Who wears the pants here?

Pussy pitfall epic. Marriage doesn’t work Third Reich period melodrama. Bolweiser (1977, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) is a power struggle that lasts a lifetime that centers its conflict on who wears the pants?

     Most of the narrative of Bolweiser is Xaver (Raab) getting into trouble. If you think about how it’s set up: Xaver has this sweet post as part of the board of directors in the Reich running a train station and has a hot wife whom he loves with a rich father after all that what do you think could go wrong? Exactly. When it comes to his disillusionment trajectory and limerence voracious sexual desire Fassbinder crafts an entire infrastructure of tension apprehension fear paranoia jealousy doubt humiliation and complete loss of control around it. Continuously. Unease. Thriller. 
     Xaver attends this court case where a woman LIESL is on the stand accusing her employer of something she says like “I’ll marry you when the old woman is gone.” Xaver goes out and gets wasted with TREUBERGER (I always love Peter Kern in a Fassbinder movie) on those huge steins and on the train ride home pukes out the window with Leisl’s words swirling around in his conscious like a tempest. (I always wondered how Germans could hold so much beer I like how this scene shows sometimes they can’t.) This foreshadowing establishes a vibe: cheating on your spouse + trying to negotiate some deal to get away with it long-term = on court trial busted for it. 
     Also on this little trip Treuberger blackmails Xaver because he found some fancy undergarments and smellgood soap in his attaché. Xaver’s wife HANNI is already distraught now about the soap so Xaver has to beg her to believe he didn’t have an affair. This is important because again it foreshadows the tragedy that’s eventually gonna go down. Because it leads to Hanni’s first infidelity. Hanni has this brief fling with MERKL the butcher and yes this film stoops to lines like she’s stepping out because she wants to go get some meat. But as the board boys quickly make the butcher affair public and Xaver the laughingstock we get the first match in the messy bout between the married couple.
     The psychology here is achingly confoundingly true while completely beyond comprehension. In other words human. Because as soon as Xaver questions Hanni she becomes hostile and a master of blameshifting, which causes Xaver to plead with her excessively that he’s not jealous or suspicious and loves her so pathetic so desperate. And soon after he’s lost the power he calls himself a steer. Yep. She’s cut his nuts off. (Later you can notice when he’s trying to reclaim his virility in that whorehouse he calls himself a bull again.) 
     It’s also interesting the way Hanni breaking it off with Merkl is depicted. Once she’s decided to end it there’s that scene where she closes the door and um well looks to be struggling with the conflict of her carnal lust. She wants him. But she ends their hooking up because she says people are finding out. Conflicted characters are compelling characters. She takes up with this hairdresser SCHAFFTALER played by Udo Kier next. Then at home looking at herself in the mirror she spits. End of part 1.
 
Compounding the impact of her forcefulness when Xaver catches Hanni in a lie stepping out with the hairdresser she turns it on him with the famous what were you spying on me accusation. “Do I have to tell you my every move?” But the best is she ends it with I forgot where I was that night. Not even trying to come up with a believable cover up anymore. Is Bolweiser long? Yeah like three and a half hours. But It earns it to feel just how long a codependent relationship like this can go on.
     Their lives are pure miserable. The film is pure miserable (which makes it sublime). There is a lot of sex in this movie. And some business loose ends. But I’ll sum it up with the ultimate twist of fate. Another snitch goes to the Reich and Xaver gets arrested and convicted on trial because it is discovered that in an earlier trial against his wife cheating he provided a false alibi so now he has to do a four year stretch. Going to prison because your wife cheated on you. Ouch. 
     There’s this coda that’s almost unintentionally too funny where Xaver is out of prison wandering the countryside and finds this cabin in the woods where some dude with a Lincoln-Ahab beard tells him Hanni’s married the hairdresser and Xaver ends up living there for the rest of his life. He buries Lincoln Ahab. Grows his own beard. Takes up canoeing. The end.
     Okay the sheer magnitude of the epic is how tortured Bolweiser is over his devotion attraction to Hanni. And her dalliance with the butcher is over so quick. Frivolous. Then she’s onto the hairdresser and that’s that. She’s unfaithful. Nothing can change that. But Xaver so intensely wants to possess her that he’s often willing to sacrifice his composure dignity sanity livelihood reputation and drink himself into a stupor or blow his wad with a team of prosties and champagne showers just to cope. It’s like Lincoln Ahab said in a marriage one eventually gets wilder and the other one colder. Don’t do it.

A woman's best protection is her own money

Marriage doesn’t work silver lining period melodrama woman’s picture. Tradwife vs independence discourse. If MARY HAINES isn’t a survivor strong woman inspiration glaringly optimistic for a Fassbinder heroine then I’m the Duchess of Windsor. 

     In terms of plot structure there’s a bookending effect that evokes something like doomed perpetual repetition vicious cycle territory when CRYSTAL ALLEN (Barbara Sukowa Fassbinder debut) becomes the second Mrs. Haines. Because opportunistic busybody gossipmonger SYLVIA (Carstensen) desperately tries to solicit access as Crystal’s new bestie, inheriting it from the woman who previously held the title (Mary). When Women in New York (1977, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) begins it’s Crystal who’s the other woman; stealing Stephen Haines away from Mary. At the end she assumes the role of the former: her true love is taken away from her. And as a result she’ll lose ol moneybags.
     There’s a scene where Mary first hears of her cheating husband while MIRIAM (Irm Hermann) is giving her a manicure, narrating the entire story of the woman being cheated on the entire time unbeknownst to her that Mary Haines is the woman to whom she’s telling the story. I’ve always been immensely fascinated by the properties of storytelling inherent in being able to hear someone talk about you without knowing it’s you so you get to hear what you sound like in the third person as a character in a story.
     Another aspect to the framing of the narrative is Mary has a daughter who’s always spying that when we first meet says women talk too much and they’re stupid. She doesn’t want to be a woman. We probably shouldn’t use the word androgynous anymore but she (or maybe they) appear uncomfortable with conforming to a feminine look. For a film about women with no men in the cast this little touch is innovative. 
 
Dialogue in Women in New York is rapid-fire rare for a Fassbinder. But it’s set in the early 1930s so. This thing is full of gossip, pregnancies, cheating, divorces, beauty standards, money, aging, family, career. A maximalist woman’s picture. The scene with what's her name the Eva Mattes character smoking a cigarette in bed while nursing her newborn and she gets ashes in the baby's eyes yet oblivious is cringe funny goodness. 
     The final act is in Reno where several of the women steal away for a quickie divorce and coincidentally all happen to have done so the same weekend. Miriam steals Sylvia’s husband and there’s a pretty wild all out brawl that ensues. This thing is a constantly in progress series of proceedings revolving around which woman is stealing which’s husband. It’s cynical yet Fassbinder’s and our own interest in its subject matter mean we love these women. They get dragged through the muck though. There was a line that was something like “My therapist says the problem with modern women is they never really please their men and they’re not good mothers.” I feel like the film is trying to redefine the tradwife vs independence societal pressures and say why not both? Go after what you want and what’s the difference?

1. The Baby—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.

Strangers on a Train

The fourth film in the AFS Wim Wenders retrospective that I went to.

Unlike the previous films directed by Wim Wenders, each released annually and assembled together in his road movie trilogy (1974-1976), Der amerikanische Freund (1977, Wenders) emerges with a tightly structured plot, is steeped significantly in the noir genre, and floats lyrically in cinematic gravitas.

The tone of Der amerikanische Freund is one of foreboding. Like some of the most melodramatic pulp noir crafted by Nick Ray or Sam Fuller the protag is a virtuous everyman who falls onto the slippery path of crime and finds himself doomed to a pitfall of inescapable consequences.

In the opening scene Nicholas Ray plays a counterfeiter colluding in a rooftop rendezvous with TOM RIPLEY (Dennis Hopper), an American business associate on a stopover from his Hamburg home to tie up some loose ends in NYC. Anytime Hopper's on-screen his magnetic effortless cool cowboy-hatted grifter project that there's a lot more to this guy we're gonna find out and boy is he funny and fun to watch.

Next back in Hamburg we meet JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN (Bruno Ganz) in an auction of a painting that places these characters in a fortuitous crossing of each others' paths. We'll learn that Zimmerman plies his trade constructing frames, and may not have much longer to live due to a leukemia diagnosis, putting him in the dilemma of how to deal with its effect on his wife and young son. With Wenders ready to be flexible combining genres in Der amerikanische Freund, all of this dark heavy subject matter gets established only to have a buddy comedy element thrown in. And it all works. Very original too.

Zimmerman is the deadpan straight man foil to Ripley's eccentric loner and the chemistry is enjoyable on a variety of levels. Thus far from what I've seen Wenders' greatest strength is character. And there's so much detail going on with Zimmerman, like his fondness for antique film/photographic novelties, passion for rock 'n' roll, and all of the different choices he makes involving his escalating high stakes embroilment in the film's straightforward plot that empathizing with him is easy and the pith of the story.

And like the best pulp crime Wenders' characters here don't feel unrelatable or like caricature, they feel like people you've met or could meet any night out. He has this humble way of expressing human objectives.

The train sequence in the third act is the high mark suspense-wise of an all around taught narrative. But somehow all still bears the brand of Wenders offbeat humor and appreciation for the requisite spontaneous aspects of life.

Robby Müller finds his compositions in urban jungles this time. The overhead angle on Zimmerman running down the escalators in Hamburg gave me vertigo. And the scenes of Zimmerman sprinting down the tunnel motorway in desperation is as good as noir imagery as evers  been done. Müller also seems as though around this time he's becoming keen on the green spike certain film stocks exhibit when photographing green flo tubes (the lamp on top of Ripley's pool table is the best example) as aesthetic device. But the red curtains and sheets in Ripley's apartment are pretty far out too. And the boat yard outside Zimmerman's Hamburg flat is perfect for the extreme long shot vistas Müller revels in.

The climax sequence of the Cad ambulance and VW bug trip also finds one of Müller's greatest examples of his style and talent.

Der amerikanische Freund is highly enjoyable even though wrought with some darkly fatal quality to it, and even though I can't say why exactly, the maniacal Hopper as Ripley writhing in spasms of release while taking selfies of himself with a Polaroid remind me of the magic of movies.

--Dregs