Summary
A flashback in which we see Dr. Caligari in his office reading about the real Dr. Caligari. A title card reads, “The obsession.” He declares, “I must become Caligari!” He goes into the town, and sees words in the air, all of which say, “You must become Caligari.” The words appear everywhere.
Act VI. Francis and the doctors read Caligari’s books and look concerned. Suddenly, a messenger comes in and tells him that they found Cesare out in the fields. Francis and the doctors follow him to examine the Somnambulist, who appears to have died. The men carry the Somnambulist’s corpse back to Caligari’s office. Caligari is standing behind his desk, and Francis tells him to come clean about his identity. As the men carry in the corpse of Cesare, Caligari becomes upset, collapsing onto the corpse of the Somnambulist.
Suddenly Caligari is overcome with rage and lunges at one of the doctors to attack him. They hold him back and carry him off. In the next room, they get him into a straitjacket and put him down on a couch. Eventually, Caligari becomes more subdued and the doctors close the door to the room.
We are back where the story started, with Francis telling the story to the old man in the park. He tells the old man, “…and from that day on, the madman never again left his cell.” The old man gets up and looks at him with a strange expression.
Suddenly we are back in the asylum. Jane is standing in the midst of a number of other patients. Francis and the old man come in. They are apparently patients at the asylum, and Francis jumps when he notices Cesare standing up against a nearby wall, not a sleepwalker at all, but an animate person gazing at a flower. Francis warns the old man never to ask Cesare for his fortune. The old man wanders away from Francis, who begins to smile and go to Jane.
Jane is almost catatonic. Francis asks her to marry him, but she replies, “We nobles are not free to answer the call of our heart.” Suddenly Francis becomes agitated, and some other people in the asylum have to hold him back. The director is coming down the stairs, and it is Dr. Caligari. Francis yells, “You all think that I’m insane! It isn’t true. It’s the director who’s insane!” Francis begins to attack the director, calling him Dr. Caligari, and some of the doctors hold him back and put him in a straitjacket to subdue him.
Dr. Caligari puts on his glasses, which make him look all the more like the nefarious Dr. Caligari from the story. Francis looks horrified as Caligari examines him and tells his assistants, “At last I understand his delusion. He thinks I am that mystic, Caligari. Now I know exactly how to cure him…”
Analysis
Caligari’s obsessive desire to become Caligari, to “know everything…penetrate his secrets” is at the center of his diabolical nature. His desire to become the figure, not simply model his own life after him, but to become him, reveals just how insane and crooked the evil asylum director really is. Indeed the drive is so strong within him that when he goes out into the world, he sees encouragement to become Caligari projected in text form in the world around him. The world explicitly encourages the asylum director to become Dr. Caligari, to take on Caligari’s life as his own. Caligari's obsessive drive to erase the boundaries between himself and the historical mystic is what terrifies Francis the most.
Indeed, boundaries of all kinds are dissolved throughout the film, and it is through the asylum director’s obsession with Caligari that this becomes symbolically relevant. Just as the asylum director wants to literally become Caligari—thus dismantling all boundaries of identity and time between them—physical boundaries are loose in the world of the film, and people can come and go as they please. As discussed before, Cesare’s breaking in to Jane’s room is less of a break-in and more of a wander-in; it is as though the window is barely an obstruction. Additionally, throughout the film, characters move in and out of one another’s spaces, and the set itself feels more like a whimsical and intricate system of tunnels than a town of distinct architecture. In this way, the loose and permeable psychological boundaries of the characters—particularly Caligari—are mirrored in the way that physical space functions.
The most shocking revelation comes at the end, and lends some clues as to why boundaries are so indistinct within Francis’ story. After Francis finishes telling the story of Dr. Caligari to his older friend sitting on the bench with him, we realize that Francis himself is a patient at the asylum. While the viewer has assumed that Francis is perfectly sane and is giving an objective account of his experience, this assumption is immediately and starkly brought into question with the realization that he is himself insane. Immediately, he becomes an unreliable narrator, and the entire narrative becomes something of an illusion. This revelation is disorienting indeed, in that it calls into question the plot of the entire film, but it is also clarifying, in that it lends context to the dreamy and at times outlandish nature of Francis’ yarn.
Indeed, all of the sane characters in Francis’ account are insane in real life. Jane, the story’s damsel-in-distress, is an unusual looking woman who believes that she is a queen. She and Francis are not engaged at all, but are simply fellow patients at the asylum. Cesare the Somnambulist is not a Somnambulist at all, but an insane man looking at a flower in the courtyard of the asylum. Indeed, Francis himself is delusional. While in his account it seemed as though the world itself was going mad around him, and he was the only beacon of right-mindedness, the reverse is actually true. The asylum director, the same man who portrayed Dr. Caligari within Francis’s story, is not an insane murderer at all, but a measured doctor who is trying to find the correct diagnosis for Francis. This switch completely reverses the viewers’ perceptions and disorients and destabilizes the facts of the narrative.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is horrific because it seeks to make viewers feel as though they are insane, just like Francis. In placing the game-changing revelation at the very end of the film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari leads the viewers along a particular narrative arc before informing them that all they have believed to be true is actually false. In this way, the film simulates the effect of a person being informed they are insane. While the insane person feels as though their perceptions are true and they can trust their own understanding of reality, it is the doctor and the sane person’s undertaking to prove that this is not the case. Because we have been aligned with Francis and his perceptions of events, when the end arrives, it is as though we the viewer are complicit in his insane perceptions. Having seen what Francis saw, we the viewer cannot be so sure of what is truth and what is illusion.
