Dream team: the Brothers Quay

ArtForum, April, 1996 by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve

BQ: Yes. At that point we wanted it to appear almost as though Kraus were telling the tale. He's feeding the fish, and the food falls into the fishbowl; so it's as though he's making snow for the fish. Having Jacob and Herr Benjamenta in the snow, which looks as though they were in a glass bowl, gave it that slightly fairy-tale ending.

TNG: Herr Benjamenta tells Jakob, "I've pronounced the Institute dead. We are free. . . . Follow me out of this world forever." Yet Kraus remains. Lisa is dead - killed by the Institute, or, better, by her evolving inability to enact its rules.

BQ: These people course through the film in strange trajectories: Lisa is slowly arcing down, Herr Benjamenta is rising euphorically, and Kraus will be the pearl secreted by the Institute. He'll be there for all time, with the fish in the goldfish bowl, just turning these endless circles. And Jakob is the princeling who should have woken Sleeping Beauty with a kiss of life, but he's brought the kiss of death.

TNG: Jakob says at one point, "As long as I obey her, she will live." But he has instigated in Lisa the desire not to be obeyed, the desire to move beyond this world in which, a sign reads, "Rules have already thought of everything." But why is it Herr Benjamenta who gets to leave with Jakob at the end?

BQ: In his final speech, he says, "Once I was crowned with success, the world smiled on me. But I hated the world. Hated existing. Hated those I taught to take orders. . . . But no longer, now that I am not a king. . . ."

TNG: ". . . Now I want to live. . . ."

BQ: Yes, "Now I want to live." But the film in fact ends unexpectedly, with Kraus - the genuine work of God, the nothing, the servant. Earlier, Lisa has told Jakob that God gives a Kraus to the world in order to entrust it with an insoluble riddle. This line is an echo of that fiddling opening quotation from Orff. And so, ending with Kraus, the film ends as it begins, with a riddle; the circle is reformed. And maybe we're no wiser, because, as Lisa's voice from the heavens says in the film, "Things unfathomed still occur. And this fairy tale will tell you last."

Thyrza Nichols Goodeve is a frequent contributor to Artforum.