Lucid deathmarch. Drug addiction. Junk. Dope. Needle. Pills. Escape from the pain. Veronika Voss (1982, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) is in terms of its aesthetic values a parody of a 40’s Hollywood schlocky B (yes I know that’s redundant) melodrama. But at its very core is genius. An interior portrayed through stark high contrast black and white imagery conspiracy plot that emerges as one of the few if not only original druggie films to say something new about substance abuse.
It’s always bugged me how every drug abuse movie I can think of having seen always follows the same general plot. Rise and fall. Someone with everything loses it all. Loss of dignity. Loss of self. Rock bottom pasty sweaty desperate begging for another fix. And always so bombastic. The plot of Veronika Voss pits an aging former UFA star against her primary care physician DR KATZ. Veronika goes to this magnificent spa clinic brilliantly art designed all white complete with white plaster statues sculptures and any and all other decorative items likewhite. What is this place? Rehab? A methadone clinic? Worse.
Thematically I gotta say this but Veronika Voss feels like it in some way I can’t prove or describe link drug addiction with the Holocaust. There’s that one elderly couple that Robert’s gf goes to to try to pawn some priceless vase so Veronika can buy more dope who refuse to accept it.
Veronika lives in a house where all of the furniture is draped in cloth. Like someone who knows they’re going to die and has to take care of every loose end before they go. The elderly man has the concentration camp tattoo on his forearm. He was at Treblinka. The couple and Veronika are all trying to escape their pain. The mysterious question to ask is why won’t he giver the young woman money? “Do you see now why I want nothing to do with your world?”
Someone mentions that Goebbels blacklisted Veronika but it’s not confirmed. Which could mean only that she’s Jewish. There doesn’t seem to be enough to put together what I’m trying to say but the vase feels like precious artifacts stolen from Jewish people by the Nazis. I’m probably wrong. But the feeling is we know the elderly couple and Veronika both get their dope from Dr. Katz. They’re being sent to die. They are suffering their own pain.
Veronika is a has been. Younger actresses are getting the parts she used to. We even see one fresh off the casting couch. This whole dark sordid blackmarket exchange of flesh and shooting up become indistinguishable. When Veronika runs out of money and Dr. Katz plans her demise after the farewell party locked in her apartment with no more morphine only pills she’ll od. And she does. And what day does that happen on? Good Friday. The day of Christ’s Crucifixion. Lamb of God. Veronika sacrificed by overdose.
Such an effective portrayal of addiction at the end Veronika in her apartment room in disarray. Fidgeting. Lipstick. Mirror. Country western music mournful sad on the radio way more powerful than any other loud obnoxious run amok shenanigans Hollywood’s done elsewhere. Xaver Schwarzenberger’s star filter takes on secondary meaning. Distorted reality.
The expressionist black and white world of Veronika Voss is artifice awareness transport beauty by art. Don’t you dare say German Expressionism. There’s more to life than Caligari. This film is cold. Clinical. Controlled. Balanced. Death.
The film opens with again with Fassbinder a movie within a movie that foreshadows the extent of the meaning we’re about to get. One of Veronika’s old movies. She plays a drug addict. Her character deteriorating from drug dependency. “I’ll give you everything I possess. Everything I am. Now I belong to you. Everything I have belongs to you.” She’s talking to her addiction. To her dealer.
And in the theater she watches full of fear. And at the end of the film she’ll finally add “all I have left to give you is my death.” The earlier scene is her watching a premonition of her deathmarch. And Fassbinder is there right next to her in the theater not saying anything. Just watching. And he’ll die in real life from drugs the same year this film was released. An actress playing an actress watching an actress. An addict can become different people on a whim invariably to manipulate gain sympathy confide confess subterfuge withhold intimacy for protection. Confusion. Despair. Death.
Thematically I gotta say this but Veronika Voss feels like it in some way I can’t prove or describe link drug addiction with the Holocaust. There’s that one elderly couple that Robert’s gf goes to to try to pawn some priceless vase so Veronika can buy more dope who refuse to accept it.
Veronika lives in a house where all of the furniture is draped in cloth. Like someone who knows they’re going to die and has to take care of every loose end before they go. The elderly man has the concentration camp tattoo on his forearm. He was at Treblinka. The couple and Veronika are all trying to escape their pain. The mysterious question to ask is why won’t he giver the young woman money? “Do you see now why I want nothing to do with your world?”
Someone mentions that Goebbels blacklisted Veronika but it’s not confirmed. Which could mean only that she’s Jewish. There doesn’t seem to be enough to put together what I’m trying to say but the vase feels like precious artifacts stolen from Jewish people by the Nazis. I’m probably wrong. But the feeling is we know the elderly couple and Veronika both get their dope from Dr. Katz. They’re being sent to die. They are suffering their own pain.
Veronika is a has been. Younger actresses are getting the parts she used to. We even see one fresh off the casting couch. This whole dark sordid blackmarket exchange of flesh and shooting up become indistinguishable. When Veronika runs out of money and Dr. Katz plans her demise after the farewell party locked in her apartment with no more morphine only pills she’ll od. And she does. And what day does that happen on? Good Friday. The day of Christ’s Crucifixion. Lamb of God. Veronika sacrificed by overdose.
Such an effective portrayal of addiction at the end Veronika in her apartment room in disarray. Fidgeting. Lipstick. Mirror. Country western music mournful sad on the radio way more powerful than any other loud obnoxious run amok shenanigans Hollywood’s done elsewhere. Xaver Schwarzenberger’s star filter takes on secondary meaning. Distorted reality.
The expressionist black and white world of Veronika Voss is artifice awareness transport beauty by art. Don’t you dare say German Expressionism. There’s more to life than Caligari. This film is cold. Clinical. Controlled. Balanced. Death.
The film opens with again with Fassbinder a movie within a movie that foreshadows the extent of the meaning we’re about to get. One of Veronika’s old movies. She plays a drug addict. Her character deteriorating from drug dependency. “I’ll give you everything I possess. Everything I am. Now I belong to you. Everything I have belongs to you.” She’s talking to her addiction. To her dealer.
And in the theater she watches full of fear. And at the end of the film she’ll finally add “all I have left to give you is my death.” The earlier scene is her watching a premonition of her deathmarch. And Fassbinder is there right next to her in the theater not saying anything. Just watching. And he’ll die in real life from drugs the same year this film was released. An actress playing an actress watching an actress. An addict can become different people on a whim invariably to manipulate gain sympathy confide confess subterfuge withhold intimacy for protection. Confusion. Despair. Death.
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