There are films that entertain, films that instruct, and then there are those rare, terrible works of art that function as open wounds. Augusto Villaronga’s 1987 masterpiece In a Glass Cage (Tras el cristal) belongs definitively to the last category. It is a film that has been called “the most horrifying and disturbing film I’ve ever seen”, “an extraordinarily upsetting film”, and one that “crosses the line for most”. Yet beneath its shocking surface of pedophilia, Nazism, sadomasochism, and ritual murder lies one of cinema’s most penetrating inquiries into a question that haunts the modern world: how does the human mind become fascist? What makes Villaronga’s vision so devastating, and so urgently relevant, is its insistence on the humanity of its monsters. This is not an apology for evil but its opposite: a refusal to allow us the comfort of othering the fascist mind. By walking us through the exact psychological steps by which a victim becomes a perpetrator, a child becomes a monster, the film performs an act of radical, uncomfortable empathy—not to excuse, but to understand. And in that understanding lies the only genuine inoculation against the fascism that, as the Auschwitz survivor Edith Eger wrote, “we each have … within”.

Part One: The Historical Wound—Spain, Franco, and the Lingering Ghost To understand In a Glass Cage, we must first understand the historical crucible in which it was forged. Villaronga made his debut feature in 1987, twelve years after the death of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, during what one critic has called “the flagrantly permissive post-Franco Socialist period when all censorship was suspended”. This was a nation emerging from nearly four decades of fascist rule, a country whose collective psyche bore deep scars that had never been properly lanced. The film’s setting, however, is explicitly the 1950s—the high Franco era—and its protagonist is a German Nazi doctor hiding in rural Catalonia. This temporal displacement is crucial. Villaronga is not making a film about the Holocaust per se, but about the export of fascist consciousness. By relocating his Nazi monster to Franco’s Spain, he draws a direct line between the two great European fascisms of the twentieth century. As one critic notes, the film functions as “a death cry over the evils of another fascist dictator—Francisco Franco died 10 years before this film’s release”. The Nazi doctor Klaus is a living seed of authoritarian violence that takes root in fertile soil. But the film’s historical resonance goes deeper than simple political allegory. Klaus is explicitly modeled on the figure of Gilles de Rais, the fifteenth-century French knight and child murderer. Villaronga, in an effort to give the story “more contemporary resonance, changed his Rais figure to an ex-Nazi doctor in exile”. This transformation is telling: it suggests that fascism is not a unique historical phenomenon but a recurring structure of desire that can attach itself to any ideology, any era, any nation. The Nazi uniform is merely the most recent costume for an ancient horror. This insight connects directly to the work of the German-Jewish social psychologist Erich Fromm, who in 1941 insisted that “any attempt to understand the attraction which fascism exercises upon great nations compels us to recognize the role of psychological factors”. Fromm understood that fascism could not be explained solely by economic conditions or political history; it required an investigation into the emotional and psychological vulnerabilities that make authoritarianism seductive. Villaronga’s film is, in essence, a cinematic translation of Fromm’s project: a case study in the psychology of fascist desire. Part Two: The Iron Lung—Encapsulation and the Architecture of Fascist Space The most striking visual element of In a Glass Cage is, of course, the iron lung itself—the cylindrical, body-length machine that encases Klaus after his failed suicide attempt, leaving only his face visible to the outside world. The film’s title refers both to this literal glass cage and to the larger metaphorical cages that structure the characters’ existence. The iron lung functions as a powerful symbol of fascist consciousness in several ways. First, it represents the encapsulation of the self within a rigid, mechanized system. Klaus cannot move; he cannot act on his desires except through the agency of others. He has become pure will without body, pure intention without execution. This is a profound commentary on the fascist mind: it is a consciousness that has severed itself from the messy, vulnerable, embodied reality of human existence. As one critic observes, the iron lung makes Klaus “a captive audience” for Angelo’s reenactments of his own crimes. He is forced to watch—to be the spectator of his own evil, refracted through the actions of his protégé. But the glass cage also functions as a theatrical space. In a telling moment, a maid remarks that Klaus’s iron lung makes her uncomfortable “because it makes her feel like she’s at the movies”. This meta-cinematic observation cuts to the heart of the film’s project: In a Glass Cage is itself a glass cage, a transparent but inescapable space in which the audience is forced to witness horrors we would normally turn away from. “A film becomes a glass cage for the audience,” one reviewer notes; “when it connects, it creates a space around an audience that’s translucent yet halts all movement”. This theatricality is not accidental. The fascist mind, as Hannah Arendt famously observed in her coverage of the Eichmann trial, is characterized by a profound banality—a disconnection from the reality of suffering that allows atrocities to be committed as if they were mere administrative tasks. Villaronga literalizes this by turning Klaus into a spectator of his own crimes. The iron lung transforms the villa into a theater of cruelty, with Klaus as the immobilized audience and Angelo as the performer. The scrapbook of photographs and drawings that Klaus kept of his wartime atrocities becomes a script, a manual for the repetition of violence. This leads us to the second mechanism of fascist consciousness: the aestheticization of violence. Klaus treated his murders as “some ennobling, pseudo-Nietzschean philosophical experiment or art project,” preserving detailed records of his actions as if they were works of art. The film itself, with its “cold blue-gray palette” and “oppressive ambient hum,” adopts a deliberately aestheticized visual language. As one critic writes, the film “implicates us in that Fascist/Nazi privileging of the organized, symmetrically beautiful over the human, with human beings treated as so many disposable, aesthetically-ranked objects in a hierarchy of taste imposed by the rule of the strong”. We are made complicit in the very gaze we condemn. Part Three: The Cycle of Abuse—Trauma as Transmission Mechanism At the narrative heart of In a Glass Cage is the relationship between Klaus and Angelo. Angelo is revealed to be one of Klaus’s former victims, a boy who was molested and tortured by the doctor during the war. But Angelo has not returned for simple revenge. Instead, he seeks something far more disturbing: initiation. Angelo arrives at the villa claiming to be a trained nurse, wins over the family, and gradually begins reenacting Klaus’s crimes in front of him. He brings young boys to the house, kills them using Klaus’s own methods, and forces the paralyzed doctor to watch. In the film’s most shocking sequence, Angelo removes Klaus from the iron lung, allowing him to suffocate, then climbs into the machine himself, as if donning the mantle of his predecessor. As one critic puts it, “the cycle of abuse and murder comes full circle”. This is the film’s most devastating insight: trauma does not merely damage its victims; it can transform them into perpetrators. The psychological literature on this phenomenon is extensive. As one scholar notes, “Angelo was one of his victims, and after having been a victim, he himself becomes a predator, which unfortunately is a cycle that happens in real life to victims who aren’t able to get help”. The film refuses the comforting binary of innocent victim versus evil perpetrator, insisting instead on the tragic, morally ambiguous reality of intergenerational trauma. The trauma psychologist Gabor Maté has written extensively about this mechanism. “Nobody is born with rabid hatred, untrammelled rage, existential fear or cold contempt permanently embedded in their minds or hearts,” he argues. “These fulminant emotions, when chronic, are responses to unbearable suffering endured at a time of utmost vulnerability, helplessness and unrelieved threat: that is, in early childhood”. Angelo embodies this truth. His horrific actions are not the eruption of some innate evil but the logical—though morally monstrous—consequence of what was done to him. But the film does not allow us to simply label Angelo as a victim acting out. His agency is real; his choices are his own. Villaronga forces us to sit with the uncomfortable reality that understanding the causes of evil does not erase the responsibility for it. As Maté writes, “fascism is on the emotional level: a desperate escape from vulnerability”. Angelo’s transformation into a murderer is an escape from the vulnerability of victimhood—but it is an escape into something even worse. This insight connects to the work of the Frankfurt School, particularly Theodor Adorno’s concept of the “authoritarian personality.” Adorno and his colleagues sought to identify the psychological traits that made individuals susceptible to fascist ideology. Their research revealed that authoritarianism is not a political position but a character structure—a way of relating to the world that craves hierarchy, fears ambiguity, and projects repressed desires onto scapegoats. Angelo’s obsession with Klaus, his need to master the master’s techniques, his transformation of the villa into a miniature concentration camp complete with barbed wire—all of these are textbook manifestations of the authoritarian personality in formation. Part Four: Homoeroticism and the Seduction of Power One of the most controversial aspects of In a Glass Cage is its explicit linking of fascism with homosexuality. The film contains “some of the most bizarre love scenes ever conceived (anyone for iron lung sex?)”. Angelo masturbates on Klaus’s face, kisses him, and engages in elaborate erotic rituals that blur the line between love and violence. As one critic notes, the film is “a variation on the themes of sadomasochism and the relationship between sex and Thanatos under fascism” first explored by Liliana Cavani in The Night Porter. Why this association? The answer lies in the psychology of fascist desire. Fascism, at its core, is about the eroticization of power—the transformation of domination into pleasure. The fascist mind does not merely tolerate violence; it desires it. This is what Foucault meant when he spoke of “the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us”. The homosexual dimension of the film is not a statement about gay identity but a metaphor for the structure of desire that fascism cultivates: a desire for the strong, the dominant, the beautiful—a desire that is fundamentally narcissistic, turned inward upon the self and its reflection in the powerful other. The film’s treatment of Klaus’s scrapbook is particularly revealing in this regard. The scrapbook contains not just records of murders but photographs, drawings, and writings that treat violence as aesthetic production. It is a kind of pornography—not of the body but of power. Angelo’s study of this scrapbook is an education in the erotics of domination. He learns not just the techniques of murder but the pleasure of it. This connection between fascism and homoeroticism has a long pedigree in European cinema. Visconti’s The Damned (1969) first posited “the implicit relationship between homosexuality and fascism”. Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974) explored the sadomasochistic bond between a concentration camp survivor and her former SS tormentor. Pasolini’s Salo (1975) depicted the systematic sexual torture of adolescents by fascist libertines. Villaronga’s film belongs to this tradition, but it pushes the connection further by making the sexual dimension pedophilic—a choice that has made the film almost unwatchable for many viewers. Yet this extremity is not gratuitous. By making the erotic bond between Klaus and Angelo explicitly pedophilic, Villaronga highlights the developmental dimension of fascist transmission. Fascism is not adopted by fully formed adults making rational choices; it is installed in childhood, through abuse, neglect, and the modeling of authoritarian behavior. Angelo’s desire for Klaus is the desire of a child for the powerful adult who first shaped his understanding of love and violence. It is tragic precisely because it is so understandable—and so damning. Part Five: The Mirror and the Gaze—Fascism as Performance Throughout In a Glass Cage, Villaronga employs a sophisticated visual strategy that forces the audience to confront our own relationship to the violence on screen. The film is shot predominantly in subjective point-of-view shots, with the camera often positioned as if it were spying on Klaus through a window or observing Angelo’s rituals from an unseen vantage point. We are made into voyeurs, complicit in the gaze that objectifies the victims. This strategy reaches its apotheosis in the film’s use of mirrors. Klaus is positioned so that he can see himself in a mirror as Angelo reenacts his crimes. He is forced to watch himself—or rather, to watch a younger, more vital version of himself performing the acts he can no longer commit. The mirror functions as a site of reflexivity, forcing both Klaus and the audience to confront the relationship between spectator and spectacle. This reflexive dimension is crucial for understanding the mechanism of fascist consciousness. Fascism is not merely a set of beliefs; it is a performance. The Nazi rallies, the uniforms, the salutes, the rituals of submission and domination—all of these are theatrical spectacles designed to produce emotional states in both participants and observers. Villaronga’s film internalizes this theatricality, turning the villa into a stage and Klaus’s iron lung into a proscenium arch. As one critic observes, the film itself “functions as a sort of iron lung for the audience”. We are immobilized, forced to breathe the same poisoned air as the characters, unable to look away. This is not exploitation for its own sake; it is a calculated strategy to produce in the viewer the very feeling that fascism produces: the simultaneous attraction to and repulsion from violence, the desire to look and the wish to turn away. The film’s “cold blue-gray palette” and “oppressive ambient hum” contribute to this atmosphere of claustrophobic fascination. We are not allowed the relief of moral clarity or aesthetic distance. Instead, we are plunged into a nightmare that “stays in the mind long after more bloodthirsty recent horror flicks have faded away”. The film’s power lies precisely in its refusal to let us off the hook. We are made to feel the seduction of the abyss. Part Six: The Spectacle of Suffering—Bakhtin and the Grotesque Body To fully appreciate the film’s psychological mechanisms, it is helpful to consider them through the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque and the grotesque body. Bakhtin argued that carnival—the medieval festival of role reversal and bodily excess—served as a form of popular resistance against the “stern diktats of state and church”. The grotesque body, with its emphasis on orifices, protrusions, and the dissolution of boundaries, represented a challenge to the classical, closed body of official culture. In a Glass Cage inverts this carnival logic. Here, the grotesque is not liberating but fascist. The film is filled with images of bodily violation: the iron lung that encloses Klaus’s body, leaving only his face—his mouth—exposed; the injections, beatings, and suffocations that Angelo inflicts on his victims; the final image of Angelo climbing into the iron lung himself, as if the machine were a womb or a coffin. What Bakhtin called “the lower bodily stratum” becomes in Villaronga’s film the site not of democratic laughter but of authoritarian domination. The body is not celebrated; it is disciplined, broken, remade in the image of power. This is the fascist body: a body that has been severed from its own vitality, reduced to a mere instrument of will. The grotesque, in this context, serves a specific psychological function. It desensitizes the spectator to suffering by making it aesthetic, ritualized, predictable. Angelo’s murders are not chaotic eruptions of rage but carefully choreographed performances, complete with photographic documentation and the recitation of passages from Klaus’s journal. This ritualization is a classic mechanism of fascist consciousness: by transforming violence into spectacle, it becomes bearable, even pleasurable. The film’s most disturbing scenes—the moments when we see young boys being tortured and killed—are shot with a detached, almost clinical precision. The camera does not flinch, but neither does it indulge. We are made to feel the horror precisely through the absence of sensationalism. As one critic notes, “most (though not all) of the violence and aberrant sexuality is implied”. It is the implication that haunts, the suggestion of horrors that our minds must complete. This strategy connects to a broader tradition of European art cinema that aims “to provoke a visceral sense of disgust and outrage by getting us far too close-in to the cruel, rancid, inhuman decadence represented by the ultra-right regimes”. These films operate on the assumption that only by feeling the horror—by experiencing it bodily, viscerally—can we truly understand it. Villaronga takes this project further than most, but his aim is the same: to produce in the spectator an experience that no documentary or history book could replicate. Part Seven: The Seduction of the Mirror—Angelo’s Transformation The central psychological arc of In a Glass Cage is Angelo’s transformation from victim to perpetrator. This transformation is not instantaneous; it unfolds gradually, through a series of ritual acts that mirror Klaus’s original crimes. Each murder brings Angelo closer to the man who destroyed him, and each act of violence makes Klaus’s power more securely his own. The film’s title is key here. The glass cage is not just Klaus’s iron lung; it is also Angelo’s mind. He has internalized Klaus’s gaze, Klaus’s desires, Klaus’s aesthetic of violence. He sees himself reflected in the glass, and he likes what he sees. As one critic observes, the mirror that Klaus can see himself in “actualizes the reflexivity that the film is interested in”—the reflexivity of fascist consciousness, which is always looking at itself, admiring itself, performing for itself. This narcissistic dimension is crucial. The fascist mind, as Christopher Bollas has argued, is characterized by “the destruction of symbolic thinking” and “the destruction of the contents of the mind”. Symbols—with their ambiguity, their openness to multiple interpretations—are replaced by rigid, literal signifiers. The swastika, the uniform, the salute: these are not symbols but commands. Angelo’s transformation involves precisely this destruction of symbolic thinking. He does not interpret Klaus’s scrapbook; he reenacts it. He does not understand Klaus’s crimes; he repeats them. This is the mechanism of fascist transmission at its most terrifying. Fascism is not passed down through explicit teaching but through imitation—the modeling of behavior by powerful figures that vulnerable minds absorb without conscious reflection. Angelo did not choose to become a murderer; he was shaped into one by the man who first hurt him. And yet, the film insists, his choices are his own. The tragedy is that his freedom has been so constrained by his history that the only choices available to him are monstrous ones. The film’s ending—Angelo climbing into the iron lung after Klaus’s death—is a masterstroke of psychological precision. He has not simply killed his tormentor; he has become him. The cycle of abuse is continued, with Angelo now in the position of power. The final image is one of terrible stasis: the glass cage now contains a new occupant, and the machinery of fascist consciousness hums on. Part Eight: The Spectator’s Complicity—Why We Cannot Look Away Perhaps the most uncomfortable question raised by In a Glass Cage is not about Klaus or Angelo but about us. Why do we watch? Why do we subject ourselves to images of such extreme suffering? What desire does this film satisfy? These questions go to the heart of the film’s project. Villaronga is not simply depicting fascism; he is reproducing its structure in the relationship between film and viewer. As one critic argues, the film “appears to be making a meta-critique about how film can serve as a vehicle for reproducing fascism itself”. The very act of watching—of looking at suffering from a safe distance, of taking pleasure in the aesthetic arrangement of violence—mirrors the voyeurism of Klaus’s scrapbook and Angelo’s performances. This is a devastating indictment of the viewer, and it is one that Villaronga does not allow us to escape. The film’s “controversial and problematic strategy,” as one critic puts it, “could, potentially, offer more insight into the meaning of the real historical horrors to which the film refers than any more tactful narrative film or earnest documentary ever could”. By forcing us to confront our own desire to look, the film makes us recognize the fascism within ourselves. The “fascism in our heads” that Foucault spoke of is not a metaphor. It is a real structure of desire, a real susceptibility to the seductions of power, hierarchy, and violence. In a Glass Cage does not allow us the comfort of believing that fascism is something that happened to other people in other times. It insists, with brutal honesty, that the seeds of authoritarianism lie within every human psyche, waiting for the right conditions to sprout. This is not a counsel of despair. On the contrary, it is the only realistic basis for resistance. As Maté writes, “Self-reflection, something the fascist mentality cannot abide, can soften the heart”. By forcing us into self-reflection—by making us confront our own complicity in the gaze that objectifies suffering—the film performs an act of psychological counter-fascism. It breaks the spell of aestheticized violence by making us feel its horror, not just understand it intellectually. The film’s banned status in countries like Australia is a testament to its power. But it is precisely this power—the power to disturb, to offend, to unsettle—that makes the film so valuable. We do not watch In a Glass Cage for entertainment; we watch it as an inoculation, a vaccine against the very poison it depicts. The experience is painful, but the alternative is worse.