian quarrel over this, but then Sally discovers that she is pregnant. She is not sure, however, who the father is. Immediately Brian suggests that they get married and move back to England, but Sally realizes her need to toss caution to the wind would be suppressed there, and instead decides to have an abortion. When he discovers this, he goes back to England, she stays in Berlin, and their lives go on.

If it were not for the sad ending and the shroud of Nazism, this would almost be called a happy film. That is because the characters make their world happy. They are surrounded on all sides by death, torture, injustice and war. In effect, they are surrounded by death. And how can you live in that world? How can you eat, drink or be merry in a world where it is unusual to walk down the street and not see a bloody corpse? How can you stay in your home when people put dead dogs on your doorstep? These are destructive times, and everyone needs an escape.

So Sally, in her great bohemian wisdom, creates that escape. She creates life. Her getting pregnant is simply a metaphor for the German people at that time. She sings and dances on stage, she oozes sexuality from every pore. She is life, or as she puts it near the end, life is a cabaret. Because, you see, the very act of creation does something to stop the destruction. Eventually, this metaphorical love child will be aborted, but the fact that love was there is beautiful enough. It gives them a brief reprieve from the broken world in which they live.

The Cabaret is simply a microcosm for this phenomenon that exists in all times and all places. Whenever we are surrounded by death we create life, and when we are surround by life, we destroy. Look at the 60's, a time when the country was entrenched in the Vietnam War, and there was a romantic bohemian revolution, a sexual revolution, a musical revolution. It was a revolution of life. Look at Adam and Eve: when presented with creation, they had to disobey. It is as if our bodies need to keep the creative and destructive juices in equilibrium. We need to keep our homeostasis, and when presented with a world that is either too good or too bad, we have a psychological need to reduce it to the middle.

I leave you with a quote from another great film, The Third Man: “Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”