Confounding and very fun masterpiece. Impossible. Playful. Full of contradictions. Locks and keys. Set in Berlin right before the Nazis Despair (1978, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) is a murder mystery where we know who did it and why by the time we get to the murder. But there are plenty of other questions for us to ask.
I’ll begin with the contradiction this is a film probably best left up to individual interpretation and now go on to explain what I think it means. Or some of it. Or try to. So when is the first time we see the doppelgänger everyone’s always talking about? When HERMANN HERMANN (Dirk Bogarde yeah for real Dirk Bogarde) is making love with his wife LYDIA and there’s this awkward beat we see another Hermann in the same apartment outside across from them through their window staring and Lydia tells Hermann¹ “I’d like to know what’s going on inside your head,” he tells her to shut up.
Soon after Hermann¹ runs into an insurance salesman he wants to be a psychoanalyst and brings up disassociation. The man who stands outside himself. This sets up the double motif. (Great joke Hermann¹ says “I thought about writing a book about it. Or two.” There’s gonna be a ton of double stuff.) So the earlier scene with Hermann¹ and Lydia is Hermann¹ in philosophical terms is the object. Therefore viewing him from the other flat Hermann² is the subject. But back to the restaurant with the introduction of the insurance salesman-therapist. There’s a mural on the wall that foreshadows the end of the movie Swiss villa where the cops bring Hermann¹ in for charges of murder. This film has a ton of doubles and a ton of foreshadowing.
Next we get the most important key to understanding Despair, which is the Keystone Kops one-reeler. Everything in this short foreshadows the film we’re watching. There’s twin brothers with moustaches (moustaches are also no joke a big detail to follow) who have this lifelong feud confrontation and we cut to an exterior where one walks out having killed the other. The cops realize the evil brother switched places with the good one and shoot him down too. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the evil brother’s name was brown.
But also chocolate has this connotation of [pardon me] women eating while sitting on their fat asses. I think the chocolate can represent commercial movies. And if Fassbinder could be seen as a designer chocolate maker it fits that everyone else tells him his chocolate is “too bitter.” Nevertheless the Düsseldorf owner tells Hermann¹ he can keep his fucking chocolates (which very much sounds like he says “shackles”). I don’t know how to segue out of this it gets absurd Hermann¹ did tell the other owner that he's a Rothchild and his mothers’ dowry was her weight in gold coins that turned out to be chocolate. His father died of grief and his mother died of diabetes.
I also kinda really wanna say there’s this idea of something like an alternate reality. Or ideal projection Hermann¹ conceives of. And it’s jarring when he crosses over. And back. And maybe we’re not sure where and how the boundary that separates these two realms is divided.
So you know how when ARDALION (Volker Spengler) shows Hermann¹ that painting with the swastika on back of it and says the innkeeper’s son painted it, that’s his idea of politics? When Hermann¹ goes into that hotel to get FELIX (Klaus Löwitsch) to agree to the deal whereby based on the Keystone Kops plotline Felix will be his double—more on that later Hermann¹ goes into serious shock when he sees that painting on the wall. And he demands that guy tell him “how long has this painting been here?” “It’s always been here.” But when Hermann¹ returns to ask Ardalion if he still has the painting with “the two roses and the briar pipe painting,” and goes rummaging through the studio to find it he doesn’t say anything about it but we see that it’s not the same painting. This one is of two apples and a cage. I know this probably sounds lame but I think with the moustache Hermann¹ is entering his ideal projected dissociative reality and the painting reminds him of the swastika and troubles him because the whole point was to block any of that existence far from his mind.
Also that same guy he asks how long the painting’s been there tells Hermann¹ not to forget his key and then gives it to him. And in the last scene when Hermann¹ leaves the hotel hideaway he’s holed up in and goes to that other one (notice the Ingrid Caven double even) the girl at the other hotel in some ominous way I can’t put my finger on tells him to take his key and not go up the stairwell he looks at but go around outside “your room is the first one on the left.” And these are the only two times in the film Hermann¹ says he’s a film actor.
Even though Ardalion tells the police that he’s in the room and their weapons are aimed in its direction when Hermann¹ tells them they have to let him leave they still all look the other way. As if while all went according to plan even though it ends with him being shot dead as an actor he can avoid the fate of the character. Confusing? What does it all mean? I think it’s like the second hotel clerk tells Hermann¹ “there was a movie shooting here last week. We all had parts.” If Hermann¹ is object he’s viewed by the subject. So if Hermann² is the subject so too is the audience the subject. And Dirk Bogarde is the object. Or if Hermann¹ tried to escape his diegesis by creating a projected secondary reality so too can he remove himself from the laws of that reality. Or am I way too overthinking this? Like I said Despair is confounding and very fun.
Soon after Hermann¹ runs into an insurance salesman he wants to be a psychoanalyst and brings up disassociation. The man who stands outside himself. This sets up the double motif. (Great joke Hermann¹ says “I thought about writing a book about it. Or two.” There’s gonna be a ton of double stuff.) So the earlier scene with Hermann¹ and Lydia is Hermann¹ in philosophical terms is the object. Therefore viewing him from the other flat Hermann² is the subject. But back to the restaurant with the introduction of the insurance salesman-therapist. There’s a mural on the wall that foreshadows the end of the movie Swiss villa where the cops bring Hermann¹ in for charges of murder. This film has a ton of doubles and a ton of foreshadowing.
Next we get the most important key to understanding Despair, which is the Keystone Kops one-reeler. Everything in this short foreshadows the film we’re watching. There’s twin brothers with moustaches (moustaches are also no joke a big detail to follow) who have this lifelong feud confrontation and we cut to an exterior where one walks out having killed the other. The cops realize the evil brother switched places with the good one and shoot him down too. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the evil brother’s name was brown.
But also chocolate has this connotation of [pardon me] women eating while sitting on their fat asses. I think the chocolate can represent commercial movies. And if Fassbinder could be seen as a designer chocolate maker it fits that everyone else tells him his chocolate is “too bitter.” Nevertheless the Düsseldorf owner tells Hermann¹ he can keep his fucking chocolates (which very much sounds like he says “shackles”). I don’t know how to segue out of this it gets absurd Hermann¹ did tell the other owner that he's a Rothchild and his mothers’ dowry was her weight in gold coins that turned out to be chocolate. His father died of grief and his mother died of diabetes.
I also kinda really wanna say there’s this idea of something like an alternate reality. Or ideal projection Hermann¹ conceives of. And it’s jarring when he crosses over. And back. And maybe we’re not sure where and how the boundary that separates these two realms is divided.
So you know how when ARDALION (Volker Spengler) shows Hermann¹ that painting with the swastika on back of it and says the innkeeper’s son painted it, that’s his idea of politics? When Hermann¹ goes into that hotel to get FELIX (Klaus Löwitsch) to agree to the deal whereby based on the Keystone Kops plotline Felix will be his double—more on that later Hermann¹ goes into serious shock when he sees that painting on the wall. And he demands that guy tell him “how long has this painting been here?” “It’s always been here.” But when Hermann¹ returns to ask Ardalion if he still has the painting with “the two roses and the briar pipe painting,” and goes rummaging through the studio to find it he doesn’t say anything about it but we see that it’s not the same painting. This one is of two apples and a cage. I know this probably sounds lame but I think with the moustache Hermann¹ is entering his ideal projected dissociative reality and the painting reminds him of the swastika and troubles him because the whole point was to block any of that existence far from his mind.
Also that same guy he asks how long the painting’s been there tells Hermann¹ not to forget his key and then gives it to him. And in the last scene when Hermann¹ leaves the hotel hideaway he’s holed up in and goes to that other one (notice the Ingrid Caven double even) the girl at the other hotel in some ominous way I can’t put my finger on tells him to take his key and not go up the stairwell he looks at but go around outside “your room is the first one on the left.” And these are the only two times in the film Hermann¹ says he’s a film actor.
Even though Ardalion tells the police that he’s in the room and their weapons are aimed in its direction when Hermann¹ tells them they have to let him leave they still all look the other way. As if while all went according to plan even though it ends with him being shot dead as an actor he can avoid the fate of the character. Confusing? What does it all mean? I think it’s like the second hotel clerk tells Hermann¹ “there was a movie shooting here last week. We all had parts.” If Hermann¹ is object he’s viewed by the subject. So if Hermann² is the subject so too is the audience the subject. And Dirk Bogarde is the object. Or if Hermann¹ tried to escape his diegesis by creating a projected secondary reality so too can he remove himself from the laws of that reality. Or am I way too overthinking this? Like I said Despair is confounding and very fun.
No comments:
Post a Comment