From the Vaults: 'Wings of Desire'

And I cried.

Jude wept.

There was an effusion of liquid from the eyes of Jude, Il Patron, the Judester, Jude-eh-Jude-eh-Jude (na na nananana).

And not just, like, a single manly tear. I mean sobs. Ugly sobs. Red-faced, scrunchy-chinned, air-gasping sobs. I had to leave the room. My parents were there. I was 16 years old. It was embarrassing.

It took me 10 minutes to get myself together and come back to the movie. Sobbing was kept to a minimum for the rest of the film. Sniffles were noticeable but unremarked. The remainder (blinking on the family room TV screen) was watched in moderate silence. My brother rolled his eyes a lot at the occasional nose-blowing.

So, what I guess I’m saying is “Wings of Desire” hit me pretty hard in the old emotional-cum-intellectual metaphorical solar plexus and it was a big event in my life. Wim Wenders, 1987. West Berlin. Angels. Classic girly shit. A real blow to the masculinity for somebody whose favorite movies had been “The Godfather” and “Rocky.”

When I was 16 years old, in the summer before my senior year, I was trying to figure out what to do with my life—which colleges to apply to, which disciplines to study, how I was going to use my major to feed myself after school, etc. etc. I was already well on my way to internalizing the Great American Lie that you are what you do and what you do should be making money, and that the money was mostly focused in ye olde hard sciences, and while biology was fine I wasn’t too super keen on the mathy stuff, and it’s the mathy stuff that makes you the big bucks, so we’d better start pretending we like the mathy stuff, hadn’t we, Jude, since it’ll come in handy whether you’re in actual research in development or if you’re just going to be one of the clever bastards on Wall Street pushing around the imaginary assets that led to the Crash, which career, while on the whole perhaps detrimental to society, at least promised rather a lot of money (even for New York) and a certain nice socio-economic-cultural cache. In other words, I was feeling pretty miserable and depressed and unfulfilled and generally kind of low in a cattle-ish, numb, soul-selling kind of way. Alienation, for lack of a better word. I was pretty alienated.

So it’s July and I am cattle-ish and depressed, and my mom has us watch this silly-looking Kraut movie about angels in Berlin. Worse than just being about angels who require subtitles, it’s about an angel who falls in love with a trapeze artist. I mean, please. Come on, America. It’s 2011. Trapeze artists? Angels? Love? Love died in the 80s, Mom. Right after they filmed “The Princess Bride.” Money-power-grandeur-economic-value, though. That’s some pretty hot stuff right now, Mom. Let’s watch a movie about rich people. Because that’s what it’s about, Mom. Being rich, right? Right?

So I’m watching this movie with my mom and dad and little brother who’s been coaxed away from his computer for half an hour, and there are these angels who are completely objective and immortal and full of boundless knowledge but who don’t really enjoy it. Who wish they could change. Who wish they could feel pleasure and pain. Who wish they could touch people instead of just hearing their thoughts. Who want to be there, to experience, instead of just accumulating images and symbols and the other currencies that represent human experience.

It was a lot.

I was already borderline-weeps by time the suicide happened. A man on a skyscraper. Headphones. Oblivious to the crowd screaming at him to step back from the brink, that it wasn’t all bad, to live. An offhand remark—off the building—fin. The end. No more man with headphones. No more accumulation of things, but worse, no more experiences. No more feelings. No more people. The dark.

I quickly went from borderline-weeps to full weeps and had to step out, as described.

I wish I could say that I made the change at that point from evaluating my life’s success in accumulation to describing it by experience, by living well. I didn’t. I still haven’t shaken that sense that I’m not doing things properly if I’m not accumulating the proper counters.

But I will say that I’ve been suspicious of the counters since then. Of headphones. Of not hearing the shouts from the people on the skyscraper. Of choosing to be alone. Of choosing to be not human.

And maybe I can say, with the fallen angel, after these years,

—Jude D. Russo can be reached at jude.russo@thecrimson.com.