ABSTRACT
Let’s begin with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’s notorious framing story. The one that many people involved in the film’s production and criticism have discredited over the years as having been forced onto the body of the film. I will suggest in my analysis below that part of the outrage over Caligari’s frame might, at some level, have to do with its potential to queer the narrative within the frame. In its opening moment, the film reveals a young man and an older man sitting on a bench in a bleak and strangely designed park. The older man has the first lines: “Everywhere there are spirits. . . . They are all around us. . . . They have driven me from hearth and home, from my wife and children.”3 That is, the “spirits” have driven him from a cozy normative heterosexual life to this encounter with a young man in a bizarre park.4 The young man, whom we later know as Francis, looks uneasy-as if he doesn’t really want to hear the older man’s story yet feels compelled to sit there and listen.
