Heart of darkness

If you would think Rio das Mortes (1970, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) is this optimistic sweet outlier in Fassbinder’s filmography where for once the characters aren’t in anguish due to some out of reach object of desire, instead a light fairytale with a happy ending, I’d say you’re wrong. Because the protagonist isn’t MICHEL and GÜNTHER, it’s HANNA.

     That’s why the film opens with Hanna (Hanna Schygulla) looking cool as fuck in black lingerie and thigh highs smoking a cigarette and listening to records. And ends with her lowering her weapon and stroking that fox stole before reapplying her lipstick. It’s her movie. She’s the quintessential Fassbinder central protagonist. Michel and Günther are the counterweight to Fassbinder’s sense of dramaturgy—unrealistically idealistic naïves fixated on a fairytale because they lack life experience.
     Not to be wholly discounted, Michel and Günther have this cute little buddy coming of age adventure—Hollywood drivel. A youth picture. Michel is bored at his tiler job with Harry Baer. In that male pornographic fantasy sequence when the Carla Aulaulu character seduces him in her sheer blouse doing a Marilyn Monroe number, he’s oblivious. Michel doesn’t care about sex, he just wants to move to Peru with his best friend Günther. And when Michel beats up Günther for joining the military it’s in defiance of growing up. The sad scene where Michel sells his car connects because it’s him fighting society to break away and be free to go off on his dream Peru adventure instead of accepting his adult responsibilities. 
     So toward the end of the final act Michel and Günther are in a bar and overhear something about some random philanthropist then cold visit her home and show her a childlike treasure map of Peru and she gives them $30,000. I don’t seriously think anyone is meant to buy this. I think it’s like an expressionist tacked on bit of fun Fassbinder’s having with the audience.
 
Rio das Morts if anything has got to be appreciated for its one truly sublime scene, when Hanna dances with Fassbinder to “Jailhouse Rock” in that bar. This takes us out of the fairytale and up into ascension of heightened real life. The tangible emotion is felt as we recognize Fassbinder smoking cigarettes, drinking and listening to Elvis in a bar, being nagged by some girl he belligerently assaults—his famous line sometimes happiness isn’t always fun. This is Fassbinder. This is Hanna.
     Hanna is either pregnant or thinking about having a child. She’s grown up. My fantasy reading is that early scene when Michel spills the salt and there’s that stinger then we cut tight to an insert and close-ups is a curse to the film that sends him out of Fassbinder’s anguished world and into an artificial fairytale away from the truth. Fassbinder embraces brutality, but condemns fear. Michel is afraid of growing up.
     That cruel coda when Michel’s landlady assumes Hanna is his wife and asks for the rent is Hanna being stuck with having to pay for his escape. Fassbinder’s characters are slaves to their desires. Hanna even hatches a few schemes to get Michel to Peru that don’t work because it’s a pipe dream, until KATRIN HANNA’S FRIEND actually gets her researcher husband JOACHIM to fund the expedition. But Michel is a baby and doesn’t want to go on his child adventure with those lame-o’s. Hanna wants Michel so bad she even tries to sleep with Günther to get him to take her to Peru either instead of Michel or along with both of them so she can be with Michel. The heart is unreasonable. 
     If there is an exception to Rio das Mortes it seems like Hanna is pretty okay about losing her most cherished love here. And not in a heartless disillusioned Fassbinder way. She’s resilient. She proves a stronger woman than the manchild. And like how the film supposedly about a trip to Peru never gets around to it until the very last minute, Hanna shows us a character who exists apart from getting what she wants. Right before he drafts his fantasy map Michel even says “You can’t do what you really want,” but it’s Hanna who embodies this. And that’s the most romantic thing about Fassbinder.

The Coffee Shop

If you were to examine the morality in Das Kaffeehaus (1970, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) what would you get? Among its ensemble, characters can be grouped into either those in anguish, or those who accept the status quo as is. Yet who is it that suffers the most?

     Hans Hirschmüller as TRAPPOLO the servant and married couple Günther Kaufmann as FLAMINIO ARDENTI, his wife Ingrid Caven as PLACIDA face tragic fates, and as is typical in Fassbinder’s films, they’re outsiders. In Trappolo’s case, he’s stuck in the past, how different his time spent in the New World was, discovering gold in Arizona. But not here. Not anymore. Venice is a crooked game where (to repeat myself yet again) Fassbinder lays out an infrastructure based on sex, love, and money as the necessary objects people need and will do anything to get; along the way this can include borrowing, lending, stealing, and swindling. Trappolo invests his life savings in the stock market and loses it to the broker before he even gets the chance to play.
     Flaminio Ardenti is in hiding under the alias COUNT LEANDER and initially under this false identity is doing pretty good for himself here in Venice. That is until his wife, who’s “on his tail like the devil” catches up with him. In Fassbinder it’s the anguish that sticks with me. Their fate is powerful. They’re staged like buried corpses. Screaming their devotion to one another feels like marriage is decay, being buried alive, which ironically is something along what Leander accuses the whore LISAURA (Hanna Schygulla) of.
     But through all the backstabbing and maneuvering Lisaura lands on her feet, happy to go back to DON MARZIO (Kurt Raab), and he happy to get his old whore back, which is what he wanted more than anything this entire time. Das Kaffeehaus has its focus on institutions. The dude who owns the coffee shop and the dude who owns the gambling house call the shots. But the twist is the gambling house is rigged, except because the proprietor RIDOLFO (Wilhelm Rabenbauer) is in debt to the city of Venice they publicly admit they won’t arrest him until he pays off what he owes them. This stuff is rich. Fassbinder sees the worst in society. And life is a free market where the currency is human desire.
     EUGENIO (Harry Bär) seems like the central protagonist. Is this one of the only times we see a happy ending in Fassbinder? In the opening of the play Don Marzio mentions to Eugenio, who has a severe gambling problem, that he might get his wife to work as a hostess in the gambling hall for extra cash, to which Eugenio defiantly opposes. But what happened between then and the end where he pimps his wife VITTORIA (Margit Carstensen) to PANDOLFO, owner of the gambling house? Eugenio and Vittoria walk away gleefully truly happy living off the hopes that with the money they’re making from her having sex with the old dude one day they might have enough to buy the casino. Oh wait I guess the real tragedy is that they think that could actually happen. This one is tricky though. Because for the moment and foreseeable future all three of them are happy. It’s the morality of de Sade’s Justine. The wicked are rewarded and the virtuous are punished.
 
The dialogue in Das Kaffeehaus is delivered at a constant pace, unlike in Fassbinder’s films. Because there are no sets and characters never leave the stage, there are even times when different scenes nearly overlap. Or cross cut (in the same shot) at the very least. It makes me miss his weird long pauses slow delivery style. Lucky for me there’s plenty more of that to come.

     There's also this comedic device that never gets old where anytime money is mentioned someone nearby converts the dollar figure into marks. And every time it's instantaneous. And every character gets a turn. They all do it deadpan. Just emphasizes the importance of money in a very funny way.

Technical draftsman mumblecore

Okay just kidding Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (1969, Michael Fengler, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) isn’t technically mumblecore. Because while it resembles that genre in form, the content of mumblecore is usually a string of episodic small little ups and downs along the path of emotional growth among some young people finding themselves. Or something. Basically not far off from early Mike Leigh or kitchen sink realism.

     But when you watch Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? You first wonder wait a minute why is this movie boring as fuck? And then you’re like wait a minute, this is Fassbinder (it’s actually not), why is the camera handheld and boring? Raking shots? No rigorous formal staging? Because this movie is a sick joke. It’s mumblecore as disguise for working class satire to show how boring buttoned-down respectable member of society life is. Torture. 
    The friends trying to tell jokes and none of them are funny. The obnoxious record store trip asking what’s the name of that song with such broad details as to be inconsequential—although the girls get it. Which is sad, like this is what life is about. The family visit with the in-laws where they can’t remember the name of the director or actor of the production of Othello they just attended; their only insightful observation that the overture was kinda loud. This movie is bleak. Depressing. And the only thing going for the married couple is HERR R. (Kurt Raab) might get a promotion with slightly more pay. Kill me now.
     After the office party where Herr R. gets wasted and goes on rambling another of the boringest speeches ever heard, his wife tells him the older he gets, the stupider and fatter. There’s some character growth after all. He has a friend visit and when you see the coverage of the wife that’s when this movie is legit hilarious. And not to spoil anything, it’s in the freakin title, when Herr R. runs amok it’s his wife who has a friend over and the way Irm Hermann delivers that endless account of a ski trip is even more boring even funnier. There’s a special place in hell reserved for movies like this.

Warning if you suffer from depression don't watch this film

 

Katzelmacher (1969, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) is another one of Fassbinder’s bleak little gloom dumps. Its languor is a cinematic device to convey depression. 5 women. 5 men. Its theme, sex is currency, money is currency. Its entire runtime devoted to gossip, prejudice, hypocrisy, spiteful bickering, backstabbing, deception, borrowing and lending money and sex interchangeably among a friendgroup living in a low rent apartment building in a neighborhood we get the sense they all grew up not far from. And it depicts everything there is to say about society. Because what else is there to say?

     The moral of the story here is if you have the looks, you charge for sex. If you don’t, you pay for sex. Life in a nutshell. Through the first act the whole time the boyfriends of the 2 women keep talking about some risky plan what they’re discussing is their intentions to each pimp out their own girlfriends. That’s a new one for the dudebros. But it’s also integral to defining the infrastructure in this microcosm. And one of the two dudes makes his money as secret rough trade to a regular.
     Fassbinder maintains his ongoing theme, exploiting the wellbeing of others for profit. Katzelmacher is a dead end. This little community suck the life out of each other. When the foreigner arrives, him being from another country is only the surface, the deeper meaning is he is different because he has hope, tenderness, and if not happy to be alive, at least he appreciates his existence and what he has. That’s why he’s a target. That’s why MARIE (Hanna Schygulla) wants him. That’s why they click him in the street. And that’s what crushes his tender affection for her. That’s why his slumlord in the making landlady overcharges him (and begins her search to do the same to as many more foreigners as she can).
 
The style of Katzelmacher is as oppressive as its substance. It might be the only movie ever made where noticeably every single camera setup is flat. As in lines in each frame run perfectly level, parallel along x axis. Nor does the camera ever move. Save for one instance, which is repeated often, and the only time music is used in the film (a sparse piece for solo piano), a leading 2 shot where characters walk and talk outside the building, maybe a courtyard.
     Then there’s ROSY, the one woman who openly accepts money for sex, who when doing so, or socializing with anyone in her flat, is shot in an all-white walls vacuum void. ELISABETH (Irm Hermann) is the only one with any real money. And Rosy is the only one capable of earning a living by having sex for money. But by the end of the film it becomes apparent Elisabeth will live comfortably, probably becoming wealthy. Yet Rosy has dreams of being in showbusiness that everyone, including us, are made to clearly understand has no chance of happening. I don’t read this as some sob story boo hoo critique as much as I accept is as a refreshingly succinct take observation.
     And as brutal depressing as Katzelmacher is, by the final act it proves too much, to the point I can’t bear it any longer, and then it becomes hilarious. Full circle. Just like life. Hey, things aren’t so bad after all.

Art is colder than entertainment

Love Is Colder Than Death (1969, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) takes what made the Hollywood delinquent films of the 1950s cool and gets rid of everything else about them. What remains is smoking cigarettes, wearing a leather jacket, and acting tough. Yet it also places this conception of cool in more of an everyday real life relatability. At times it even seems to distance itself from the patently convenient moralizing that comes with the crime genre. It feels like an Andy Warhol exercise in the crime aesthetic via a fuck you to what Quentin Tarantino gets so excited about.
     The film opens with this great shot of its central protagonist FRANZ, played by Fassbinder himself, sitting reading a paper, when a dude asks him for a cigarette and Franz says no. The dude takes the newspaper Franz’s reading and throws it on the ground. Good one. Franz beats the crap out of him, then goes back to his paper. The tone here is so plain. Boring. But the action explodes from nowhere and it’s funny. It’s cool. It’s dangerous. It’s tough.
     Franz is thrown in some place where some group called the syndicate keep forcing him to join. But he refuses. The syndicate is an organization, and if Franz joined he’d belong to a system of criminals. No way. Franz does his own thing. And cares about nothing, which is what makes him so cool as a fictional character. Ulli Lommel is BRUNO, a twerp Franz meets who’s also being held in the building where the syndicate is rounding up potential recruits. Bruno wears a fedora and drives a sedan that looks like it’s from the 1940s, as in he’s playing gangster dress-up. 
 
After Franz is released from the syndicate, Bruno tracks him down. Franz stays in a flat with JOHANNA, played by Hanna Schygulla, who will go on to be the best thing to happen to Fassbinder’s film career. Schygulla is sultry, cute, curvaceous, and perfect in her role here as the woman Franz is pimping out. Pimping her out? In real life not cool. In this movie, very cool. 
     It’s cool because she and Franz don’t have to have square jobs to make a living. When Bruno finds Franz, he moves in with them. Why? How obnoxious. Later we see Franz arrange for Bruno to get his chance with Johanna. Schygulla is the coolest with her hair and how great her ass looks in those jeans, with leather riding boots, a glass of wine, as a record plays just splays herself out on the rug like she doesn’t have the energy to even care about trying anymore, when Bruno attempts to suck on her breast. And she laughs because he’s such a dork. So Franz slaps her. Franz forces Johanna to sell her body. But she refuses to give Bruno a freebee. Why? Because her feminine intuition tips her off that he's syndicate. Syndicate in this case is code for mainstream commercial genre conventions. Crappy cookie cutter crime movies. Johanna is our surrogate. We are here because we find the same type of movie abhorrent. Status quo. 
     The movie ends with a heist where we find out Bruno is working for the syndicate. They tell him “Mr Strauss says get rid of the girl.” But Johanna called the cops before the heist and so they shoot Bruno down in the street. And by now we get to fully appreciate exactly how Love Is Colder Than Death isn’t the crime genre movie we might’ve thought it was. Franz never shot anybody. He let Bruno. And why did Franz trust Bruno? Because he wanted a friend? No way. Because the syndicate is mainstream genre bullshit and so is Bruno. When the syndicate couldn’t get Franz, they tried to take the one thing he cares about, his girl. But they can’t. Franz doesn’t even care about her anyway. We care. But we don’t care about Bruno. And after the cops kill him, the couple toss his corpse out of the car and aren’t at all too broke up about it. The last shot of the movie is the car driving away and Johanna tells Franz, “I called the cops.” And he replies, “whore.” It’s truly hilarious in its understatement. 
 
There’s also this thing with the gun. First we see Franz fiddling fondling that pistol as if he’s more interested in the gun than he is in Johanna. And later when Franz is in custody and Johanna strips nude and lays on the bed next to Bruno, he’s fussing with the gun in the same way. But the difference is Bruno shoots people (and gets shot). Franz doesn’t. Lack of affect, affiliation, showing no emotion is cooler than felony violence.
     Formally, Love Is Colder Than Death uses many direct reverses between two characters, where they each look directly into the lens. This austere, flat, imposing compositional structure is conducive to Fassbinder’s distancing manner of dialogue, which is very sparse, with long pauses in between sentences and reactions, sometimes delivered by one of the characters staring off in another direction entirely. Being a fan of the later works of Nicolas Winding Refn, especially laughing aloud along with how ridiculously slow the dialogue is in Too Old to Die Young, I have to appreciate how at home this style is in all of Fassbinder’s films—the dude invented it. 
     Yet despite such a bleak austere aesthetic, this thing is totally hilarious. Not all the time. But there are a few choice moments for sure. The one that proves the most pertinent for what this film achieves as satire is when they’re buying illegal weapons from that dealer, and poking fun at chic overly stylized genre *cough Tarantino* indulgence, when Bruno dramatically close up looks ahead at camera and slowly removes his sunglasses, the dealer says “Why did you take off your glasses?” And anytime a character is gunned down, the film doesn't even try to sell it as believable. No squibs. No smoking gun. Sound effects sound amateurishly inept on purpose.
     If anything I think this movie is saying what’s really tough is a character like Franz, who is pressured to sell out his independence, betrayed by some jerk that thought he'd be stupid enough to befriend out of loneliness yet easily discards said traitor like trash because he never really was, and selfishly be honest about using his girl. Fassbinder here has begun his path as master of using artifice to express authentic emotions. Avoiding fake genre confines, fake societal confines, in order to portray the anguish of being yourself. It's setting up one of Fassbinder's largest themes: emotional opportunists, exploiting others to survive. Franz never cared about Bruno, so he uses him like the cheesy crime melodrama plot exploits the emotions of audiences who are gullible enough to let them. And Franz living off Johanna selling her body is Fassbinder living off us the audience by operating on our emotions through his art. As we'll soon see Fassbinder is best suited for audiences whom are emotional masochists.

Eraserhead plot analysis

Eraserhead (1977, David Lynch) is about how darkness can control you and embracing the light as a way of overcoming it. The prologue is MAN IN THE PLANET operates the controls in a shack with a hole in its roof, on a planet, in HENRY SPENCER’S head. These are dark forces within any of us. In this case, Man in the Planet releases the ANIMAL FETUS HEAD MOUNTED ON AN APPENDAGE CREATURE into a puddle. Puddles are a recurring motif in Eraserhead. 

     Back in his apartment, when Henry gets the torn in half photo of MARY X from his dresser drawer it shows that he was heartbroken and has since attempted to move on from her. Sex is mysterious in Eraserhead. In the home of Mary X, there’s a foreboding air of sex and terror. There’s something filthy about the way Mr. X has put all of the pipes in the part of town they live in; and something ominous about the way he refers to it as the hellhole it's become. There’s a depravity about him. And the repetitive squishy sounds of the man made chicken gushing ooze from its orifice as MRS X groans with her head tilted back achieves a frightening sexual tone. The shot where the subjective camera moves through the living room is Henry’s trust in Mary going out the window.
     Back at Henry’s apartment we begin to see the first of several shots of his window with the only thing visible beyond it being a brick wall. The mailbox in Henry’s lobby is significant. When he checks it and there’s that small pouch, he goes outside to open it—it’s something he doesn’t want Mary X to know about. Inside it is a small squiggle that’s his sexual desire. Oh and the Animal Fetus Head Mounted on an Appendage Creature no longer has the appendage form it did before entering our world via the metallic interdimensional puddle. It’s bandaged below the neck now. It’s not a baby. It was never meant to be thought of as a real baby. Eraserhead exists in a world where reality and dream logic have merged. So if the Animal Fetus Head Creature isn’t a baby then what is it?
     I don’t think we’re supposed to ask in the literal sense what the Animal Fetus Head Creature is. It’s a means by which Mary X and her family have coerced Henry into becoming entangled with its care. And because he can’t care for it in any proper sense of the term, then what’s it doing in his apartment? So meanwhile Henry’s put his libido squiggle in the little sack in a cabinet stash spot. It’s begun to rain outside. Mary X has left again for the night. The Animal Fetus Head Creature gets sick. Henry then goes to the stash cabinet, but doesn’t open it. Then, notice a shot of the mailbox. (The mailbox isn’t in Henry’s apartment though, it’s downstairs in the lobby. Why this shot? Because Henry’s thinking about some other form of desire or hope that could help him get away from this annoying creature.) But when Henry tries to grab his coat, the thing freaks out. So he can’t leave.
     Now we begin to see what Henry’s been watching when he props his elbows up laying on his bed like he’s watching his favorite TV show, LADY IN THE RADIATOR. She represents Henry’s option to embrace the light. She’s an escape from the darkness (Man in the Planet) controlling Henry. The proscenium arch links her with staged entertainment, an elevated art that enhances your emotions, spirit, or mind. (And take note that doors to the proscenium open similarly to the way the elevator doors in his lobby do.) The remainder of what we get in this middle part of the movie is Lady in the Radiator stomps many smaller Animal Fetus Head mounted on Appendage Creatures as she smiles at us (Henry). Then Lady in the Radiator recedes back into darkness. Next Mary X is back in Henry’s bed, the sound design emphasizing the sound of her teeth chattering in her sleep and the wet sounds of her eye socket as she sweaty writhes in cocoon of bedsheets, spilling out a litter (like the dog with the puppies in her home earlier) of newborn Animal Fetus Head mounted on Appendage Creatures that Henry throws at the wall obliterating them. At this point the cabinet with the squiggle (Henry’s sex impulse) becomes animated and takes on a life of its own. It refuses to stay in the cabinet—as BEAUTIFUL GIRL ACROSS THE HALL calls on Henry for sex.
     When Henry and Beautiful Girl Across the Hall embrace, they’re in something like a giant steaming puddle of white in the middle of his bed. And when the woman submerges below the surface the top of her head resembles a mound of a woman’s pubic hair. Sex between Henry and Beautiful Girl Across the Hall takes him into the proscenium, but at the moment he travels to his next place, the white liquid is seen as to open up like (the elevator doors and) Lady in the Radiator’s proscenium doors—this is there to indicate a sublime (transcendent) ascendance. Also before Henry goes into the radiator there are shots of Beautiful Girl Across the Hall terrified by the appearance of a large lump that resembles Henry’s planet.
 
I think in Eraserhead everything to do with Mary X is experienced in a reality that operates according to the logic of a nightmare. And everything that has to do with Beautiful Girl Across the Hall is experienced as a reality that operates according to the logic of a wet dream. Now the final part of the narrative after Beautiful Girl Across Hall comes over occurs in Henry’s psyche. We get “In Heaven Everything is Fine.” When Henry touches her everything fades to white; he’s practicing. He can’t fully overcome darkness on his first try. When he stops, Lady in the Radiator disappears, and quickly replaced by Man in the Planet.
     When Henry’s head pops off and an Animal Fetus Head sprouts up, he clutches the rail in the proscenium in a way identical to how Beautiful Girl Across Hall did right before she and Henry had sex in his room. A rock is wheeled in that cracks a stream of dark liquid (Henry’s peace of mind). Then his head is sold for erasers. I think this construct is depicting how Henry’s lust is battling his increasing succumbing to the dark taking him over, as is his professional-creative life. He works as a printer. He creates. His head being turned into an eraser is the opposite. He destroys.
 
Upon Henry’s return to reality from his psyche exploration, back in his apartment he looks through his window (for the first time brick wall is gone) and sees someone outside down below beating someone up in a puddle. Then Animal Fetus Head Creature taunts him mercilessly. But a closer shot outside again now shows there’s nothing happening at the puddle. It’s Henry finally beginning to see a world beyond his inner struggles, finding that courage. And his fears at seeing an attack are what the darkness delights in, but looking again realizing that they aren’t there is overcoming the fear.
     When Henry sees Beautiful Girl Across Hall with other dude she sees Henry’s head for a moment with replacement Animal Fetus Head (dark has claimed him). So Henry overcomes the dark and cuts to the heart of his torment (literally cutting into the guts of Animal Fetus Head Creature). And the lamp shorts out just like the lamp shorted out at the dinner when Mrs X first burdened Henry with taking care of Animal Fetus Head Creature. Man in the Planet explodes. Henry literally embraces the light. 
 
In conclusion, I think Henry might’ve been a virgin before he met Mary X. Or she was his first love. And she dumped him. Ghosted him. And it hurt. Everything else that happens in his reality occurs according to nightmare logic, stemming from them having sex, possibly guilt induced. What if Mary got pregnant? What if her mother Mrs X claimed he’s the father of a baby? Even though Henry knows beyond a reasonable doubt that he couldn’t be. What if he had to take care of it anyway? What if it was hideously deformed, sick, taunted him? What if Mary bailed (like she did the first time) and left him to raise it? What if she had more? And the implication that Mr X is depravity and Mrs X is lust and they are the source of terror sex disease. Nightmare.
     Similarly, I think Henry might’ve only seen Beautiful Girl Across the Hall in passing. And his sex dream logic fantasizes that in his mailbox the pouch is this virility, like magic beans out of a fairytale, that make him so desirable to her that she’ll make the first move, knocking on his door in the middle of the night and outright initiating sex. 
     And throughout all this, Henry needs to get back to work. His vacation needs to end. It’s imperative he find his way back to Lady in the Radiator, his muse. And it doesn’t hurt that after he defeats Animal Fetus Head Creature garmonbozia is released from it like magma. In Eraserhead the elevator is only ever seen going up. The appearance of elevator-like doors to the stage where Lady in the Radiator is found is what uplifts us: heaven, spirit, art, cinema, inspiration; the white liquid elevator doors also include sex in this bliss.