Category: Movies and Film

So this week we made it through to the end of part three of the Ring Cycle: Siegfried, or as I call it in my head “The Broventures of Siegfried.”

Ok, so, as we may recall from the end of Die Walkure, Brunnhilde gets sent to do the Sleeping Beauty thing, but in the process she rescued Sieglinde and sent her off to live in peace someplace. And she was pregnant at the time. “Call him Siegfried,” Brunnhilde suggests, all eagerness.

Spoiler in the title: Sieglinde does indeed call him that.

Unfortunately that’s the only contribution she’s going to make to this story, as she conveniently dies in childbirth, leaving us to spend almost the entirety of Act 1 watching Siegfried grudgingly engage with the only caretaker he’s ever known: a nasty little Nibelung we may all recall from Das Rheingold: Mime, brother of Alberich.

This may at first seem especially baffling considering that neither of them appear to like each other in the slightest, but Mime does spend a lot of time monologuing to himself, and so it is we learn that this is really just an attempt at a very long game: He’s banking on the idea that Siegfried will become the hero he is prophesied to be, and kill the current holder of that pesky ring of power this whole saga gets its name from: Fafner the giant, who thanks to the Tarnhelm has turned himself into a dragon. (Oddly, he hasn’t really done anything ELSE with either his draconic powers or all that gold, just appears to be hanging out with his hoard, sleeping a lot. Living his best life, I guess?)

Anyway. Siegfried’s super keen to get going on this whole heroing thing, or perhaps just to get the fuck away from his skeevy pseudo-parental figure, but before he can do that he needs a decent sword, and Mime’s been promising for years that he’ll fix up that busted one his Mom had when she died (Nothung, the sword extracted from the tree at Hunding’s place back in part 2.) Problem is, Mime hasn’t been able to mend the damn thing, despite his obviously strong smithing skills.

Cue the arrival of Wotan, not fooling anyone (…in the audience, anyway) by turning up dressed like a Neil Young cosplayer. In this disguise he wagers his head against Mime’s and we get one of those old-school “answer these questions” games. Mime isn’t nearly as smart as he thinks he is, so this is probably not going to go well for him, but we do learn a little something that may point to why he’s never had any luck with that sword: Only someone who doesn’t know what fear is can repair it.

And wouldn’t you know it, we happen to have just such a fellow right over there.

What follows may be summed up rather simply: Siegfried, who has no idea what it means to be afraid of anything, resolves the sword-forging problem himself – rather than attempt to repair a broken blade he files the whole thing down and forges himself a new one. (Whether there is a comment here on artists who are excessively careful in their output, and whether or not it is deliberate, I don’t know – but I do wonder if more of us might not benefit from melting our own swords down, whatever those swords may be.)

From there we’re off to the races – Siegfried sets out to the dragon Fafner’s cave, where for some reason Alberich is hanging out waiting for someone to do something about it so he can get the ring back. Along the way he has a pleasant chat to a little forest bird, who of course just sings wordlessly along.

Taking out Fafner is…not really any big deal at all, in the end; in what feels like just a few bars the former giant is sprawled on the forest floor, his blood already beginning to taint the nearby spring. It’s very hot blood, too; when Siegfried pulls the sword out the blood burns his hand, and he thoughtlessly sticks a finger into his mouth. In our world, this would be a terrifying health hazard, but in this world, it means he’s just gained the power to understand the speech of animals, so from his little bird friend he learns that there are two very particular items of treasure he might want to pick up – the ring, and the Tarnhelm that enabled that draconic transformation.

He has just time to pick them up before Mime makes his appearance, all set to murder him and take the reclaimed ring for his own. Unfortunately for him, Siegfried’s new language-comprehension powers extend to (strangely) the ability to comprehend Mime’s thoughts, and so it’s not that long before Mime joins Fafner on the forest floor, with a general air of “good riddance.”

You’d think this would be Alberich’s chance, wouldn’t you? But…no. Weirdly, for some reason, he does nothing, even as our hero sits there lamenting in an extremely bro-ish fashion that even slaying this dragon thing didn’t teach him how to be afraid and that sucks. (Why it is he wants this knowledge is unclear.)

Oh well. Whatever! The little bird has another quest flag piece of information for him: High on a nearby mountaintop is a beautiful woman he can claim for his bride, if he is brave enough. Sounds like somewhere you could find fear, yeah? So off he goes.

Everything else from here is a foregone conclusion, really. Wotan shows up and (for some reason) puts forth a not entirely convincing resistance to letting Siegfried climb the mountain where Brunnhilde sleeps, and Siegfried shatters his spear (!) in the process. (That’s not going to have consequences or anything.) Siegfried climbs up the mountain, navigates the flames, and beholds the first woman he’s ever seen.

We get a lengthy and somewhat odd scene between Siegfried and Brunnhilde where Brunnhilde realizes that she’s in love with Siegfried (that was fast) but also is feeling the onset of mortality and cue existential crisis but also oh my god isn’t this dude hot, and where Siegfried at first thinks he’s learned fear but wait no actually maybe it was just the onset of his first experience of lust. Oh well, what the heck, now he has a woman!

The end.

This production of Siegfried is a bit more compelling than the last one we saw – possibly because the performers for both Mime and (crucially) Siegfried himself were a lot more into their roles, hamming it up from time to time and injecting humor into the proceedings as our somewhat exasperatingly-self-confident-yet-uninformed hero derps his way through Germanic Mythology-land doing his own personal riff on one of the lesser-known tales of the Brothers Grimm. The effects are also particularly spectacular in this one, with the piles of projected fallen leaves skittering away as Siegfried kicks at them, or a digital version of the little bird whose beak somehow is able to follow along with the singer’s voice exactly.

This show is a beast, though, with a full production running something like six hours. Anyone’s attention span might well be flagging by the end of it, and I admit mine was a bit by the end of that odd little love scene. (Is it a love scene really?)

There is something really sort of irritating in having a hero who is a decent but remarkably incurious fellow who insists on reminding you every couple of minutes that by the way he’s terribly brave, you know, never been afraid of anything in his life. Siegfried’s all right and all, and the performer playing him does a great job with one of the most legendarily difficult roles in all of opera…

But I cannot help but feel that Brunnhilde deserved better. (Then again, I suppose we’ll be getting to that as the cycle concludes.)

The second of the operas in the Ring Cycle is the one that is performed most commonly on its own. This makes sense to me; it’s both the most self-contained of the lot (even though it fits into the larger picture) and debatably the one with the most human-level stakes. (It also introduces a character we can all actually sympathize with in Brunnhilde, though they certainly do her dirty here.)

When last we left off, the gods had just managed to ransom back Freya from the giants, and all those Nibelung handicrafts were sent off with the giants – well, for about ten seconds, before Fafner murdered Fasolt to claim the cursed ring for himself.

But we don’t start with any of that (and in fact won’t be seeing much of anything regarding it). Instead we start off with a harried-looking fellow collapsing at remote forest homestead, having been chased through the forest for some time by rather a lot of angry folks. There, he is tended to by the lady of the house, Sieglinde, whose husband Hunding is, it is hinted, Not A Nice Man.

Naturally, because this is an opera and runs on opera rules, the two of them fall for one another immediately. Like, immediately. As in “the second they look at each other.” And so we get a whole act’s worth of increasing smolder between the two of them as we gradually learn the mysterious man’s backstory (he was raised in the middle of nowhere by his dad after his sister was kidnapped and his mother killed when he was young, then his dad disappeared mysteriously one day), why he was being chased through the woods (after a life on the edges of law/society he tried to rescue a girl from a forced marriage, and it went so badly he ended up killing her brothers, she died too, and now the entire clan is after him), and that Hunding is one of said kinsmen and is fully planning to kill him in the morning, though the law of hospitality forbids him from so doing now. Oops.

Incidentally, we also learn that Sieglinde’s marriage to Hunding was also forced, and that the marriage was attended by a mysterious wanderer in gray with a hat worn so low it covered one eye. Said wanderer jabbed a sword so far into an ash-tree that only the hilt is visible, announced that only a true hero could draw it, and then peaced out, leaving the audience to wonder if Odin really cares about disguising himself at all because really dude come on.

Anyway. Our smolder-y pair decide that the best plan, now that they’re clearly madly in love with one another, is to have him (now called Siegmund) draw the sword from the stone tree and get the heck out of Dodge before Hunding wakes up. And so they do, after a very extended sequence of rapturous ravings about the glories of their love for one another.

Teeny problem with this plan #1: An attentive audience will have noticed by now that Sieglinde’s story and Siegmund’s overlap. A lot. And it looks increasingly likely that they are not only madly in love with one another but also brother and sister.

Teeny problem with this plan #2: Sieglinde is (technically, unwillingly) married. And Hunding’s response on waking up and finding his wife gone is to demand justice from a certain goddess whose portfolio includes marriage and who happens to be herself married to Odin.

Oh boy.

So yeah, cue the divine bickering, which arrives in force in Act 2. Frigga/Fricka insists that Siegmund must die to avenge her honor; Odin is insistent that he needs this guy for…things, okay? And anyway, he’s already told his favorite Valkyrie Brunnhilde to see to it that Siegmund is victorious in the coming battle. Back and forth they go, manipulating each other, until eventually, with great reluctance, Odin caves. Fine. Siegmund will die. He’ll change his order. Satisfied (and more than a little smug-looking), Fricka leaves, just as Brunnhilde returns to check in with dad before heading out.

And here we get an interesting little scene, where Odin explains what’s bugging him so much: That ring. Alberich is still out there, you see, and sure, Fafner may have the ring now, but if a whole-ass army comes after him, Alberich may very well get it back. And then…well…bad news for the world. But he cannot act directly to prevent this possible catastrophe – that has to come from someone else, someone who isn’t bound by the same contracts he is, someone free…

Someone like the kid he went off to have and then ghosted a while back, who is even now in a world of shit for being a little too charming to his own sister.

And so, after a moment of despair, he tasks Brunnhilde with a new job: make sure Siegmund dies in the coming battle with Hunding. Feeling more than a little morose herself, she sets off.

…And then, after meeting up with Siegmund and seeing him do the unthinkable by turning down elevation to Valhalla rather than leave Sieglinde, she decides “Actually, fuck this” and helps Siegmund in the battle anyway. Orders or no orders.

It doesn’t work, of course. Odin himself shows up and sees to it that Siegmund is killed, shattering his sword; Brunnhilde rescues Sieglinde (and the sword fragments) before her father can show up to administer her punishment for her disobedience, advising Sieglinde that she’s now expecting a child who will one day wield that sword again, once it is re-forged. She also offers a name for Sieglinde to give the future hero: Siegfried.

And then, the punishment comes. Brunnhilde is to be disowned utterly for her rebellion. Put under an enchantment, Sleeping Beauty-style, stripped of her immortality, and left to the mercies of the first man who happens to wander by and wake her. (I…am probably not the only audience member to detect an only-just-barely-implicit “disobey me? Enjoy probable rape at the hands of some rando!” threat here, am I?)

Only after she points out that her act of rebellion was the thing Odin truly wanted in the first place does he agree to mitigate her sentence by setting her up with a ring of fire for protection. She may end up stuck with the man who comes to wake her, but that man will at least need to be brave, a hero.

I mean, that sentence is still some bullshit even on a second viewing, particularly since one can argue that her only real “crime” is doing what a powerful man wanted to do but could not. (…Kind of like that hero he’s so obsessed with finding.) A Valkyrie is powerful, but ultimately an instrument of the will of Odin; for her exercise of her own agency Brunnhilde must have that agency stripped completely, along with her power.

She must become that most powerless of all things, in fact: a mortal woman.

The horror of this punishment is so great that all of the other Valkyries flee it in terror.

I don’t know much about Richard Wagner’s personal life, but I cannot help but wonder how the women in his life may have felt about all this.

I mean, there’s quite a bit of WTF-ery going on here. We’ve got an incestuous relationship that the participants seem…surprisingly fine with, and the whole shitstorm really takes off because there’s a marriage being violated, though it seems a bit rich that the goddess of marriage doesn’t have a problem with spousal abuse or, you know, forcing people into said marriages but god(s) literally forbid you try to leave such an arrangement.

Then there’s the part where all of this is arguably Odin’s fucking fault in the first place, again, since he obviously has been planning to have Siegmund find that sword, and knew his sister was there (being forced into a marriage at the time), didn’t do anything about it – encouraged her to think of the one who would take the sword as a hero, even! – and then somehow is all shocked-Pikachu-face when it all blows up on him. Again.

Even if things hadn’t gone quite so far south – if Hunding had just decided well, I kind of hated her anyway let’s find another woman – one wonders if Siegmund really would have counted as “a hero that he’d never helped” given that Odin fathered and raised him, then left him a magic sword in a tree and was all set to make arrangements to send a Valkyrie to help him out into the deal. That…sounds like an awful lot of help, dude.

Back to the first major throughline of the whole cycle: The gods are assholes.