Content Warning: partner violence
The first time I saw The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), I was ashamed of how much of myself it reflected. I had just met a boy I wanted to possess; as with most of the boys I had been with, I felt myself like a series of beads on a line, each moment with him strung together awaiting the next, the lengths of cord in between serving only to bridge the gaps in space. There’s a yearning for oneself there that I can’t quite describe, but I’ll do my best: it’s as if you only exist in the moments of togetherness, passing through the rest of time like a ghost, waiting to find yourself resurrected in another’s look. The film’s protagonist Petra (Margit Carstensen) sits waiting for a call from the woman who does not love her back, flinging herself across the room at the first clang of the ringer. Like her, I would feel my phone buzz and tear it from my pocket hoping it was him; if it wasn’t, I’d answer, present in body but not in mind. But if it was… finally, a purpose. Please, before you judge me for feeling this way, know that it was a learned obsession with roots in profound insecurity — only a few years of true loves (from others, from myself) were able to shake me from this miasma of anxious self-effacement. But in the thick of it, all I wanted in order to be with myself was to be with another; the question remains of who possessed who. This notion — the dynamics of love and possession — permeates not only Petra von Kant but much of the body of work of its director, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The bad boy of New German Cinema, Fassbinder deals in themes of violence, sexual desire and expression, queer identity, and manipulation, all converging in a rather cynical perspective on the nature of love.
His own life was riddled with romantic tumult; the love of his life, the strapping El Hedi ben Salem, was prone to bouts of physical violence and alcoholism, later dying by suicide after being convicted for the stabbing of three people in Berlin. Fassbinder himself fell prey to similar brutality; his lover, the actor Irm Hermann, once attested that “he almost beat [her] to death on the streets of Bochum.” In his relationship with ben Salem, did he feel the same self-effacement I did? Were his attacks on Hermann rooted in the same desire to possess? No one but him can say for sure, the death of the author condemning us to emotional conjecture, but his work speaks in his stead. Fassbinder’s films are steeped in the violences — the “everyday fascism” — of romantic relationships; with his friends and lovers making appearances in dedications and on screen, ben Salem and Hermann included, I can’t help but imagine a painful bond between his films and his own experiences and perceptions of love. For what we find in his body of work is that love — in the Fassbinder sense — is pain: a pretext for violence, a lever of power, a commodity to be bought and sold. We find that love exists within a fluid dynamic of possessor and possessed, each lover slipping between either role to gratify their desires or defend their hearts. But most importantly and most tragically, we find that love means inflicting suffering on others; whether with intention or out of ignorance, Fassbinder’s lovers play oxygen thief with one another, using sex and money and desire as instruments of passionate torture. In Fox and His Friends (1975), the catapulting of working-class Fox (played by Fassbinder himself) into high society is preyed upon by a cadre of upper-crusters, including Fox’s own lover. In The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, a triangle of devotion and cruelty unfolds between a dictatorial fashion designer, her servile assistant Marlene (Hermann), and her fresh-faced muse Karin (Hanna Schygulla). In Querelle (1982), a sailor (Brad Davis) morphs into a killer as he navigates the eroticism and violence of seamen, laborers, and gay bar frequenters. As the curtains close on each entry in Fassbinder’s œuvre, love makes way for death and disgust; the flame is choked out, but touch the smoldering embers and you’ll find that they still burn.
***
They asked me how I knew
My true love was true
I, of course, replied
“Something here inside
Cannot be denied”
Before we slather ourselves in the muck of romantic fascisms and amorous violence, we have to answer one simple question: what is love? In Fassbinder’s universe, the answer is simple: love is slavish devotion. You know your love is true when you are willing to debase yourself for it, to let your beloved abuse you with money or words or sex because — you tell yourself — you are nothing without them. This devotion is expressed in Fox and His Friends by way of transaction; Fox — a carnival worker who finds himself alone amidst the trappings of bourgeois living after he wins the lottery — repeatedly attempts to buy the love of Eugen (Peter Chatel), the scion of a wealthy printing family. Eugen, for his part, laps it up, pressuring Fox to purchase extravagant furniture for a plush apartment as repayment for an education in high-society manners (in Eugen’s own words, to “make a human being” out of him). In the miniature economy that develops between them, love acts as both commodity and means of exchange: for Fox, the cash must be kept flowing to ensure consistent affection from Eugen and his coterie of vultures; as for Eugen, love is the medium of payment in return for which he receives material and social capital in the form of loans for the family business and status-producing luxury goods. Their relationship is frequently represented as a professional one: when Fox first meets Eugen’s father, the word “partner” is used with both romantic and business connotations. The dynamic is reproduced in the first tour of their new apartment; Eugen sketches plans for the home’s furnishings to Fox’s bewilderment (“A bookshelf. For books, my darling.” “What books?”) and Fox, fulfilling his role as investor, dutifully foots the bill. Such a double-edged partnership fits into the film’s more general association of sex and money; take, for example, a shot in which one of Eugen’s entourage explains to Fox the potential opportunities in investing in Eugen’s company while another man, lithe and classically-figured, hangs his member freely in the periphery. In the next scene, Fox signs a contract with Eugen’s family, sealing his loan — and their partnership — at a flexible seven percent interest rate, the vicious economy of love and cash made legally binding.
Like Fox, the character of Marlene in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant expresses her slavish devotion to her beloved by giving. As Petra’s live-in servant, she brings her orange juice in bed, completes her sketches for new clothing designs, and types out her dictated letters, all at Petra’s command. But unlike Fox, whose possession is brought upon him by his newfound financial power, Marlene’s is rooted in weakness and disempowerment. This is reflected in her positioning on camera; Marlene’s blocking, like Petra’s and Karin’s, is part of an elaborate choreography of depths and elevations that indicate who — across one of the film’s five theater-like acts or within a moment — wields the power between two characters. Marlene’s place is in the background, busying herself out of focus as Petra and Karin abuse one another, occasionally turning toward the camera for a moment of connection with the viewer. In one sequence, Marlene is sent to answer the door, but instead of returning to the bedroom she and the camera duck into a hallway, the windows offering a view of Petra in her bed. She presses her hand to the glass in the darkness, obscuring Petra’s image, and hangs her head. Whereas Petra and Karin constantly jostle with each other for the camera’s attention, Marlene is always on the outside looking in both in the frame or on the set, heightening her isolation and position of weakness vis-à-vis Petra. In the play of master and slave, Marlene is rendered, whether through her masochistic desire to please or her inability to resist, metaphorically invisible.
***
They said, “Someday you’ll find
All who love are blind”
When your heart’s on fire
You must realize
Smoke gets in your eyes
The heights of desire are a dizzying emotional space in which Fassbinder’s characters resort to their most atavistic and self-preserving tendencies. While Marlene submits to Petra’s effacement in her devotion, Petra and Karin clash on screen in a rocking balance of forms. Their passion — Petra’s for Karin, Karin for her potential career success under Petra’s wing — unfolds brutally in the aforementioned choreography of spaces. In this way, the single room the film takes place in offers itself as a battlefield of high and low ground, a manifestation of that emotional primal space. Karin lounges in bed, reading a magazine while Petra feeds her bottomless gin and tonics in a visual reversal of the Petra-Marlene master-slave dynamic. As she is waited on, Karin barrages Petra with insults, bragging about last night’s fling and dismissing Petra’s attempts at companionate connection. Later, once Karin learns that her husband (yes, it gets messier!) is in town and gets up to leave, Petra takes her place in bed and, without other recourse to reclaim the position of power that once accompanied that space, hurls insults at Karin (“rotten little whore”), a beam bisecting the frame and them within it. But Karin is standing now, a visual position of power; Petra’s insults leave barely a scratch. When Karin starts to leave, Petra hurls herself at her feet, à la Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son, and begs for forgiveness. Her power solidly confirmed, Karin insults her again. This exhausting spatial and relational back-and-forth not only brings physicality to the power struggle between Petra and Karin, but also highlights the constant recourse to violence and cruelty as one (or better yet, the only) tool for maintaining the upper hand and, with it, a sense of self-possession within the structure of a romantic relationship. This love is a zero-sum game; as Petra says of her previous flame, “You’re afraid of losing points. You’re afraid of being the weaker one.”
It doesn’t stop there; Fassbinder shows us that love and violence can have an even more intimate fusion. Enter Querelle, a film in which every moment of tenderness is accompanied by an equal and opposite moment of cruelty. Querelle himself, our sadomasochistic sailor anti-hero, engages in several barbaric romances: with Village People policeman Mario (Burkhard Driest), with the soft-hearted and hard-hatted Gil (Hanno Pöschl), with the dom boss of the Bar Feria Nono (Günther Kaufmann), with the slithery sailor Vic (Dieter Schidor), et cetera, et cetera. In the sequence of desire and its actualization, romantic and violent gestures are paired almost one-to-one: a man goes in for a kiss and then hooks a gut-punch, a knife is put away and a cigarette is shared, Querelle cuts Vic’s throat and then kisses him tenderly. And let’s not forget the two predominant symbols of the film, the cock and the switchblade, paired to great effect when Querelle reaches into Mario’s pants and Mario springs a glittering hard-on with his knife. Whereas violence is used as a weapon to maintain power and dignity within the context of a romance in Petra von Kant, there is no love without violence in Querelle, the two forms of physically relating to another existing codependently or not at all.
***
So, I chaffed them
As I gaily laughed
To think they would doubt our love
Yet today, my love has gone away
I am without my love
But alas, in the course of a romance a consensus must be reached: either it will go on forever or it will be snuffed out. In the Fassbinder world, there are no happy endings; the end of love leads his characters to abandonment and destruction. It happens in Querelle like this: Querelle and Gil, blood-bound by their symmetrical natures as killers, fall for one another. Theirs is one of the few relationships in the film left unconsummated — whereas in all the above examples, the manifestation of “love” is in sex, for Gil and Querelle love takes its form as tender words and soft gestures; Querelle, for his part, declares to Gil that he is the only man he has ever loved. However, this doesn’t stop Querelle from turning Gil in; immediately after Gil’s break from jail, Querelle leaves a tip with Nono to pass onto the police: Gil’s name, his destination, and his time of departure by train. Like Petra before him, Querelle’s only recourse against the vulnerability of love and the possibility of being “owned” by another through his devotion is violence, choosing to abandon and therefore condemn the man he loves rather than face a lifetime of self-dispossession. “Querelle had entered into a kind of unspoken pact with the Devil,” an intertitle asserts. “He promised to him neither his body, nor his soul, but something just as precious: a friend.”
Querelle’s abandonment of Gil mirrors Eugen’s abandonment of Fox, but in a manner more parasitic than sacrificial. Having sucked everything he could out of their fiduciary and emotional partnership, Eugen reacts to Fox’s desire for freedom and self-possession (“I want to be myself again”) like the jilted party of an expensive divorce proceeding: he takes the apartment and the furniture — the status symbols that will continue to accrue social capital — leaving Fox with only his car and bedazzled denim jacket to sleep in. As for the loan, it was “repaid” in the form of Fox’s salary working at the company; surely Fox did not expect his unskilled labor to be worth that much, did he? With the contract breached, love makes way for contempt once again. In perhaps the saddest moment of the film, Fox’s sister Hedwig (Christiane Maybach) — the only person with whom he can be said to have had a genuine love — demands 76 marks in repayment for the courier service that dropped off the last of his belongings at her house; his last friend in this world leaves him to the vultures, or, better yet, becomes one. His abandonment complete, Fox overdoses on Valium in the dead halls of the U-Bahn; the final shot of the film sees two boys rifle through his pockets for money and strip off his logo-typical jacket, Fox’s corpse finally picked clean of the last of its valuable flesh. His love for Eugen is reciprocated insofar as it continues to be a good investment; once the losses begin to outweigh the profits, Fox is left for carrion, the only logical conclusion to the market shelf-life of a commodified love.
***
Now, laughing friends deride
Tears, I cannot hide
The tragic romances of Fox and His Friends, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, and Querelle thus chart the evolution of Fassbinderian love: the initial possession, marked by a devotion that sucks life from one partner to feed the psyche of the other; the turbulent climax, whereby both lovers turn to violence to elevate themselves within their internal power structure; and the final abandonment, in which the weaker of the two — the loser of the zero-sum game — is cut down by one last suffering, the love having achieved its transformation from rapture to rot. It is worth noting that all these examples — and plenty more across Fassbinder’s body of work — are representations of queer relationships, Fassbinder himself having experienced and perpetrated abuse with partners of varying genders. I find this sort of representation daring, especially keeping in mind the contemporary clamor for queer romances that end well (us LGBTs, you’ll see, are tired of stories in which we die). But that is now, this was then; the suffering wrought upon lovers in Fassbinder’s tragiromances grant an unusual complexity to the queer love story, reminding the viewer of the possibility of intimate violence across the wide spectrum of relationships. In this, Fassbinder’s condemnation of love rings universal: in a world where all who love are blind, love itself is sentenced to the garbage heap, the dumpster fire, the pile of ash.
So, I smile and say
“When a lovely flame dies
Smoke gets in your eyes”
