I saw it at a very young age (maybe 10?) and was, therefore, particularly impressionable, so I can’t help but wonder how much of an influence it was by the time I got around to writing this …
… but there are certainly echoes of it in there (come back, Liza Minelli, all is forgiven), along with disdain for the likes of Crowley, Byron and their ilk (think: the degenerates in the debtors prison in Plunkett & Macleane as well).
I never saw him as being an apologist for ... nor even simply indifferent to ... it but more of an avatar for the author/director with which to speak to the audience directly, without strictly breaking the fourth wall.
He spends a lot of time delivering his (punch)lines in a way that allows the ambiguity of his knowing nods and winks, to both those whom he is there to entertain and us as an equally knowing audience armed with hindsight, to operate on both levels simultaneously — one thing to those in the movie ... another to the audience only he knows he is entertaining at the same time (namely us).
I always felt he was more than simply the character he appears to be and, himself, perfectly aware that he is a narrator ... that what is happening around him is predetermined ... has already happened ... making his remarks observational critique rather than mere witticism/entertainment and his seeming indifference to them, therefore, a result thereof — he can't change anything, only hope to survive it as unscathed as he can, so his attitude is phlegmatic, fatalistic ... insofar as one who knows they will not themself suffer the worst excesses of the horrors to come need be.
Just as the cabaret is all cabarets … the very Zeitgeist ‘personified’ as it were … and Berlin is all Germany, so he is all compères. He is, if you will, History personified, speaking to us in the Future as it inexorably and inevitably unfolds in its own time and he lives through it as it, and he, must.
But that’s just my take on it — I’ve no idea if I was ever meant to get that impression.
Peculiarly, I don’t seem to have it my collection … although I was very much of the opinion that I did and it’s not on my list of movies to get either. To say I’m not a fan of musicals is to put it mildly — in fact I don’t simply dislike any given musical, I loathe the very concept of them on principle. But Cabaret is one of the very few for which I make an exception, so I’m really very pleased I stumbled upon this post — otherwise, who knows how long it would’ve been before I noticed and … on that occasion when I wanted to check some detail … been frustrated by the oversight?
