This was a powerful film with brilliant performances by both Rampling and Bogarde in a dark and deadly dance of sado-masochism. Thanks to their courage in tackling these roles many of us have been saved from its powerful grip.
Night Porter is about Max, a sadistic, mentally disturbed Nazi Soldier awaiting trial for his atrocities during the holocaust while working as a night porter in a hotel. During the holocaust he commits heinous abuses upon Lucia, an it girl, during her captivity. He torments the girl, yet makes her believe he is her protector, at one point, after a performance before many SS soldiers, displaying the head of one of the male inmates in a box. He does this in an attempt to bind her to him while keeping her in fear for her own head, a story he later claims to be Biblical, but I viewed as his own vindictive, artistic interpretation of Holofernes, clearly in which he seems to be taking vengeance on seductive women. One might think his childhood interpretation of this event deserved rectifying by abusing seductive women and could be related to Hitler and his personal interpretation of this event in the Bible. Fairbairn states with regard to similar circumstances, “the badness of an object was not the child’s sadism but was a reflection of maternal deprivation.” His instincts have been perverted so as to cause him to desire such relationships in order to satisfy his sexual needs. Fairbairn states, “what ranked as crucial for the child was the establishment of a satisfactory object relationship during the period of infantile dependence”.
With this in mind, it becomes clear they are both victims of unfulfilled infantile desires and positive parental deprivation, Lucia’s deprivation having been created for his purposes in his god-like conception of himself. The behavior acted upon Lucia is part of the “traumatic bonding”, defined in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a Clinical Review, Sidran Press and is described in the Stockholm Syndrome. At some point Max and Lucia part, never to see each other again until she arrives at the hotel with her husband, where Max happens to be employed.
His atrocities upon her pervert her natural childhood instincts, replacing her parental attachments and creating in her a masochistic dependency, frequently inflicting his own sadistic behaviors onto her, later dissociated from her consciousness until she encounters him at the hotel. During her imprisonment, it is clear she was fixated on him and his abuse of her, why she has arrived at the very hotel where he is working. This happens, in part, because of their sick attachment, their initial involvement being what Jung called synchronicity. This is also dramatized in Death in Love, when the Doctor appears in the city where his victim lives. Lucia is like the mother in Death In Love only she does not have children on which she inflicts her trauma, she seeks to inflict it on her tormentor, Max. Again Fairbairn remarks that a healthy object (meaning caretakers) relationship is critical during the period of infantile dependence.
The encounter triggers her memories of the events that occurred between them during her captivity, as well as Max’s, called flashbacks. Their relationship is reignited with numerous scenes dramatizing their relationship during Lucia’s captivity, their libidinal energies now driven by the need for violence; suffering and pain. In one scene, we see her clearly exhibit sadistic behaviors, Lucia acting the loving obedient but flirtatious child, deliberately smashing a bottle onto the floor of the bathroom after locking the door. Upon unlocking the door, Max bursts through stepping onto the glass cutting his foot. Lucia then reaches under his foot at which time he crushes her hand into the glass, again inflicting sadistic harm upon his “little girl”. Here, from my own synchronistic observations, I recognize scenes from The Woman In Green in which a long needle is driven into the hand of a stage performer in order to demonstrate hypnosis, I later re-enacted by stepping onto a nail in a board while crossing a creek.
This is the nature of their bond with each other now, she as an adult woman and he as a civilian. Now he wants to love her as a man would love a woman but their affair is more or less a kind of sadistic play between each other, Lucia manifesting her childish masochistic flirtations, setting off Max’s sadistic desires he attempts to control. In hopes of changing her and saving her he keeps her locked up in his apartment at one point chaining her to a chest claiming he is keeping “them” from taking her. He also wants to prevent her from testifying against him which she has threatened to do. He provides her medical treatment she refuses claiming there is no cure, also intimating her reasons for her appearance at the hotel is more than chance.
The ending is climatic as the two sink further into depravity, still inflicting pain one on the other, acting like animals, he caressing her mouth as if to caress and care for her vagina which gives him pleasure, but wanting to cut out of her vagina that which makes her seductive and wanted by others. Both, on the verge of starvation, in an attempt to prevent Lucia from being taken into custody and Max arrested for his crimes, they leave the re-creation of their prison, the apartment, and take their final steps to freedom. Shots are fired, both falling to their death.
