In his autobiography entitled An Orderly Man, Dirk Bogarde, who plays Gustave von Aschenbach in Luchino Visconti’s film version of Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice, writes of the response that the film received after its premiere in London in 1971 at a benefit to raise funds to help save Venice from crumbling and sinking into the polluted sea that was then and remains its sorry home. A friend, Baroness Moura Budberg, approached him after the screening, "her eyes twinkling with mischief. ‘Hello, my darling,’ she said in her whispering Russian voice. ‘It is marvelous, very marvelous, but it is not Mann!’" (Bogarde, pp. 79-80). The topic of the current discussion is a comparative analysis of the different ways in which the language of the novella and the language of the cinema portray alienation. What might have induced the Baroness to judge that the film betrayed its origin? To address the assertion that the film is not Mann, for the purposes of this study we must first decide what Mann is, that is, how Mann portrays von Aschenbach’s alienation and then compare that with how Visconti also portrays that alienation. In the essay "Humanism and Occultism in Thomas Mann," Marguerite Yourcenar writes that "the works of Thomas Mann have attained that very rare category, the modern classic; that is to say, they are among productions still recent and still open to debate, but worthy of being taken up again and again for examination and reconsideration in all their aspects and at every level of meaning" (Yourcenar, The Dark Brain of Piranesi p. 199). Certainly there are multiple levels and multiple meanings in Death in Venice.

On the surface, Death in Venice describes the obsession that a middle-aged man has for a beautiful14-year old boy. But the novella is much more than that. Mann's work also attempts to investigate the nature of art and its relationship with its creator. The novella seeks to answer the question of what happens to an artist who devotes himself to art so completely that he neglects to nurture his humanity, indeed, even fails to acknowledge his humanity. Can an artist who allows himself no human feelings, no human relationships, no human identifications create art, and if he can, is his art of any value to anyone but himself? On the other hand, can an artist who releases himself completely to his emotions maintain enough discipline to create art inasmuch as art is a product and takes time, talent, and effort to produce? In the novella, these questions are investigated largely through internal questions and interior monologues. A successful film adaptation of Death in Venice needs to find some way to portray these questions and their answers in the language of the cinema.

The story of Death in Venice is simple enough. Gustave von Aschenbach, a German writer living in Munich, takes a walk near his home one day in 1911 or so. He happens upon a wanderer near a local cemetery. This chance meeting inexplicably induces him to decide to take a restful vacation. He goes first to an island off the Istrian coast but finds it unacceptable. He travels ultimately to Venice and takes a room at a grand fin-de-siecle hotel. He is surrounded by strangers whom he avoids and elegance to which he is inured, paying far less attention to his grand and busy surroundings than he does to an unusually attractive boy of fourteen or so, stunningly beautiful. Although he has scrupulously avoided unnecessary contact with people in his life as a pseudo-scholarly writer and indeed finds common social interactions painful, Aschenbach is intrigued by this singular boy. Aschenbach has spent his life trying to achieve beauty in his art, or more precisely, trying to achieve greatness for himself by creating art. He can create art, however, only by controlling his senses, dominating them with his will and sublimating them for the pursuit of the fame that will come to him as a result of his work. But the boy, a young Pole, Tadzio by name, apparently achieves effortlessly a perfection in his physical beauty that Aschenbach can never quite aspire to achieve via his intellect. Fascinated, awed, drawn, Aschenbach arranges his time at the hotel so that he can watch Tadzio cavort on the beach with his playmates. Their paths cross several times. Tadzio bears the older man’s attention with curiosity and childlike pride—and perhaps flirtation. Becoming more obsessed, Aschenbach actively follows the boy. His following becomes worship, his worship becomes dysfunction, his dysfunction becomes neurosis, all at the expense of his own interests and his health. Ultimately the writer succumbs to cholera in his beach chair while watching Tadzio, who has been consciously posing for Aschenbach as he stands in the sea.

The context of alienation in Death in Venice is that of a man alienated from himself, that is, from the parts of himself that he does not want to admit exist, and of a man from the rest of humanity. Gustave Aschenbach has been not merely isolated from any meaningful relationships with his fellow human beings, but forcibly divorced from them. When confronted with his intense fascination with, his obsession for, and perhaps his desire for the androgynously, perfectly, simply beautiful Tadzio, he is incapable of dealing with that fascination, that obsession, that desire because these are feelings that he has previously banished from his life. Thus, he is incapacitated by his inability to deal with the failures and contradictions he has created for himself in his professional and personal lives. Impelled both towards and away from both objects of his desire, that is, both Tadzio and his urge to achieve greatness, he stagnates in dissolution and death. He cannot control his feelings as he has in the past and he cannot survive the feelings themselves because he does not know how to do so. Not only does the image of greatness that he has built up for himself carefully, layer by layer, like the phrases in one of his books, slip away from him as he slips into his obsession, but the novella questions whether that which Aschenbach produced, both his art and himself, is great in the first place. We ultimately learn that Aschenbach’s art, the pride of his public life, stands apart from the truly artistic because it is motivated not by the desire to create beautiful art, but by the desire to self-aggrandize. His work is unanimated by human feeling and polluted with bourgeois pretension, just as Aschenbach himself is alienated for similar reasons from himself and his fellow human beings. Mann portrays Aschenbach’s alienation through his careful descriptions of Aschenbach’s isolation, his inability to deal with other human beings, his inability to deal with his own emotions, his inability to deal with his own sexuality, and ultimately, his inability to live out the artificial life that he has imposed on himself as a result of the hollowness of his pretensions as an artist.

At the outset of the novella, Mann suggests the literary plan that he will develop throughout the novella:

Gustave Aschenbach is thus instantly and undeniably alienated. This sentence tells us that he "set out alone" on his walk, and on even the most accessible level, he is alienated from himself. Indeed, Gustave Aschenbach is no longer Gustave Aschenbach, but rather he has become Gustave von Aschenbach, a pretentious bourgeois given the right to put the affected nobiliary particle into his name merely in recognition of his literary accomplishments. Although we immediately learn that Aschenbach is alienated from himself, we do not learn until nine paragraphs later that he is a writer, although we have a hint seven paragraphs later when he muses about his "literary gift." And to learn that he is a writer, we must read through those carefully crafted opening paragraphs, a mixture of realism — "The English Gardens, though in tenderest leaf, felt as sultry as in August and full of vehicles and pedestrians near the city" (Thomas Mann, Death in Venice p. 3); naturalism— " … the stone-mason’s yard, where crosses, monuments, and commemorative tablets made a supernumerary and untenanted graveyard opposite the real one" (Thomas Mann, Death in Venice p. 4); psychology — "Desire projected itself visually. ... He beheld a landscape, a tropical marshland ... a kind of primeval wilderness-word of islands, morasses, and alluvial channels. ... There were trees, mis-shapen as a dream .… Among the knotted joints of a bamboo thicket the eyes of a crouching tiger gleamed—and he felt his heart throb with terror, yet with a longing inexplicable" (Thomas Mann, Death in Venice pp. 5-6); and myth — " ... he would go on a journey. Not far—not all the way to the tigers. A night in a wagon-lit, three or four days of lotus-eating at some one of the gay world’s playgrounds in the lovely south" (Thomas Mann, Death in Venice p. 8) — we know that Mann is creating for us a world where his use of carefully chosen words in even more carefully crafted phrases will portray the meaning for us. It is not only the "plot" and the "theme" that are important; it is the language with which that plot is told and that theme is developed, just as we shall see in the film version of the novella that it is the way in which filmmaker Luchino Visconti uses the language of the film to tell that same story and portray that same theme adapted to the screen.

The very name "Aschenbach" tells us that words are not only important but also in conflict, in tension, for "Aschenbach" is made of "aschen" and "bach," or "ashes" and "brook," a compound image of dead, dry, dark, burned-out destruction joined with cleansing, life-giving, translucent liquid purity, although we do not know if the brook flows cleanly out of the ashes like a phoenix or whether it runs into the ashes, thus blackening itself while quenching any ember that might remain alive. Moreover, we know that Aschenbach has achieved a notoriety, a position because of his writing, because of his use of words. But we also learn that writing has not left Aschenbach a full man, well-rounded, well-developed. Writing occurs for him as a "daily theatre of a rigid, cold, and passionate service" (Thomas Mann, Death in Venice p. 7). Rigid and cold passions are oxymorons suggesting contrast and tension between fixity and movement, between death and desire. Moreover, because we know from the title that the novella deals with the topic of death, we already know where Aschenbach’s mythically psychological journey is likely to take him. There is thus in Mann’s telling of Aschenbach’s death in Venice a tension between the inner man and what he pretends to be, a tension of differences in the styles of the writing, a contrast of opposites, a suggestion that things are not as they may appear to be, and over all, a dependence on the importance and the meaning of words, for it is by words that Aschenbach has made himself and it is by words that Mann both makes and unmakes him.

Aschenbach is himself not only a creature but a naturalistic creation of opposites:

There is thus a sense in Mann’s description that Aschenbach can claim no natural source for the "literary gift" that animates him. Indeed, given his origins, Aschenbach is portrayed as being great in spite of himself.

Aschenbach is an artist in more ways than one, for not only has he created the heroes of his writing but he has attempted to live his life as one of those heroes would live, according to the motto "Hold fast" (durchhalten). Aschenbach has observed

His most individual figures, that is, including himself. His life, then, as he has chosen it and forced himself to live it, has been a constant denial of his humanity, a struggle against it. In order to achieve greatness, he has had to become "great in despite." He has been driven by two urges, the urge to create great literature and with it the urge to create greatness in himself and for himself by his command of words, by his dominion over art, and by his triumph over any so-called baser human part of himself. To do so, he has become "fixed" as he has felt the need to live out the themes his literature embodies, "the aristocratic self-command that is eaten out from within and for as long as it can conceals its biologic decline from the eyes of the world" (Thomas Mann, Death in Venice p. 11). Aschenbach, then, is a false hero, creating his idea of what a genuinely great man should be in his works and then forcing himself to live, in outward appearances at least, in that image, forever creating his work, his words, and thus forever recreating the character that he makes of himself in the creation of those words without ever subjecting his assessment of greatness of mind and character to any objective metric, without ever asking himself if there is anything more to life. He carries himself with a "sere and ugly outside, hiding the embers of smouldering fire—having the power to fan them to so pure a flame as to challenge supremacy in the domain of beauty itself" (Thomas Mann, Death in Venice p. 11). Again Mann emphasizes the nature of the contrasts in both Aschenbach’s name and in his soul, ashes and flames, ugliness and beauty, but with an arrogance about his abilities that, perhaps, Mann suggests he does not have a confident right to express because he "bears the burden of his genius upon such slender shoulders and resolved to go far he had the need of more discipline" (Thomas Mann, Death in Venice p. 10). He succeeds not by talent, not by ability, but by discipline as if discipline alone will allow him to achieve his goals as it does the heroes of his works. Mann mocks his talent, calling his genius a "burden," a word descriptive more of the work in the life of a common laborer than an intellectual. He bears a burden, that is, bears something that is not a natural part of him or of his greatness, and his ability to carry it off is slender. He is not a great man, he is a man pretending to be great, a man "great in despite."

Aschenbach cultivates his role of literary genius, revels in it, defining himself as an intellectual by drawing a circle around himself and keeping outside that boundary those things that ordinary people do and think. It is a conscious act of defiance, not a natural act of self-expression. He begins his day "with a cold shower" (Thomas Mann, Death in Venice p. 10), perhaps as a means to squelch sexual passion, perhaps as an outward indication of his spartan asceticism. His writing is for him an act of ritual self-worship as he begins writing by "setting a pair of tall wax candles in silver holders at the head of his manuscript" as he "sacrificed into art, in two or three hours of almost religious fervour, the powers he had assembled in sleep" (Thomas Mann, Death in Venice p. 10). But his art is a sham. As Mann puts it:

Thus it is doggedness and not ability, inanimate tensile strength and not human intellect that allow him to create the illusion of his genius. There is nothing wrong with hard work, but it neither equals nor replaces naked ability. Neither is there joy in his discovery of his slender ability to write, for "Aschenbach’s whole soul, from the very beginning, was bent on fame" (Thomas Mann, Death in Venice p. 9) and not in deriving any pleasure from the writing itself or from other people’s enjoyment of it. No, his slender abilities provide for him no joy. Nor does he seek to enjoy life itself. Rather, he wants to live to an old age only to complete his claim to fame because he believes that only an artist who has lived a full life to an old age and contributed writing from all of his ages is truly great.

He goes so far as to banish common words from his writing and his speech. But, conscious though his efforts are, his defiant fussiness about his life and his ritualistic devotion to his writing do not prepare him to live in the world that he seeks in restorative flight. It is a journey that he will continue throughout the novella, a flight that ends ultimately and inevitably in his death, because von Aschenbach is as phony as his name and his art. He dies because he runs from but cannot escape who he is—someone who, despite his pretensions and protestations to the contrary, has not triumphed over the "sere and ugly" inner self that he does not even know exists within him—and who he is dooms him. His theory of life is as incompetent as his theory of art, his mastery over his life and his art, both shams. Moreover, what talent he may have had when he was younger is mocking him now in its absence:

Mann uses the artistry of his words to portray Aschenbach. It is by this kind of playfully equivocal description of Aschenbach's past and his mental state, by carefully chosen words and crafted sentences, that Mann creates the contexts of both artifice and alienation that permeate Aschenbach's life:

This is not braggadocio; this is excuse. He is a master of words yet he cannot speak. He cannot speak of what he feels, yet he feels that his feelings are more profound than those of other people, but since he does not discuss feelings with those other people, he has no basis for the assessment he makes. These are the thoughts, the affected intellectuality of a pretender to greatness, not the thoughts of a great man. Aschenbach’s solitude gives him the appearance of being above what he sees, what he experiences, but also ill-prepares him to deal with those sights and experiences when he is forced to, when his solitude is broken. That which creates the poetry in his life also creates "perverse, illicit, and absurd" feelings. These are not the responses of someone holding fast. His grasp on himself has begun to slip. No longer isolated in Munich, no longer occupied by his ritualistic devotion to his religion, that is, to his writing and its concomitant contribution to the mythical self he has created, no longer attenuating and sublimating his human feelings by means of his spartan lifestyle and its numbing cold shower, an act akin to the practice of teen-aged athletes in training and ascetes in celibacy, he has to deal with real people who produce real thoughts and feelings in him, not the controlled and artificial thoughts and feelings that come carefully formed one on the other in his writings. The real world is a jumble of people, places, things, sights, sounds, smells, desires, lacks, emptinesses, satisfactions, disappointments, joys, and fears, and he is unprepared to incorporate them into the petty and imprecise unity he has prepared and circumscribed for himself. He comes out of the darker reverie of his thoughts to rejoice on what he sees, but he has done so without resolving his relationship to the ugliness that he was beginning to notice.

Perhaps it is his tendency to hold fast that carries him through here, a sign of supposed strength becoming a weakness because it does not allow him to know himself. Because it is here that words begin to fail him. Without their protection, he is in a strange place, and not only because he has left Munich for Venice. In his encounters with the ticket salesman and the unlicensed gondolier, Aschenbach is someone to whom actions occur, not someone who makes actions happen. He is feckless, unable to make his own way in the universe except when deference is shown him because of his credentials, as the various other functionaries treat him throughout the novella and the film. Indeed, in the film version of the scene with the gondolier, Aschenbach and the gondolier are never even in the frame together because they simply exist in different worlds, so separate has Aschenbach struggled to make himself, so incapable is he of communicating his feelings and participating in the real world. The world frightens him. The usual fills him with dread because his feelings are not only unfulfilled, they are unexplored, unincorporated in the whole man that he could be because he has sublimated his right to enjoy feelings to the masturbation of writing that has replaced real relationships and real self-mastery in his life, because his life is as empty yet spooky as the false cemetery he meets on his walk. The stonemason’s yard across the street from the real cemetery makes "a supernumerary and untenanted graveyard opposite the real one" (Thomas Mann, Death in Venice p. 4), much in the way that his writing is a false graveyard for him, not yet his final resting place, but the lifeless life which it supplies him has left him already dead, ready to be embalmed and prepared for the death that he seeks on his journey, that he awaits.

Aschenbach is created by Mann in much the same way that Aschenbach’s heroes are created by Aschenbach, through the careful use of words. Mann creates Aschenbach creating von Aschenbach the great man. Yet it is not only by words that Mann reinforces the idea that Aschenbach has achieved some sense of greatness. In her memoirs, Katia Mann tells us that:

So Aschenbach, though a fictive protagonist, is modeled after Mahler, a great man, yes, but a great man who doubted his own greatness, which is perhaps why Katia Mann says that he gave only the "impression" of being great. Thus, Aschenbach’s greatness is ersatz like Mahler’s, since Mahler’s current reputation as a composer (although not as a conductor) is largely a posthumous phenomenon. So why does Mann make Aschenbach not a composer like Mahler but a writer, like Mann? Indeed, Aschenbach is so like Mann that he has completed works that are similar to works that Mann had written or planned at the time that he wrote Death in Venice. He is in a sense an older version of Mann. (Mann was 36 when he wrote Death in Venice, in which Aschenbach is said to be in his mid-50s.) And that difference in age, perhaps, explains Mann’s portrayal of a hollow greatness in Aschenbach. Perhaps Aschenbach is a great writer with feet of clay because Mann is unsure of the value of his own success at the time, questioning his own relationship to art, questioning what he might develop into if he cannot find greatness in himself and his writing, questioning his own relationship to greatness through his investigation of Aschenbach. It would be a mistake to claim that Death in Venice is "really" about Mann, just as it would be a mistake to suggest that it is "really" about Mahler, but it is reasonable to suggest that the novella questions the relationships of art to greatness, of greatness to decadence, and of the utility of art and greatness if they are incapable because of their relationship to decadence of incorporating humanism into humankind’s expression of them.

So Aschenbach is a self-defined great man, a great solitary intellect seeking something, perhaps rest and relaxation in Venice. But, no longer solitary, renewed by the sea and by his contact with Venice again, full of self-aggrandizing durchhalten-ness yet not fully aware of himself, Aschenbach, disinvigorated by alienation, primed for obsession by the alienation that separates him from the rest of the world, encounters Tadzio for the first time as he sits waiting for dinner his first evening at the Hotel des Bains:

On this first chance meeting with the boy who is to become Aschenbach’s obsession, an obsession which would unmake his careful self-making, Mann begins the passage with description from a realistic perspective and eases into the interiority of the psychological novel, revealing Aschenbach’s feelings, feelings which Aschenbach claims to have surmounted, that is, Aschenbach has created the false von Aschenbach, but here Mann reveals the real Aschenbach. Aschenbach is "astonished" by Tadzio’s "perfect beauty," which reminds him of the "the noblest moment of Greek sculpture." In Tadzio’s first appearance in the novella, Mann makes him both art and artist, for he is without any conscious preparation an icon of ideal Greek beauty. Tadzio’s beauty is available to any person who cares to look upon him. No one who sees him has to wade through heap upon heap of careful if stolid prose to find that beauty, that greatness, as they would have to do in the case of inspecting one of Aschenbach’s works. But Aschenbach has a moment of doubt about Tadzio (whom he does not yet at this point know by name), because for him Tadzio was "the object of a self-willed and partial love." Aschenbach diminishes his otherwise laudatory judgment of Tadzio at this crucial point because by making Tadzio an object of self-willed and partial love, he makes himself superior to Tadzio, and he makes Tadzio something less than himself, thus something that Aschenbach, the superior, can control, inasmuch as Aschenbach can understand and relate only to things that he can control. And yet, there is a hint of self-recognition, too, for Aschenbach is also such a self-loved and self-willed object. Tadzio is also described in noticeably gustatory and oral incorporative words. He has a "winning mouth" and "clustering honey-coloured ringlets" of hair. He is honey, something sweet to be gathered, sucked, licked, tasted, savored, as he might savor himself with his winning lips, or, since there is an equation set up between the self-made Aschenbach and the self-made Tadzio (Tadzio is marble, a stone statue, and Aschenbach is "astonished," figuratively made into stone himself at first sight of Tadzio), with Aschenbach’s lips, long deprived of any satisfaction by the alienation that keeps Aschenbach from noticing anyone until he notices Tadzio. If Aschenbach is superior to Tadzio, then the natural result is that Aschenbach is the predator and Tadzio the prey, that Aschenbach is the diner and Tadzio the dinner or at least the sweet dessert to a cold, self-abasing life lived "in despite" amid cold showers, wax candles, and no outlet for sexuality, indeed, no recognition or acknowledgment of any sexuality in himself.

But Tadzio’s astonishing beauty has begun to have an effect on Aschenbach. As Aschenbach watches the Polish family leave the lobby and enter the dining room, Tadzio "chanced to turn before he crossed the threshold, and his strange, twilit grey eyes met Aschenbach’s, [who was] absorbed in looking after the group" (Thomas Mann, Death in Venice p. 27). When Aschenbach is led into the dining room, some time after Tadzio’s family has entered, he is "shown a table far off [my emphasis] the Polish family, as he noted at once, with a stirring of regret" (Thomas Mann, Death in Venice p. 27). That night, in spite of his life of durchhalten-ness, he passes "the night in deep, unbroken sleep, visited, however, by varied and lively dreams" (Thomas Mann, Death in Venice p. 28). Of what he dreams, we can only guess, but surely this Tadzio and his beauty figure prominently. On his second sight of Tadzio, Aschenbach is:

In both of these satori of astonishment, Aschenbach relates Tadzio to Greek sculpture. Greece (along with and after Egypt) is where we pretend that Western art, both the plastic art of sculpture and the narrative and poetic art of literature, and the theories of these art forms began. The one, sculpted beauty, is what Tadzio is; the other, literature, what Aschenbach wills himself both to create and to be. Mann’s words here describing Aschenbach’s thoughts are carefully chosen to embody the workings of a bourgeois gentleman’s mind, refined, schooled in classicism, taught to follow its precepts, forcing himself to embody their theory in his work without perhaps understanding their full meaning.

And Tadzio is not just any statue, but a statue of Eros the god of sexual love, and not just any Eros but one that blooms, blossoming with allure. Aschenbach cries to himself upon seeing Tadzio that second time, "‘Good, oh, very good indeed!’ assuming the patronizing air of the connoisseur to hide, as artists will, their ravishment over a masterpiece" (Thomas Mann, Death in Venice p. 29). As a ravished connoisseur, again Aschenbach seeks to control Tadzio as he has controlled himself, seeks to make him something to be appreciated, sought, tasted. Words in literature are art, specifically, both Aschenbach’s and Mann’s art. It is by careful use of description of scene and thought that Mann sculpts the character of Aschenbach. Words mean a great deal to Aschenbach. They are the means by which he has carved a place for himself in the world rising above the position into which he was born. The control of those words means even more to Aschenbach. By controlling himself, he controls his words and builds them up into his private world word by word, phrase by phrase, book by book, stone by stone. But after seeing Tadzio for the first time, words begin to fail him both in the way that he uses them to communicate and in the way that he fails to use them to communicate, as well as in the way that Mann uses them to change the ways in which he describes Aschenbach.

The perfection that Aschenbach has created by strength of will begins to crack upon his seeing Tadzio, the flower of "incomparable loveliness," the lad of "perfect beauty," the youth with the "indescribably lovely smile." And yet, just as Aschenbach is not quite great "in despite," Tadzio is not quite perfect "in despite." On their fourth meeting in the elevator one day after luncheon, Aschenbach notes "that Tadzio’s teeth were imperfect, rather jagged and bluish, without a healthy glaze, and of that peculiar brittle transparency which the teeth of chlorotic people often show. ‘He is delicate, he is sickly,’ Aschenbach thought" (Thomas Mann, Death in Venice p. 34). Aschenbach has previously thought of Tadzio as having "clustering honey-coloured ringlets" of hair and a "facial tint [that] was ivory white." While he is a deliciously beautiful object of desire, Tadzio also has a pale complexion that suggests both the classical beauty of an ivory-hued marble statue and the pallor of a chlorotic, that is, someone suffering from anemia.

Perhaps it is this contrast of opposites, this tension between what Tadzio appears to be on the outside and what he might be on the inside, that also draws Aschenbach to Tadzio. Mann emphasizes again that Aschenbach is becoming the predator, Tadzio the prey. Of course there is Tadzio’s physical beauty, on which Aschenbach rhapsodizes, but there is also the recognition of a kindred soul. Aschenbach is also a contrast of opposites, wrought by tension between what he wants to appear and what he is. Moreover, just as Aschenbach cultivates his role as cultured writer and prig, he notices the deference that Tadzio’s mother and sister give him when he is with them. Tadzio is the center of their attention, so much so that they are caricatures barely fleshed out by Mann only enough to depict them responding to Tadzio. A narcissist himself, Aschenbach responds to the narcissism in Tadzio, sees himself in Tadzio, perfect yet imperfect. This aesthetic and psychological attraction to Tadzio shows in the use of words, both by Aschenbach and by Mann in describing Aschenbach. No longer are they perfect.

Aschenbach is at first disturbed by being party to Tadzio’s distasteful reaction to the Russian family at the hotel, but he is "in truth both moved and exhilarated—that is to say, he was delighted. This childish exhibition of fanaticism, directed against the good-naturedest simplicity in the world—it gave to the godlike and inexpressive the final human touch .…" (Thomas Mann, Death in Venice p. 31). Thus, Aschenbach equates the exhilaration that he receives in watching and experiencing the sea with the joy he gets from watching Tadzio. No longer does he achieve satisfaction only from his control of himself and his words, from keeping himself apart from and above what he disdainfully observes. Yet, Aschenbach hides from himself this recognition of Tadzio’s imperfection just as he hides from himself his knowledge of his own imperfection. Aschenbach thinks that "Tadzio will most likely not live to grow old. He did not try to account for the pleasure this idea gave him" (Thomas Mann, Death in Venice p. 34). By suppressing this thought, he surrenders his preciously guarded control of words by committing this lie of omission and so banishes thoughts of Tadzio’s imperfections throughout the remainder of the novella, concentrating on his beauty and the attraction Aschenbach has for him.

The failure of words has been a theme introduced previously in the novella, but it begins to take on more importance at the point at which Aschenbach represses his suspicion of Tadzio’s imperfection. Not only do incidents of failed language become more frequent and more pronounced, but as Mann increases the tempo of his "editing," to borrow a cinematic term, the tension becomes more sexual as Aschenbach’s attention to Tadzio moves from fascination to intense fascination and ultimately to obsession.

Although he is fascinated by Tadzio, Aschenbach is also moved by his concern for his own health in the fetid city, however, and so decides to leave Venice after having seen Tadzio only four times. The fifth and last time is in the dining room at the hotel where Tadzio:

Aschenbach the solitary unused to speaking finally speaks, and his words form a mournful farewell to a beloved encounter that did not quite actually happen.

To leave Venice, he has to cross the lagoon to the city proper to make arrangements for his departure, the city where "there was a hateful sultriness to in the narrow streets. The air was so heavy that all the manifold smells wafted out of houses, shops and cook-shops—smells of oil, perfumery, and so forth—hung low, like exhalations, not dissipating" (Thomas Mann, Death in Venice p. 35). This scene in Venice proper contrasts dramatically with the scenes on the beach. The beach is perhaps a primeval place, a place of birth, of coming from the sea, perfect and godlike as Tadzio does. And the hotel, although a cultured place, rigid in its formality and containing a microcosm of external society, rigid with conventions and both class and cultural divisions, is nonetheless not Munich, not home, not a place where he is put upon by his fame and by his jealous attention to it. Rather, it is a place of relaxation and escape. He goes to Venice, after all, to get away from the things that are bothering him—his writing, his durchhalten-ness, and the like. It is a place without the demands, without the strictures of his life. Those strictures are there, perhaps, but only in a shadow. He can do more or less what he wants within the elegant beauty of the hotel and the natural beauty of the beach. Now he returns to Venice proper, and he encounters things that are disturbing, unpleasant, heavy, foreboding, foul, more akin to his disturbing reverie about foul trees at the outset of the novella than to his restless dream after first meeting Tadzio. This unpleasantness mirrors the ugly distress in his soul and reiterates the mythical dimension of Aschenbach’s journey. He is torn between his desire to leave and his desire to stay, just as he is torn between his need to control himself and his desire to give in to his intense fascination with Tadzio and stay in Venice. If he leaves, he is probably going to preserve his health, but if he leaves, he will unlikely be able to enjoy watching Tadzio again. This conflict in him is something that he uncharacteristically cannot control.

The Aschenbach of durchhalten continues to loosen his grip on himself. When he finds that his trunk has gone to Como and that he is faced with the prospect not of leaving but of staying:

He is confused by the difficulty he has in wearing the "right" expression, as if there is a set of right and one of wrong expressions that we can control rather than having emotion animate our faces without any filtering by our consciousness. It is as if his decision to stay has been made for him, thus enabling him to give in to his desire to see Tadzio again without having to make that decision himself. Thus Aschenbach finds it difficult to be both a Great Man, to use his own words, and to be a mensch. His inability to be both things leaves him torn with indecision, leaves him unable to act except in an outburst of anger over a blessed mistake that makes him stay in Venice. It is chance and not Aschenbach that decides his fate, again emphasizing the naturalistic component of the novella. He cannot leave Tadzio and he cannot live in Venice, so he dies. Again, he cannot communicate his feelings. The misdirected trunk is something that happens to him, not something that he controls. But it helps him resolve his momentary crisis. Because of it, he can neither leave Venice, nor, as it happens, live there.

After returning to the hotel and finding a room as good as the one he had left a short while ago, he opens the window of the room and sits contentedly, happily, dreamily. Then he sees Tadzio coming up from the beach and he:

The casual greeting, something this great commander of words should find a simple task, is rather something that he cannot muster. He has it in his mind to say only to himself and not to Tadzio. His mastery over words continues to decline.

Aschenbach’s sexuality has been only glancingly treated prior to this point in the novella. His dead wife and married daughter have been dismissed in a few words. "He married young, the daughter of a university family; but after a brief term of wedded happiness his wife had died. A daughter, already married, remained to him. A son he never had" (Thomas Mann, Death in Venice p. 14). He has lived a life of self-conscious denial before he arrives in Venice, but once he returns by chance owing to a misdirected bit of luggage, the language of Mann suggests that there is a sexual element in Aschenbach’s fascination with Tadzio. Tadzio is "the naked god with cheeks aflame" and the beach becomes "burning hot" (Thomas Mann, Death in Venice pp. 40-41). Aschenbach returns to the hotel and the weather and the sights contrast starkly with the images he had escaped in the city. So is it the sun or is it Tadzio that makes the beach hot? It is both, of course. Aschenbach returns and finds Tadzio and the weather both perfect for his enjoyment.

Aschenbach falls into a "pleasing monotony of this manner of life, readily engaged by its mild soft brilliance and ease" (Thomas Mann, Death in Venice p. 41). We see him quickened, in more ways than one, by his return. He is no longer pensive and lugubrious. He is bright, he is gay, he is delighted to be who he is, how he is, where he is. He feels::

This is not the Aschenbach of durchhalten. Rather than his work, his observation of Tadzio has become the ritual devotion at the center of his life. His outlook has changed with his routine, his source of satisfaction has changed with his growing obsession.

The Polish words that Tadzio uses, though foreign to Aschenbach, take on special significance for him as when "Aschenbach understood not a word he said; it might be the sheerest commonplace, in his ear it became mingled harmonies. Thus the lad’s foreign birth raised his speech to music" (Thomas Mann, Death in Venice p. 43). Aschenbach, to whom words are so important for their meaning and for the ability they give him to dazzle others with his brilliance, no longer needs to control words because the beauty that Tadzio supplies outshines the beauty that Aschenbach can create on his own. Tadzio’s speech becomes a unique art in Aschenbach’s mind, for Aschenbach, like a primate mother who can pick out the cries of her own child in a swarm of infants, identifies Tadzio’s voice from amongst the cacophony of the children playing on the beach, instinctually rather than intellectually, mating the importance of words with the sublime beauty the speaker of those words carries for Aschenbach:

What memories? What thoughts? Passion? Joy? Feeling alive as he had not felt since he donned the tabard of scholar and labored so hard to preserve the image that it made of him? Yet here is Tadzio, also an image, godlike work of art, and as importantly, a disciplined work of art, something to which the self-disciplining Aschenbach can relate because the recognition of an Aschenbach trait in Tadzio draws upon the narcissism that draws him to Tadzio:

Linking love and thought, mathematics—the least feeling of the sciences—and feelings themselves, Mann emphasizes the change in Aschenbach who was a phony scholar, one who until this point has not expressed any joyful emotions but has rather expressed only the grey prickly emotions of a fusspot disconnected from and afraid of the world about him.

In his imagination, Aschenbach discusses his relationship to Tadzio in the form of the dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus on the nature of beauty. In doing so, Aschenbach transforms himself into a classical Greek scholar. Is this vanity, or is it realistic? Any person can see how beautiful Tadzio is, after all, and probably many already have. Yet perhaps Aschenbach is right in considering himself an Olympian, playing Zephyr to Tadzio’s Hyacinthus because he understands and appreciates Tadzio’s beauty from the perspective of a well-schooled if self-defined artist. Tadzio is celebrated with fragments of classical poetry and thought, as a work of classical statuary. Inspired by the feelings that Tadzio stirs within him, Aschenbach is able to do some work, something that he has previously been unable to do. Tadzio is Aschenbach’s muse, at least for the moment, but he also inspires, I think, a subtextual reference to what at the time of the novella would have been called "the unspeakable vice of the Greeks" which remains unspoken here because Aschenbach is both unaccustomed to speaking about his feelings and because he is losing his mastery over words. Moreover, though, Aschenbach thinks of Tadzio in aesthetic terms, specifically as a statue, that is, something that is unreal. Aschenbach is unable even in his attraction to be attracted, at least at first, by a human Tadzio. Rather, he is attracted to an idealized Tadzio that does not exist.

Up to this point, it has been arguably just Tadzio’s beauty that inspired in Aschenbach a sympathetic beauty of the spirit. He does after all talk about how the lover is closer to God than the beloved, and certainly Aschenbach the "great man" would consider himself closer to God than most men. But once he starts following Tadzio, his relationship crosses the line into the neurotic. He is obsessed. He derives secret satisfaction from following and seeing Tadzio, spiritual satisfaction, yes, but an overtly sexual satisfaction as well. He "worships" Tadzio at church, becoming the "fond fool" who watches over Tadzio. Mann has heretofore described Aschenbach as being like his heroes "of an intellectual and virginal manliness, which clenches its teeth and stands in modest defiance of the swords and spears that pierce its side" (Thomas Mann, Death in Venice p. 11). But he is no longer like that, not after he meets Tadzio. He neither clenches his teeth nor stands in modest defiance, but melts with desire without actually being able to give in to that desire and act upon it, satisfy it, let alone name or understand it. He watches, he yearns to watch, he plans his days to watch Tadzio. That is not defiant. And his desire to watch becomes an obsession that is neither modest nor virginal. He may appear to most people still to be Gustave von Aschenbach, still to be in control of his life, but neither Tadzio nor Aschenbach himself is fooled. He has not held fast, he has not poured water on the fires of his inner passion but rather let some life-filled fluids into his soul, the tainted water that carries the deadly vibrions to his gut, dirty water to mix with the ashes in the brook of his own existence, and the liquid fuel of the Venetian sunshine and seashore that feeds his desire for seeing, being, loving Tadzio.

The imagery, over and over, that Mann ascribes to Aschenbach as he describes Tadzio and imbibes of his beauty is too much, too repeated, too sensuous not to include some sense of sexuality. It is not merely descriptive of actions, of time and place, but of the way that seeing Tadzio makes Aschenbach feel on the inside, the way that Aschenbach mixes his feeling with his thinking.

There has been some debate among scholars as to why Mann introduces the theme of homosexuality and to what extent homosexuality is the "real" subject of the novella. In Homosexuality and Literature 1890-1930, Jeffrey Meyers writes:

This assessment is fatuous because Aschenbach is less a creative genius than merely someone who has worked very hard at looking like a creative genius. Meyers further suggests that "When Aschenbach encounters Tadzio’s perfect beauty, delightful charm and expression of pure serenity he does not see him as an actual boy of fourteen, but as an embodiment of Greek art, transmuted and gilded with mythical significance" (Thomas Mann, Death in Venice p. 45). I agree but only parially. Perhaps that is what his conscious tells him, but his unconscious sees Tadzio as something else as well; otherwise Aschenbach would not have become as engorged with obsession as he does.

Mann himself had homosexual affairs. In his review of Thomas Mann, Tagebucher, 1933-1934, Klaus Schroter writes that in the diaries: "Thomas Mann justifies his homosexual inclination as a basic, general trait." Mann writes of his affair with the painter Paul Ehrenberger that it was "humanly correct," one of the "central experiences of my heart at age twenty-five" (Schroter, p. 466). As we have seen, Aschenbach is like Mann in his profession and in the books that he has written, but it is an open question how much of Mann is in Aschenbach. Nonetheless, it is natural that Mann would reach for a characteristic that he found a moving, central and "humanly correct" part of his life and give it to Aschenbach as he tries to understand the relationship between himself and art, between life and art, between achievement and decadence, between durchhalten and what is "humanly correct."

Others suggest Aschenbach’s destructive passion could not have been the result of anything other than a homosexual desire:

But this assertion seems unconvincing. Mann chooses as the central image homosexual passion because of what it means to him, just as he chooses Aschenbach’s accomplishments because of what they mean or would mean to him. Homosexual passion provides a tension and contrast in Mann’s life, just as it does in Aschenbach’s life. Moreover, Reed seems to back away from his assertion, writing later:

It would be simplistic and wrong to say that earlier analysis of Death In Venice neglected to deal with the issue of homosexuality because that issue was taboo, or rather that it dealt with the issue of homosexuality by denying that homosexual love was the theme of the story, claiming instead that the homosexual attraction came only after and as a result of aesthetic passion. Simplistic, but at least partly true. Only by being able to discuss something openly can it be considered completely as a theme or an influence, and discussion of homosexuality has been rather tepid until the past 30 years or so. But it would be wrong because certainly homosexual love was not unknown to Mann and obviously a central theme in the novella.

Moreover, the question of homosexuality is central to the alienation that Aschenbach feels. His emotional life has been sterile up to the point at which he encounters Tadzio, and after that encounter his emotional life is in turmoil. The crux of the novella and of the film is Aschenbach's obsession with Tadzio. His obsession with Tadzio is the first relationship that Aschenbach has that gives him pleasure, except perhaps for his relationship with his wife and daughter, characters who exist only briefly in the novella, and any conclusion about the pleasure those relationships held for Aschenbach is purely wishful thinking. Moreover, it is this obsession that ultimately causes his death. He is obsessed because that is the only way he knows how to deal with his feelings. Obsession is the natural result of a man who lives his life by the motto of durchhalten; he holds fast to his feelings for Tadzio, too. He in essence regresses to an earlier stage of development, a juvenile stage, where gazing provides much the greatest extent of allowable sexual gratification, where infatuations are tolerated and excesses are the norm. He has not left 7th grade. Setting himself the impossible task of being the stoic, intellectual, creative artist who finds pleasure and satisfaction only in overcoming his senses, he remains nonetheless a human being and has never learned how to deal with those senses and the desires they provoke. Perhaps if he were as great as he thinks that he is, then he would be able to control himself "in despite," but he cannot.

Aschenbach quotes Socrates, Plato, and Plutarch on the issues of love and beauty inspiring art. But according to Plato, ideal love and beauty are unattainable. In one sense, Aschenbach is alienated because he cannot accomplish the goal that he sets for himself of finding ideals in love of art. He cannot, after all, be art himself as he half-believes Tadzio to be, and it is through his control of himself and not through love of the beautiful that he inspires himself. In another sense he is alienated because he has an unhelpful and unhealthful relationship to the one thing that does inspire him--Tadzio. His obsession is making him dysfunctional, deviant: "He was no longer satisfied to owe his communion with his charmer to chance and the routine of hotel life; he had begun to follow and waylay him" (Thomas Mann, Death in Venice p. 54). There are at this point in the novella two secrets, two misuses of words: the secret that Aschenbach carries in him about his obsession with Tadzio and the secret that Venice is keeping from the Aschenbach and other visitors. Words then, are no longer true and noble. They have become sullied because they remain unspoken. Aschenbach is as unhealthful and perhaps as unclean as the teeming waters of Venice. He already bears within him not just the burden of his putative genius on slender shoulders but also the seeds of the disease that will kill him, not just the vibrio cholera but also the disease of the spirit that leaves him disconnected from the world and yet trying so compulsively to become connected to Tadzio.

When he follows Tadzio and his family and they stop, he stops. When they turn around, he ducks into shops, panicked. But he is a master of words. Why can he not simply introduce himself as a gentleman, saying, "Good day to you, my young friend. I’m Gustave von Aschenbach. Perhaps you’ve heard of me. I’m staying at the Hotel des Bains, as you are. I’ve come here for some rest and relaxation, and I’ve gotten plenty of that. Would you come have lunch with me? I’m writing about how it feels to be young. I’d like to know what goes on inside you, what makes you tick, what makes you laugh, what makes you cry, what things of beauty move you." He could add, mentally, "as much as your beauty moves me." But he makes no effort. He is, after all, a supposedly great writer, a highly- and well-practiced craftsman of words. He could probably think of something along these lines or even better. But he says nothing. He just follows, and when he is seen, he panics and ducks into a shop, an action that suggests at least awkwardness, but more likely guilt, criminality. His words fail him, that is, his strength and intellect fail him. What remains? His soul? His spirit? His feelings? He has none of these essential human attributes because his durchhaltenness has squeezed them out of him. And yet he is making a somewhat odd spectacle of himself, calling all the more attention to his feelings for Tadzio, perhaps because both sets of feelings are present in Aschenbach. Mann proposes the innocent and spiritual feelings on the surface but they are undeniably mixed with the sensuous, too, as Mann hints. And Visconti certainly emphasizes them more in the highly visual film.

Mann’s careful words describe Aschenbach’s continuing loss of himself to his obsession.

These are not words to describe the intellectual creation that Aschenbach made of himself. An intellect living above and outside the contaminants of life’s desires does not pursue, slink, or lurk. A man consummately concerned about his appearance and control of his life does not ignore the directions that he takes while walking in unfamiliar environs. And he does not ignore the pains of his body, the messages that his body is trying to send him to tell him that something is wrong. But Aschenbach is no longer the man clenched in life and in mind with a sense of self-control. And finally overcome so much by the disease that is draining him, he becomes an abject figure rather than the writer of a great treatise entitled The Abject as Mann describes him:

This is no longer a master, either of words or of himself; this is a slave. No longer a hero to be worshipped by Mann’s prose, he becomes an abstraction who, or more likely, which ceases to matter to the world of Literature and Art. This is the result of his journey, his destination and his destiny. He is prepared for the final leg of that journey, the mythic dance with death that Mann dismisses with a few short sentences:

Ultimately Aschenbach has failed to achieve victory over himself via his control of words. He thinks that is true at the outset of the novella, but his success is only partly true and only for awhile. It is the lack of his control of words that prevents him from talking to Tadzio, making him a friend, changing him from an unrealizable ideal goal to a flesh and blood boy, a singularly attractive boy, but a real boy, and not a statue, an idealization, a fetish. If Aschenbach had been able to exercise his self-proclaimed mastery over words, he might have learned to deal with his infatuation, but he fails. He cannot account for his desire, and so he succumbs to his desire. He is not victorious, but an abject, vanquished failure.

Mann’s mixture of the innocent and aesthetic aspects of Aschenbach’s relationship with Tadzio with the sensuous aspects are more ambiguous in the novella, but they certainly exist, and Luchino Visconti certainly emphasizes them more in the highly visual film. The novella cannot be visual. The film must be. There are five steps to the development of Aschenbach’s relationship with Tadzio:

These five steps occur in both novella and film; thus, the film portrays the outlines of the same plot as the novella. Visconti had wanted to make a film version of Death in Venice for a long time: "He had a passion for Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann, both poetic archeologists of family life" (Stirling, p. 6). Moreover, Visconti was fond of Mann:

"Thomas Mann was a writer whom Visconti had loved and absorbed throughout his life, and with whom he identified—the more so as he grew older" (Servadio, p. 196). As he passed age 62, he had directed fourteen features and sections of two others. He had achieved an international reputation with his films of great beauty and passion, intelligently made. He had the prestige that would allow him to make a difficult film, as Death in Venice would surely be. The novella is not accessible to mass audiences, yet to obtain the financial backing necessary for the film with its need for expensive location shooting, Visconti and his executive producer, Mario Gallo, had to enlist the support of Hollywood, and Hollywood usually insists that the films it backs be destined for a mass audience. Visconti and Gallo obtained the money they needed from an executive at Warner Brothers "who not only had made money out of The Damned, but had also read Thomas Mann" (Stirling, p. 206).

Indeed, perhaps it was the success of The Damned that set Visconti thinking about adapting Mann. After all, The Damned was partly inspired by Buddenbrooks, something which is evident in the opening scene when the Essenbecks (Eatingbowl or Eatingpelvis) are dining together. Moreover, Visconti had originally wanted to give the title Gotterdaemmerung to the film that eventually was released as The Damned in a clear reference to Wagner and the themes of decadence and self-destruction that permeate The Ring operas. These are themes to which he returns in Death in Venice.

But the involvement of Hollywood brought with it new obstacles. The story, after all, does concern the obsession, ostensibly but not necessarily limited to the platonic, of a middle-aged man for a young teenaged boy. The possibility of homosexuality in the film did confuse and perhaps frighten the Warner executives. Called collectively "American Money" by Visconti, one of these executives said after the premiere in London, "You know, what I can’t understand is how the Queen of England could bring her daughter to see a movie about an old man chasing a kid’s ass ..." (Bogarde, p. 80). Perhaps it is the element of homosexuality, perhaps present, perhaps not, that disturbed the Baroness Budberg. But this hint of the love that dared not speak its name in the early part of the twentieth century occurred to other people as well. Katia Mann writes that her "... uncle, Privy Counselor Friedberg, a famous professor of canon law in Leipzig, was outraged [when the novella was first published]: ‘What a story! And a married man with a family!’" (Katia Mann, p. 63). So the presence of the homosexuality in the novella is not a result of my imagination. Others have seen it there as well as in the film.

In appearance, Visconti's Death in Venice is a conventional adaptation, one that more or less faithfully recreates the locale, actions, and atmosphere of the novella. But in dealing here with an inner reality, Visconti has had to find other means to convey Aschenbach's transformation from a respected and disciplined bourgeois to a pathetic dishrag, and he does so in five ways: he begins the film with Aschenbach’s arrival in Venice rather than with the decision Aschenbach makes in Munich; he makes Aschenbach a composer rather than a writer; he relies upon a series of flashbacks to capture Aschenbach’s interior dialogues in the form of discussions with Alfred, the friend invented for the film; he creates a cinematic plan for the film that isolates Aschenbach visually from the people and the world around him, a mirror for the narrative plan that Mann uses to make and unmake Aschenbach; and he uses that cinematic plan to change the internal philosophical discussions on the nature of beauty and art to a visual experiencing of that beauty.

The reason to begin the film in Venice rather than in Munich is obvious: The perambulating, the inner thoughts, the random encounter with the wandering man would be difficult for an audience to understand. Although these activities provide Mann the means by which to explain Aschenbach’s journey, they are not necessary. What is important is the picture of Aschenbach that these activities supply, and Visconti achieves these visually with the shorthand sketch of Aschenbach, quiet and ill on the arriving steamer and with the interpolated flashbacks in which Aschenbach discusses the nature of Art with his friend Alfred.

The processes of reading and writing are private events; they are not suited for cinematic depiction. However, although the process of composing music is equally private, its result can be a very public event, that is, a concert. Moreover, music is a part of the synaesthetic experience of the cinema. It is not only part of what we as audience expect as part of the non-diegetic experience of the film (that is, the musical soundtrack), it can also be part of the content of that medium, as the segment of a concert portrayed in the film demonstrates. Moreover, we have been prepared for this somewhat special use of the music in this film by the opening sequence. In those opening shots, the steamer that carries Aschenbach to Venice emerges slowly through the mists, but the sound that we hear on the soundtrack is not the sound of the boat. Rather, we here the fourth movement, the "Adagietto," of Gustav Mahler's 5th Symphony, music that we later learn has been written in the context of the film by the character Aschenbach. The tempo for the "Adagietto" is marked "Sehr langsam" or "very slowly and deliberately," and when played, it sounds elegiac, perhaps funereal, setting a tone for the film in much the same way that Mann sets the tone for the novella in the opening pages.

That is, for the film, Aschenbach has been transmuted not into just any composer, but a specific though slightly fictionalized composer with a body of music from which the filmmaker can draw for use on the soundtrack as either diegetic or non-diegetic sound. The music, then, is reflexively depicted in a way that writing cannot be depicted in a film, making us more aware of the artist's creative urge and the tension between his desire to create and the distance he imposes between himself and his fellow human beings.

This tension is the subject of discussion between Aschenbach and Alfred, his musical friend and alter ego, during a series of flashbacks. We also learn, through some arguments between Aschenbach and his friend, of Aschenbach’s beliefs about the source of creativity and the value of art. According to Aschenbach, it is his discipline, control, and balance that makes his music great. According to his friend, it is Aschenbach's discipline, control, and balance that prevent his music from being greater than it is. We also learn in a flashback that it is probably illness brought on by over-work and artistic failures that have caused Aschenbach to seek respite in the restorative but ultimately fatal pleasures of Venice, a convenient way of obviating the need for the potentially confusing opening of the novella which the film ignores, but an explanation that nonetheless echoes the durchhalten theme of the novella.

Indeed, this is the stance we would expect from Aschenbach, given the way Mann describes him in the novella. These flashback discussions are Visconti's way of showing the film's audience Aschenbach's mental process that caused him to arrive at his alienated state. They are a crude but workable substitute. In a novel, a single mind can have a discussion with itself; in a film, soliloquies look silly, in spite of what some literary critics might think:

The conversations and arguments with Alfred are a compromise between the difficulties in conveying the literary and the visual. Aschenbach was a careful writer, yet he loses the ability to communicate. This loss is not as evident in the film as in the novella. The literary plan of the novella works because of the changes in the words that Mann uses to describe Aschenbach and his thoughts and actions. They become less intellectual, less refined, and more pathetic, more desperate. The directly comparable cinematic plan requires shots that make Aschenbach less of a man in control of himself, and that is what Visconti does with mise en scene and with a visual plan that emphasizes Aschenbach’s visual obsession with Tadzio. His status as a composer makes him aristocratic, if not quite the noble that the Aschenbach of the novella wants to be. His life is one of manners and style. At the outset of the film he has both, but during the course of the film, he loses both. There is a valid point to the complaint that his fall is different in the film, but it is no less profound and no less interesting even if it is different. The questions are still the same: What are the relationships between the artist and the real world, between the artist and art, between control and decadence? But Visconti gains by making him a composer because it is easier to portray composing and its result, music, than it is to portray writing and its result. Moreover, Visconti was aware of Mann’s fascination with Mahler, and Visconti was fascinated with both.

Reed’s insistence that something is "lost" when the "inner monologue" is exchanged for the "rantings" of Alfred, the friend invented for the film, has merit but is ultimately unconvincing. While it is certainly possible to portray such inner monologues on film, they are more a theatrical than a cinematic device and are often laughable in film. Think, for instance, of the inner monologue of Norman Bates at the end of Psycho or of Groucho Marx's lampooning of the Eugene O'Neill play Strange Interlude in the film Animal Crackers. Or, for that matter, think of the film version of Strange Interlude, which is interesting but unintentionally funny in its ludicrous use of voice-over to portray ponderous inner thoughts. Perhaps greater actors than Clark Gable, Norma Shearer, May Robson, and Robert Young could have achieved the effect, but the film as it exists, though interesting, is rather silly. Voice-over works best when used sparingly, when the speeches are written with great care so as not to sound pompous, ridiculous, or otherwise unlike the character who speaks them, and when spoken only by actors who can act well enough to portray the external expression of the inner thoughts contained therein. This change from writer to composer, however, is the source of some other critical complaints:

Such hebetude is what comes of literary critics unknowledgeable about film nonetheless making comments about film adaptations. The connection is not broken; it is made visually. Some critics ascribed this change "either to complex psychological or metaphysical motives or to mere caprice" (Stirling, p. 202). More likely, it is a result of Visconti’s realization of how it would be easier to portray a musical artist rather than a literary one combined with his knowledge that Mann had Mahler in mind at least for some of the characteristics that he gives Aschenbach and with his own admiration for Mahler.

Moreover, these flashback arguments provide Visconti with the opportunity to inject some discussion of the relationship of art to life. The dialogue from one of these arguments follows:

Aschenbach cannot be ambiguous. In this way, the Aschenbach of the film is like the Aschenbach of the novella. He needs to speak in absolutes, no matter how preposterous or silly they sound. It is interesting to note also that Alfred looks a bit like a grown up version of Tadzio, more ragged and thicker with age, no longer the naturally beautiful object of admiration and desire. Of course, Alfred does not exist in the novella. Thus, Aschenbach needs Alfred to be the point to his counterpoint in intellectual discussions just as he needs Tadzio to be the point to his counterpoint about beauty, life, physicality, and desire.

There are other complaints from literary scholars about Visconti’s changes:

Perhaps Reed is not looking at the whole film. It is obvious in the film that Aschenbach is internationally known and respected, as his reception by the hotel manager and the deference shown him by the train master demonstrate. Moreover, it is probably only a revered composer with significant status who could generate such a horrendous razzing on the premier of his latest composition. The lack of respect that is shown for Aschenbach in this scene is due to his fall from grace, not due to the fact that he has none.

Perhaps even Mann might have complained about the adaptation of his novella into a film if not the changes made in the film because for him "the very nature of visual art denied it the moral status of literature" (Reed, Making and Unmaking p. 4). But given the film’s artistry, perhaps Mann would have at least understood Visconti’s changes even if he could not agree with or appreciate them.

Indeed, it is because of these changes that Visconti achieves a strikingly cinematic way to portray Aschenbach’s alienation and obsession. By far the most interesting cinematic method that Visconti uses to convey Aschenbach's alienation is the visual plan that Visconti uses throughout the film. In general, this plan isolates Aschenbach from the people and the world around him. In many shots, Aschenbach is alone, physically isolated from the rest of the world, isolated in a way that the novella simply cannot depict. Or, if there are other people in the shot, either they are moving and Aschenbach is motionless, or he is moving and they are motionless, or they are both moving, but never towards each other, never to encounter each other, except, of course, in the case of Tadzio. Moreover, the visual style that depicts Aschenbach’s first notice of Tadzio and his infatuation that grows into obsession is markedly different from standard visual style and thus prepares us for the visual depiction of obsession and concomitant dissolution throughout the rest of the film.

This visual plan is in accordance with Visconti’s beliefs about adaptation. In making the earlier film adaptation of Albert Camus’s L’Etranger:

Thus the existential element to Meursault’s thinking needed to be shown by the banality of Meursault’s actions. In adapting Death in Venice, Visconti said, "The fact is, the reasons Mann gives in his story cannot be reproduced mechanically [on the screen]" (Stirling, p. 209). But Visconti can nonetheless choose to use the language of the cinema to reproduce Aschenbach’s inner monologue on the screen.

In the first shot we see of him, on the steamer as he approaches Venice by the sea, Aschenbach is wrapped up in his cloaks against the sea breeze, reading, that is, attempting to be absorbed in an intellectual process but apparently with little success. He looks sad, tired, as if his life has been hard, which it has been. The first diegetic sound in the film is the sharp whistle of the boat, breaking the reverie of the opening shots. Aschenbach stands motionless in the frame as the other passengers, most of them more youthful than he, walk briskly past him; he is not part of the action, he is not part of the crowd.

This visual plan for the film contains the basis for the most dramatic and interesting relationship in the film, that between Aschenbach and Tadzio. Visconti makes it a visual as well as an emotional relationship. As in the novella, Aschenbach first observes Tadzio when the guests at the hotel are waiting for dinner to be served. The boy sits with his dour family—mother, sisters, and governess, none of whom smiles or acts in the least bit animated—while Aschenbach looks on.

His obsession for Tadzio becomes more and more apparent throughout the film as he arranges to be able to see the boy, but it is nowhere more important than in that first meeting in the hotel lobby. The scene is built on the editing logic of shot and reverse-shot, that is, a shot of a person looking edited up against a shot of what that person is looking at. The person is the subject of the shot, the thing looked at, the object. Aschenbach is the subject, Tadzio is the object. This shot and reverse-shot logic culminates in a final, panning shot that begins with Tadzio. We are led to believe from the logic of the editing that Aschenbach is the subject of this shot because it occurs immediately after a close-up on Aschenbach—thus he is the owner of the shot—but as the camera pans off of Tadzio and past the people in the lobby, it ends on Aschenbach, showing that he is both the subject and the object of the shot. That is, he both gazes at Tadzio and is gazed back at by both Tadzio and the audience—and himself. This shot and reverse-shot logic provides an emotional linkage between Aschenbach and Tadzio, and between the audience and the Aschenbach-Tadzio relationship that the novel simply cannot do. In the film and the novella, Aschenbach cathects his alienation through obsession which he pursues via his gazing at and pursuit of Tadzio. In the audience, we are speculatively engaged in gazing as well. We have become involved in the obsession as we cannot have been in the novella, unless we choose to walk out of the theatre, and I suspect that most people do not. Visually, we watch Aschenbach watch Tadzio, visually we watch Aschenbach pursue Tadzio, visually we watch Tadzio return the gaze, visually we watch Aschenbach analyze (look at) himself much as in the novella he speaks to himself in interior dialogues. At the beginning of this shot, Aschenbach is reading a German newspaper and the The Merry Widow waltz plays diegetically, perhaps as Visconti playfully reminds us that Aschenbach is a widower and can be merry. As the scene ends, Aschenbach is playing with his lips in an absent-minded gesture that suggests the hint of sensuality that will continue to grow as his obsession with Tadzio grows, too. When Aschenbach joins the rest of the guests in the dining room, he moves a vase on his table so that he can get an unhindered view of Tadzio.

The boundaries of the relationship between Aschenbach and Tadzio, which remain more ambiguous in the novella, are more overtly homosexual in the film, though still ambiguous, and muted and portrayed in away so as not to disturb a mainstream audience. After all, Aschenbach has a wife and child, whom we visit via the flashbacks and whose pictures Aschenbach makes a ritual of kissing as he prepares for bed at night in his hotel room, much as the Aschenbach of the novella makes a ritual of his writing. (We later learn that the child has died. We learn nothing more of the wife.) Yet, this particular wife and child are manufactured for the film; in the novella, the wife is dead and the daughter is grown, married. Perhaps they exist only to make it less obvious that Aschenbach has sensual yearnings for Tadzio. After all, a married man, according the flawed logic of the dominant culture, cannot be a homosexual. There is more than a hint of sensuality, more than a hint of homosexuality, and although neither is made clear, they exist for the sophisticated observer to notice and ponder. And yet, when Aschenbach becomes more and more obsessed with Tadzio, we no longer see him kiss the pictures before he goes to bed. The man of precise rituals and manners has abandoned them both.

The second day that Aschenbach spends in Venice, he notices the Polish family as he eats breakfast in the morning. They, too, are at breakfast. At first he appears disappointed that Tadzio is not with them, but Tadzio soon arrives, wearing a white top and navy blue slacks. It is apparent in this shot, as in other places in the film, that Tadzio is aware of how attractive he is. It is extremely unlikely that young boys as cute as he is are blind to the feelings that they cause in young girls—and young boys, and older, perhaps bisexual, perhaps homosexual, perhaps merely searching men.

It is interesting, however, that in the novella it is made clear that Tadzio is perfect "in despite" in the sense that he has imperfect teeth and a pale complexion that might indicate a mild case of anemia. Although this slight imperfection is not discussed at length in the novella, it differs from the picture of Tadzio in the film. It is possible that the relationship between Mann and Aschenbach that animates at least a part of the novella is complicated by the addition of Visconti, that is, by the addition of Visconti’s relationship both to Mann and Aschenbach—and Visconti’s relationship to Tadzio as well. In the film, Tadzio is played by fourteen year-old Bjorn Andresen. When casting for the role, Visconti chose the first youth he saw and that was Andresen. Perhaps he imprinted on Andresen much as Aschenbach imprinted on Tadzio. Andresen is undeniably beautiful. Visconti thus fully implicates us in the appreciation for Tadzio in a visual way because the novella goes to great lengths to discuss how beautiful Tadzio is, so much so that Aschenbach refers to Tadzio as a classical Greek beauty, a kind of standard of perfection from a lost Golden Age, something that excites Aschenbach's aesthetic sense as well as his sexuality.

This is natural. After all, we know that homosexuality also played a role in Visconti’s life:

And more:

Thus, the alienation of Aschenbach becomes as well the alienation of Visconti in the film. The greatness of Visconti the artist allies him with Aschenbach the artist who attempts to achieve greatness by creating art. The relationship between Aschenbach and Tadzio, while much more significant than the relationship of Mann to Aschenbach and Tadzio in the novella, is probably not as strong as the relationship of the aging Visconti to both Aschenbach and Tadzio in the film. Visconti understands the way that Aschenbach feels about Tadzio, probably better than the way Aschenbach himself understands it. Although it bears many facets of Aschenbach’s questioning of himself, it is at basis a homosexual attraction after all. And this homosexual tension amongst the four—Mann, Aschenbach, Tadzio, and Visconti—leads to "both an obstacle and a stimulus to art, and ... to a creative tension between repression and expression" (Meyers, p. 1). Or a tension between unity and dissolution. While the homosexual attraction in the novella is a stimulus to the mind and not to the loins, an appeal, in Meyers’s words, to the imagination and not to sensation, this boundary is broken in the film.

Meyers suggests that Death in Venice "is strongly influenced by ... the Apollonian-Dionysian polarity in [Nietzsche’s] The Birth of Tragedy" (Meyers, p. 42), suggesting that Mann perhaps sees himself as the heir of both Wagner and Nietzsche. Of Wagner, Mann writes: "He is not a musician and not a poet, but a third category, in which the other two are blended in a way unknown before; he is a theatre-Dionysius, who knows how to take unprecedented methods of expression and give them a poetic basis, to a certain extent to rationalize them" (Thomas Mann, Past Masters p. 72). Mann also writes of Wagner that "each [Wagner and Ibsen] subjected to an undreamed of process of sublimation a form of art which, in both cases, stood at a rather low ebb … they have it in common, that they took the accepted and made of it something new, something undreamed-of" (Past Masters, p. 21). Mann does much the same thing. Mann, too, is a Dionysius, finding matter and expression in decadence and dissipation. Mann is not limited by the theories of art that surrounded and infused narrative by which others before him were bound. Rather, he undertakes a new discussion of decadence, desire, dissolution, and creativity, and to do so he tries to achieve in his writing a new approach to writing as well as a new result while at the same time questioning his role in each. Death in Venice explores Mann’s theory of art as well being an example of that art. The novella explores the integral relationship of art and artist, but it also explores the disintegration of art and artist, a disintegration from which we can extrapolate parallel themes about the relationship of culture to self and their concomitant disintegration. For that is what happens in Death in Venice, the ultimate disintegration of death occurring in Venice, a prominent node in the nexus of culture. And for his metaphor for death, for his vehicle for dissolution, he has chosen to depict homosexual attraction and the disconnection, the alienation, that results from it as well as that alienation experienced by artists, specifically writers.

This choice of homosexuality is difficult for some critics to deal with. Investigating the seamier side of human desire, but neither achieving greatness and distinction out of the experience as Neitzsche might suggest or even achieving a greater awareness of a more human side of himself and a more humanistic world view, Aschenbach fails and he dies. The corruption that a Neitzsche or a Wagner might suggest is inadequate, but Mann does not have a ready replacement to provide and so uses homosexual attraction. Stirling writes of the film that "Proof that Aschenbach is not yet tormented by his admiration for this human ‘art object’ is shown by his deciding to leave Venice when the sirocco upsets his health" (p. 216). Yet when Aschenbach gets to the train station and discovers that his trunk has been incorrectly sent to Como, Stirling says that "he pretends to lose his temper, but is in fact overjoyed at having a legitimate excuse to return to the Grand Hotel des Bains." More likely he is tormented by his admiration for Tadzio. If he truly wanted to leave, then he would not have pretended to lose his temper. And in my viewings of the film, I do not believe that he is pretending. I believe that he is angry. Yes, he is happy to return to the hotel because he is happy to return to watching Tadzio, but his anger is real because he is someone to whom things happen, not someone who controls his life nearly as much as he thinks that he does. And remember, we are watching him watch Tadzio so we are watching Tadzio, too. Aschenbach’s—and Visconti’s—desire to see Tadzio becomes our own. Just as Alfred Hitchcock implicates us in Norman Bates’s scoptophilic embrace of Marion Crane, Visconti invites us to enjoy the beauty of the young Tadzio, penis package prized and in front, jingling about in his antique swim suit that delights as much for what it hides as for what it reveals.

Moreover, Tadzio is frequently wearing a little sailor suit of some kind, as was fashionable for young boys of his class at that time, but it also suggests that he is wearing the trappings of a young man. Tadzio is on the verge of manhood if not quite yet there. He is therefore perhaps more attractive to Aschenbach because of his feigned manhood. Perhaps, too, Aschenbach is yearning for his own youth, which if it was anything like his severe adulthood, would probably have been far less appealing and satisfying than the youth that Tadzio appears to have. Or, perhaps Aschenbach is wistful about the purity and power of adolescent longing, about how different his own life might have been had he been able to reach out to someone when he was much younger as he tries but fails to reach out to Tadzio now. His attire also suggests something of the whispered truths about what some sailors share with each other during the long confinement of a sea voyage and of Visconti’s own affairs with stableboys and cavalry soldiers.

That second day on the beach as Aschenbach watches, Tadzio wears a swimsuit of royal blue with white stripes, recalling his sailor suit. Some friends call him, they run on the beach and engage in the building of sand castles. One puts his arm around Tadzio as they walk along the beach and pass in front of Aschenbach. The other boy kisses Tadzio gently on the cheek, an act of complete innocence and the utter devotion of childhood. Yet, Visconti cuts to a close-up of Aschenbach absent-mindedly brushing his hand against his own cheek. The equation is made.

Aschenbach eats some strawberries, perhaps the vector of his infection. A photographer sets up his huge turn-of-the-century portrait camera on the beach. Aschenbach continues to sit on the beach, not really participating in any beachside activities except the watching of Tadzio at play. As his mother and the nurse call him, Tadzio emerges from the water, without his top and wearing only his pantaloons, and he eats some strawberries, too. Again, the equation is made. That which binds Aschenbach to Tadzio also binds Tadzio to Aschenbach.

Later that day, Aschenbach is uncomfortable when he is in the elevator and Tadzio is there with his mother and some playmates. The boys whisper, perhaps about Aschenbach for they are aware of the way that Aschenbach looks at Tadzio. Tadzio leaves the elevator but turns around and slowly backs away after he gets out, watching Aschenbach, again linking the two in the common act of gazing at each other, but again also emphasizing Aschenbach's alienation inasmuch as Tadzio moves away from him.

Back in his room, Aschenbach tries to work but cannot. Anguished by something, he splashes water on his face, trembles, slams a drawer on his dresser. Perhaps he is mad at himself for not being able to work, but that explanation just pushes the question back a generation. Why can he not work? Because he is angry. Most likely, he is angry at himself for the feelings he has for or about Tadzio, although he probably does not yet himself understand them. But they exist, as Visconti shows us, desire is there as well as fascination, curiosity, and awe derived from his acknowledgment that Tadzio does effortlessly what Aschenbach cannot do.

The next day, he is obviously now ill. This illness might ambiguously be the reason for his trembling when he was angry earlier in his room, that is, he is upset because he is physically ill, but he is not only physically ill, he is also intellectually and spiritually challenged by his fascination with Tadzio.

As Aschenbach eats breakfast the next morning, he explodes at the servant who says "time passes" in an apparent effort to get Aschenbach to check out more quickly. Again, Aschenbach is unable to control his emotions and to express himself verbally. As he leaves, he and Tadzio meet again and exchange glances in passing. He says, "Farewell, Tadzio. It was all too brief. May God bless you." Much like the woman that Bernstein glanced briefly but memorably enough to describe to Thompson fifty years later in Citizen Kane, Tadzio has made a lasting place for himself somewhere in Aschenbach’s heart, perhaps occupying only one of its four chambers, perhaps more.

The relationship between Aschenbach and Tadzio is otherwise wordless, without contact, ambiguous. Certainly ambiguous. But if it is ambiguous, the "other half" of that ambiguity must be sexual to balance the platonic. It would be consistent for Visconti, who was attracted both to men and to women, to be more aware of the kinds of things that an older but gentlemanly bisexual might find appealing in a young boy. It would be consistent for Visconti, the visual artist, to be successful at portraying these sights and the desires they invoke in the cinematic plan of the film. Servadio suggests:

And with us. We are also involved with this obsession.

Aschenbach's obsession for Tadzio is undeniable. Although Tadzio might perhaps suggest to Aschenbach what Aschenbach wishes he could be, the hushed admission, "I love you," that Aschenbach directs towards Tadzio ambiguates that supposition. This, too, is a difference between the novella and the film because there is more in the film than the aesthetic admiration in the words that Aschenbach aspirates in the novella. Moreover, the hasty departure that Aschenbach arranges suggests homosexual panic, a denial of his desire, an attempt to regain the control that he has maintained all his life. His anxious manner could also be the result of his panicked acknowledgment that he has begun to lose control over his emotions, failing to maintain that intellectual mastery that has defined his life. But whether it is only one of these things that inspires his leaving or both, the flight fails, and Aschenbach is clearly the happier for it, his happiness being a contradiction of his control over his emotions. Aschenbach is not in control of his senses, much as he would like to be. Since he is not, it is reasonable to believe that his desire is homosexual, his wife and child merely conventions.

At the train station, when the misdirected luggage keeps Aschenbach from his planned departure, a victim of the cholera epidemic slips to the floor, foreshadowing Aschenbach’s own private appointment with death. Aschenbach and others see him, but. no one comes to help the dying man. A walking skeleton, he could have come from Auschwitz or any other Nazi death camp. Although that allusion was something that Mann could not have known at the time when he wrote the novella, it is part of our cultural history now, and Visconti makes use of it, a metaphor for what will happen both to Aschenbach as the disease disfigures him and for what will happen as a result of the disease that infects Germany in the decades after the time depicted in the novella and the film.

Aschenbach is relaxed and happy on his return to the Lido, in contrast to his shrunken and withdrawn appearance when he arrived on the steamer. He is positively expansive, arms wide, as he opens the window of his hotel room and spots Tadzio on the beach. He smokes a cigarette, another visual allusion unavailable to Mann, but a standard way in film of depicting the refractory period after sex. Of course, Aschenbach has not made love, but Visconti prods us into making the connection again about the nature of Aschenbach’s feelings for Tadzio. As if to underscore this connection, Visconti provides here another flashback, this time to a very young Aschenbach playing with his wife and daughter on a hill somewhere, ostensibly in Bavaria. He is animated, spontaneous, and affectionate with them. Visconti visually ties the feelings that Aschenbach apparently has had for his wife and child in the past with the feelings that he currently has for Tadzio.

On Aschenbach’s next appearance on the beach, he is wearing a dark jacket and white pants, similar to an outfit worn earlier by Tadzio, perhaps in homage, perhaps in identification. But at this point we can see that Aschenbach is obviously very ill, unsteady, but he nonetheless pulls out some paper and works. So his creative powers have been restored; the refractory period is complete. Soon thereafter, Aschenbach encounters Tadzio walking under the awning that leads from the hotel to the beach. Tadzio this time wears an orange swimsuit with cream-colored stripes and a straw hat, looking positively bucolic and ready for Wordsworth to enshrine and worship him in a poem. Aschenbach is uncomfortable because it is apparent that Tadzio is deliberately posing for him. And Visconti. And us. But this time Aschenbach looks small, ill, and fragile, in contrast with the flashback to his life with his family when he was young, happy, and healthy.

The next time we see Aschenbach, he is in the lobby hotel, where Tadzio is playing Beethoven’s Fur Elise in a childlike way on the piano as he shyly gazes up at Aschenbach. Visconti chooses at this point to insert another flashback. Although this scene does not appear in Death in Venice the novella, it is somewhat derived from a scene in Dr. Faustus. Tadzio’s playing Fur Elise is a spark for Aschenbach’s remembering his unsuccessful encounter with the prostitute Esmerelda in the bordello. Esmerelda also looked at Aschenbach shyly, gazing out from time to time behind the upright piano where she, too, was playing Fur Elise. Stirling reports that this was Andresen’s choice, but it is convenient, because Beethoven comes from the beginning of the romantic period of music and Mahler from the end, a relationship which balances Tadzio being the youthful ingenue and Aschenbach (or Aschenbach as a stand-in for Mann and Visconti) being the older sophisticate. But this intercutting also relates Aschenbach’s desire for the prostitute with his ever-less ambiguous feelings for Tadzio.

The scene at the brothel ends in a cut to an apparent afterwards marked by an extreme close up on her squeezing his hand and his trying to pull away. He wants both to stay and to go, ambiguously, just as the scene is ambiguous as to what happened during Aschenbach’s encounter with Esmerelda. (Stirling interprets this scene as showing Aschenbach’s impotence, but there exists no visual or narrative evidence for that conclusion.) There is a quick cut back to the present showing Aschenbach walking on the veranda, looking even more ill than before. Later Aschenbach and Tadzio exchange glances again as their paths cross during their evening walk. Aschenbach says to Tadzio, though no one can hear him, "You must never smile like that ... at anyone. ... I love you."

It is at this point in the film, mirroring the novella, that Aschenbach slips from enchantment to obsession. He "worships" Tadzio at mass. He follows the Polish family as they walk through the streets of Venice. We see a civil worker pouring disinfectant on the walls and paths as the camera shows us warning signs posted on the walls. The juxtaposition of the scene in the church and the scene on the streets indicates a relationship between the sublime and the physical, the same kind of tension that presses on Aschenbach’s soul. The scene ends with his remarking to no one in particular, "What’s that filthy smell?" as he becomes aware of the scent of the disinfectant.

As the film rapidly reaches its denouement, the "Adagietto" from Mahler’s 5th Symphony plays almost continuously nondiegetically on the soundtrack. Its funereal pace and feel emphasize the final transition that Aschenbach makes. He sits and allows the barber at the hotel to snip and color his hair. He paints himself up in the same ways as the old gay man on the boat who repelled him at the time, also in the same way as the painted prostitute at the brothel. He is, in a sense, being made up like an embalmed corpse, choosing death over life both by staying in Venice and by yielding to his passion for Tadzio. His life is meaningless without Tadzio; that is, Tadzio represents all that is alive whereas all of Aschenbach’s former way of life was not alive at all in any meaningful way, although he never consciously realizes how dry his life has been. As the barber finishes Aschenbach’s transformation, he says, "And now the signor may fall in love as soon as he pleases." But of course, we know what the barber cannot, that Aschenbach is already if not in love at least in love with the idea of being in love, something that is alien to his arid life.

On what is apparently his penultimate day alive, Aschenbach, painted and "restored" to amorous youth, continues to follow the Polish family. Tadzio, wearing his dark sailor suit, turns and half-carefully poses in a portico. But Aschenbach is very ill. The simple actions of following them around make him sweat and the dye in his painted hair begins to run down his temple. But he continues to follow them, looking worse and worse. The "Adagietto" has been playing continuously since Aschenbach left the barber. Tadzio still acknowledges Aschenbach’s presence by turning around. But Aschenbach is in distress because of his illness, and he finally opens his collar and slips from weakness to the ground. Nobody comes to help him. Visconti cuts to an extreme close up on Aschenbach’s face as he is laughing out of pathetic recognition of his own absurdity.

At this point, Visconti inserts another flashback. Aschenbach, much younger, directs the final chord of a piece he has written. The crowd jeers and boos. Immediately afterwards in his dressing room, Aschenbach and Alfred have another dialogue:

At this point, Visconti cuts to the present, but Alfred’s voice continues on the soundtrack, saying, "Wisdom. Truth. Human dignity. All finished. Now there is no reason that you cannot go to your grave with your music. You have achieved perfect balance. The man and the artist are one. They have touched bottom together. You never possessed chastity. Chastity is the gift of purity, not the purified result of old age, and you are old, Gustave. And in all the world there is no impurity so pure as old age." And at this point, Visconti cuts to a close-up on Tadzio’s face with the sun behind it, giving him a halo about his golden hair. Thus Visconti visually relates the themes of Aschenbach’s defiant control of his emotions, his domination of self in pursuit of art, with Tadzio’s apparently effortless ability to be beautiful and to mock the things that Aschenbach can never be, never achieve, never love including Tadzio himself. As Alfred’s tauntings remind us, Aschenbach can now go to his grave.

The next morning, Aschenbach learns that the Polish family will soon leave. Cut to outside the hotel. An old lady sings a song on the beach as the Polish family listens. It sounds like a dirge. Aschenbach approaches from under the awning at the top of the frame. He leans on a cabana boy as he walks across the beach. At this point the "Adagietto" stops.

Aschenbach sits in his chair. Tadzio and a companion throw sand at each other. They wrestle in front of the photographer’s camera, still set up but unmanned on the beach. The other fellow goes too far. Aschenbach sits up in his chair, concerned for Tadzio’s safety. The dye on Aschenbach's hair is running. At this point, the "Adagietto" starts again. Tadzio rejects the other youth, walks away with his back to Aschenbach and the camera. He shrugs off the other fellow’s attempt to conciliate and walks into the sea.

Aschenbach watches Tadzio enter the sea from a distance. He is very ill, but glad that Tadzio is safe and sad because he knows that Tadzio is leaving the hotel with his family. Does Aschenbach know that he’s leaving, too, that he’s leaving the world? In a series of shots/reverse shots, we see Tadzio enter the sea in a medium shot. Aschenbach watches. Tadzio poses in front of the camera on the beach, a self-referential commentary by Visconti, no doubt, an otherwise meaningless detail carried over from the novella. Aschenbach tries to sit up in his chair. He reaches out, but falls back. Cut to an extreme long shot of Aschenbach in his chair on the beach. People begin to come over to him as they notice that he appears ill.

In the novella, Mann creates a picture of Aschenbach as alienated through the use of descriptive words, through descriptions of Aschenbach’s actions, and most importantly through the use of interior dialogues that Aschenbach has with himself as he ponders his relationships to himself, to life, to art, to greatness, and to his feelings for Tadzio. These methods of portrayal are not easily available to Visconti in his depiction of the alienated Aschenbach becoming the obsessed Ashenbach. In his interior dialogues with himself, Aschenbach poses questions about the value of life, art, greatness, and love that have been posed by great thinkers and writers of the past. In fact, he re-poses them, relying as he does on references to Plato, other philosophers, and classical mythology. As his durchhalten hold on himself and the life that he has created for himself become less and less secure, his internal dialogues become more sensual, more focused on Tadzio and his feelings for Tadzio. To depict the same kind of interior struggle, Visconti chooses instead to rely on the visual aspects of Ashenbach’s fascination with Tadzio. The interior dialogues are largely missing, replaced in some sense with the flashback episodes involving Alfred, but far more important in depicting Aschenbach’s alienation and his growing obsession are his inabilities to deal with the most common of human emotions. His fascination for Tadzio grows ever less ambiguous. This sexual aspect of the film is, perhaps, what the Baroness Budberg meant when she said that the film was "not Mann." Surely the homosexual component is in the novella, but it is muted. In the film, it is central, for it bears the burden of showing how little Aschenbach is in control of himself in spite of his self-avowed aspiration to dominate the senses. Aschenbach’s obsession with Tadzio provides the means of visually portraying how much unlike his previous self Aschenbach more and more becomes. And Aschenbach’s homosexual attraction for Tadzio, which is entirely visual as it is depicted in the film, provides Visconti with a means in which to engender a sympathy in the audience for what Aschenbach endures, inasmuch as we see what he does, and homosexual or not, we are aware of Bjorn Andresen’s beauty.

These are wise choices for Visconti to have made. Few people in the film audience would likely understand the classical references that Mann makes in the novella, but everyone can see how beautiful Andresen is. It is debatable how many people would be convinced by a formal argument about the relationship of the artist to art, of the artist to greatness, and of the artist to life. But in the film, we need be convinced of nothing. The words of the formal argument have been replaced by simple visual logic: Aschenbach sees Tadzio and is transported beyond his usual sphere where he maintains absolute control. Visconti invites us to follow.

Thus, Visconti has used several techniques not available to Mann to depict Aschenbach's sense of alienation, his anxiety, and his faltering attempt to mediate his alienation through obsession. When he allows the barber to redo him, to dye his hair, to color his face with powders and paints, he becomes further separated from himself. He is as false as the imaginary Tadzio he has created in his mind. That is, he has become infatuated with Tadzio on the basis of superficialities, because of Tadzio's appearance, his youthful energy, his innocence. By adopting the appearance-altering techniques used by the painted, drunken homosexual on the ferry, Aschenbach adopts his neuroses, refusing to accept that he has become an older man, attempting to recreate a more youthful version of himself to make himself more appealing both to Tadzio and to himself. He is also feeding his obsession with Tadzio, who represents a youthful version of perhaps what Aschenbach could have been or wanted to be. More importantly, he has lost his grasp on the hero he has created in his writings, the hero as whom he has tried to live his life. In Neurosis and Human Growth, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Karen Horney writes:

This definition of neurosis accurately describes Aschenbach’s dilemma. Unable to achieve the perfect version of himself that he would prefer, the hero of durchhalten that he describes in his writing, Aschenbach fails in that and in trying to get in touch with his other self, his "real self," in Horney’s terms.

Ultimately, Aschenbach fails to obtain the object of his desire. Weakened by the vibrio cholera that infects him, he can deal neither with his alienation by resuming his former life nor his obsession by approaching Tadzio. He returns to the beach one last time, watching Tadzio in the distance gesture towards the sea. Water has been a ubiquitous but ambiguous symbol throughout. It is water that Aschenbach sought as a restorative, it is water that makes Venice charming and unique, it is water that harbors the bacteria, and it is the loss of body water through diarrhea as a result of the action of the cholera's endotoxin that ultimately causes Aschenbach's death. Water is ironically the thing that he both can and cannot have at the same time, that he both desires and loses, as he is afflicted with cholera, and it is also Tadzio that he both can and cannot have, that he both desires and loses, incapacitated as he is with the neuroses of alienation and obsession.

Perhaps the ultimate irony is that cholera is completely treatable. The patient does not even need antibiotics, which did not exist anyway at the time of the novella. The patient merely needs to replace fluids and electrolytes to regain homeostasis, much as Aschenbach would have survived his neuroses if the mental pseudo-homeostasis that he insisted on for himself did not exclude basic human contact. But his disease is not merely cholera, it is also his dis-ease, his distance from himself and his emotions, which has led him to become alienated, which has led him to allow himself to succumb both to his obsessional dysfunctional desire and to the bacteria. But Aschenbach, so practiced in self-control, does not even know that he has become a patient.

The Damned, the film Visconti had made prior to Death in Venice, was made because he "had wanted to make a film about a family—the human unit he found most interesting—powerful enough to commit murder with impunity" (Stirling, p. 191). The death in Death in Venice is more subtle, not murder, certainly not murder, but not an accident, either, and not quite suicide. It is, surely, the story of one man’s actual death, the end of his life, the cessation of the molecular and cellular activity of his body and the supervention of decay. But it is more than that. Marguerite Yourcenar has suggested that it is "perhaps the most beautiful allegory of death every produced by the tragic genius of Germany" (Yourcenar, Dark Brain p. 199). Another opinion is provided by Bjorn Andresen, the 14 year old Swedish youth who played Tadzio, as related by Dirk Bogarde. On location during shooting, Andresen amused himself by reading the novella, contrary to Visconti’s orders. Bogarde writes that Andresen knew that he was not supposed to read the book but had done so anyway, and said to Bogarde, "Hell, man, now I know who I am. I’m the Angel of Death, right?" (Bogarde, pp. 78-79).

And that is what eventuates from Aschenbach’s relationship with Tadzio. Tadzio is the Angel of Death who comes ironically both to save Aschenbach from the aridity of his former life and to pull him into a final mythical dance of death. Alienation is portrayed in the novella by Mann’s description of Aschenbach’s rigorous, studied, forced control of his senses and emotions. Mann uses words that are both more intense and more emotional as he increases the pace of Aschenbach’s obsession in steps 3 and 4. Events happen more quickly. By the change in the words that Mann uses to describe that obsession, growing from casual notice to deliberate study to pathetic stalking, Mann shows us that Aschenbach actually grows more alienated as he goes on his journey toward obsession, that is, in one sense he becomes de-alienated because he is reaching out for Tadzio and thus trying in a way to rejoin the human race that he has spent his lifetime avoiding. Yet, in another sense, his growing obsession mirrors a further alienation. It is pathetic, irrational, wordless, full of the emotions and actions that Aschenbach has previously worked so hard to eliminate from his character. It is not a real relationship. It is a fragile imaginary creation, a fetish, as much as Scottie Ferguson’s (Jimmy Stewart) desire for Judy/Madeleine (Kim Novak) in Vertigo, another film that examines desire that stresses its subject to the breaking point. He is not trying to get to know Tadzio, to appreciate him as a human being, as a friend. Although a little unusual, that kind of relationship would be socially acceptable, even healthful, that is, the kind of relationship that would help Aschenbach become de-alienated. But that is not what he does. Perhaps because he is inept, a social neophyte, he cannot reach out to Tadzio or receive Tadzio’s friendship in a useful, healthful way. In fact, in pursuing a relationship so inappropriately, he succeeds only in further alienating himself.

Aschenbach’s growing obsession in the film is developed visually by showing the literal alienation of Aschenbach from the other people in the film, with whom he barely interacts, save for his obsession with Tadzio. Indeed, the shot reverse-shot logic of the film shows us that it is nearly always Tadzio that is the object of Aschenbach’s gaze.

Katia Mann reports in her memoirs that the contours of the events of Death in Venice are taken from an actual experience that Thomas Mann had: