Summary
A group of people, including Mr. Olsen, discover that Jane has been abducted, and all run through the broken window into the street. We see Cesare carrying Jane up the strange angle of one of the buildings in town and then around a corner, pursued by the two men who heard Jane’s screams. As he makes his way down a ramp, the crowd catches up to him and he is forced to leave Jane behind. The two men who heard her screams attend to Jane, while the rest of the group pursues Cesare, who walks now with his arms outstretched like a zombie. We see him collapse onto the ground.
Francis waits outside Dr. Caligari’s house, thinking that he is keeping watch over Caligari and the sleeping Cesare. Eventually he returns to the Olsens’ house, where he finds Jane passed out on a couch, her father standing above her. As Dr. Olsen raises Jane’s head up, she appears as if she is in a trance, and begins yelling, “Cesare!” Francis does not believe that Cesare could have possibly been the one to kidnap her, as he has been waiting outside Caligari’s dwelling watching Cesare sleep all night. Jane is unconvinced, and she and her father look at Francis, who runs off.
Act V. Francis goes to the police and tells them the story of what happened. He asks the policemen if the prisoner, the alleged murderer, is in his cell, and they nod that he is. Francis requests to see the prisoner and the guards take him to the cell where he is being kept. The murderer sits in a room on the ground with shackles. Seeing that there is no way the murderer could have gotten out, Francis looks discouraged.
We then see Francis and some policemen approaching Caligari’s dwelling. Caligari comes to the door, but tries to block them from entering. One of the policemen pushes him aside and they storm in, as Caligari watches with a stricken expression. The men carry out Caligari’s cabinet, and Caligari looks worried. Inside the cabinet, they find a dummy version of Cesare, and Francis realizes that while he thought Cesare was sleeping, it was just a dummy of Cesare. Caligari flees, pursued by Francis. Caligari eventually runs into an insane asylum. Francis looks at the gate before following him in.
When a doctor at the asylum comes downstairs, Francis asks him if they have a patient named Caligari. The doctor shakes his head, but Francis insists that he wants to know. Another doctor comes over to see what Francis wants, and Francis again asks if there is anyone there named Caligari. The second doctor replies, “The director returned earlier today. Perhaps you should speak to him personally.” Francis agrees and follows the doctor up a set of stairs.
Upstairs, the doctor lets Francis through a triangular door into the director’s office, where there is a skeleton and a desk with piles of books all over it. Sitting at the desk is Dr. Calagari. Francis is horrified to see that Caligari is the director of the asylum and runs down the stairs, fainting at the bottom. The doctors run to help him and sit him down in a chair, where he begins ranting about the fact that he just saw Caligari. The doctors look at one another as the scene fades.
A title card reads, “While the director, now placed under observation, is sleeping in his villa.” We see Caligari sleeping. Having checked that Caligari is sleeping, Francis and the doctors go to the asylum and begin to look through Caligari’s office. One of the doctors goes over to a shelf and pulls out some particularly old looking books. One of the books is a book on sleepwalking. Francis opens it up and flips through it. He turns to a page titled “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” which tells the story of a mystic named Caligari who, in 1703, toured the fairs of northern Italy. The next page explains that he also played a part in a number of “foul murders committed under almost identical circumstances.”
The next pages read, “He had entirely subjugated to his will a Somnambulist named Cesare, whom he did compel to carry out his nefarious schemes. A puppet, the exact likeness of Cesare, and which took his place in a cabinet, allowed him to divert any suspicion that might fall on the Somnambulist.” Francis closes that book and opens up Caligari’s diary. On one page, Calagari has written excitedly about the fact that a Somnambulist has “finally” been brought to the asylum. We see a flashback of the doctors bringing the Somnambulist into Caligari’s office. Caligari marches over to him and dismisses the doctors. He then becomes gleeful about the arrival of the Somnambulist, turning to the book about Dr. Caligari and holding it up triumphantly.
Back in the present day, Francis and the doctors scour the director’s diary, which says that he has always dreamt of turning into the historical Dr. Caligari, in order to “unravel [his] psychiatric secrets.” They read on, and discover that Caligari’s project is connected to his desire to discover if a Somnambulist can be trained to commit murder and other acts that would be “repugnant” to him while awake.
Analysis
The set pieces, in their asymmetry and unrealistic perspectives, create bold illusions in the moments of flight and pursuit. When Cesare tries to abduct Jane, we see him carrying her through the town in the middle of the night. He walks up a structure that appears to be neither a wall nor a roof, and the unusual angles of the film’s sets make the scene all the more monstrous, almost as though he is carrying her via routes that defy gravity. The surreality of the set pieces makes it so that the twistedness of the story becomes reflected in the physical reality of the town. Then, when Francis and his companions visit Dr. Caligari at his house, they pull out his cabinet, where Cesare is allegedly sleeping. They are surprised when what they find in the cabinet is not Cesare at all, but a stuffed dummy, a puppet of Cesare, which proves to them that Cesare is indeed the one who tried to kidnap Jane in the night. Before they can confront Caligari about this, he has bolted, running away, up over a hill and down the other side. The hill looks almost flat, which gives the illusion that it is especially steep, a kind of altering optical illusion which heightens the suspense of Caligari’s escape. It is as though the nefarious villain is running through a storybook, as though he himself can bend reality and fit it into the contours of his twisted perceptions.
It is symbolically significant that the figure in the cabinet of Dr. Caligari is nothing more than a stuffed puppet. This signals not only the literal revelation that Dr. Caligari has been deceiving the people of the town, but also that Caligari is using various kinds of “puppets” and “dummies” to carry out his wishes. Indeed, there is very little difference between the stuffed puppet and the Somnambulist; both are devoid of vitality and free will, subject to the whims of their authoritarian master, Dr. Caligari. In this moment, we can see once and for all that Dr. Caligari is not simply an unusual carnival worker with a strangely devious attitude, but a true manipulator, a man who wants to have total, Frankenstein-like control over others. Caligari seeks complete control, the ability to make other people do his bidding, and this comes to the surface when the puppet is revealed. Caligari flees the scene, horrified at having had his malevolent desire found out.
The revelation that the sleeping Cesare is actually a puppet is one of two instances of doubling in this section of the film. Soon after discovering that Caligari keeps a stuffed version of Cesare in his cabinet to deflect attention away from the Somnambulist’s deeds, Francis discovers that Caligari is actually the director of the asylum. Caligari is not Caligari at all, but a local psychologist who seeks to turn himself into a historical figure, the original “Dr. Caligari.” The real Dr. Caligari carried out murders in Northern Italy with the help of a Somnambulist, just as the director of the asylum is trying to do now. The Caligari of the film is in fact a counterfeit Caligari, but he has made himself basically identical to the historical Caligari described in the old book. Thus the doubling in this instance puts the notion of identity into disarray. Indeed, the asylum director has effectually turned himself into Dr. Caligari, blurring his own identity and self into an image. Just as there is a disorienting blurring between the identities of the puppet and the Somnambulist, so too is there a blurring between Dr. Caligari and the asylum director.
The revelation that Caligari is the asylum director contributes to the unusual and disorienting tone of the film. The world of the small town in which Francis lives is like something out of a nightmare or a fever dream. Not only are the sets and general aesthetic of the film anti-realist, in keeping with the film’s genre of German Expressionism, but the story itself, the twists and turns that it takes, hinges on disorientation and horrific revelation. Francis arrives at the asylum looking for help finding the mysterious Dr. Caligari. The other doctors do not know the name “Caligari,” but they think that maybe the asylum director can help. In true nightmare fashion, they bring Francis to the person whom they believe can best help him—but it turns out to be the villain. This sleight of hand is what makes The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari a horror film. The floor is always falling out from beneath the characters, people are never who they seem to be, and death is always around the corner.
The moments of horror, the climactic bursts and realizations, are broadcast by the performative styles of the actors. For instance, in the moment that the group discovers the puppet in Dr. Caligari’s cabinet, they hold it up with great alarm, as Caligari wears an exceedingly anxious expression. Suspenseful moments erupt and take hold of characters’ whole bodies, sending them into shock and awe. When Francis discovers that Caligari is the asylum director, he launches into a melodramatic pantomime, stumbling down the stairs with theatrical outrage and falling into a heap at the bottom. When confronted with bad news, the characters in the film fully embody their responses, yet another way in which the film is actively anti-realist.
