Dream team: the Brothers Quay

ArtForum, April, 1996 by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve

TNG: What's the significance of all the antlers and stag imagery in the Institute?

BQ: They're not in the book. But we thought, the Institute had an existence before it trained servants. So we imagined it had been a factory for making perfume. Musk comes from the male deer - actually from a deer without antlers, but we took a little poetic license.

We also imagined that the man who had run this factory had had a Wunderkammer room where he collected somewhat pathological deer imagery. This is the museum that Jakob discovers. Like the Institute, it's a maze. On one side of it there's a hell jar of ejaculate of stag, from when they're rutting. We got the idea when we were sawing antlers one day and as the horn fell onto the paper it smelled of sperm. Did you know that when an antler deroutes, they presume - it's not really known - that it's because the deer's been shot in the testicle? When a deer is hunted, it turns its behind to the gunshot to run away. If the bullet hits the testicle, that - possibly - deroutes the antler.

TNG: Which means what - that it falls out?

BQ: No, that it becomes aberrational. We have collections of antlers with these extraordinary detours and florescences - a flowering of the testicles in the opposite direction.

All of that was a subtext. We were interested in this contamination of the Institute by the dead perfume factory. Herr Benjamenta closes himself down into this world of deer memorabilia - almost as though it was he who'd been wounded in the testicle. Then the Institute itself, in that it's for teaching servants, is like a reservation of young bucks - eunuchs. These guys are learning the art of demeaning repetitive labor. They're being taught an abstraction, an ideal code or system: "Work more, wish less." And all those elements come together with the animal kingdom in the film's layer of fairy tale.

TNG: Walser himself attended a school for servants, didn't he?

BQ: Yes, though not for long. For us, Jakob is a quiet portrait of Walser. He spent the last 26 years of his life in an asylum. At the beginning he still wrote; then he stopped. He said, "I'm here to be mad, not to write." He died on a walk in the snow on Christmas day. That's why Mark Rylance does that gesture at the end with his hat - because Walser was found facedown in the snow with his hat falling off, one hand on his heart. It's the most fairy tale-ish ending. In one of his earliest novels he talks about coming across a poet dead in the snow.

TNG: Is that landscape of death the same landscape that ends Institute Benjamenta?

BQ: Oh yes - in a sense we just tried to create that final realm. We actually took that last walk of Walser's when we were in Switzerland - we had this photograph of him dead, and we were wandering around trying to position it in the landscape. We never asked Mark to make that gesture; he just did it, and it was only when we were looking at the rushes that we went "**!**!!," because we had shown him the photograph.

TNG: Your description of walking, looking for Walser, suggests how you inhabit the world as flaneurs - wandering around, looking not for something specific but just for what the world will give you. That's how you build your esthetic.