The seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes had once said, ‘All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called "Facts". They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain’. In Tras el Cristal (1987) a.k.a In a Glass Cage, Spanish director Agustí Villaronga’s ‘art shocker’, Klaus (Günter Meisner) has an 0ld habit of keeping record of certain facts about himself that are so disturbing that he has managed to keep them a secret from his wife Griselda (Marisa Paredes) and his little daughter Rena (Gisèle Echevarría). Little does he know that soon these facts will come back to haunt him, in an excruciatingly horrifying manner, embodied in a beast, ironically named Angelo (David Sust).
Similar to Psycho (1960), Tras el Cristal tells the crux of the story that will eventually unfold in the pre-credit sequence itself. The film opens with close-up shots of an eye and a camera, followed by click of the shutter perfectly synched with the blink of the eye. At that very moment, we the viewer, become privy to the fact that the film is all about ‘looking’, ‘listening’, and ‘memories’.
As the scene unfolds, we see a man (whose name we shall learn later, is Klaus) clicking photographs of a young boy, who is naked and wounded, hanging from the ceiling with his hands tied up. It is around this time that another gaze enters the frame—a point-of-view of a third entity, hidden outside the building and peering through the window, looking at both Klaus and the obviously numb-in-pain youth.
If one goes back to Hitchcock’s most famous film, one will remember how there, too, in the opening sequence, an external gaze, in a swooping bird-like motion, enters a motel room where two individuals are involved in another type of activity, which, like Klaus, they, too, want to hide from the eyes of others. But in both instances, Hitchcock and Villaronga turn the audience into voyeurs by using point-of-view shots, and thereby make them accessory to the ensuing horrific events.
There is similarity between the two opening sequences in a sense of foreboding as well. While the bird-like swooping movement in Psycho alludes to Norman’s hobby of taxidermy as well as his predatory instinct, in Tras el Cristal, the ‘gaze’ pertains to knowledge. Unlike Klaus, we know that he is being watched, and unknown to Klaus, we see someone picking up a diary from the scene of the crime. And knowledge, as we shall see, will play a pivotal role in the remainder of this treatise on sadism, violence, and voyeurism.
A distraught and repentant Klaus, wishing to put an end to the evil inside him, tries to commit suicide. However, he fails, and instead of finding himself inside a coffin, lands up inside an ‘iron lung’—an artificial, metallic respiratory contraption, in which his paralysed body lies immobile, with only his head sticking out under a glass dome. While Klaus remains cocooned inside the breathing apparatus, Griselda and Rena, we learn, have remained imprisoned within the four walls of their mansion, ever since the family went into exile eight years ago. Into their lives walks in Angelo, a young man, who proclaims to having taken care of Klaus when he was in the hospital.
In sync with the first sequence of the film, where we could only hear his breathing and never come face-to-face, we ‘hear’ Angelo, long before we ‘see’ him. We find him threatening to reveal what Klaus did before he jumped off a roof, if he is not hired as his private nurse.
And when we do get the first glimpse of Angelo, we see him through the gap of a door not fully opened, telling us that there is a lot more to this young man than our eyes can discern at first glance.
For Klaus, the horror begins almost immediately. At night, when the two other members of the family are fast asleep, Angelo tiptoes into Klaus’ room and starts reading out from Klaus’ own diary, the despicable acts he had carried out on little boys when he was employed as a Nazi doctor. As if reliving those disgraceful days and heinous deeds were not enough, very soon Angelo reveals to Klaus” ‘I could be what you used to be’.
With paedophilia as an underlying theme, Tras el Cristal is not an easy film to watch to begin with. But by making innumerable references—both oblique and direct—to scopophilia (the act of deriving pleasure from looking), it makes the experience a first-hand one for the audience. Like Klaus, who is stuck in a contraption for the rest of his life, and has no other option but to look at his ‘mirror image’ in Angelo via an actual mirror that Angelo erects in front of his face; or similar to the young boys who Klaus used to strap down to a chair before abusing them, we the viewer find ourselves rooted to our seats, equally powerless and horrified by what is happening before us, but unable to look away.
In fact, to underline this very aspect, Villaronga, through the character of the maid of Klaus and Griselda’s household, tells us, though in a different context: ‘The machine makes me nervous. It’s like being in the cinema’. To add to the overall claustrophobic experience, Villaronga supplements his visuals, which are perpetually bathed in swathes of icy blue and depressing gray, with ingenious sound effects. The suggestive ‘beast within’ comes alive as much as in the screeching mechanical heaving of the ‘iron lung’, as it does via the sound effects depicting the rattler of a rattlesnake and the squeal of a wounded animal, during two pivotal scenes in the film, wherein the life of one individual lies at the mercy of another.
To the frequent film-watcher, the parallels to Bryan Singer’s Apt Pupil, a film that was released more than a decade after Tras el Cristal, are obvious. However, unlike its distant, watered-down cousin from Hollywood, this Spanish film has built up a certain reputation for itself—and quite rightly so. Rather than merely slapping an in-your-face message of ‘immorality never pays’, it actually manages to be disturbing because it turns the audience into an accomplice.
Just like Angelo used meshed wire to turn the hallway of Klaus’ house into a replica of those numerous concentration camps, Tras el Cristal creates the eponymous glass cage for the audience, as well. We are infantilised, immobile, and passive in our response, but very much active in our participation. Klaus is made to look through the crystal dome via a mirror. We just cannot tear our gaze away from the screen.
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