Domestic animals

Dispassionate. And distant. Confronting society with its hypocrisy, desperate negotiations as means to navigate our insatiable pathetic needs. Fassbinder shows us a homily to sort out women’s problems. Bremen Freedom (1972, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) is a women’s picture chamber nightmare clinical study that pathologizes what a woman must endure and lets her resort to a reasonable recourse that society would deem unacceptable. But nevertheless, it’s fun to see what that would look like.

     GEESCHE (Carstensen) is everything a man could want. She’s submissive, a loyal servant, longsuffering, and sexually available. She’s everything a woman could want as well. She’s business-minded, asserts her independence over any obstacle or foe at any cost, and murders everyone around her once it becomes convenient. The plot structure goes through a series of men who Geesche dispassionately poisons at the end of each act. But each murder feels justified. From her syphilitic whoring cheating abusive husband, through each subsequent suitor who becomes a replacement that puts her right back in the same identical situation going through the same motions. Including her mother, father, children, girlfriend, anyone who comes over, poisoned.
     Except one random dude played by Fassbinder himself who has the white pellets in the coffee tested and plainly asks, why did she want to poison him? To which Geesche’s response is to give up and die. Collapsing on the floor. Fassbinder withholds from us the expected climax and resolution. This might be to emphasize how the material and what it’s dealing with about life isn’t anything to emotionally connect with in a way that gets outraged, or angry, or catharsis brought on by revenge. It’s boring. Flat. This is how women have been treated a hundred years ago and still are today. It’s a miracle more of them don’t poison us all.
 
Bremen Freedom is one sided. Geesche bends over backwards to be a wife, mother, successful businesswoman, homemaker, lover, yet each successive man in her life abhorrently neglects her as insubordinate chattel. It’s everyone else who’s impossible, not Geesche. Also they’re all pretty much losers.
     That Geesche kills everyone only once they objectify, abuse, dehumanize, betray, and take advantage of her is as equal in this fictionalized setting as to how they treat her. And the way all of the acts share a similar length, and follow a certain repetition creates a sense of identifying with the everyday mundane relatability of all of this. For someone who makes such bleak tedious art films Fassbinder sure knows how to appropriate familiar genre mechanisms and subvert them in emotionally or intellectually resonant ways without resorting to cheap exploitation.
     I presume based on his acumen for macroeconomics and games of chance that Fassbinder’s disillusionment in the institution of marriage and society’s expectations of women, he sees the way to balance the ledger through cinema. Geesche is characterized as if she were society or men. The tables are turned. And beyond this intricate swap I identify with her and condone her choices, though I wouldn’t say the same about society or men in this specific context. And that’s cinema at its best: not just provoking you to think about something differently but also feel something differently while you do.