y
t o t * __________ _
Fassbinder as Addict Savant
Fassbinder s imagination did not soar. It writhed.
B
Y
W .
C
.
M
c_ R
A
E
en years ago, Rainer Werner
Fassbinder was the toast of the inter
national film industry Today. Fass
binder is out of fashion along with other
vestiges of the 1970s — poppers, disco,
sex, drugs. The German director had
made, at his death in 1982 at age 37 some
of the most provocative films of the 1970s
and early ’80s Now thev seldom, if ever
T
appear on the art film circuit
Aftet reading Robert Katz's fine gutter
eye-view biography. Love Is Colder Thun
Death (Random House, cloth. $19 95), I
understand why Fassbinder’s stock has
alien so precipitously. To read about his
life and to remember his films is to look
back to another age: Fassbinder is about as
tar from “ just say no” as Berlin is from
the Betty Ford Institute. These differences
aren't measured in years, but in ideology.
An only child. Fassbinder grew up in
post-World War II Bavaria, in a then-
normal irregular family Adenauer’s
economic miracle notwithstanding, Fass-
inder spent his adolescence in a raffish
leighborhood of prostitutes, transvestites,
md itinerant workers. During the Sixties,
assbinder became involved with an avant
garde theatre in Munich Using actors
from this repertory, Fassbinder began to
write and direct films, often with his male
lovers cast in leading roles He gained
European acclaim by 1970, when he
was 25.
Fassbinder brought to films a taste for
melodrama, an appetite for despair and the
kinky, and an incredible energy In 1970,
he completed seven films and he vowed to
finish his thirtieth film by his thirtieth
birthday (he missed his goal bv three
films). A Fassbinder film typically sets a
weakened or abject character against indif
ferent forces, or isolate*- an individual in a
nexus of power relationships Fassbinder
focused on the suffering of the character
however, he refused to invest his victim
w ith any moral worth or value. The cultural
soporifics that we benevolently worship ir
our secular humanist temples — love, uni
versal brotherhood, peace, the family —
are exposed as depravities and deceptions.
In Fassbinder, the moral dimension exists
only as a venue for duplicity and the exer
cise of power. “ Love.’ Fassbinder claimed,
“ is the best, most insidious, most effec
tive instrument of social repression."
With their stylized despair, it is no sur
prise that Fassbinder's cinema of cruelty
finds no audience in the anodyne 1980s In
.4 Year with Thirteen Moons, a man who
changed his gender to better suit his male
lover, only to be then further spumed, con
entwined with his creative process. One of
his lovers committed suicide with drugs,
another hung himself in jail. Fassbinder
was a tyrant to his actors. Katz recounts in
unjudging detail the drugged, drunken
wallowing in the temptations offered for
sale to habitues of the international art/gay
scene. Katz doesn't reveal a new Fassbin
der; he simply exposes more of the old.
However, Katz avoids drawing easy
morals from Fassbinder s life and early
death by overdose. Katz instead presents
Fassbinder as an Add. :t Savant against a
backdrop of the times drugs were de
rigueur, Germany wa? repulsed and
fascinated by the radic ;! chic of the
Baader-Meinhoff gans. New York cla
mored to Andy Warho and slunk about in
black leather; fisting w is just another
souvenir from America Paris was caviar
| and champagne: wealti meant a chartered
iet just to fly in cocaine
templates his life and commits suicide In
Fassbinder's life an- films message
Chinese! Roulette, a young physically dis
abled girl uses guile to lure her callous
and messenger, now s* m symptoms of a
parents, with their respective lovers, to a i decade that no one wa cs to exonerate: too
country chateau, where nasty parlor games
soon the fin de sieclt -fiit our repugnance
lead to suicide In Veronica Views, a do-
at Fassbinder’s over-abuse — of despair
good journalist attempts to aid a former
of drugs, of anger — j s much a symp
Nazi film star held in drugged bondage by
tom of our age. as the c ver-indulgence wa*
an unscrupulous doctor, with suicides as
a symptom of the 1970s To draw a moral
the unfortunate result “ I detest the idea
from Fassbinder's life would be to fall into
that love between two persons can lead to
a trap that the entire oeuvre disclaims:
salvation," said Fassbinder. “ All my life I
There is no edifying moral lesson to be
have fought against this oppressive type of
drawn from individual experience. In the
relationship."
vale of tears that is Fassbinder, there are
Not surprisingly, his life was no prettier
only varying degrees of oppression. Given
than his films. Fassbinder's drug addiction
this philosophy, self-oppression with
and alcohol dependency were both truly
drugs becomes self-determination, and a
monumental, and seemingly inextricably
tentative personal freedom
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