Watching The Night Porter film for the first time, I was struck not only by how disturbing it was, but also how rare it is that a film will tackle such difficult issues. For those who haven't seen it, the film is about an ex-concentration camp prisoner, Lucia, (Charlotte Rampling) who meets her Nazi tormentor, Max (Dirk Bogarde) 13 years after the war. He is now working as a night porter in a hotel in Vienna, and they resume a sado-masochistic relationship which leads ultimately to their destruction.
The film shows the distortion of memory and the difficult response to guilt, as Max meets with his ex-colleagues. They simultaneously seek out witnesses to threaten, confess to each other in the hope of absolution (thus furthering the bond), and swear continued allegiance to the fuhrer. Although many war films show a simple battle of good and evil, this film looks at the legacy, in a way that is uncomfortable. Europe in the years following World War Two was full of guilt; not only the primary guilt of Nazi Germany, but the secondary guilt of collusions, the failure to act, and of furtive pleasures.
The Night Porter is uncomfortable, because not only does it portray the Nazi who is now too ashamed to go out in the light, but it shows that Lucia is a willing prisoner, this time in Max's apartment, and willing submissive in their S&M sex. The world they create is essentially delusional, recreating as it does a past where he was glorified in the Nazi uniform and she was glorified as "his little girl", the one he chose out of all the others.
The compulsion is clear: he ties her up not so she can't escape, but so others cannot take her away. She smiles in delight when he says it will all end only if she goes to the police - she can choose to be a prisoner for as long as she likes. It has been hard for many people to accept that she is a willing accomplice. Some people have commented that it is immoral to show such abuse as sexually exciting. However, it is a recognised and common response to trauma to recycle it in the mind into something pleasurable and benign. In that respect, the acting out of sexual abuse in the camp by the pair is believably compulsive for Lucia (if not exactly healthy). Of course not all victims respond in this way, but many have sado-masochistic fantasies after the event and in fact identify with the perpetrator.
We often want our victims to be wholly good, to make our moral divisions clear and easy. What we are asking in some cases is that they will be frigid. Victims of sexual abuse are very often women, and we hate to acknowledge that women aren't saints, that they too have a libido and could identify with the person who made them suffer.
The sado-masochistic response is a very human one, and the human will to survive will persist in the most strenous of circumstances. The rage of society at a film like the Night Porter is the rage of Caliban seeing his own reflection, as Oscar Wilde would say. Unpleasant truths are truths nonetheless, and should be faced. To deny a fantasy is to deny the opportunity for self-knowledge, and therefore change. This is a rare film that makes change possible.
