Fassbinder 1000’s of Mirrors by Ian Penman. 200 pages, Semiotext(e). 2023.

There are only two ways to start an essay on Rainer Werner Fassbinder: with sex or with death. All the things else is scenery. This one begins with death. On the 1982 Venice Film Festival, a pirated copy of Fassbinder’s death mask reportedly made the rounds of hotels and cafes, smuggled in a plastic bag like a kilo, like takeout. Juliane Lorenz, a movie editor moonlighting as Fassbinder’s wannabe widow, commissioned the mask after the director died at thirty-seven—prematurely, but still right on cue—that June. (Stroke was the official explanation for death, his indefatigable cocaine weight loss program a probable comorbidity.)

Lorenz had envisioned a reverent artifact, something like Goethe’s varnished nineteenth-century death mask, but what she got was less dignified. By the top, Fassbinder was bloated and unkempt. His uniform of sunglasses and fedora looked like Stasi drag and did nothing to cover his lifelong pockmarks. (Pickle Face was the schoolyard taunt.) Neither did the scraggly beard that seemed plagiarized from the hapless men of Ukiyo-e prints. And, yet, the death mask will need to have exerted a fetishistic pull. Imagine Venice’s glitterati ogling it of their luxury suites as they chain-smoked. Finally, they’d come face-to-face with Europe’s last wunderkind in a stillness that was entirely anathema to him.

This anecdote was cribbed from Love is Colder Than Death, Robert Katz’s 1987 biography. Many critics rebuked that book for being too salacious, which is like lamenting the aroma from a sewer. Why go to the mud in the event you’re afraid of a little bit mess? (Some trivia: Unlike Mapplethorpe, a coprophagy fiend, Fassbinder’s anal fixation favored insertion fairly than excretion; Katz notes that the director was introduced to fisting on the Anvil in Latest York and exported the pastime to Munich.) Katz’s book is so seductive precisely since it’s sleazy—part hearsay, part vendetta, part boozy confabulation. Writing within the London Review of Books, critic Mark Lawson decried it as “a classic slob biography,” the sort of takedown that charms unrepentant rubberneckers like me jonesing for a blow-by-blow of Fassbinder’s tailspin. Lawson continued, “A significant element in such a project is the contrast between subject and biographer: the dull, ascetic and possibly jogging yuppy sees within the fluid-spilling and abuse-fluent wreck his own antithesis and is fascinated by it.”

Ian Penman’s book isn’t a lot about Fassbinder because it is a memoir of living alongside his movies.

Katz’s book exemplifies one approach to Fassbinder: the hermeneutics of death. Fassbinder 1000’s of Mirrors, by the British critic Ian Penman, offers the choice: an erotics—of cinema, of memory, of the gradual wreck of history. The sensuality of Penman’s book is inseparable from the music of his prose. Listen: Fassbinder is the “bully superstar of a looming recent decadence.” The Fifties, the last decade of the director’s childhood, were years of “deprivation and wild surmise.” As Fassbinder juddered toward his final hectic obliteration: “Sudden crying jags, mad hungers, humid sweats. Sleep now a grand prix or slalom; a shark chasing its own turbulence.” Penman’s book isn’t a lot about Fassbinder because it is a memoir of living alongside his movies. Not a fan’s tribute, then, not a critic’s buttoned-up appraisal, but something with the gnawing compulsiveness of victim testimony.     

Penman first conceived of the book within the early days of the pandemic lockdown. (Yet to be written is a study of how quarantine downsized literature, rendering it more insular, more nostalgic, coquettish with ghosts.) He had the comprehensible urge to rewatch most of Fassbinder’s forty-four movies, notebook in hand, but quickly abandoned that ordeal in favor of a text that’s “dissolute” and “utterly partial.” He accomplished a draft in about three months—roughly the period of time it will have taken Fassbinder to film seven or eight movies. (The Merchant of 4 Seasons was shot in eleven days.) Composed of 450 numbered fragments, the book reads like biography dropped from a high window: smithereens of that cataclysmic German life strewn with Nazi ruins and Penman’s own punk and drug-dazed requiems. (If I resort to metaphor to explain the book, that’s since it’s so elliptical. You’re thinking that you’ve gotten a handle on it, but then it billows askew.)

For Penman, Fassbinder is a sort of behemoth phantom poised between modernism and whatever got here after. Indeed, there’s a transitional quality to his whole filmography. The early movies—Love is Colder Than Death (1969), Gods of the Plague (1970)—are not-quite-knockoffs of French Latest Wave, especially Godard, and particularly Band of Outsiders. But even listed below are flickers of the Fassbinder signature: stagey blocking, explosive talkiness, the woozy pacing of a hangover. Next got here the virtually back-to-back masterpieces of The Merchant of 4 Seasons (1972), The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), movies through which Fassbinder channeled his idolatry of Douglas Sirk into finely stilted melodramas. Then, in a rush, got here the messy mid-career spree: Devil’s Brew (1976), Chinese Roulette (1976), Despair (1978). The tonal vertigo and absurdist pathos of In a Yr of 13 Moons (1978) is followed immediately by the grandeur of the BRD trilogy: The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), Lola (1981),and Veronika Voss (1982). On this late triptych, Fassbinder refracts the sordid psychodrama of postwar Germany through his own sadomasochistic fantasies—national history reimagined as a not-so-nervous breakdown. I haven’t even mentioned the made-for-television stuff yet. 

So, the director was a lone-wolf Hollywood in the grey backwash of seventies West Germany, although possibly I condescend; in 1964, no less an arbiter of cool than Time referred to Munich as “easily probably the most exciting city” within the country. (Penman: “There was a moment within the mid-to-late Seventies when West Germany felt just like the crucible of virtually every thing it is advisable to be fascinated with or diverted by.”) And it’s not quite accurate to insinuate that Fassbinder worked in a vacuum. The Latest German Cinema was well underway by the point he released his first feature. In 1962, Alexander Kluge and cohort unleashed a manifesto declaring, “The old cinema is dead. We imagine in the brand new one.” Fassbinder’s own list of an important directors in Germany included himself in the highest spot, but in addition figures—Werner Schroeter, Wim Wenders, Volker Schlöndorff, Werner Herzog, amongst others—who were already staking their claims to greatness and arthouse fandom.

“Why exactly is it [Fassbinder] has been so dishonored by not being became a monument?” Penman asks. Perhaps one answer has something to do with the pleasure-to-pain ratio in Fassbinder’s vast catalog. Few other filmmakers of comparable mystique may be as spectacularly tedious. Exhibit A: The fifteen-plus-hour Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), a TV miniseries adapted from Alfred Döblin’s cacophonous 1929 novel. Irrespective of how luscious the cinematography or full-throttle the performances, there’s an unevenness to Fassbinder’s oeuvre that necessitates every kind of disclaimers. “There are moments of high drama,” Penman writes, “but in addition long cool shallows; sublime self-possession but in addition cartoonish self-parody.” There’s also Fassbinder’s queerness, which was encoded from the start and have become more overt because the years ticked by, climaxing within the baroque faggotry of Querelle (1982), adapted from Jean Genet’s novel. (Penman can quickly convey a movie’s flavor: Querelle is an “apocalypse of fashion”; Despair, adapted from Nabokov’s novel, is the equivalent of “Lalique crystal, or a Faberge egg.”) Fassbinder’s queerness isn’t innocuous or affirming. It isn’t campy. It isn’t even especially subversive. It’s just one other dreary fact of life—like a job, like a debt.

Sentimentality isn’t Fassbinder’s bag. “He made movies, he said, that were intended to indicate that emotions people felt didn’t exist in any respect and were only a sort of sentimentality which we thought we wanted so as to be properly functioning members of society,” the Danish filmmaker Christian Braad Thomsen writes. I’m reminded of a line from Maria Braun. It’s an offhand quip, delivered by a barmaid, that nonetheless cuts to the short of Fassbinder’s moral universe: “Emotions aren’t the reality. Love is a sense between the legs.” Penman reads this cynicism because the spirit of the age: “The bottom mechanics of post-war reconstruction are lurking behind every relationship.” If Fassbinder’s world is transactional, then it’s also counterfeit, in the best way that exploitation all the time demands make-believe. Either the exploiter lies and flatters and cajoles, or the exploited pretends their debasement was a misunderstanding—or, worse, that a unique fate is feasible.

Penman is correct to notice the lurid artificiality of Fassbinder’s movies. West Germany was a manufactured state crawling with grifters and whores, everyone lying to themselves, leeching off an not possible dream of normalcy. An environment of banal violence and petty chicanery prevailed. It was a rustic in denial about its own villainy and so embraced a culture of benign industriousness, blinkered euphoria. This was aided by the very real “economic miracle” of the Konrad Adenauer years, but what lay behind that boom was a nation of closeted executioners and apologists, entire cities once brainwashed, a population of conspirators buoyed by their sudden redemption. Still, the spoiled guarantees of fascism lived on within the petit bourgeois. Consider the elderly cleansing lady, Emmi, in Fear Eats the Soul. On her wedding day, she and her recent husband (an immigrant, no less) have fun with dinner in what had been Hitler’s favorite Munich restaurant. Or Veronika Voss, the faded UFA starlet rumored to have once bedded Joseph Goebbels, now hooked on morphine and desperate for a comeback in a society that has no use for her. Nearly all of Fassbinder’s characters deceive themselves. Those that appear to have a legitimate purpose are still inscrutable. I’m pondering of the enigmatic man in In a Yr of 13 Moons who was fired from his job because he has kidney cancer. He now haunts the road below his office, watching the sixteenth floor for eight hours a day, five days per week. What’s the riddle of his awful wisdom?

In his movies, ugliness reclaims beauty until the 2 develop into indistinguishable, fused within the aesthetic luxury of abjection.

The family is one other bogus scheme. Or, more to the purpose, a rehearsal for subjection. “Love is the very best, most insidious, handiest instrument of social repression,” the director once said. Fassbinder’s circle of relatives life was marked by an absent father (a physician, a landlord, a dilettante) with whom he was at perpetual odds, and a tubercular mother who had a teenage lover and moved the family to Munich’s “prostitute row” when Fassbinder was six. “He is rarely quite certain who’s family and who isn’t,” Penman writes, adding that Fassbinder was “born right into a world of shadows, ruins, suspicions.” Those that knew the director speculate that this early disconnection accounts for his constant adult entourages, the studio of homegrown stars—a grubbier version of Warhol’s Factory—that he tyrannized and betrayed. Hanna Schygulla, Ingrid Caven, Kurt Raab, Margit Carstensen, Brigitte Mira—these were the surrogates, mostly female, of what Penman calls “a garish, dysfunctional, squabbling, unreconciled, LGBT+ family.” The dysfunction spasmed into two suicides, each of them Fassbinder’s lovers: that of the Moroccan actor El Hedi ben Salem in 1977, and the German actor Armin Meier in 1978. (The latter allegedly killed himself after not being invited to Fassbinder’s birthday celebration.) It’s no accident that Thomsen, in his study of Fassbinder, titles a chapter “Terrorism and the Nuclear Family.” These are synonyms in Fassbinder. To wit: the tormented wife in Martha (1974), held captive in her own residence, and the disturbed mother in Fear of Fear (1975), choking on her middle-class comforts. (Margit Carstensen plays each roles in a bravura double crack-up.) 

Penman is especially attuned to the political frequency of Fassbinder’s work. Germany in Autumn (1978), the omnibus film that Fassbinder and ten other directors made in response to the Red Army Faction’s season of terrorism in 1977, was perhaps his most personal political outburst. “[He] puts his life onscreen, all its chaos and contradiction: his own cowardice and violence, doubts and addictions and tantrums,” Penman writes, describing the provocation of the director’s twenty-six-minute segment, through which he simply talks. Elsewhere, Fassbinder described himself as a “romantic anarchist,” by which he seems to have meant he supported annihilating capitalism, government, and society at large while still reserving the suitable to charter planes stuffed with cocaine and lavish a lover with Lamborghinis.

In fact, Fassbinder was fascinated by the terrorism of the Seventies and even claimed distant ties to Andreas Baader (of Baader-Meinhof fame), who attended performances at Fassbinder’s Motion Theatre. Thomsen goes thus far as to suggest that this Munich theater was “one among the breeding grounds of West German terrorism.” Penman, in his telegraphic style, recounts the froth of that period:   

Wider context. Late Nineteen Sixties/early Seventies. Reclamation of the general public sphere. Political demands voiced on the road. Protest marches. Public speech and critique and discourse. Situationists. Maoists. Free Speech movement. Stonewall. Women’s Liberation. Up Against The Wall Motherfucker. Let 100 flowers bloom. Squats and communes. Drag pubs, after hours clubs and other unpoliced spaces. Unpoliced states. Ways of being on the planet. Italian Autonomia. Projects undertaken by non-academic outsiders. Uncredentialed researchers. Small presses. Autodidact waves. Turbulence. Joseph Beuys’s Free University. Conrad Schnitzler and Hans-Joachim Roedelius’s Zodiak Free Arts Lab. Munich Motion-Theatre/Anti-Theatre.

For me, Fassbinder’s most transgressive statement can also be one among his most infamous. “I need to be ugly on the duvet of Time—it’ll occur and I’m glad about it and I admit it—when ugliness has finally reclaimed all beauty. That’s luxury.” He never did make the duvet, but in his movies, ugliness reclaims beauty until the 2 develop into indistinguishable, fused within the aesthetic luxury of abjection. (Here a selected scene involves mind: Martha, her body vividly sunburned due to her husband’s malevolence, lying nude in bed in a seaside room.) “Some terms get their time within the highlight,” Penman writes, “but it surely’s someway never the suitable time for a celebration of the flagrantly ugly.” Fassbinder didn’t have fun ugliness but captured it together with his camera as you’d capture an act of nature: the grimy interiors, the harassed or hangdog faces of individuals crushed by life, the fumes of cigarettes, and mirrors, after all. A whole bunch of mirrors. 1000’s of mirrors. What did they mean? For Penman, “The countless mirrors and reflections in Fassbinder’s movies are emblematic of lives without foundation or rooted beliefs.” Thomsen, in his book, puts it more succinctly, almost like a koan: “The mirror accommodates a warning.” Fassbinder made an art of not heeding it.