The Night of the Hunted

Jean Rollin's The Night of the Hunted is a typically moody, abstractly haunting film from the idiosyncratic horror auteur. More even than most of his work, this film dispenses with any actual concrete horror in favor of a vague sense of disquiet that's almost entirely psychological and mental. This is a haunting study of the nature of memory and its linkage to identity and human consciousness, and the fear here arises almost entirely from the loss of memory, from the feeling of one's sense of self slipping away with one's memory. It's about fear of the loss of self, making this an entirely existential horror film.

The film opens in the fashion of Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly: a young woman (Brigitte Lahaie), dressed only in a filmy nightie, runs out of the dark forest one night and into the path of a car driven by Robert (Alain Duclos). She tells him that her name is Elisabeth, and she's running in terror of something, but she doesn't remember what — moments later, she doesn't even remember that her name is Elisabeth. Her memories keep slipping away from her; it's not just amnesia, but the slippage of even short-term memory, so that if Robert were to be out of her sight for just a few minutes she'd forget him too. Naturally, she clings to him desperately, and he takes this confused, frightened girl back to his apartment, where he comforts her and they soon have sex, in a scene of cheesy, gratuitous softcore of the kind that Rollin almost always slotted into his films, and yet here the sex is tinged with desperation and a genuine thirst for connection. Elisabeth lives only in the present moment, she says, and she clings to each moment like a precious raft in a sea of nothingness, because each present moment is all she has to hang onto. She urges him on, demanding that he stay with her, that he not let her forget; her intense desire for a memory to cling to makes what could otherwise have been a rote, porny sex scene surprisingly poignant, both passionate and deeply sad.

Apparently, though, this whole situation doesn't leave enough of an impression on Robert, who, hapless as most male Rollin heroes, soon goes off to work, leaving Elisabeth alone to forget him, and herself, all over again. She's quickly found by the doctors she'd apparently been fleeing at the beginning of the film, and they take her to an apartment building that houses other patients, like her, whose memories are continually erased. Most of Rollin's previous work was set in the majestically ruined countryside, in crumbling ancient castles and disused graveyards, but The Night of the Hunted is an urban film, with a very different aesthetic. Rollin's haunted rural castles and fields had always been both creepy and beautiful, mingling fear and foreboding with the strange allure of death and the supernatural. In this film, though, the sinisterly blank apartment towers and concrete wastelands of the city are merely creepy, the building's surfaces and interiors as blank as the minds of the inhabitants. The building, obviously an abandoned office tower, is nearly undecorated, its walls stark white or black, and the patients, with their missing memories, wander aimlessly through these blank, sterile spaces, the austerity of their surroundings reflecting the emptiness of their lives.


It's a haunting, disturbingly poetic film, especially in its first half, before a series of pointless sex scenes and pseudo-scientific exposition dumps disrupt the poetic vibe. At the apartment, Elisabeth meets two other women who are afflicted as she is: Catherine (Cathy Stewart), whose memory is so bad that she can't even remember how to eat, and Véronique (Dominique Journet), who Elisabeth seems to vaguely remember from her previous life. The scenes between these women are evocative and poignant, as they struggle from moment to moment to remember something, to hold onto some memory, some experience, some person who means something to them. They invent stories and memories for each other. Catherine and Elisabeth pretend that they were childhood friends, though like everything else that game too soon slips away from them. Later, they encounter a woman who's constantly searching for her lost child: she remembers, or thinks she remembers, that she once had a child, but not the child's name or even its gender.

Rollin is delving into the nature of memory and what it means to the construction of one's identity: without memory these people are nothing, no one, barely even alive, their very selves erased along with their pasts. These scenes are deeply emotional, infused with tenderness and sadness, the film's opening already forgotten because these mysteriously afflicted people truly live exclusively in the present tense. In her previous collaborations with Rollin, The Grapes of Death and Fascination, Lehaie, who started her career as a porn actress, projected a fierce carnality, a feral, sexualized violence that made her the ultimate femme fatale. She seems like almost a different actress here, her intensity transmuted into vulnerability, melancholy, a sense of loss that seems to infuse her every gesture, her every fragile, innocent expression.

The film falls apart a bit at around the halfway point, replacing this moody exploration of loss and mental anguish with a number of gratuitous scenes of violence-tinged eroticism, which seem to have come from an entirely different film. Robert also returns towards the end, and the plot is needlessly explained in multiple exposition-laden speeches delivered by the sinister doctor. But the film's final image, which compares the memory-less Elisabeth to the shambling walking dead of a zombie film, provides an effective, eerily romantic finale for a strange, and strangely affecting, film. The Night of the Hunted is ultimately uneven and flawed, only sporadically delivering on its promise and its evocative study of memory and identity. At its best, though, the film achieves the haunting quality of Rollin's other films without any of the supernatural or horror elements that generally characterized his other work.

Inferno

Dario Argento followed up his eerie, beautiful masterpiece Suspiria with something of a sequel, Inferno, which expands on the previous film's mythology about witches and evil forces, focusing on another member of a trio of sinister "mothers" who are spread out across the world. Like its predecessor, though, Inferno is more concerned with atmosphere and a general mood of dread and terror than it is with narrative sense; this film is even less coherent than Suspiria, its plot laughably fragmented and bizarre, placing the emphasis entirely on Argento's typically chilling set pieces, his gorgeous lighting schemes and cinematography.

Inferno never even quite settles on a central protagonist: instead, a number of people begin investigating strange occurrences in both Rome and New York, including Rose (Irene Miracle), her brother Mark (Leigh McCloskey), and Mark's classmate Sara (Eleonora Giorgi). Argento jumps back and forth between multiple potential protagonists, but few of them stick around for long, except for Mark, who's a curiously passive character, plagued by fits and ailments that prevent him from doing much more than stumble aimlessly and ineffectually through the film, following a strange and unsettling trail of clues to the film's fiery climax.

The emphasis here is not on the plot or the disposable characters, but on the beautifully disturbing imagery that Argento (in collaboration with his mentor Mario Bava, who crafted many of the film's optical effects and set designs) applies to the film's series of creepy murders. There's an almost surreal sensibility to the film at times. At one point, as a prelude to a murder, Argento cuts in a never-explained series of shots — a lizard eating a moth, gloved hands cutting the heads off paper cutouts, and a woman being hanged — that suggest the violence to come but are otherwise all but non-sequiturs.

This nonsensical strangeness reaches its apex with a grisly, torturously prolonged sequence late in the film, when a man is attacked by rats at a pond in Central Park, the rats swarming over him and gnawing at him as he splashes about in the water. Argento allows this grisly death scene to stretch out for a long time, until a nearby hot dog vendor suddenly hears the man's screams and goes running towards (and then, magically, across) the pond, seemingly to save the floundering victim — until he pulls out a massive butcher knife and begins hacking at the man's neck instead. It's darkly comic and utterly unexplained, beyond the fact that the malevolent "mothers" can apparently possess and control anything and anyone, from rats to people to the cats that tear apart another of the film's victims.


This was a troubled production for Argento, who fell ill during filming and was not even on-set for some scenes, turning parts of the film over to assistants (apparently including Bava). And yet the film is unmistakeably steeped in the same aesthetic that drove Suspiria, associating death and terror with the distinctive red and blue colored lights that bathe so many of Argento's sets, even when it makes no conceivable sense — when Mark pries up the floorboards of his sister's apartment, he climbs down into a crawlspace that is, unaccountably, lit with that same eerie, striking primary color palette. The film's opening scenes, in which Rose prowls through the dilapidated basement beneath her towering, gothic apartment building, memorably evoke the same slowly accumulating tension as Suspiria, with the wide-eyed heroine stalking through pools of shadow and colored light.

The sequence climaxes with a stunning underwater scene (apparently not even directed by the ailing Argento) in which Rose descends into what looks like a little puddle of water but opens up into an entire underwater room. Like a lot of things about this movie, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, except as a dreamlike passage from ordinary life into the unsettling other world that lies beyond our own. Something as prosaic as dropping one's keys leads to an eerie encounter with death, and the heroine can step into a puddle and emerge into a submerged chamber, a remnant of another time, offering grim portents of the fate awaiting her if she continues her investigation. The sequence has the slow, dreamy quality of an underwater ballet, the fear and tension of the sequence eroticized by the way the woman's clothes cling wetly to her body, her skirt billowing up around her, her lithe form diving and slashing through the water as the suspense builds and builds. There's an almost fetishistic quality to the scene, which is also embodied in the way that Argento abstractly associates injuries to the hand with impending doom — for no apparent reason, throughout the film, seemingly innocuous hand injuries almost always precede death and terror.

Inferno is a worthy follow-up to Suspiria. It is even more reliant on atmospheric imagery than its predecessor. It's a pure mood piece that's all about its lurid lighting, crisp sound design (including a score, by progressive rock legend Keith Emerson, that builds to operatic prog-metal bombast at the film's climax) and grotesque set pieces. Argento, in these films, is abstracting horror until the silly, hole-ridden plot is irrelevant, and all that matters is the eerie beauty with which the film presents its suspense and its bursts of violence.

Mon oncle d'Amerique

Alain Resnais' Mon oncle d'Amerique is a fascinating narrative experiment from the director who, more than any other, has always been concerned with the workings of the human mind. This film takes as its subject the biological processes by which the mind and personality are shaped, the ways in which one's persona is formed from the sum of one's experiences and the neurological foundations governing our reactions in various situations. The film is narrated, sporadically, by the French neurosurgeon Henri Laborit, who discusses the film's three interconnected stories in terms of behavioral biology ideas that explain the actions of the characters in these dramas. Laborit discusses fight-or-flight in a human society in which the "fight" component of that response has been rendered largely unacceptable. He analyzes careers and relationships in terms of systems of reward and punishment that are ingrained from very early in childhood. He observes the ways in which psychological stresses related to these biological underpinnings are expressed in anxiety and psychosomatic illness.

It's a potentially reductive and limiting rubric, pulling apart these dramatic stories and discussing the action in terms of biology and behavior. In fact, though, Resnais, working from a script by Jean Gruault, is after something far more complex. Gruault had also written the script for François Truffaut's The Wild Child, and at one point Laborit's voiceover mentions that when a human child grows up in isolation, without any human contact, he will be like "a little animal" with no language or other human behaviors. Resnais, much more powerfully and inventively than Truffaut, is exploring what it means to be human, exploring the essence of humanity as a sum of experiences, biology, and most crucially, one's interactions with other people. A core idea of the film is the concept that the individual human mind is actually formed from contacts with other people, from ideas learned from others, experiences, memories. An individual human, then, is actually comprised of the other people he or she has come into contact with, the experiences they've shared, the memories they've formed together. Resnais and Gruault, in collaboration with Laborit, have rendered science and biology as poetry, discovering that to analyze and dissect the nature of human behavior is not to render it cold and clinical, but to make the mystery all the more remarkable.

As Laborit says towards the end of the film, implicitly responding to such criticisms of science, "knowing the laws of gravity doesn't make us free from gravity." In the same way, the film's analysis of its stories in terms of behaviorist theories doesn't render the stories abstract or rob them of their power as human dramas. Indeed, what's quite remarkable about the film is that despite its constant breaking of the narrative illusion with explanatory voiceovers and comparisons to animals and laboratory experiments, the film remains consistently affecting on a human level. These are simple stories of disappointment, anxiety, and desire. René (Gérard Depardieu) is plagued by anxiety about his career; he's dedicated himself to his work but a series of mergers and shake-ups at his company put him in ever more precarious situations, ultimately forcing him to choose between his career and his family life. Jean (Roger Pierre) is a politician and aspiring writer who starts an affair with Janine (Nicole Garcia) just as his own career starts going through some trouble. And Janine has her own story, about her dreams of being an actress and her up-and-down romance with the married Jean.


It's not only biology that drives these stories. People learn from experiences, from the models provided by parents and other relatives — and also the models provided by the cinema. Throughout the film, Resnais cuts in excerpts of black-and-white films starring Jean Gabin, Jean Marais, and Danielle Darrieux, who provide templates for the actions of the three protagonists, cinematic role models whose behaviors are often echoed in this film's stories. The cinematic reference points parallel the biological ones, suggesting that just as biology contributes to the shape of a person's life and soul, the things that a person sees and experiences also add to the person they might become.

In the film's second half, Resnais shuffles the structure and begins interspersing the dramatic scenes more and more frequently with scenes of laboratory experiments featuring mice, scenes from the protagonists' childhoods that connect back to their later lives, and, hilariously, inserts in which men in rat masks enact scenes of love and competition. Those surreal interludes simultaneously buttress the theme of biology and behavior and undercut it, since they emphasize the gap between the biological foundations of behavior and the actual complexity and variety of human behavior. This is why, far from reducing humanity to a series of programmed responses, what Resnais, Gruault and Laborit are doing here is really all about the complexity and mystery of behavior, the intimacy between science and poetry in creating a full portrait of humanity.

In the film's powerful, mysterious final sequence, Resnais shows an urban building that has an image of a shady green forest covering one of its walls. Resnais cuts to successively closer and closer shots, and in each one the illusion of a tree growing from concrete is shattered more and more decisively. First the texture of bricks can be seen in the image, which is a mural painted on the wall. As Resnais cuts to even closer views, the overall sense of the image is compromised, and it stops looking like a tree at all — in the closest shot, the film's final shot, the image has become abstract smears of paint on bricks. At that intimate distance, it is impossible to tell that from afar the paint creates a rather convincing illusion of forest greenery; up close it's just paint, seemingly splattered on the bricks with little care, just a splotch that looks like nothing at all. It's a startling and ambiguous metaphor, suggesting that the closer we look at something — like human behavior — the more mysteries are introduced, even as looking closely increases understanding about how things are put together.

Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers

Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers, the documentarian Les Blank's goofy, eccentric ode to garlic in all its forms, isn't quite an informational piece about garlic, though it does include some history and scientific info about the "stinking rose," nor is it a how-to-cook-with-garlic feature, though there's some of that, too. Instead, it's a loose and appropriately earthy film that takes more of a free-wheeling approach to garlic as a tasty seasoning but also as a symbol for traditional ways of life, as a route into conversations about modern agrarianism and mass farming, and as a way of articulating a certain attitude towards life. That attitude is, of course, one of freedom, self-confidence, a rejection of the "puritanical" American value system. One of the people Blank interviews, the founder of a garlic appreciation society, who wears a floppy hat shaped like a head of garlic, speaks passionately about how garlic represents an enthusiastic embrace of life and a lack of fear about social niceties. Again and again Blank's garlic enthusiast interviewees characterize garlic as rooted in traditional values, as representing the opposite of "civilization." One man speaks of a 17th century food critic who opposed garlic and advocated for bland dishes, and the contempt in his voice is palpable. "Can you imagine eating dinner with that guy?" he asks, his red-rimmed eyes growing shifty and widening in horror.

For his part, Blank remains slightly aloof from the goofier passions of particular interviewees, instead embracing the value of garlic as something wild, untamed, in opposition to the increasing conformity and self-consciousness of modern society. Blank plays back a mouthwash commercial that emphasizes the fear of garlic breath, and several of the garlic lovers in the film have adopted a slogan in response to such campaigns: "fight mouthwash, eat garlic." Garlic represents tradition as opposed to modernity and social niceties, and it's through this theme that Blank touches on the shift in farming from small-level agrarianism to the corporate mega-farms that today dominate vegetable production. The film was made in 1980, and it's somewhat sad to see the various advocates of small, independent farming, still believing that it's possible that the corporate model might not win out.

One farmer who Blank interviews grows only a little garlic and admits that he's not a garlic fanatic, so he seems to be in the film mainly because he's the most eloquent proponent of small-scale independent farming, with everything grown organically without use of pesticides. Today, the idea seems quaint and it probably did then, too, but despite the farmer's relative disinterest in garlic Blank suggests that garlic is the ultimate symbol of this kind of do-it-yourself agrarianism. His many shots of garlic dishes being prepared emphasize the work that goes into preparing garlic: peeling it, separating the cloves from the head and often chopping them or mashing them into tiny bits. This work, this intimate hands-on connection with the stinky, messy food, is part of the pleasure of cooking and eating. Garlic thus becomes a symbol for a larger idea about resisting corporate pre-packaging, resisting the lures of ease and convenience that alienate people from the processes of farming, cooking, and even eating itself. Perhaps to reinforce this point, Blank makes the morbid joke of showing some piglets suckling at their mothers, then shortly after shows the dead pigs being sent to a restaurant and prepared. Many of the dishes being made don't do much if anything to divorce the meat from the animals that produced it: the pigs are cooked whole, as are many fish, their mouths stuffed with whole heads of garlic.


Blank, typically, is just as interested in the folk music that surrounds the food festivals where these garlic-heavy foods are prepared and served. A Spanish man shows how simple sandwiches of garlic and tomatoes nourished poor people during times of strife in his home country, then dances and sings to the accompaniment of vigorous flamenco guitar, snapping his fingers and holding aloft a wreath of garlic. Numerous other folksy bands are represented as well, their music accompanying the many scenes of Blank documenting how a particular garlic dish is prepared. Blank's willingness to divert from the film's primary subject injects his own personality, his own enthusiasm, into the work; he even opens the film with a gap-toothed woman (another of his obsessions) telling a story about how much her mother despised garlic. The woman is Irish-American and suggests that garlic isn't typically an Irish herb, but the rest of the film is pretty inclusive in documenting how different cultures and types of cuisine use garlic: in Italian and Chinese cooking, in pesto sauce, in barbeque, to stuff chicken, to cook fish or squid, or even in some cases on its own, as in the baked whole garlic head that's served at one garlic festival.

The film is often funny, and Blank seldom misses an opportunity to point out an idiosyncratic or silly detail — like all the T-shirt aphorisms about garlic or the stand at one festival selling a "pet garlic" on a leash for some unfathomable reason — but he never seems like he's mocking his subjects. Like his friend and peer Werner Herzog (who appears here speaking about his film Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht, seemingly baffled as to why Blank is asking about garlic) Blank seems to enjoy enthusiasm and passion for their own sakes, and his interest in the ephemera of garlic is contagious. He spends a great deal of time simply admiring the preparation of delicious-looking garlic-heavy dishes, until the distinctive odor of cooking garlic nearly seems to waft out of the screen. But more than that Blank suggests that what we choose to eat, and how we think about food, is a big part of what defines our identity. Thus garlic becomes a symbol for independence, playfulness, love of life, and the earthy hippie values of previous generations, still then just barely hanging on. Blank's film embodies these qualities and celebrates them, finding a great deal of metaphoric complexity in a simple herb.

The Shining

Stanley Kubrick's The Shining undoubtedly deserves its reputation as one of the cinema's creepiest, and most artful, horror films. Adapted loosely from Stephen King's novel about a hotel caretaker who loses his mind over the course of a long and isolated winter, the film is a bizarre and unrelenting experience, a slow pressure cooker that bears down on the viewer in much the same way as Jack Torrance's (Jack Nicholson) isolation affects him. Kubrick strips down the story to its bare core, as a study in slowly suffocating dread and terror. The film's pace is deliberate, and its plotting is minimal; Kubrick establishes the dominant mood through his evocative, distanced visuals and, especially, through the eerie soundtrack, with its pulsating heartbeat rhythms and sinister strings. In point of fact, it's easy to miss that not much actually happens here, that the film's actual horrific incidents are widely spaced and parceled out. More often, Kubrick lets the terror grow and grow, through lengthy and uncomfortable scenes that create the expectation of a horrible payoff, before abruptly cutting them off instead.

What's at the core of the film is the dysfunction of family, the bitter and ugly feelings that emerge from troubled father figure Jack. He's taken on a job as the winter caretaker at the Overlook Hotel, where he'll be snowbound for months with his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and their son Danny (Danny Lloyd). While there, Jack, under the influence of the hotel's many ghosts or just his own unstable mind, begins to seethe with resentment and hate, feeling that his family is in some way holding him back or destroying his life. These sentiments are latent in Jack to begin with, as revealed by a story that Wendy tells to a concerned physician before the family heads to the Overlook. It seems that Jack had once been a drinker, and in an angry, uncontrolled moment had dislocated Danny's arm. This is a remarkable scene, staged almost entirely as a closeup on Wendy's face as she describes this incident, trying to put a positive gloss on it, to pretend that it was just an ordinary mishap. Kubrick captures her twitching smile, the way Duvall conveys the anguish and confusion lurking just below Wendy's chipper exterior. Duvall's performance here is extraordinary, as she bares her gums and her big buckteeth, while Kubrick holds the closeup, and holds it, and holds it, finally cutting to the skeptical, deadpan expression on the doctor's face, a stand-in for the audience, seeing right through Wendy's desperate cheerfulness. The scene perfectly conveys the multiple layers at work here, all in a simple memory that gets at the essence of this story's themes.

Wendy's insecurity about her potentially violent husband only worsens once the family is locked in at the Overlook, and this story about the dislocated arm lends queasy resonance to Jack's interactions with his family. At one point, Jack calls Danny over for a conversation, holding the boy in his lap and hugging him, asking him innocuous questions about how things are going and how he likes the hotel. It's a seemingly normal conversation on its face, but it's made creepy and strange by Nicholson's twitchy performance, and by the slowly escalating dread in the music. Kubrick treats everything this way; even the typewriter that Jack writes on is made an object of terror with a slow pan in towards its carriage, and of course later in the film this terror is revealed to be warranted when Wendy finally reads Jack's manuscript.


The Shining's particular form of terror is familiar by this point, even overly familiar, but it maintains its power because of Kubrick's subtlety, his decision to treat Jack's escalating madness as a surreal break with reality. The famous scene where Jack talks to the ghostly Lloyd the bartender (Joe Turkel) is a case in point. Jack walks into an empty ballroom and sits down at the bar, then Kubrick cuts to a closeup of Jack talking, presumably to himself, before cutting back to the longer shot of the bar, which is now stocked with bottles of booze and staffed by the suavely sinister Lloyd. The climax is even more startling in its disjunction from reality, as a frazzled Wendy staggers through the Overlook, catching glimpses of horrifying and puzzling sights, like what appears to be a man in a bear/pig mask giving head to a man in a suit. This famously inscrutable image, so unsettling in its effect, is a leftover from King's novel, where these characters had a story and a reason for being. Here, in Kubrick's film, without this context, it's simply a destabilizing surrealist break, a non-sequitur without any possibility of explanation or understanding.

Kubrick makes it absurd, and scary, and unfathomable, just as he strips much of the psychological rationalization from Jack. Kubrick keeps Jack's pathology at a distance, not only shooting everything in alienating long shots, but refusing to show the process by which Jack transforms from a slightly troubled family man into a raging lunatic. Instead, Jack's madness is shown from his family's point of view, as unexplainable and abrupt outbursts, as mood swings and sudden fits of rage without any clear cause. By the time Jack actually starts seeing ghosts — like his encounters with Lloyd and the hotel's former caretaker Grady (Philip Stone), who'd murdered his family many years before — he's already become violently angry. Nicholson's portrayal is of a man who is always just barely balancing on the edge of murderous rage to begin with, since Nicholson is almost naturally kind of creepy, with his sarcastic drawl and crooked smirk. Even before the family arrives at the Overlook, Jack tells his son about the Donner Party, taking such obvious satisfaction in freaking out the kid that he already comes across as a bit of a sadist.

Kubrick isolates this distasteful character within the Overlook's oversized rooms, not delving into his character but simply showing his disintegration from a distance. Wendy and the psychic Danny are shown at a similar remove, and Wendy's characterization is particularly limiting, as she is mostly just a weepy, insecure woman who sticks by a potentially abusive and nasty man. She nearly falls apart by the end of the film, and it's only Duvall's gape-eyed performance that gives Wendy some much-needed depth beyond her repetitive terror and crying. Ultimately, Kubrick makes the limitations of his archetypal characters into virtues, as the film is more about an abstract feeling of dread and the threat of violence than it is about a particular family and their horrific experiences. This is especially obvious in the character of the hotel cook Hallorann (Scatman Crothers), a stereotypical "magical Negro" character who can hear Danny's psychic cries. He shows up at the hotel after a lengthy struggle through the snow to get there, and just as suddenly gets an axe in his chest for his troubles. It's essentially a macabre joke from Kubrick, as he spends so much time chronicling Hallorann's journey to the Overlook only to abruptly destroy the pat hope represented by this rescue attempt. This is the film's essence, this reminder that hope and rescue can't come from outside: it's only Danny's cleverness during the final hedge maze sequence that ultimately saves him and his mom.

The Elephant Man

If most of the films of David Lynch might be described as a journey into the strangeness beneath the thin outer skin of ordinary reality, The Elephant Man essentially reverses the director's usual preoccupation: the film locates the ordinary and the human within an external skin of extraordinary surreality. The point is basically the same in either case, namely the coexistence of the prosaic with the unimaginable. Based on the famed real-life "elephant man" John Merrick, the film traces Merrick's transition from a carnival sideshow attraction to a cultured, intelligent man living in relative comfort and tranquility. John Hurt, playing Merrick beneath a thick coating of makeup and prosthetics, turns in a performance of amazing sensitivity and complexity. He is deformed, his head and body misshapen and covered in bulbous, fleshy protrusions. The sensibility at work in creating this image is obviously the same one that dreamed up the "lady in the radiator" with her swollen, protuberant cheeks for Lynch's debut Eraserhead: in these two figures of warped humanity, one entirely imaginary and the other based on a real person, Lynch's aesthetic of humanity made strange achieves its most potent early expressions.

That Hurt, his face hidden and distorted by this overpowering accumulation of makeup, still manages to be expressive and poignant is a miracle of acting. His performance, filtered through the obstructions of his disguise, mirrors Merrick's own slow emergence from within the cocoon of his appearance: both actor and character must project their inner selves through intimidating façades that threaten to suffocate them. When Merrick is initially discovered by the physician Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins), he is completely submerged in his externality. He is being displayed daily at a demeaning freakshow by the abusive, exploitative Bytes (Freddie Jones), who showcases his pet freak by day and beats him by night. Merrick is, as a result, withdrawn into himself, hidden away behind his own face, which he wears as a mask: everyone assumes that he is merely an uncomprehending animal, and he does or says nothing to disabuse them of the idea. It takes Treves, who slowly begins to realize that his new patient is more conscious than he had initially suspected, to draw out Merrick's inner life. The film's narrative is about finding a human mind, a human soul, within what had previously been deemed a mere empty husk. Treves is perhaps slow to recognize the humanity of this man; when he first discovers Merrick, his instinct is to display the elephant man before an assembly of medical professionals, exchanging one type of sideshow for another. But once Treves begins treating Merrick as a human being rather than a sideshow freak or a medical example, he discovers, much to his own surprise, a fully functioning intellect within this distorted body.


Lynch, perhaps recognizing that his central character is strange enough already, plays things relatively straight here. His images are disarmingly beautiful and classical, lending an unflinching sense of reality to his outrageous hero. The direct, unpretentious quality of Lynch's imagery makes Hurt's Merrick believable as more than an accumulation of impressive makeup effects and acting tics. The physicality of this elephant man is enhanced by the way he is introduced, slowly building up to his first appearances in much the same way as the classic monster movies held back the unveiling of the creature. Merrick is variously cloaked in shadows or hidden beneath burlap masks and heavy coats; in one inventively staged sequence, the outline of his body is visible through a thin curtain as he is displayed to a group of scientists. Paradoxically, as long as Merrick is living as a spectacle, Lynch withholds his full appearance from the audience, only suggesting the contours of his deformed body at most. When people view him only as a monster or a freak, Lynch films him through the filter of the monster movie, presenting Merrick in the shadowy half-light that is characteristic of the genre. This intensifies the effect when Merrick is finally revealed without any obstructions, when he appears in shadow-free daylight; his transition into humanity and society is signaled by his emergence into the light.

The film is dotted with very recognizably Lynchian dream sequences, in which Merrick is haunted by images of his mother — whose photo he cherishes as the only reminder of her role in his life — being trampled and mauled by elephants. These dreams incorporate ghostly superimpositions and slow-motion billows of smoke, familiar markers of the Lynchian unconscious. The director's hand also shows through in the sound design, which occasionally delves, without explanation, into the underbelly of the hospital where Merrick is staying, capturing the creaks and mechanical whooshes of pipes and machinery. The film explicitly takes place on the cusp of the machine age, as indicated by an early scene where Treves performs surgery on a man injured in a factory accident. He comments that they will be seeing more and more injuries like this, and laments the heartless nature of machinery, which "cannot be reasoned with." This idea flows subtly through the entire film, never mentioned again but always present in the soundtrack's pristinely recorded machine rhythms. Merrick's warm, reasoning humanity, found in an unfamiliar and externally awkward guise, is a counterpoint to the cold but perfectly sleek inhumanity of the machine and the metal pipe. As with all of Lynch's films, The Elephant Man is an eye-opening glimpse into the strangeness — and the strange beauty — of humanity.

Spetters

The motorcycle racing drama Spetters follows a similar pattern to many of director Paul Verhoeven's films, which often start with the basic elements of a trashy genre film and transform it into something much deeper, richer, and stranger. That's certainly the case here, as Verhoeven worms his way into this pulpy exploitation tale about a trio of arrogant young dirt bike racers striving to make it big and get out of their small town rut. Rien (Hans van Tongeren) is the most promising of the bunch, an ace driver who's on his way to becoming the king of the underground racing circuit, just a short step away from mainstream success. Eef (Toon Agterberg) is his mechanic, a sullen hood in a leather jacket who's mainly trying to buck the influence of his overbearingly religious parents. Finally, the goofy Hans (Maarten Spanjer) is the trio's loser buddy, perennially in Rien's shadow, with a bike that only starts half the time because Eef's more interested in maintaining the winner's motorcycle. This trio, with their girls and hangers-on, spend the first half of the film largely goofing around, going through an array of teen comedy moments with the usual Verhoeven flair.

The film earnestly takes on this milieu, wallowing in the cheesy fun of an early 80s disco, where Eef does his best imitation of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, before being outdone by a black guy with better moves. Travolta looms large over the film, sometimes literally, as when a poster-sized blow-up of his face fills the frame before Verhoeven zooms out to show what else is in the room. These kids are living in a wholly imitative culture, grooving to Blondie and Michael Jackson on dance floors that might've been modeled on New York City disco clubs. Verhoeven takes real pleasure in depicting what these kids get up to for fun, and he diligently checks off the requisite scenes: the disco, the motocross race, the fight where the outnumbered but defiant teens manage to outwit the big, tough motorcycle gang. It's all cheesy, kitschy fun, rendered with Verhoeven's typical appetite for such purplish material. But through it all, there's something more going on beneath the fun and the nods to genre clichés.

For one thing, Verhoeven's characters are developed with much finer strokes than the typical pulpy teen adventure. Even from the very beginning, these characters have a tinge of desperation lurking beneath their outward cheekiness; there's a very real sense in which these motocross races represent the teens' only chance to make something of themselves. In a town with very few opportunities — Eef works in a gas station, Hans and Rien as carpenters — these seemingly uneducated guys only dream of stardom and success, an escape from the various things they want to run from. As usual, Verhoeven also explores the subject of sex, which is both something of a status symbol for the kids and a sore spot in terms of their limited means. One definition of success for them might be having a nice place to bring their girls to get laid, something Rien gets a taste of whenever his parents leave town, while the other guys have to settle for distinctly un-sexy abandoned buildings and grassy fields. Even so, there's more than a hint that the guys go through the motions of sex not for its own sake but because it's an expected communal ritual. There's a hilarious scene where Eef and Hans, in adjacent rooms, aren't having sex but convince their girlfriends to fake it anyway, moaning and screaming until they fake cumming. The guys immediately break away and join up, bragging about how good it was, the homoerotic undertones in this kind of buddy movie coming to the fore here (and more explosively elsewhere) as sex becomes just a way to bond with the guys.

More subversively, sex also comes to the fore in the way that Verhoeven treats homophobia and various forms of prejudice and hatred. One way in which his film defiantly departs from its pulpy inspirations is that the main characters are depicted as hateful, obnoxious bigots and homophobes, getting their kicks by torturing others. At one point, Rien sneers about "nigger and Chinese" doctors, while in an earlier scene the group berates and tortures a gay couple, smearing one boy's mouth with lipstick and beating him. Still later, Eef takes up the habit of spying on and robbing gay hustlers, watching them perform their services and then beating them up afterwards to steal their money. He is fascinated and drawn to this scene even as he's repelled by it, and the money seems less like a motivation than an excuse. This cover-up is complicated by the fact that he's ostensibly stealing in order to win the favor of the fickle Fientje (Renée Soutendijk), who only sleeps with men who have either money or the promise of earning it someday soon.


Fientje has a lot in common with the three motocross kids, in that her one overriding motivation is a desire to better herself, to move up in life. She's sick of selling cheap fried food from the traveling stand she runs with her brother, hitched to the back of their car. She wants a man who can give her security and a fur coat, and to that end she'll kiss any guy with promise and screw any guy with money. She's a caricature of the shallow, socially ambitious slut, looking with her teased blonde curls and expressionless painted face like a trampy doll. Verhoeven revels in exaggerations of this sort, making Fientje an unapologetic slut and status-seeker to play off of Rien's more complex girlfriend Maya (Marianne Boyer), who cares about him in a far deeper way. It's not so much a virgin versus whore dilemma, since both girls are more than willing to sleep with Rien, but a question of why they want him and what they see in him. Ultimately, the shallow Rien picks the girl who's a makeup-caked mirror image of himself — Fientje shares his ambition, while all Maya can offer him is love and caring.

Throughout the first half of the film, Verhoeven does an excellent job of making these characters both interesting and profoundly unlikeable. They're self-centered jerks, vain thugs with no respect for their women and no tolerance for anyone different than themselves. Their idea of a fun night out involves boozing, dancing, gay-bashing, and having sex, this last a triumphant capper to the night's excitement. Despite all this, Verhoeven never allows them to become mere villains, and he sympathizes with their ambitions and camaraderie even when he detests their prejudices and attitudes. This complicated stance towards his protagonists pays off in the film's increasingly devastating second half, which departs more and more from its genre origins into deeper tragedy. As the film progresses, the initially inseparable trio are driven apart into diverging storylines, each pursuing his own fate as Verhoeven crosscuts between them, using rigorous, systematic parallel editing to emphasize this separation. The characters are deprived of all their grounding, as the motocross racing milieu becomes less and less important to the film, its status as a symbol of success replaced by a much more open and desperate thrashing about.

Spetters is a typically complex film from Verhoeven, not as harrowing or as fully developed as his earlier Turkish Delight, which treads some similar ground, but still a fascinating deconstruction of some particularly lightweight trash genres. This is a motocross film, a disco film, and a teen comedy all wrapped into one, though each of these elements is pushed into the background as the story progresses. Its second half, with its tragic narrative arc and shocking, brutal scenes of sex and violence, is a natural development of the film's negative worldview, in which the best that can be hoped for these kids is a life of compromise and willful self-deceit, always looking for more. Verhoeven's pulpy tribute to a degraded genre delivers the requisite motorcycles, sex, and leather, but he also delivers so much more.

Berlin Alexanderplatz (Epilogue)

Other episodes:
ep. I-II | ep. III-IV | ep. V-VIII | ep. IX-XI | ep. XII-XIII | Epilogue

The final stretch of Fassbinder's 15-hour epic Berlin Alexanderplatz is comprised of a two-hour epilogue, which Fassbinder has appropriately titled, "Rainer Werner Fassbinder: My Dream of the Dream of Franz Biberkopf by Alfred Döblin." The epilogue is a radical aesthetic break with the preceding 13 hours, a fragmentary collage of dreamlike incidents, imaginings, and visions that reflect the devastated mental landscape of Franz, following Reinhold's murder of Mieze. The film occasionally emerges into the reality of Franz's life at the time — he's collapsed, virtually comatose, in a mental institute — but the majority of the episode takes place wholly in the scarred surfaces of Franz's mind. Or actually, as the self-referential title of the epilogue reminds us, in Franz's mind as imagined and commented upon by Fassbinder, who himself appears in one scene as a silent witness, his eyes covered in dark glasses, smoking a cigarette, mutely documenting Franz's dreams and hidden obsessions. The epilogue is as much Fassbinder's fantasy as Franz's, a record of the ideas and obsessions that so moved him in Döblin's original novel, which apparently affected him a great deal.

Because of the dreamlike nature of this epilogue, it brings to the surface many of the ideas and images that had remained mainly subtexts in the film proper — allowing parts of Franz that he wouldn't even be aware of to run rampant. In particular, this segment of the film is rich in Christian iconography, gay culture (particularly S&M), and Nazi symbols and imagery. Fassbinder delves much deeper into the gay identities of Reinhold and Franz, especially in a touchingly awkward scene between Reinhold and another male prisoner, which clearly references Jean Genet's iconic prison sex film Un chant d'amour. In prison, Reinhold comes to understand his lifelong love/hate relationships with women as the result of his conflicted and suppressed true sexuality — an epiphany arrived at too late for anyone concerned. As for Franz, what he could barely articulate or understand in life, he unleashes in his mind in a barrage of homoerotic imagery, often masochistic, like the sequences of Reinhold whipping him, or a sparring match with his rival that ends with a kiss rather than a punch.

Franz's confused ramble through the dreamlike pastiche of his mind brings him into contact, sooner or later, with virtually every cast member who's appeared throughout the series. The major figures in Franz's life are of course all there — Reinhold, Mieze, Eva, Meck, Ida, all of Franz's various girlfriends — but his dreamscape is also populated with a string of minor figures too, characters who appeared in only one or two episodes earlier in the series, sometimes only briefly, who recur here, recast by the workings of Franz's clouded mind. These characters wander through a world strewn with trash and wreckage, and many of them present themselves to Franz as suicides, suggesting that he's in some kind of purgatorial limbo for lost souls — both the gangster boss Pums and Franz's discarded girlfriend Fränze tell him that they've committed suicide. Franz is accompanied through these wanderings by a pair of "angels" dressed in gold armor, who later watch Franz's sufferings, standing by the side of Fassbinder.

The scene they're watching is one of the most richly suggestive in the epilogue, a slaughterhouse sequence that suggests a multitude of different meanings. Franz is laying on top of a pile of naked bodies, as Reinhold and the other members of the gang, armed with axes and hatchets and dressed as butchers, chop at these limp bodies and flay them like animals. This is on one level a literal visualization of a metaphor that Fassbinder employed throughout the film, in comparing the oft-clueless Franz to an animal being led to slaughter by the societal forces around him. In this scene, he is literally strung up, hacked at, his body treated like a piece of meat. It's a scene that also recalls, somewhat inevitably, the Nazi death camps, with the heap of naked bodies and the subhuman conditions surrounding this wholesale murder and butchery. And yet, in a later scene, Franz happens across the same pile of bodies again, only this time they seem to be engaged in a kind of lackluster orgy, which Franz shrugs and joins in on. The subtle shift in meaning across the two scenes, which share similar images, suggests the mutable frontier between sex and violence, pleasure and punishment.

This extended epilogue also represents a change in musical strategies for Fassbinder, as well as visual and narrative ones. Previous episodes were almost exclusively scored by the expressive music of Fassbinder's usual musical collaborator, Peer Raben, with his repetitive patterns and haunting tension between melody and disharmony. In this episode, though, Fassbinder abandons a traditional score, instead stitching together the soundtrack from songs by Kraftwerk, the Velvet Underground, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, and fragments of opera and classical music. He repeats these songs and segments of songs at rhythmic intervals, returning to the same musical and lyrical ideas (Joplin's assertion that "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose," Kraftwerk's apocalyptic musings on radioactivity) over and over again. In one particularly powerful scene, Franz appears to Reinhold wearing heavy makeup, looking somewhere between a cross-dresser and a clown, while the Velvet Underground's "Candy Says," an ode to Warhol Factory transvestite Candy Darling, murmurs in the background. These musical undercurrents further divide this two-hour coda from the rest of the film, emphasizing Fassbinder's drastically different aesthetic decisions in this section.

Not that all of these decisions work. The epilogue, unhinged from the solid ground of the narrative, sometimes drags and falters in ways that none of the earlier episodes ever did — a few scenes drag on too long with little change, or worse yet with dialogue that seems like mere space-filling, the kind of near-nonsense that is meant to convey a mind out of control. There's also a sense that Fassbinder doesn't push hard enough at the visual possibilities available to him, that he allows too much of the epilogue to inhabit the same brown-and-black visual terrain as the more grounded main narrative. The occasional diversions are all the more powerful for the contrast, though, like the bone-chilling slaughterhouse scenes with their splashes of brilliant red, or the climactic scene where Franz is crucified with an A-bomb exploding behind him, a moment of rebirth for the film's hero. Even so, the visual grandeur of these scenes is missed elsewhere in the epilogue, as too many of the interior scenes seem like more aimless extensions of their narrative counterparts.

These are minor complaints, though, in the context of a two-hour distillation of the film's overarching ideas, as well as a critical extension of some of its subtler subtexts into fully-developed themes. This is a fitting end to Fassbinder's epic achievement, a coda that draws together everything in the preceding work. The epilogue works on both a literal level, as a record of Franz's dreams and hallucinations while he's in the mental institute, and on a secondary level as Fassbinder's own reaction to the novel, a jumbled but evocative expression of the novel's effect on his life. It is, in some ways, an act of literary criticism, drawing out the novel's underlying themes and ideas as Fassbinder sees them. This is probably the first point in the film when Fassbinder takes on a psychological perspective, attempting an analysis of Franz rather than simply an observation — he even inserts a lengthy argument between two doctors at the mental hospital, about whether medicine should venture into the psychological dimensions opened by Freud or not. Fassbinder's sympathies are clearly with the Freudian doctor, who advocates for an understanding of the way the mind can make us sick. This emphasis on the mind, coupled with an understanding of society's influence on mental processes, is a key component in Fassbinder's work, brought to its fruition here.

The epilogue concludes a work of staggering ambition, a crowning achievement in Fassbinder's brilliant and prolific career. Berlin Alexanderplatz is a drastically extended character study, with Fassbinder taking full advantage of the large canvas available to him to delve deeper than ever before into his recurring fascination with the way societal factors shape and alter the individual. In Franz's case, this shaping is often literal, physical, as well as mental, and it encompasses political, social, and sexual dimensions. Franz Biberkopf is the ultimate Fassbinder hero, a tragic figure who suffers greatly for not fitting comfortably into the societal roles allotted to him, and who dies and is reborn only when he realizes his own role in accepting the oppressing structures around him. It's an overwhelming film, impossible to summarize here, sweeping in its scope. I readily accept that even the lengthy comments I've recorded here thus far only scratch the surface of this infinitely rich film.

Berlin Alexanderplatz (parts XII-XIII)

Other episodes:
ep. I-II | ep. III-IV | ep. V-VIII | ep. IX-XI | ep. XII-XIII | Epilogue

Now that Berlin Alexanderplatz is finally wearing down to a close — after tonight's two episodes, I only have the infamously strange two-hour epilogue left — I'm almost sad it's over. I've been so immersed in Franz Biberkopf and his troubled life for the past week that I can hardly believe the end is in sight. It's been an exhausting but edifying experience, and I'm glad I watched it all in such a short time period. In fact, I think whenever I revisit this film someday, I'd like to condense my viewing even more. What Fassbinder has achieved is a work that essentially combines the best aspects of both television (its original medium) and film (for which he reportedly intended it despite the TV commission). From TV, Fassbinder took the measured episode-by-episode pacing, which allows him to not only cram the film with incident and narrative detail — thinking back to the first episode, it's hard to believe just how much happened to poor Franz since then — but also to move organically through a number of stylistic and tonal shifts. Even so, the film as a whole doesn't really play out episodically, but feels like a continuous flow from one moment to the next, so much so that the boundaries between different episodes often blend together. Even the way the opening titles fade into the first image of each episode, which is often the very same image as the last one from the previous episode, heightens the sensation of continuity within the film as a whole. The miniseries flows like a single film, even as its great length and episodic divisions allow Fassbinder to stretch out and do things with his storytelling that he couldn't have achieved in any of his shorter theatrical films.

The twelfth episode begins languidly, quietly, with Franz and Mieze hanging around their apartment, having made up after Franz's explosion in the last episode. This kind of gentle domestic scene has recurred periodically throughout the film, with the couple playfully sparring, hugging and kissing, and generally enjoying the camaraderie of lovers. There is nothing here to indicate that this episode will provide a cataclysmic climax to the film, and to Franz Biberkopf's life. The climax comes about as a result of Mieze's introduction into the previously separate milieu of Franz's criminal associates at Maxie's bar. Franz had purposefully kept Mieze apart from his friends, and especially Reinhold, out of a sense that Mieze's essential innocence and goodness should in some way be isolated from the crudity of his criminal acquaintances. It was, certainly, a good instinct. When he brings her to the bar in order to introduce her to his friends, her appearance only inflames Reinhold's raging and complicated feelings about Franz — a combination of jealousy, desire, and a complete lack of understanding about what makes his "friend" tick. The nervous, stammering, sickly Reinhold seems to be continually set on edge by Franz's self-assured, robust manner and acceptance of whatever life throws him.

It's unclear whether Reinhold envies Franz for having the seemingly unshakable love of Mieze, or whether he's jealous of her for having Franz. In any event, his jealousy drives him to trick Mieze away from Franz, blackmailing Meck to get him to lure her away into the country. What follows is a lengthy back and forth between Mieze and Reinhold, shifting fluidly between threats, flirtation, and manipulation. Throughout their conversation, Mieze is trying to pump Reinhold for information about Franz's past, while Reinhold attempts to seduce the girl, with sometimes successful results. Mieze is sending out decidedly mixed signals here, sometimes acting as though Reinhold is trying to rape her, and pulling violently away from him, but at other points literally throwing herself at him, expressing her love for him. Mieze is a strange, impenetrable character, clearly capable of spreading her love far and wide, but nevertheless possessing her own variety of loyalty to her one true man, Franz. Throughout this scene, the one thing Reinhold can't seem to make her do is denounce Franz — he could have her, for a day or perhaps even for a continuing affair, but he could never make her abandon her Franz.

As this becomes clear, it infuriates him all the more, and his attentions to her become increasingly violent and suffocating, until he finally flings her to the ground and falls on her, choking her and then leaving her limp body behind in the woods as he walks away into a thick fog. Reinhold's jealousy and complex, suppressed feelings about Franz have led to an unthinkable, shocking climax — shocking not so much because Mieze was murdered, but because Franz wasn't the one to do it. Fassbinder obliquely drives home the Reinhold/Franz distinction by filming Mieze's murder from such a distance that the two figures are lost in the composition, dwarfed by the woods all around them. It's an image of isolation very different from the murder of Ida that has recurred throughout the film, which Fassbinder filmed from a much closer vantage point, the camera weaving around the scene to capture the murder's brutality. By the end of the film, Reinhold's cold, strangled emotions have replaced Franz's white-hot ardor and quick temper, and the second murder is not so much a crime of passion as the clinical dispatch of a troublesome distraction.

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With this brutal but distanced climax, the film has essentially come full circle — Franz Biberkopf's tale began with one murder, and it more or less ends with another. There is still, of course, the epilogue, but the thirteenth and final episode already functions as an epilogue of sorts, a quiet and pensive denouement in the aftermath of Mieze's death. Curiously, Fassbinder actually diverts the narrative attention away from Mieze's absence for the vast majority of this episode, instead concentrating on Franz and his continued associations with the Pums gang. The episode opens with a devastating shot of Franz, made up in Mieze's lipstick and dressed in her clothes, as though he's trying to become her. Contrary to the initial impression, though, Franz has not learned of Mieze's death, and he is distressed because he believes she's walked out on him.

Although this scene is undeniably moving in its over-the-top melodrama, it also seems like a very self-conscious gesture from Fassbinder, an example of the ways in which he plays with episodic structuring and audience expectations in this film. Franz's behavior here is exactly the kind of maudlin reaction that one would expect following the ending of the last episode, and Fassbinder seems to be briefly holding out the possibility that the series' final proper episode will be an extended wake of sorts for Mieze. The image of Franz in makeup works on at least two other levels though, in terms of the theme of suppressed homosexuality that was hinted at over the last few episodes, and in the idea of Biberkopf as a sad clown, parading his misfortunes for the amusement of others. Moreover, Fassbinder doesn't allow Franz's depression to last too long, and to the extent that this final episode serves as a valedictory for Mieze, it does so in terms of absence, structuring the narrative around the hole where she might have been.

Franz soon pulls himself together, at least enough to go see Pums and Reinhold, and he becomes involved in the gang's latest robbery. Fassbinder dedicates an extraordinary amount of time to a lengthy argument in which the gang members are disputing with Pums over their next job. Several of the men, including Reinhold and Meck, have come up with a plan to rob a safe that's loaded with cash, for one of their biggest robberies yet, and they are trying to convince Pums to go along with this plan. Franz stands off to the side, mostly uncomprehending, and Fassbinder films this scene with his familiar style of fluid camera moves following the weaving patterns of the characters as they cross paths around the room, a choreography of conversation. Throughout this scene, which seemingly has nothing to do with anything that's taken place in the film before, the memory of Mieze's tragic death nevertheless hangs over everything, as it does throughout this episode. Fassbinder seems to intuitively realize that her character has had enough of an impact that he doesn't have to belabor her disappearance — that final shot of her body lying in the woods lingers on unbidden, as does this episode's comic, melancholy image of Franz mourning her absence by donning her wardrobe. Thus, though the bulk of the episode concerns the debate over the robbery and then the (botched) robbery itself, the unspoken subtext of Mieze's death is always present.

The episode, and the series proper, ends with a final scene back at Franz's apartment, when he learns about what really happened to Mieze through a newspaper article, while a distraught Eva and Frau Bast look on. Meck had betrayed Reinhold to the police, revealing that Reinhold had killed her and then buried the body in the woods. Nevertheless, the ending scene suggests that Franz is going to be blamed anyway, and Fassbinder inserts another brief replay from Ida's murder to finally close the circle. The film's last episode ends with Franz facing the violent death of his lover for the second time, and now only the epilogue awaits.

Berlin Alexanderplatz (parts IX-XI)

Other episodes:
ep. I-II | ep. III-IV | ep. V-VIII | ep. IX-XI | ep. XII-XIII | Epilogue

Tonight's viewing of three more episodes from Berlin Alexanderplatz brings me ever closer to the end of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's grand masterpiece, and the work is starting to take shape as a whole by this point, with "just" four hours left to go. The ninth episode concludes the conversation that Franz and Eva were in the middle of at the end of the previous episode, where Franz learns about Mieze's work as a prostitute. Franz, recovering from his initial anger, goes to Mieze and forgives her, and then he surprisingly goes to see Reinhold, who he hasn't seen since the "accident" in which Reinhold played such a decisive role.

His old friend is initially fearful, but as he realizes that Franz is not there to kill or blackmail him, he reverts into his sneering, hateful posturing. He even expresses his disgust at cripples, and asks to see Franz's injury. Reinhold says that cripples, useless to society as they are, should simply be killed, and Franz sadly agrees. The undercurrent here is an ugly popular reflection of Nazi ideology, with its casual anti-humanism and relegation of certain groups to sub-human status — Hitler was nearly as adamant about eliminating the handicapped as he was about the Jews. Reinhold's easy dismissal of the worth of an entire subset of society is the kind of mentality that allowed the Nazis to rise to power so easily just a few years later.

The killing of Ida is replayed twice more in this episode, each time accompanied by a different voiceover, so that the two iterations of the scene wind up playing out in very different ways. This memory has a pivotal importance in Franz's life. It is both where he came from and where he could yet return to, and it is also the catalyst for everything that happened subsequently in his life, from his prison stint to his vow to go straight to the tragic consequences of this vow that then led him right back to a life of crime. This scene thus means many things to Franz, beyond the shocking violence he commits, which serves to remind the audience that the man they're watching, who is often so sympathetic and emotionally complex, is also capable of truly terrible acts. By repeating the scene so many times, though, Fassbinder allows it to acquire a totemic power beyond the shock value of its brutality, so that the audience might explore the scene's multiple meanings in the way Franz does.

In this episode, the first time it's shown, the murder is accompanied by narrated news updates about political figures, an airplane making a transcontinental flight, and royal romances. This places the murder footage in a purely documentary mode, as another incident worthy to be reported, along with any number of other inanities about daily life in Germany. The film, like Döblin's novel, is concerned with the way that the specificity of Franz's life and milieu fits into the broader picture of the city he lives in, and the country it's situated in. Fassbinder doesn't make any cliché "the personal is political" statement, but he nevertheless situates his protagonist in a broader political context, always through oblique suggestion and multilayered commentary of this sort. The second iteration of Ida's murder scene in this episode makes this even more clear. It's overlaid with an imagined biblical dialogue between Abraham and Isaac, with father and son debating the merits of the proposed sacrifice. Of course, they decide to go through with it, all the while believing that God will step in and call it off, which He does at the last minute, rejoicing because they were obedient. As with the earlier conversation with Reinhold, the Abraham story obliquely suggests fascist anti-humanism, equating Isaac with a ram to be slaughtered, sacrificed for a greater cause. Sacrifice is a recurring theme in Berlin Alexanderplatz, and especially the idea that in capitalism the lower classes sacrifice themselves for the sake of the upper. In this sense, the God of the Abraham story becomes the State, asking for (and receiving) total obedience from its subjects.

In the second half of the episode, this political exploration carries over from the subtext into the narrative when Franz and Willy go to a socialist meeting. The speakers there advocate for much stronger, more decisive action to end oppression than the socialists in the government have achieved. But Franz is hardly interested, and in the midst of the meeting, he daydreams about Mieze. Fassbinder cuts away from the meeting, in a bombed-out room, to a wonderfully dirty closeup shot of Mieze, her tongue licking Franz's hand, her mouth sucking suggestively on his fingers. It's an evocative, nearly obscene moment, like peeking in on some unbearably private fantasy — no one was ever better than Fassbinder at evoking the dirty, sensual awkwardness of desire and fantasy.

Afterwards, Franz argues strenuously against socialism with one of the meeting's attendees, an old worker who is in favor of general strikes and socialist organizations to achieve proletarian solidarity. But then Franz and Willy go to see Eva and Herbert, and Franz argues strongly, albeit with sometimes hesitant language, for socialism, decrying the way the ruling classes use the poor to increase profits, and arguing that the earth and all its lands should be owned by no one. How strange it is, he says at the end of the episode, that one can think about and advocate for contrary positions on the same issue. Franz is the ultimate dumb prole, unable to decide for himself or relate abstractions to reality in any meaningful way — he winds up spitting back nearly undigested fragments of things he's heard, while the capacity to put it all together remains beyond his reach. This is Fassbinder's typically bleak idea of the prospect for real political change, a reminder that the vast majority of people at any time are like Franz, preferring the immediacy of their own lives to the abstractions of large-scale politics, and not really understanding even when they do decide to pay attention.

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One strange thing I'm noticing while watching Berlin Alexanderplatz is that Fassbinder was not especially rigorous or consistent in relating Franz's story with the larger context of Weimar Germany. Certain episodes (like the previous one) really lend themselves to rich subtextual analysis, drawing in a wealth of references to political and social realities outside of Franz's immediate story. Other episodes, however, seem rooted much more in the details of Franz's life and character, indulging in Fassbinder's taste for melodrama and rarely engaging in the kinds of distancing techniques and self-conscious literary adaptation that peppers the more formally radical episodes. Part of the benefit of the film's great length is that these stylistic, aesthetic, and thematic shifts work within the context of the whole. The film encompasses the entirety of Franz's life, both his most private dramas, and those moments where his story touches or comments upon the world around him. Episode ten is more of a narrative episode, largely abandoning the political exploration of the previous episode, settling back into the domestic melodrama of Franz's relationship with Mieze.

The episode begins with a conversation between Mieze and Eva, the two most important women in Franz's life. Mieze's character is slowly being defined as someone with an almost overly generous heart, willing to let in whatever love and sentiment is offered to her. Thus, Eva's offhand comment that she'd have a baby with, for example, Franz, is taken entirely seriously by Mieze, who insists that Eva follow through on it. This scene is played out with definite lesbian overtones, as Eva attempts to rebuff what appear to be advances from Mieze, who nevertheless insists that she's not a lesbian. In fact, it seems she's omnivorous when it comes to love, and even willing to accept another's love for Franz. Franz, meanwhile, degenerates further and further into drunkenness, his life cycling back around so that it begins to resemble his time with Ida more and more.

There are two especially crucial scenes in this regard. The first is a fight with Mieze over her prostitution that constantly threatens to escalate into violence, though eventually Mieze is able to defuse Franz's fury. This provides a glimpse of the angry, potentially brutal Franz who beat his girlfriend to death in an uncontrollable fit of rage. Fassbinder pointedly doesn't cut away to the earlier murder scene at this point, although the repeated retreading of that sequence during moments of stress over the course of the last few episodes certainly primed the audience to expect it. It doesn't come, though, and the action remains solidly in the present tense, providing no escape from the tension of the situation.

In the second important scene, Mieze and Franz get drunk together, in an epic drinking bout that goes from silliness to unfettered sexuality, the two of them rolling around on the floor, pawing each other, screaming and laughing. The couple crosses back and forth between lust and violence, emphasizing the thin line between the two in terms of physicality. Fassbinder documents it all from a stoic distance, letting the camera sway and circle around them, but keeping their frolicking always at arm's length. The scene's tone completely changes when Mieze's regular client shows up, asking Mieze to come away with him for a few days. This is, of course, catastrophic for Franz, who weeps as Mieze leaves with her client. It's obvious that Franz's descent into his past is spiraling dangerously close to the well of violence and rage that caused him to kill Ida so many years before. His drinking is intensifying, he's turning back to crime, and he's in a relationship with a girl who inspires complex and contradictory emotions in him: jealousy, impotence, adoration, desire. Franz is at a low point in his life, and it doesn't look like it's likely to improve anytime soon.

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Indeed, the eleventh episode chronicles the complete breakdown of everything Franz had been doing to hold himself together since his release from prison — he returns entirely to the unfettered state he was in when he killed Ida. This episode also marks Franz's real reunion with Reinhold, the reinstatement of their friendship, and Franz's renewed association with the Pums gang, this time genuinely helping them out on their crimes. It's at this point that Franz's relationship with Reinhold becomes increasingly ambiguous and tangled, verging on masochistic — after all, Franz is insinuating himself with a man who tried to kill him and wound up horribly maiming him instead. He brings Reinhold to his apartment, planning to introduce his friend to Mieze, but hiding Reinhold under the covers on the bed first, so that he can watch from hiding for a while before revealing himself. The real intent of this maneuver is never apparent, though Franz tells Mieze that he wanted the notorious womanizer Reinhold to witness the way a "decent woman" behaves. Regardless, the coded homosexuality of the scene is glaringly obvious, despite the fact that there has been no previous reference to this kind of relationship between Franz and Reinhold, other than an intertitle which referred to Reinhold and Mieze as the two people who Franz loved.

In fact, throughout this episode, Fassbinder inserts some curious coded references to homosexuality, which in some ways is puzzling from an openly gay director who, when he wanted to include homosexual relationships in his other films, simply did so outright. The suppressed nature of the gay undertones in this case may be an outgrowth of the source material, or a reflection of the conservative social climate in which the story is set, or a comment on the likelihood that neither man really understands the nature of the friendship they feel for each other. The film's gay subtext is coded in much the same way as it often was in so many classical Hollywood films, with subtle references and knowing gestures or words that could be understood as gay by those inclined to read the film in that way. The gay subtext here seems especially obvious, though, and Fassbinder even provides a knowing wink in this direction when he has Eva ask, "Why would he hide a man in the bed?" It's a pointed question with a rather obvious answer, one that neither woman supplies in response.

There are other unsubtle indicators here, suggestions of a gay reading for the relationship between Franz and Reinhold, not least of which is the guilty glance that Reinhold casts around the bar before he walks into the bathroom, following Franz. Moreover, Reinhold tells Mieze that he and Franz once shared "strange things" together, suggesting that there was a lot between the two men that she didn't know about. He is of course referring to the exchange of girlfriends that he talked Franz into, but the vagueness of his wording inevitably conjures up other associations as well. Fassbinder's sudden establishment of a previously unexplored gay subtext for Frank Biberkopf is rather surprising, though it also makes a surprising amount of sense in the context of his ambivalent relationship with Reinhold.

In addition to this newly flowing undercurrent, the episode comes to a head with Franz's complete meltdown at Mieze, while Reinhold watches from hiding. He completely snaps, erupting into frightening physical violence that recalls the murder of Ida in every respect, right down to the room it occurs in, the staging of the sequence, the way the girl's body falls, and the presence of the landlady Frau Bast as a horrified onlooker. Franz stops short of killing Mieze, mainly because Reinhold intervenes to stop him, but in every other way the two scenes mirror each other, and Fassbinder's constant hammering home of the details of the earlier scene through repetition ensures that the similarities are readily apparent. It's a startling and harrowing scene, made even more so by the moment when Mieze, during a break in the violence, spends nearly a full minute standing in the middle of the apartment and shrieking at the top of her lungs, her voice finally cracking and going ever higher the longer she screams. It's an utterly disarming scene, totally erasing any sense of distance that Fassbinder had previously upheld in the film's scenes of violence or physicality. The raw emotional quality of Mieze's screams signals an intense vulnerability and unfettered humanity — this is not a newspaper account of violence, or violence as a metaphor for class oppression, or the mass violence of war. This is violence at an individual human level, pure suffering, and Fassbinder's frayed-nerves presentation of this scene is the very opposite of dehumanizing fascism.

Berlin Alexanderplatz (parts V-VIII)

Other episodes:
ep. I-II | ep. III-IV | ep. V-VIII | ep. IX-XI | ep. XII-XIII | Epilogue

At the beginning of episode five of Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz, Franz Biberkopf has returned to the familiar pattern of his life before Otto's betrayal and Franz's sudden departure. He's back in his old haunts, hanging around the local bar drinking with Meck, even taking up residence at the old apartment he rents from Frau Bast — where, upon his return, he finds Eva waiting for him. This is an especially active and pivotal episode, in terms of the narrative, as it introduces the crucial new character of Reinhold (Gottfried John) and sets Franz on yet another new path. It appears that Franz's latest experiences had not, after all, cured him of his endemic trustfulness and naiveté. He instantly befriends the slimy, sickly-looking Reinhold, who is employed in some way by the equally shady "boss" Pums (Ivan Desny), a local gangster who says he's in the fruit business.

Franz continues to resist becoming involved in the obvious crimes his new friends are committing, but he does agree to help Reinhold out with the latter's "problem" with women. Reinhold gets sick of his girlfriends after less than a month, and he enlists Franz to take them off his hands once he's finished with them, so that he can move on to someone new. Franz does this first with the plump, homely Fränze (Helen Vita), who is Franz's female counterpart not only in name, but in temperament and appearance, a kindly and pliant woman with a surprising sexual appetite. Franz likes her well enough, but still passes her off to his friend the newspaper vendor when Reinhold decides to get rid of his latest girlfriend, Cilly (Annemarie Düringer). Cilly is a lively, energetic redhead, and Franz instantly takes to her as well. There's a wonderful scene, towards the end of the episode, where Franz comes home to find her dancing to an uptempo 20s jazz record, and he spontaneously joins her, tapping his feet with a big, infectious grin on his face. It's hard to watch without grinning along with him.

Such moments of warmth and humor are sprinkled throughout Berlin Alexanderplatz, and Cilly especially brings a sense of vitality and verve into Franz's brown-hued life. Franz seems to attract a never-ending succession of women with his slanted grin and oddly compelling charm. In this episode, he simply goes with the flow, sleeping with Eva for old time's sake when he finds her at his apartment, letting Fränze drift in and out of his life, and finally settling in with Cilly. Franz is truly adrift by this point, back in his familiar territory, and settling into familiar habits of boozing it up and creating a domestic space with his latest woman.

This is a low-key episode overall, setting things up for the greater tension and conflict that is soon to develop surrounding the character of Reinhold and his interactions with Franz. This episode does drive home to me the extent to which length dictates the form of a film. This episode, starting over four hours into the film as a whole, begins at a point where most ordinary films would probably come in — the ex-convict with a troubled past becomes involved with the machinations of some petty gangsters. This film has a more expansive way of handling narrative, allowing new stories to arise organically from the fabric of the main character's life, rather than dictating the particular moments of interest. The sprawling length and attention to detail in this film allows viewers to determine for themselves what is important in Franz's life, whether it's the day-by-day development of his relationships with women, or the friendships and betrayals that shake his impression of the world. Franz's association with Reinhold, which in a more traditional film would be the sole focus of the narrative, here comes as a new wrinkle in a life that has already seen many changes and experiences, and will doubtless see many more.

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In the sixth episode, Franz finally agrees to work with Pums and Reinhold, after infuriating his new friend by refusing to trade in Cilly for Reinhold's latest rejected girlfriend, Trude (Irm Hermann). Franz tries to convince Reinhold that he intends the best for him, that he needs to learn to settle down with one girl, but the refusal changes the nature of the duo's relationship, and the always offputting Reinhold becomes even more withdrawn and taciturn, especially with Franz. Nevertheless, Franz is talked into working with Pums, helping him to pick up some goods one night — he naïvely seems to believe that he's really getting involved in a legitimate business, but when the night comes around, he realizes that he's just being enlisted to stand lookout while the rest of the gang rob a house. Franz is wracked with guilt and fear, but is forced to stay with the gang, and the episode ends with a life-altering "accident" for Franz.

Fassbinder films Franz's guilty recriminations in near-complete darkness, as Franz is shrouded in shadows on the nighttime streets, worrying aloud about his role in these crimes and the path that has led him to this point. The darkness, rather than hiding Franz's guilt, as one would expect, amplifies it, makes it fearsome, with voices coming out of nowhere, the speaker unclear. Franz is surrounded by friends, including Meck and Reinhold, but he is very much alone nonetheless, and Reinhold in particular reveals a prodigious nasty streak that causes him to berate and beat Franz for hampering the robbery with his worrying. This is another betrayal, another case of Franz trusting too much in the wrong people, and this time he won't be getting off as easily as he did with Otto.

This episode also makes extensive use of an aesthetic device that Fassbinder had been periodically using throughout the earlier episodes as well, but here brings to its true fruition. The original Döblin novel apparently includes a great deal of extraneous material not directly related to Franz's story, in order to provide a sense of place and setting for the main narrative. Fassbinder incorporates this material, always in a self-consciously literary way, through the use of newspapers and other textual means of telling stories not directly related to Franz's life. Franz frequently reads from the newspaper aloud, sampling mostly just the headlines, reading in a monotone voice that gives equal weight to sports results, local murders, political machinations, or anything else, great or small. In this way, the outside world enters the hermetic space of Franz Biberkopf, who is always Fassbinder's central point of interest in this story. Berlin, and Weimar Germany as a whole, are reflected and refracted through Franz as though through a prism, but always indirectly, always through words, while the images are reserved for Franz's story itself.

The logical extension of this idea comes in this episode when the narrator recounts a story about a young man and his lover who agree to kill each other because they are too poor to get married. The narrator intones this tragic tale as though it's just another newspaper article, and the whole time, on screen Fassbinder shows Franz and Cilly having wild sex under the covers, laughing and having fun with each other. The obvious contrast between image and narration serves to present two different alternatives for dealing with oppressive conditions — Franz and Cilly are every bit as poor as the young couple in the story, but they are unencumbered by traditional ideas like marriage, and rather than lament the things they don't have, they throw themselves into their lives headfirst. On another level, Fassbinder's use of voiceover here suggests a whole other world outside the boundaries of Franz's circle, a whole city of people every bit as much affected by the societal and economic forces of the era as Franz is. Such moments serve as periodic reminders that Franz's story, though highly specific and individual, is also part of a larger narrative of the pre-war German populace.

The episode ends with the narrator's somewhat hollow assurance that there is "no cause to despair." It seems, at first, a mere platitude, especially in light of what's just happened, but on closer inspection the phrase reveals itself as a much deeper expression of the film's thesis on life in general. It's not just that there is "no cause" in the recent events of the film for despair, which would be a highly specific interpretation of this vague expression. More generally, the narrator seems to suggest that there is never cause for despair, that there is no situation so untenable or terrible that it should entirely crush the human spirit. In the context of such a generally depressing and downtrodden work, it's a bold assertion for human positivism in the face of tragedy and defeat.

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Episode seven picks up after this accident, focusing on Franz's recovery period, which he spends staying with Eva and her pimp boyfriend Herbert (Roger Fritz). This is a strange episode, initially having the laidback atmosphere that one would expect for such a recovery narrative, but soon branching off into some of the most extreme stylistic diversions in the film thus far. Fassbinder has always played with shifts in tone in his work, and especially the superimposition of the comedic with the tragic, but Berlin Alexanderplatz thus far has been much more even-keeled, not subject to such wild mood swings until now.

The first hint of this shift comes when Eva and Franz have a shrill, melodramatic standoff with Bruno (the great Volker Spengler), a member of Pums' gang, which is the only scene in the film thus far where I've been hesitant about Fassbinder's choices. He has never been averse to such over-the-top shrillness, especially in films like the acidic comedy Satan's Brew, but this is a truly startling tonal shift coming at pretty much the halfway mark of Berlin Alexanderplatz. It's a ridiculously overacted scene that finally pauses as a static tableau, with Fassbinder holding the shot for an uncomfortably long time once the confrontation has ended. Moreover, Hanna Schygulla is an odd choice to be delivering this angry outburst, since she usually plays more of a quiet, reserved, sensual center in Fassbinder's films, emotionally cool in a white-hot world. She handles the explosion somewhat awkwardly, and the scene is a troubling wrong note in what has otherwise been a dazzlingly executed masterwork. The effect is as startling as though a single fuzzy chord from a toy piano had suddenly been inserted, amplified and reverberating, into the center of a Beethoven sonata. I have to think, though, that to some extent this was Fassbinder's intention, and there's no doubt that my mind keeps returning to this scene. Its awkwardness, its exaggerated acting, its tonal disparity to the rest of the film, makes it hit with special force, driving home the extent of Eva and Franz's fear by the absurdity of their reactions.

The rest of the episode is less troubling, but nevertheless more heterogeneous than the first six episodes. Fassbinder also includes one of the film's most heavily stylized scenes thus far, in Franz's brief sojourn into Berlin's decadent equivalent of a Red Light District. He's led through this utterly fantastic street by a kind of carnival barker figure, decked out in a cape and top hat, who leads him past topless women whipping their customers, torches lighting the path, through a shower of golden glitter, all the while promising him a sexual demoness for his enjoyment. Franz declines, though, and instead goes for some beers at a nearby pub.

Lamprecht then provides perhaps the finest sequence in his tour-de-force performance so far, a hilarious and oddly poignant scene in which he holds an imaginary conversation with three mugs of beer and a tiny shot of schnapps. He gives the beers a thick, deep voice, and the schnapps a squeaky childlike yelp, and as he drinks down each in turn, his ventriloquist performance allows him to speak about the way in which alcohol helps to drown out "superfluous thoughts," which, he soon admits, are most thoughts. It's a ridiculous conceit, but Lamprecht pulls it off without the least touch of irony, and infuses this duel of silly voices with a real pathos and sadness. Franz has truly come to a low point in his life, and his genuine struggle with drink links back to the fourth episode's epic drinking binge. Nevertheless, despite the scene's sadder undertones, it's by far the funniest scene in the film to this point, an interlude of true virtuoso comedic acting.

Later, at a nightclub, Franz meets the lowlife gangster Willy (Fritz Schediwy) and sees his former flame Cilly, now a singer, perform a song until she recognizes him in the audience and flees, enraged at Reinhold for not telling her that Franz survived his accident. Franz's encounter with Willy foreshadows his new acceptance of crime and corruption, his realization that his earlier vow to go straight has only brought him great trouble and betrayals from even those he thought were his closest friends. Each new episode so far has at least subtly shifted the direction of Franz's life, and the amount of incident packed into each of these segments is often staggering, but this seems like a decisive break in Franz's life, the abandonment of the orienting ideas which had anchored his worldview before this point.

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The eighth episode of Berlin Alexanderplatz opens with Franz returning once more to the bar where he spends so much of his time, and talking with the bartender, who's surprised to see him. Franz reads from a newspaper an account of a man whose wife committed suicide, and he responded by drowning their three children. This scene recalls the earlier use of textual material to suggest the wider world of Berlin, but Franz reacts in this case with hysterical laughter, indicating a shift in his opinions towards the news. In his newspaper reading, Franz usually took on the objective tone of a narrator, never reacting to the headlines he recited, simply presenting them as a sampling of the city's reality from outside his own life. Franz's laughter here prompts the bartender to comment that this is a side of Franz he has not seen before, and the film's audience can only agree; this is a whole new Franz.

This new Franz becomes a second-rate gangster, dealing in stolen goods with Willy, and as a result living a life of comparative luxury for the first time in his life, even decking himself out in a fancy suit. His new direction is cemented with the introduction of Mieze (the radiant Barbara Sukowa), who Eva brings to Franz to be his girlfriend. Franz's relationship with Mieze introduces a brighter, lighter palette of colors, with sunshine streaming in everywhere and colors that expand beyond the miniseries' typical browns and yellows. When Mieze first appears, Fassbinder keeps the camera on Franz's profile while she walks into the room, her footsteps lightly pattering on the soundtrack as the only hint of her presence. The awed, almost worshipful look on Franz's face is deeply moving, suggesting the churning emotions behind his gaze, and signaling the arrival of the full-fledged melodrama that Fassbinder has always prized in his films. He holds the shot of Franz's face long enough to build up the tension about the girl's arrival, and when he finally shows her, standing in the doorway, it's a transcendent moment. She's bathed in light, dressed all in white, so that she seems to glow, standing out from the dull brown surroundings. Her appearance is reminiscent of the way Fassbinder allows light sources to flare in this film, so that any time there's a lamp or a bare bulb anywhere, it looks like a star glistening — Mieze's arrival has exactly that effect.

This is a very happy relationship, filled with love, tenderness, and fun, captured in equal measures through the imagery and the periodic textual intertitles describing Mieze's gentle nature and some small moments between the two. Fassbinder allows his presentation of this romance to verge on cheesiness, shooting in sun-drenched exteriors for the first time, opening up the film's claustrophobic visual aesthetic, especially in a scene where the couple takes out a rowboat and romps in a forest together. The sunny visuals and warm tone of this material is a real departure from the film's gloomy mise en scène, perfectly capturing Franz's ecstatic happiness with his new girl. But even this happiness turns out to be a betrayal of sorts.

By the end of the episode, it is obvious that Mieze is sleeping with other men as a prostitute, in order to support the two of them, so that the situation becomes a mirror of the one that Franz used to have with Eva. When Franz first learns that Mieze might be duplicitous with him, Fassbinder abruptly cuts to a replay of the scene from the first episode in which Franz kills Ida. While the scene plays out again in its familiar way, the voiceover tells tangentially related stories about Franz helping to save a horse that fell into a hole, and men whose wives became prostitutes in order to support them. The scene becomes a multilayered commentary on Franz's complicated feelings at this moment, his anger incarnated by the replay of Ida's murder, which was his response to a much earlier betrayal. The anger is tempered by the dispassionate tone of the narrator, whose objectively presented stories suggest the themes at the heart of the Franz/Mieze relationship. The episode ends with a hint of reconciliation, but already the brief interlude of brightness and innocent love has passed, replaced with a darker and more complicated set of emotions.