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.

True meaning of what it is to be human as told through lesbian sleepover

Another Fassbinder masterpiece. The one most important because no one other than him could make it. The one he was born to make. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) is an emotional boudoir abattoir that says everything there is to say about love in 2 hours. Its theme is being crazy about someone.

     The plot structure consists of girl meets girl, girl gets girl, girl loses girl. PETRA (Margit Carstensen) is infatuated with KARIN THIMM (Schygulla). There are those who see love through a practical understanding. Not me. I’m pathological. I see love as a passionate violent volatile fire that engulfs destroys dies. And The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant treads the thin line between love and mental illness. Occurring shortly after the meet-cute Karin says she likes movies about passion and sorrow. The first half of this film is passion. And the second half is sorrow. The midpoint is devastatingly sad. When Petra has begun hooking up with Karin the other shoe drops. Karin drops out of college because she can leech of her new sugar mommy. There’s this callback to an earlier conversation the two had about sports and discipline. Karin gives up on showing a disciplined approach to anything anymore. She quits making any type of effort. And she’s vindictive. Spiteful. She taunts Petra incessantly and enjoys it. Petra wants Karin 24 hours a day as a plaything. And this is what sets up the moral. This is indicative of the nature of infatuation. Limerence. The film shows how stupid telling someone you love them is. How hollow. Empty. How those words are convenient placeholders for either possessive desire or manipulation. The difference between unrequited and unattainable. It’s excruciatingly poignant that the first time Karin reciprocates an I love you is when Petra shows her her picture in the paper—and we know it’s so fake. Yet Petra does not.
     
There’s some strong imagery. First what’s up with the image system of lifeless human figures? MARLENE (Irm Hermann) exists in what’s symbolic of a mausoleum surrounded by all those mannequins. Marlene does not speak one word throughout the entire movie. This invariably represents both the eventual fate of an object of desire as either possession or lifeless. 
     When SIDONIE has the audacity to get Petra that doll that looks just like Karin for her birthday. The humiliation arises out of Petra’s acknowledgment as she’s forced to confront the truth that she really wanted Karin as a doll. And who doesn’t? Someone there when you get home. Someone you can cuddle in bed with. A fuck object. A pretty little thing you picked out that corresponds to your innate standards of beauty. It’s shamefully constructively intuitively insightful. Emotionally ignorant.
     The art on her bedroom wall tells us Petra worships the human form as divine. Specifically flesh. Curves. Exposed forms in repose, contortions posed ideally as aesthetically gratifying. It’s not just because she’s horny. Her intellect is slave to her body. Her need for Karin is torture because Petra knows she is no good for her. Petra spitting in Karin’s face after calling her a rotten little whore is the highpoint of the film’s provocation. Which of course she’s right. But Petra fails to listen to reason and instead succumbs to her emotions. She’s desperate to get the rotten little whore back to the point nothing else in life means anything to her. And I’ve always felt this very condition best expressed cinematically in a shot of someone alone in a room doing nothing other than waiting for the phone to ring. That shot belongs in the emotional dictionary of images. Since days of yore. I’d always associated it with Audition (1999, Takashi Miike) but forgot it’s the depiction of Petra's lowest point in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. No furniture is crucial to the psychology of the scene in Fassbinder’s version.

 

                                        

The toughest one is Marlene through the window. Early in the film we get that shot of Marlene in aguish touching the window in Petra’s apartment as Petra tells Sidonie about how her marriage fizzled out. Here Marlene is in the foreground. We’re with her. Petra is beyond—deep background. Distant. So we’re meant to identify if not empathize with Marlene suffering while Petra talks about the power shift in her marriage. As if once Marlene was a partner to Petra in a way and is now no longer treated as human.
     But way later when Petra gets the Karin doll their positions have exchanged planes. Marlene is distant background imprisoned beyond glass walls witnessing Petra now spiritually broken in front of us. We’re with Petra now no longer Marlene. Fassbinder wants us to empathize with the damaged souls. 
 
Just like the lyrics to “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” tells us what the first half of the movie means, the end of the movie can be understood by the lyrics to “The Great Pretender.” Both by The Platters. The ending isn’t your average movie conclusion that provides an adequate sense of closure and wrap things up in a satisfying way. The ending of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant fits more closely into the principles of drama. It challenges you to make sense of it instead of providing you with an easy unambiguous explanation.
     Why does Malene leave? Because Petra’s full of shit. For all the abuse and mistreatment of Marlene, Petra nevertheless was honest with her. Let her into her most inner private life unvarnished unfiltered. That’s love. Like that exchange after Karin crushes Petra, do you want the truth or do you want me to lie and tell you a story to make you feel good? When Petra acts like she’s over Karin and asks Marlene to tell her about herself she’s pretending. She’s no longer herself. Fassbinder is telling us that’s when you lose everything. 
     No longer wanting to live because your lust object broke your heart is okay. But lying to everyone and acting like everything is fine when it’s not is the real death. Cutting yourself off from your feelings is cutting yourself off from life. It’s all figurative. When Marlene shuts off the lights that’s when it’s time for us to start asking ourselves which is worse? 

Parts that get fitted into machines

So tedious it’s excruciating. Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day (1972, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) is a limited series about the working class. If you watch it in one day it’s like doing an eight hour shift at a job in a factory that’s mind-numbingly monotonous. It’s anti-Fassbinder in its dramatic content. And it breaks every rule there is about how to give the audience a reason to invest emotionally or any type of payoff for doing so.

     The job of cinema at its best is to get you to forget about what’s going in in your life for a couple of hours. Stop looking at your watch. Forget what time it is. Definitely no reason to light up your phone. Forget about your job. Escape. Get swept up in the story you paid to see. Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day is a simulator that makes you constantly feel like you’re at work learning about the means of production, business, economics, capitalism, politics, the petty dynamics among your co-workers you’re stuck with listening to. And not only does it relentlessly torture you with having to put up with such boredom, but when the characters are outside the factory they mostly talk about the exact same thing.
     Were I asked what I love about Fassbinder my answer would be characters who are doomed because of the anguish they go through chasing their unrequited object of desire. And his way of using crime genre elements as conduits of the dark crooked dead end trap where love, lust, and seeking a human connection get you. His moral that of the casino: you’ll lose it all, the stakes are everything, the house always wins, and you’ll keep coming back for reasons no one will ever know.
     In Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day we get a mainstream audience pleaser that champions the underdog. Along with its overwhelming barrage of workers rights rhetoric there’s a cheesy commercial product decisions made by committee overriding focus on superficial external conflicts that every character faces and every single time are easily resolved with little effort. It’s a reality where nothing ever goes wrong. Where every bet you placed in the casino or every lottery ticket you bought would be a winner. Cliched love story logic. Perfect marriages. Cutesy antics. 
 
I challenge you. Watch this movie and every single time it seems like something bad is going to happen or something is going to go wrong I guarantee you it will magically turn out in the only possible conclusion where everybody walks away happy. What’s wrong with Fassbinder? Is this a sick joke? 
     Is this a conceptual piece that’s supposed to make us think about how vapid cinema would be if you gave people what they want? Is this what AI’s going to look like? It wasn’t until Fassbinder’s first eleven films that he even centered one of his stories on a working class protagonist. And that’s probably the bleakest film he’s made. Work crushes Hans Epp. Fassbinder has also exclusively dealt with marriage in a derisive way. Marriage destroys Hans Epp. Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day feels like a cursed mirror follow up to The Merchant of Four Seasons. The family’s name is also Epp. It’s always playing around with zooms. Except it feels like we’re stuck in a dream where everything’s perfect that proves as a film far more troubling than all of the brutality that’s typically de rigueur with Fassbinder.
 
Throughout the entire 8 hour runtime I only found one exception. Did you spot it? HARALD, the character played by Kurt Raab. He’s the anomaly in this world. With his serial killer pedo glasses and John Waters moustache, treated with contempt by all. Harald is the only character who earns my sympathy.
     On JOCHEN (Gottfried John) and MARION’S (Schygulla) wedding night at the reception everyone is blissfully drinking dancing laughing and loving. Of course at this point everyone loathes Harald because he won’t give MONIKA a divorce. But sitting alone in his tux, when Harald asks the bride Marion if she wants to dance, she simply says “No.” That’s the only moment I felt anything throughout this ordeal. He awkwardly looks away at nothing in particular, lost, wounded, utterly alone. And as if that wasn’t enough they’re playing “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” off somewhere during this moment. Okay those feelings I can process.
     It’s also the way that all of the conflicts are external that make the film lack any way of empathizing with them. It’s too silly. There's no internal conflict because everybody gets everything they want every time. No one has to make touch choices because everything always works itself out. Exactly how not to craft drama. Then after all of the endless dialogues about workers rights and every conceivable detail associated with them finally at the end they go up to the head of their company with a list of demands to negotiate and as soon as they enter his office he’s like approved. It has to be ironic. Even the workers say they expected to have to fight for it. Nope. Not in this backwards logic cinematic curiosity. I hope the joke is on me. But that doesn’t matter. Because even if it is there’s no way for a second I could enjoy anything about this atrocious fabrication.

Not warmhearted enough

Fassbinder’s first masterpiece. The Merchant of Four Seasons (1972, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) is a bleak kitchen sink realism domestic social drama about a working class couple raising a young daughter who operate a fresh produce cart. Along with its anti-corporate street vendor, throw in a similarly anti-corporate brand of cinema, and add an anti-institutional attack on marriage that endorses casual cheating, and you get something like a free market Fassbinder ethos.

    The Merchant of Four Seasons is Fassbinder’s first grown up film. If his prior films have this youthful rebelliousness about them, this one shows what happens when you’re faced with responsibilities. And its moral is once you get to that point you might as well kill yourself. HANS (Hirschmüller) goes from miserable belligerent fuck my life in Act I, to losing his family because he beat his wife and desperately trying to win her back, succeeding, and blissful in Act II, to depressed suicidal because after that what other reason is there to live?
     Even though it sometimes borders on disconcerting how many zooms there are (this must be the first time Fassbinder had access to a zoom lens), The Merchant of Four Seasons feels as fresh as the pears the Epps are slangin. How can I prove my point here? I can’t. You just watch it and everything about it has this gravitas. This simplicity. This cohesion of Fassbinder’s vision. Material perfectly suited to his talents. Peer Raben’s tranquil soft unsentimental theme. And you almost think maybe for a little while that it’s romantic because it shows a grounded setting where real people who normally go unnoticed, undervalued by their closeminded family and society, as underdogs persevere and get to have their own life.
     But Fassbinder scornfully obliterates that existence. These people like to get drunk and fuck randos. Claiming what society offers them turns out to be a false bill of sale. No one gets Hans. The only person who cares about him and seems to get him is his sister ANNA (Schygulla). But when the family is making it and the business is running smoothly, Hans tells Anna he thinks too much with his newfound spare time and it torments him. And she doesn’t get him. She’s too busy with her own work. She’s his only defender against their parents, in-laws, and relatives. When she calls them out for despising Hans then only faking tolerating him because he’s bringing in enough bread to earn their acceptance she calls them on it. And this leads to him drinking himself to death. It's like the line in the Woody Allen movie: the unexamined life isn't worth living, but the examined one is no bargain.
 
This movie empathizes with suicide as the only thing left to do. And not because its protagonist Hans is mentally ill. Or unbalanced. He isn’t depicted as other. He’s depicted as average working class. He doesn’t lose it all, which used to be a motivation for suicidal characters in Hollywood. He gets to where everything he wanted is his. Gets his wife back. Earns a livable wage for his family and himself. Gains the acceptance of his family. And that sucks the will to live out of him.
     The flashback at the end of the film however, tells us Hans gave up wanting to live long ago. When IRMGARD (Irm Hermann) tells their daughter RENATE that “he’s going to leave if he wants to. People haven’t always been kind to your father,” it prefigures his losing the will to live. But was it because of how others treated Hans? The film doesn’t lend much weight to this being an easy conclusion. 
     Because as far as we can tell when he was a cop Hans was fired for getting a blowjob out in the open in an office in the precinct. And when he was nearly killed in the Foreign Legion in Morrocco his fellow soldiers came to his rescue and saved his life. And the woman he lusts for is made available to him. Also his wife cheats too (and if that’s eating at him it’s no excuse because Irmgard gets Anzell fired out of what would appear to be her own remorse and renewed dedication to the fidelity of their marriage), so going back to the free market accessibility, what’s so wrong that Hans loses his soul? Is the true tragedy that life isn’t enough for him? Or is life not enough for anyone? Is the film challenging what you live for? What are your values based on? And are you truly living or just another hypocrite playing at an imitation of life?

The Force Awakens

Are movies that explore the darker side of human sexuality inherently exploitative? Does watching movies that feature characters with kinky, depraved sexual fetishes mean that the viewer has kinky, depraved sexual fetishes?

There's no way around it, Toys Are Not for Children (1972, Stanley H. Brasloff) is an exploitation movie. And if this argument were based on the poster alone, I'd say no contest. But, whereas typical sexploitation movies of the Seventies frequently utilized non-explicit sex scenes and some nudity gratuitously, Toys Are Not for Children has a Freudian, highly dysfunctional family backstory that its lead character JAMIE GODARD (Marcia Forbes) is in constant torment from through psychotic flashback episodes that lead her toward a deeply troubled pursuit of a singular goal that unravels gradually through this twisted gem of low-budget filmmaking. I recently attended a screening of a 35mm print projected of Toys Are Not for Children.

I'm not at all ashamed to say I admire Toys Are Not for Children for its craft and bizarre imaginative attempts at melodrama. And for a low-budget, who the hell could this movie's audience possible be? venture, it is an inspiration that someone went through all the way with this. Also, on a technical and formal level, the tons of flashbacks, sometimes quickly intercut, running parallel concurrently alongside the present day narrative, sometimes jumbling adult and child Jamie interchangeably, electronic stinger cues (my favorite), great score, and deliriously taboo weirdness executed with a straight face are compelling. And every moment of Toys Are Not for Children ties into its overarching themes.

Toys Are Not for Children opens cold in an underlit bedroom with an undressed teenager writhing in her bed fondling a nutcracker-style toy soldier repeatedly moaning, "daddy." Her mother bursts in and goes into a hostile tirade that is and will be the only things the mother ever talks about: "It's unnatural!" So, we learn from this first crescendo rant that Jamie's mom is violently inconsolably distraught because Jamie's dad sends his daughter toys, but no longer lives at home, and is off "with his whores," as Jamie's mother will reiterate countless times to come.

Jamie it turns out, is actually in her mid-twenties and works in a toy store where she is loved by her boss, customers, and CHARLIE, whom she marries early on in the movie. They move into a new home together but the honeymoon is no sex for Charlie and Jamie stubbornly argues with him against giving up her toys, until he caves then she unpacks her toy soldier so she can sleep in peace.

Charlie patiently remains the understanding husband, and the toy store owner MAX is funny as Charlie's confidant, I mean these dudes are so bro'd out. When Max happily asks how married life is Charlie tries asking for help, "Maybe you can love toys too much, Max." But Max is sure there's no such thing.

Okay, this plot is way interconnected too. In the first toy store scene Jamie helps customer PEARL who happens to offer her a place to stay in the city, if she would ever so need. Turns out Pearl is one of the whores Jamie's dad slept with, and Jamie's mom knows it. So that's why Jamie's mom keeps telling her why men are no good and she doesn't want her daughter to end up like Pearl, "a painted pig."

Jamie actually thinks Pearl's occupation is really cool and wants in (unbeknownst to Pearl for quite some time). Pearl lives with her bf/pimp EDDIE who keeps trying to have sex with the innocent Jamie, Pearl's friend. One day when the ladies are out having a carefree lunchdate together, Jamie genuinely wants to hear more about Pearl's work and after some resistance on Pearl's part Jamie finally exclaims "But you are a whore aren't you?" The innocence and teenybopper pluck of Jamie gets me. The whole time all I kept thinking was what the hell am I watching and wow this is so good.

Back at home Charlie and Jamie are fighting now. And triggered from another flashback of her parents' ongoing fights Jamie relives her mom's defense of "Is that what you married me for? To get a housekeeper. Then stop complaining." Charlie starts drinking and going to the bar, having sex with random women, which he has no problem finding.

Well, by the midpoint Toys Are Not for Children gets even more awkward to watch as Jamie has succeeded in getting Eddie to pimp her out behind Pearl's back. New haircut and some really slutty work attire don't change Jamie's attitude though, she still projects herself as a nice girl working in a toy store. Oh and Jamie plays childish games with her Johns and calls them daddy. It's tough to watch. But okay, this is going somewhere. Jamie's really doing all this obviously just so she can find her real Daddy. And as the third act climax, it's definitely unnervingly suspenseful when their date becomes imminent. The foreshadowing up to this point has described her Daddy as Pearl warns "a lousy drunk and a John who gets his kicks by putting down women."

Jamie's so happy to be reunited with her Daddy. And the John is loving his date. And it takes him a long time to realize that the reason she keeps calling him Daddy isn't part of the act. He flips out and starts yelling at her, a struggle ensues and Jamie pushes him out of the window to his death.

Poor Jamie. The final low angle shot of her naked, slumped in a corner, staring off into space catatonically as the camera zooms into her eyes while the closing song plays, with the lyric "How Lonely Am I?"

--Dregs