38. Mata Hari (1931)

Directed by George Fitzmaurice
Written by Benjamin Glazer and Leo Birinski
Starring Greta Garbo, Ramon Novarro, and Lionel Barrymore

Mata has it all: white privilege and exotic allure. Everyone knows she’s blonde under that skullcap. I used to wish I had hair like a white woman, smooth and manageable, not thick and coarse. Maybe the family who runs the Indonesian restaurant across Broad Street thinks I could be one of them. Look at our skin, eyes, and noses. Our thick, black hair. Familiar Tagalog words appear on the menu board: asin, gulay, salamat. People from our part of the world aren’t afraid of whole fried fish with the head on, dead eyes staring down the void. Ramon Novarro’s Mexican accent sounds Filipino-adjacent. He plays a Russian pilot. Mata withholds sex until he blows out the candle beneath his shrine of the Virgin Mary — the one his mother gave him lo these many years ago. Some people can only do it in the dark. How is Freud even still a thing? Literary theory is like the hot take of intellectual discourse. In college, my professors insisted we read ahistorically, because I guess context has never enriched our understanding of anything. Arguing that a text’s real meaning contradicts its stated meaning was the height of exegetical sophistication. No wonder I said fuck grad school. Two people close to me claim to be economic reductionists, but they’re both big softies w/r/t culture. Those nuns are big softies, too, letting poor, blind Romanoff believe Mata is in a sanitarium, not in prison awaiting her execution. Showing her death would have been too vulgar. Instead, the camera fades as she walks outside to face her punishment. The movie ends without her ever taking a bullet. Does this mean Mata never dies? I’d take endless void over endless dread any day.