Great Characters: Damiel (“Wings of Desire”)
I still remember the night I first saw Wings of Desire (written and directed by Wim Wenders). I was in Berkeley, California for a weekend getaway with my wife, summer of 1988. We were both so blown away by the film, we stayed up for hours talking about it and dissecting it. Here is the premise per IMDB:
An angel tires of overseeing human activity and wishes to become human when he falls in love with a mortal.
That angel is named Damiel:
It’s great to live by the spirit, to testify day by day for eternity, only what’s spiritual in people’s minds. But sometimes I’m fed up with my spiritual existence. Instead of forever hovering above I’d like to feel a weight grow in me to end the infinity and to tie me to earth. I’d like, at each step, each gust of wind, to be able to say “Now.” Now and now” and no longer “forever” and “for eternity.” To sit at an empty place at a card table and be greeted, even by a nod. Every time we participated, it was a pretense. Wrestling with one, allowing a hip to be put out in pretense, catching a fish in pretense, in pretense sitting at tables, drinking and eating in pretense. Having lambs roasted and wine served in the tents out there in the desert, only in pretense. No, I don’t have to beget a child or plant a tree but it would be rather nice coming home after a long day to feed the cat, like Philip Marlowe, to have a fever and blackended fingers from the newspaper, to be excited not only by the mind but, at last, by a meal, by the line of a neck by an ear. To lie! Through one’s teeth. As you’re walking, to feel your bones moving along. At last to guess, instead of always knowing. To be able to say “ah” and “oh” and “hey” instead of “yea” and “amen.” Or at last to feel how it is to take off shoes under a table and wriggle your toes barefoot, like that.
When the child was a child, it walked with its arms swinging. It wanted the stream to be a river, the river a torrent, and this puddle to be the sea. When the child was a child, it didn’t know it was a child. Everything was full of life, and all life was one. When the child was a child, it had no opinion about anything, no habits. It often sat cross-legged, took off running, had a cowlick in its hair, and didn’t make faces when photographed.
When the child was a child, it was the time of these questions. Why am I me, and why not you? Why am I here, and why not there? When did time begin, and where does space end? Isn’t life under the sun just a dream? Isn’t what I see, hear, and smell just the mirage of a world before the world? Does evil actually exist, and are there people who are really evil? How can it be that I, who am I, wasn’t before I was, and that sometime I, the one I am, no longer will be the one I am?
This is an unusual case where an English title is, I think, better than the original. In German, the title Der Himmel über Berlin translates to “The Skies Over Berlin.” But “Wings Of Desire” really nails the essence of the story: an angel with a powerful yearning to “feel a weight grow in me to end the infinity and to tie me to earth.”
Damiel: A great character.
Any Wings of Desire fans out there?