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THE ASSUMPTION OF MISANTHROPY:
A CRITICAL REEXAMINATION OF FASSBINDER
AND MIKE LEIGH
by Eric Allen Hatch
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Fassbiner films NOW!
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Because their working methods come close to being polar opposites,
the filmmaking careers of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Mike Leigh
are rarely scrutinized for salient similarities. Indeed, if their
names ever are mentioned in conjunction, it is to dwell on a fairly
trite shared trait: undeniably, these two directors have brought some
of film history's darkest thoughts and images to the silver screen.
Yet if we pushed this similarity further, would a search for compassionate
subtexts in their narratives draw a blank?
Actually, further digging reveals a wealth of common ground: both
directors honed their skills in their country's experimental theater
scenes of the late '60s before turning to film; both completed a large
portion of their oeuvres for state-funded television; both enjoy intense,
unique professional and personal relationships with their actors;
both use a fluctuating core of actors in a diverse spectrum of roles,
often casting against type; both use films as a basis for discussing
class issues from a progressive viewpoint; and each director has produced
a remarkable body of work consisting of multiple masterpieces that
gain even more resonance when juxtaposed against the rest of that
director's work.
Finally - and ironically, given most critics' perceptions of Fassbinder
and Leigh - both offer a bleak portrait of human behavior that, while
comfortable in grime and gutter, never delineates a world bereft of
hope.
FASSBINDER
Rainer Werner Fassbinder wrote and/or directed nearly 50
feature films in less than 15 years, a seemingly impossible pace of
productivity he would presumably have maintained indefinitely were
it not for his overdose in 1982 at the age of 37. While certainly
one of the most prolific of film artists (his pace of output more
than doubles that of the dutiful Woody Allen), the consistent quality
of his work is staggering. Equally at home in the experimental film,
the period piece, the modern melodrama, the psychological thriller,
the dark comedy, and even an odd spaghetti western, the German auteur
produced no film that could be termed a complete aesthetic failure.
Sadly, only about half of his work has ever been issued on video in
the United States, much of which is now out of print. That said, Fassbinder
is in the news now as much as ever. His late experiment in extreme
stylization, Querelle, has just been issued on DVD
by Zeitgeist, two early features (Whity and Pioneers
in Ingolstadt) have just had their home video debut as DVDs
on the Fantoma imprint, and forthcoming from French enfant terrible
Francois Ozon is a loving rendering of a previously unfilmed Fassbinder
play, Water Drops on Burning Rocks. All are compelling
oddities in the Fassbinder canon that also serve to remind us how
many other masterworks by this auteur already beckon us from the video
shelves.
The most common complaint about Fassbinder asserts that his work is
that of a sadist. Admittedly, no one would accuse the man of sugarcoating
his narratives, and it would be duplicitous to suggest that a sadistic
streak was not present in his work. Surely the only way to read some
of his most developed features - e.g. Satan's Brew,
Chinese Roulette, and In a Year of 13 Moons
- is as the darkest of dark comedies. In these films the humor we
experience is aimed at, not with, the principal characters as they
submit to dominance from other characters or fail to see the hopeless
of their lives' trajectories.
And yet are we to find in these downtrodden characters the final word
on Fassbinder's view of human interactions? One of the largest problems
plaguing film criticism from its inception is the inability of many
people to read films from anything but a very literal perspective;
that is, the assumption that the filmmaker must advocate the behavior
we see on screen. This is rarely the case with Fassbinder. It would
be too simple to say that Fassbinder always advocates the opposite
courses of behavior from those his characters follow. That said, if
searching for Fassbinder's recipe for human behavior in his more extreme
works, it is often helpful to imagine the action taking place within
a circle with a slash running diagonally across the screen.
One of Fassbinder's most effective works remains the early Why
Does Herr R Run Amok? (1969), a sharp indictment of bourgeois
mores. In it Kurt Raab, Fassbinder's strongest leading man, lives
a humdrum, humorless, henpecked life with his increasingly homely
wife. Each day he clocks in at an architectural firm, where his work
and his personality are equally smirked at behind his back. The film
is filled with extended sequences illustrating the mundanity of this
man's existence, most notably in a record store where he haplessly
tries to describe a pop song he heard to a pair of pretty, hip young
clerks. Eventually, and very suddenly, he cracks, giving his life
the only treatment Fassbinder seems to feel it deserves: swift and
complete destruction.
More subdued, but equally bleak, is Fox and His Friends
(1974). Here Fassbinder (himself playing the title role) describes
a relationship in which a well-intentioned, poor young man gets involved
with a more mannered upper class clique, eventually entering a relationship
where he is neither respected nor loved. Indeed, he is ultimately
used physically, emotionally, and financially, preyed upon completely
in the name of love. This film was mistakenly viewed by contemporary
critics as a very personal attack by Fassbinder on German homosexuals
(a demographic to which he belonged). That said, it should be possible
to defuse that criticism in a two-fold manner: both by noting the
gentle empathy with which viewers are invited to view Fox's fall,
and by recognizing how easy it is to imagine Fassbinder making the
same film with a hetero couple (indeed, Martha is all that and more).
If we turn to Fassbinder's own words, we see not a misanthrope prognosticating
complete doom for all relationships formed from affection, but rather
a caring personality with sagacious advice for how relationships could
be more successfully sustained. In 1977, he told a Cineaste interviewer
"People haven't yet learned to love. The prerequisite for loving,
without dominating the other, is your body learning, from the moment
it leaves the womb, that it can die. When you accept that a part of
life is death, you have no more fear of it and you don't fear other
'conclusions.' But as long as you live in terror of death, you react
likewise to the end of a relationship, and as a result you pervert
the love that does exist."
For Fassbinder, hope appears offscreen. While the lives of his principal
characters are usually either over, broken, or morally bereft by the
end of his films, that does not mean we can't learn from their mistakes.
We don't have to chose the lives formed by Fox or Herr R. While not
everyone finds the right job or the right lover for them-selves at
every given moment, there are ways we can save ourselves from unnecessary
pain.
For those of us for whom modern life seems to offer nothing, Fassbinder
implies all the following: we can make sure, for instance, that we
don't enter into binding relationships carelessly: we must first ascertain
whether love and trust are present. We can participate in our culture
- in music, film, literature, visual arts, and politics - and thereby
cultivate a lifestyle more meaningful than that of Herr R, who based
his on the acquisition of capitol and the blind supremacy of the traditional
nuclear family unit.
Finally, as reflected in the quotation above and in a negative reading
of Fox's behavior, we can cure ourselves of some of our naiveté
when it comes to relationships. Ironically, if we don't expect love
to both last forever and solve all of our problems, there's a greater
chance these things might happen - and if they don't, we'll at least
be equipped for life at the relationship's end.
We cannot conclude this discussion without noting that Fassbinder's
own life was marked by extreme successes and failures in these same
departments. From his beginnings in the militant German antitheater
scene he helped create and popularize, Fassbinder had an extremely
motivating impact on many lives. He created actors, composers, and
cinematographers where before there was a struggling group of disenchanted
friends. He worked repeatedly with a core group of friends, including
many who might not otherwise have found work in an industry obsessed
with physical beauty and broad social appeal (notably Gunther Kauffman,
a gay man of African descent, and Brigitte Mira, an elderly woman).
That said, Fassbinder also based his relationships with these same
people upon the core assumption of his dominance. He told everyone
what to do, and rarely welcomed dissent or unsolicited collaboration.
He also did extremely cruel things, from asking his actresses to prostitute
themselves to finance his early pictures to casting his own mother
in humiliating roles and treating actors with whom he was dissatisfied
as human ashtrays for a day (literally).
We would be gravely mistaken to overlook the tyranny of Fassbinder's
personality, a trait that autocritiques itself in the relentless depictions
of dominance in the director's work. That said, we can also recognize
the singular brilliance of his aesthetic; and, although often overlooked,
we can find messages of hope and compassion in his legacy - his films
- even if at times there was none in his personal sphere. As Hanna
Schygulla addresses the soldier to whom she has just lost her virginity
in Pioneers in Ingolstadt, "I think we've forgotten
something... we forgot love." It's an omission Fassbinder would
always caution us against echoing.
LEIGH
Negative, or opposite, moral readings of Leigh's films are
not as easy as with Fassbinder's. In Leigh's work, the characters
are often exaggerated, grotesque personalities; generally there is
at least one character in each film so locked in intractable quirks
and habits that their annoyance to other characters (and us) seemingly
negates any possibility of this person finding love or acceptance.
It is largely these painful charicatures that have earned Leigh, like
Fassbinder, the reputation of a misanthrope.
Unlike Fassbinder, however, Leigh has also been dogged by claims that
he is a racist, an elitist, and especially a sexist - largely on the
basis of one leading character from one feature film. The unforgettable
and unforgettably nihilistic Johnny (David Thewlis) of 1993's Naked,
is at moments all of those ugly things. And yet, as with Fassbinder,
audiences (both general and critical) have had an impossible time
differentiating the creation from the creator. To piggyback on an
argument made by Michael Coveney in The World According to
Mike Leigh, no one expects Jonathan Demme to be, in real
life, a cannibalistic serial killer, nor Spike Lee a pizza deliverer,
so why the inability to perceive creative distance between Leigh and
his work? (Why also do the cries of misogyny persist now, when Leigh
quietly returned from Naked with two films offering some of the richest
female characters in film history, Secrets and Lies
and Career Girls?)
The answer can perhaps be found in the hypermagnified realism of his
work, which, in turn, can be attributed to his unique relationship
with his actors, and their uniquely collaborative working methods.
Like Fassbinder, Leigh has an intense relationship with a core group
of recurring actors (although usually only one or two familiar faces
will star in each feature). But instead of occupying a stridently
dictatorial role with these people, Leigh instead grants his actors
a huge part in the writing of his films.
For a fuller description of these methods, I would refer you again
to Coveney's text. But to summarize, Leigh begins by assembling a
group, and without anything but the smallest notions of possible plot
scenarios, asks them each to develop a character. They are to do so
based upon someone they have known or encountered, perhaps choosing
one of these person's traits to focus upon and magnify.
After weeks of staying in character, the individual roles become fully
formed, and the characters begin to improvise situations together.
Some of these scenarios are suggested by Leigh, others develop naturally
as interrelationships between the characters become clear. Fruitful
scenarios are then repeated and refined until a skeleton of a plot
becomes clear. Then, often the day a scene has developed into a particularly
poignant moment, Leigh "freezes" the development of that
moment and scripts the scene, using the improvisation as a close model
for the final script - which the actors then are to honor nearly word
for word.
The emotional veracity of these performances comes from several overlapping
factors. The actors have remained in character for months; the actors
have largely created the characters, who have advanced far beyond
the familiar charicatures from which they originated; the characters
have reacted to dozens of situations that end up being scrapped, so
the actor has a realistic sense of how the character would respond
in dozens of eventualities. So real are the performances, that actors
have been known to shed real tears upon learning - sometimes hearing
for the first or second time as the cameras roll - that a fellow character
has died, or perhaps betrayed them. A perfect example of this is Tim
Barker's unbearably genuine reaction to his character's wife's revelation
of an affair in Home Sweet Home. In short, the actor's
identification with their character in Leigh's work sometimes becomes
absolute.
All these factors coalesce, even in Leigh's weaker films, into a fictive
whole more convincing than many documentaries. His career began with
two below-par works - the grueling Bleak Moments,
and the too-brief Hard Labour - but since then has
issued an uninterrupted stream of brilliant features. Given the realistic
emotional canvas with which he so regularly paints, it is perhaps
understandable when audiences have difficulty looking beyond Leigh's
characters in search of Leigh himself.
A crucial film in understanding the whiff of hope in Leigh's body
of work is one of his middle masterpieces, the appropriately titled
High Hopes (1988). The title would seem to be ironic
given some of the emotional horrors the main characters endure - the
title does at times offset the action in the same manner as Todd Solondz's
tragicomic Happiness. Here Ruth Sheen and Philip
Davis play a communist-minded couple (Cyril and Shirley), thirty-to-fortysomething
hippies struggling to maintain their working class intellectual lifestyle
during the reign of Thatcher. Even visiting the tomb of Marx at one
point, this film does have much to say about the dashed hopes of '60s
activism, and the aggravation of those who stayed true to their ideals
in the uber-materialistic '80s.
It is also an emotionally vibrant look at the personal lives of this
couple and their extended family, notably Davis' elderly mother (played
by Edna Dore) and their insufferably nervous sister, Valerie (played
by Heather Tobias). On their mother's birthday, Valerie drags the
fragile lady out of the city to suburban hell, dressing her in party
caps and forcing her against her will to blow out candles, eat cake,
and stray from her modest routine in potentially dangerous ways.
Cyril and Shirley, whose own relationship has been marked by the sadness
of debating whether or not to bring a child into this world, bond
over their mother's mistreatment, and take her back to the city for
a more sedate birthday celebration. There they escort her to their
rooftop, where the woman's eyes open in wonder - while living her
entire life within a few block radius, she's never had a bird's eye
view of her surroundings. Her look of wonderment as she orients herself
on familiar landmarks from this new vantage point speaks plenty about
the possibility for transformation of mood and direction in human
life.
Valerie, admittedly as pathetic and irredeemable a character as Leigh
(and, therefore, anyone) has brought to the screen, had her mother
in mind only for selfish purposes, wanting to stage a hyper-active
pantomime of the doting daughter. But the genuine care of Cyril and
Shirley in treating their mother to a special day denotes Leigh's
belief in the spontaneous pleasure that can be had in treating those
around you with love and understanding. It also serves as Leigh's
ultimate ratification of Cyril and Shirley's chosen socialistic lifestyle.
Theirs is the path of both self-sufficience and compassion, and when
they end the film by deciding to have a child, based on their love
and their beliefs we agree that their decision is well founded.
As dark as all of Leigh's films have been, they usually climax around
dramatic moments of confrontation that sometimes yield catharses.
Often, as with Secrets and Lies (his greatest critical
success), an emotional problem that has been a narrative subtext is
suddenly thrust out into the open. Imagine Polanski's Knife
in the Water building as subtly as it does, until it reaches
a boiling point where the characters scream out "All our actions
betray our repressed sexual feelings for each other!" So Leigh's
films often develop - if we can imagine such explosions occurring
artfully, masterfully.
The personal truths revealed during these moments are usually painful:
an infidelity, a loss of love, a lie, a betrayal, a hidden physical
infirmity. The immediate effect on the audience is often one of gasps
or stunned silences - these surprises are just that, and generally
very depressing to boot. However, it is important to note that while
these climaxes are often painful to the main characters, and generally
result in violent emotional aftermaths, they do have a cathartic result
on screen. After the smoke clears, the relief on the character's faces
in Secrets and Lies that the truth has come forward
is as palpable as their pain. Once the truth is revealed, it can be
faced, and healing may ensue.
It is possible to read much of Leigh's work, then, as a comment on
the pain of buried hopes and secrets. Unlike in the work of Fassbinder,
we laugh with as much as we laugh at. We understand the pain of the
dysfunctional family in Life is Sweet, the impoverished newlyweds
in Grown-Ups, the randy mailmen in Home Sweet
Home, even the ignorant skinheads in Meantime.
We see in Who's Who a couple completely ignoring
each other's obsessions - the royal family with one, cats with the
other - and desperately wish they had found partners similarly obsessed,
or at least would take the time to partake in each other's interest
instead of greeting it with resignation and loathing.
Ultimately Leigh, like Fassbinder, would urge us to make life choices
that would make us happy, form trusting relationships only with people
we love and respect, and maintain these relationships with truth and
compassion. From both, this conclusion seems uncharacteristically
conservative, until we remember the violent and dark worldviews that
brought both directors to these conclusions. Both directors recognize
in the 20th century the aftermath of mass military destruction on
the one hand, and cynical capitalistic imperialism on the other. In
a world overflowing with pain, a life based upon love, ideological
integrity, and cultural participation seem to offer us the greatest
possibility for happiness.
It is just that - a hope - but a hope that is amply present (if we
know where to look) in the work of Leigh and Fassbinder both. Much
more present, in fact, than in the happy endings, platitudes, and
lies of Hollywood, in the militantly upbeat PG-13 films that return
us to our suffering with an insincere grin frozen on our faces. In
Fassbinder and Leigh both we are confronted with grim human truths
we would be foolish to ignore, but also left with some advice on how
to handle these truths, and some commiseration in the struggle. As
Leigh continues his career, and the "lost" films of Fassbinder
continue to see release in this country, our understanding of these
masterful depictions of the modern turmoil within and without can
only deepen. (Eric Allen Hatch)
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