Greta Gerwig | Barbie / 2023

the doll no one could forget

by Douglas Messerli

 

Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach (screenplay), Greta Gerwig (director) Barbie / 2023

 

Before we begin any critical discussion or analysis of Greta Gerwig’s 2023 move Barbie, I think it is important to take a breath, step back, and observe the astounding fact that in a year when it has finally sunk in that women in the US, through a Supreme Court decision, have once again lost the right to make decisions about their own bodies; in a year in which many aspects of US cultural are demanding to go back to sleep instead of accepting the “woke” notion of our numerous cultural failures and the recognition of our often hidden racially bigoted and gender restrictive behavior of the past; at a time when religious zealotry and hatred of what is perceived as alien religious ideas is at an all-time high; when sexual differences, particularly those presented by the LGBTQ+ community, are again under intense attack; and US democracy in general has found itself in grave danger—that a major US film studio was able to release a film written and directed by fairly popular cinema creators Greta Gerwig and her partner Noah Baumbach who—using basically the standardized, stereotypical roles of puppets and mannerized theater types, represented here by dolls (a form highly popular in the literatures, theater, and film of Asia, the Arab world, and in earlier times in Europe)—were able through cinema to discuss issues of feminism, sexuality, and gender in a fairly rational manner. And on the top of this, were able to draw millions of individuals into the theaters and make billions of dollars for their producers and themselves.

 

     My essay will not seek to discover what this true anomaly means or even attempt to explain how it might have happened. I will only muse with wonderment that it did happen, creating a healthy, sharply divergent series of reactions in its wake in a time when such rational argument has almost disappeared.

     The doll, obviously, is the Mattel toy manufacturer’s major product, a creation which was brought into the world in March 9, 1959, “Barbie.” The company had been created by a married couple Elliot and Ruth Handler, whose first major success involved selling dollhouse furniture and in 1947, creating a toy ukulele named “Uke-A-Doodle.” Their next best seller was Magic-8-Ball, which they acquired from creators Albert C. Carter and Abe Bookman in 1950, following up by the Fischer-Price Corn Popper and a Xylophone in 1957. Chatty Cathy was born in 1960, and the Ken doll was created a year later.

   By this time, moreover, Barbie had grown from the Stereotypical Barbie, the blonde-haired, pink dressed original doll (played in this film Margot Robbie), and several of her friends, all also named Barbie, came into existence, President Barbie (Issa Rae), Writer Barbie (Alexandra Shipp), Physicist Barbie (Emma Mackey), and many others, including the first black Barbie, who appeared in 1968. Ken was also reproduced into several variations, including, apparently, a friend of Ken, Allan (Michael Cera), who after failing to sell quick disappeared from the Barbie and Her Friends community, while a Mermaid Barbie (Dua Lipa) and even a Kenmaid merman (John Cena) survived.

      Early in the movie, the film makes clear what an amazing revolution this human-like representation of a young female was for young female children, who before had basically been given dolls who served only as symbols of the babies they would grow up to care for, reinforcing their predetermined roles a mothers and housekeepers. With Barbie, suddenly freed in their imaginations to take on a wide range of positions in society, whether or not those roles were truly possible to obtain, they were seemingly liberated from the bedrooms and kitchens of the future. And in many respects one can imagine, through Gerwig’s telling, that the larger Barbie family helped to develop these young girls’ later feminist positions, as they grew up disappointed to discover that the possibilities allowed them by the Mattel creations were not available in the real world.

 

    Gerwig presents these figures in their imagined world of the day, the popular female dolls, beloved by young girls, living in the matriarchal society of Barbieland where the numerous Barbies, who the Mattel company advertised as being able to become anything they chose to undertake, and therefore representing all the major positions in society including those of science, politics, the media, and religion, while the Ken dolls’ primary role was to hang out on the Beach and wait endlessly for the Barbie gaze.

      In Gerwig’s and Baumbach’s vision, Ken wants a closer relationship, perhaps even love—although it is important for us to remember that neither doll was given representative genitalia, and Ken cannot explain what it is he really wants to do with Barbie—but in this symbolically feminist, perhaps even lesbian world, Barbie spends all her nights with the girls. As she explains, “Every night is girl’s night, forever and ever.” And Ken is left with little else to do but to hang out with his buddies on the beach. Even his attempt to attack the false waves of the ocean ends in severe bodily image, with a conversation of the other Ken’s following which puns on their only imaginary mutual activity other than waiting on the beach, like young boys bragging in an attempt to gain male dominance: “If I weren’t severely injured I’d ‘beach’ you off right now, Ken.” “I’ll ‘beach’ off with you any day, Ken,” responds Rival Ken (Simu Liu). “Fine, let’s ‘beach off.’” “Anyone who wants to ‘beach’ him off has to ‘beach’ me off first,” interrupts another Ken, with Rival Ken taking on all bets, “Fine, I’ll ‘beach’ both of you off at the same time.”

       Allan, meanwhile, an obvious outsider “queer” doll who is allowed to remain in the Barbie world, looks on with wide eyes, the Ken boys having no other language to express their masturbatory fantasies except in terms the pink beach upon which they are permanently confined.

     Barbie is by now having her own difficulties, a sudden thought of death crossing her mind in a manner that certainly wasn’t ever meant to enter into her plastic brain. Moreover, as she stands up for her morning slip on into her perfect heels, she discovers suddenly that she has become flat-footed, and has developed cellulite. Maybe she isn’t so very perfect as she was made to be. When she consults her Barbie friends about her problem, in fact, she is told that she needs to consult

Weird Barbie, a doll who has been abused by her child-owner, and who has had to visit her “handler” in order to settle the matter, leaving her a discombobulated being who is nothing at all like the rest of the Barbie community.

      After a discussion with Weird Barbie, who insists she cannot stay in Barbieland if she intends to survive, off into the “real” world Barbie travels, with Ken hitching a ride, both to discover what exists in the supposed perfect world of Barbieland is not at all the same in the world in which the female children play with them. And that distinction, of course, is what this film is all about. Not only does Barbie quickly discover that her current “handler,” Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), who isn’t at all fascinated by the impossibly fantasy creation of a semblance of woman that Mattel has wrought.

 

      I love Helen Mirren’s announcement of Barbie and Ken’s road trip, as they drive, sail, fly, bicycle, and trailer into the “Real World”—arriving, of course, in the most unreal of real worlds, the State of Los Angeles where they immediately go skating on the sidewalks of Venice Beach. Barbie feels kind of “ill at ease” because of the stares her so-recognizable look and their outrageous costumes create, but Ken is kind of delighted that suddenly he too is being “looked at”—by the gay boys of Venice, a reality of which he has obviously has no knowledge. Barbie feels threatened, with “an undertone of violence,” while Ken luxuriates in the admiration his body seems to be drawing. The difference is in the fact that in Barbieland, the female doll has significant admiration from her women friends, but here she is being ogled by the male gaze, whereas in Barbieland Ken has had no attention from women and now feels he’s at the center of some of the male gaze, without realizing it is the “gay gaze.” She’s proud to announce to a group of workers that she does not have a vagina, but Ken is insistent, despite her statement, that he “has” all the genitals. Something as shifted in their relationship, in their perception of even their own gender. As Ken observes, “Everything’s…like reversed here.”

        A moment later a male skater comes up behind Barbie to slap her ass, she hauling of and slugging him in the face, resulting immediately in their first arrest. They immediately buy new clothing, but because they are a product of a corporation whose idea of costume is itself a commodity, they are just as outrageously dressed as before. They are arrested again, this time for not paying for their outfits.

       Whereas, Ken immediately perceives that in this “real” world, males have the power through the patriarchal views of the society, and rushes back to tell his doll boys of his new discovery, convincing all his Ken friends to take over the society, just as quickly forcing the Barbies back at home into the submissive positions of girlfriends, housewives, and maids which the pre-Barbie children were forced to undertake.

      Barbie, meanwhile finally meets up with her troublesome “handler” Sasha, at the same time meeting her far more sympathetic mother, Gloria (America Ferrera), a worker at Mattel, who has played with Barbie as a child, and only now realizes her daughter has taken out her own toys to encounter them with very different ideas than her only generation had toward them. 

      That generational distinction produces in Barbie a very different notion of who she is and how her “perfect” image effects young girls. But even more troubling is that the Mattel board of directors, headed by their CEO (Will Farrell) is now after the Barbie who has “crossed over,” ready, if they can convince her, to put her back into the box in which she originally was issued for indoctrination. The board members, as Barbie soon perceives, are now all males, her original creator, Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman) having long been replaced.

      Totally depressed by what she has discovered, Barbie is ready to return but has no idea how to alter the suddenly changed situation that has occurred in his previously “ideal” world, which she now realizes has been rendered quite meaningless by the cultural and social changes in the real world. Faced with the impossibilities she and the other Barbie represent to women and young girls involved in a real world of sexism, consumerism (of which she was part), and general misogynism, how can she return to not only the “box,” but the idealized Barbieland of her lifetime existence?

      In a marvelous statement by Gloria before Barbie heads back home, her former childhood “lover” summarizes some of the changes and difficulties that the previous “doll generation” never might have imagined. After having what they describe as an “existential crisis,” Stereotypical Barbie admits she’s not smart enough to do brain surgery, she’s never flown a plane. “No one on the Supreme Court is me. I’m not good enough for anything.”

      “It’s nearly impossible to be a woman. You were so beautiful and so smart it kills be that you think you weren’t good enough. We have to always be extraordinary. But somehow we’re always doing it wrong. You have to be thin, but not too thin. But you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but you also have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can’t ask for money because that would be crass. …You have to lead but you can’t squash other people’s ideas. You have to love being a mother, but don’t talk about your kids all of the damn time. You have to be a career woman but also looking out all the time for other people. You have to answer for men’s bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that our you’re accused of complaining. You’re supposed to stay pretty, but not to too much that if you tempt them or threaten other women because you supposed to be part of the system…,” the diatribe is delicious and memorable.

     Poor Barbie must return to settle the patriarchal revolution that her Ken has engaged in. She and her sister Barbies create a new constitution, this time including the outsiders and even the Ken’s, although still not engaging fully in sexual relationships or full leadership positions with them. After all, this is Barbieland.

      Ken, realizing he has been, perhaps justifiably defeated, now stripped of his patriarchal power, and admitting that he enjoyed the attention he received in the “real” world, sings, with a chorus of other Kens, worthy of a Busby Berkeley, “I’m Just Ken.” The Kens link hands, kiss, and try to realize in empathetic choral elisions, their dismay of being basically, in Barbieland, being nobodies.

     Yet the Barbies had now revolutionized their constitution to include both outsiders such as the gay Allan and the ostracized Weird Barbie. But basically, I have to agree that despite their constitutional embracement of the Kens, the boys’ behavior both mimics, as Megan Garber argued in The Atlantic, a sort of teenager male figuring out of who they are, encouraging the numerous Kens to explore themselves, without basically any outside help. And Gerwig’s representation of their dilemma also reminds me, with shivers going down my spine in fear of its implications, the feelings of emasculation and male fragility that have long accompanied the several male support groups such as “Men Going Their Own Way,” which represent a frustrated contingency of supposedly masculine figures who, perhaps because of similar concerns, cannot accept full female equality. 

     Ken is recommended by Barbie to discover who he might really be inside himself, as opposed to adopting the standard given views of identity, Beach boy or patriarchal male.

     Even the Mattel board, who has followed in their doll’s adventures, find a rapport in tickling one another, even if the CEO is not quite ready to accept hugs.

     Barbie, admitting finally that she does not love Ken, dares leaving her female utopian society and returning to the “real world,” now taking on the name of Barbara Handler, to join the human race, ending the film, with what Gerwig herself describes as a “drop of the mic kind of joke,” “I’m here to see by gynecologist.”

     Most certainly Gerwig’s feminist speeches are often simplistic, her evaluations of the consumer nightmare Barbie and Ken imposed on upon several generations is a kind of whitewashed picture of the actual criminal behavior of the Mattel empire in their insensitivity to the female and male images they perpetuated. It is interesting to note that soon after their success from their doll creations, Mattel purchased the famed popular, but animal insensitive The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, which in an early version I saw with my father somewhere around 1961 or 1962. They were later forced to sell off that division of their entertainment fantasies. Mattel certainly cannot be described as being fully sensitive to the forces it leased upon US culture.

     Nonetheless, one has to ask, how many films have bothered to present an argument about the treatment of women—and men for that matter—as well as to suffer over their gender difficulties as this movie has?

 

Los Angeles, January 24, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).

Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Berlin Alexanderplatz / 1980

some not so simple questions about fassbinder’s berlin alexanderplatz

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (screenwriter, based on a fiction by Alfred Döblin, and director) Berlin

Alexanderplatz / 1980

 

 I have always resisted introducing a work by proclaiming its difficulties. A good reviewer, presumably, should be able to resolve those before beginning to write or, at least, during the process. But the very ambitiousness and commensurate success (as well as its failures) of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 15 ½ hour, 14-part original television series, Berlin Alexanderplatz, if nothing else, takes one’s breath away—and all this after its creator having already directed some 40 previous films over little more than a decade. Even in order to watch the work one has to hunker down, hour after hour, suffering what critic Tom Tykwer describes as “a stretched out temporality” that “creates an elliptical sensation. For a while your concentration is so completely distracted from the narrative chain of cause and effect that you almost lose your orientation and ask yourself, in view of such a total standstill, whether the story will ever get moving again.”      

     And there is the nearly nauseating feeling that arises from watching a work centered upon a heavy-set, lumbering, stupid, often drunk, sexual manipulator such as Franz Bieberkopf (brilliantly performed by Günter Lamprecht), who has already killed one of his lovers, Ida, in a drunken fit of anger and, who, after serving 4 years in Berlin’s Tegel prison, stumbles out into the daylight like Simpliclus Simplicissimus (one of the original author, Dōblin’s, numerous literary influences) determined to be a “good man.” In fact, both Döblin’s and Fassbinder’s inverted picaresque takes us circle by circle into an ever-spiraling downward voyage through the German hell of the Weimar Republic to reach the anvil of Nazi horrors at its end.  

     Yes, there is also much comic about following Franz the dolt about the Berlin streets and into the numerous houses, bars, and underground passages through which he makes his way. And, despite the horrible mess of a human being he represents, there is something sweet and even dream-like about the man’s (and actor Lamprecht’s) almost putty-like face. If one moment Franz is a snarling monster of a mad-man, in the very next he is a sweet, loving simpleton asking for his lovers’ and, by extension, our forgiveness. Each time he acts badly, Franz’ landlady Frau Bast (Brigitte Mira), Eva (Hanna Schygulla), his former lover for whom he played pimp, and many of his current lovers willingly forgive him; but increasingly it becomes harder and harder to sympathize let alone admire such an oaf.

      Which brings us, certainly, to our very first question: why are so many dozens of women, particularly Eva; Franz’s first lover after imprisonment, Lina (Elisabeth Trissenaar); the widow he encounters while selling shoelaces; his friend Reinhold’s cast-offs, Fränze (Helen Vita) and Cilly (Annemarie Düringer); and particularly the beautifully young girl from Breslau, Mieze (Barbara Sukowa)* all attracted to this semi-bestial slob? Yes, Franz may seem loveably malleable like his always shifting face, and, accordingly, a man that quickly can be made over. Perhaps he is even a reliable lover, although early in the film there is evidence that Franz has some difficulty in getting an erection. But what does it say about Berlin culture that all these women gather round him, many, like Eva and Mieze, perfectly willing to work as prostitutes to support him?   

      Ignoring the widow, whose dead husband looked somewhat like Franz, what does it say about a world which some writers such as Robert Beachy have declared “no one was a virgin,” that Franz is given such latitude with women, whom he falls in love with before beating and betraying them? If Döblin and Fassbinder, each in their own way, are depicting a world in which women are treated little better than cattle, beasts to be fattened up for male pleasure, their behaviors clearly represent these women’s own willingness to offer their bodies up for a kind of sacrificial slaughter.

      We can speculate, of course, that in a city where a large percentage of the males are unemployed, that there are perhaps only two other choices, prostitution or robbery. Franz’ own attempts at employment seem to prove the point. After failing to sell street goods, robbed (of his products and his honor) by his partner Otto Lüders in his attempt at selling shoelaces, and later arousing the hate of acquaintances for his attempt to sell the Nazi Party newspaper Völkischer Beobachter, Franz has few choices. The women of this society, moreover, have even fewer choices if they want to survive and find protection, particularly if they are independent minded such as Eva and Meize.

      Yet, somehow, these answers do not quite explain the strange attraction of the central figure of Fassbinder’s work for these strong feminine figures, particularly given the fact that Franz is also often passive in his choices of his companions, continually refusing Eva’s sexual advances and allowing himself to casually take-up with Reinhold’s cast-offs. While I am sure that some readers and viewers will perceive this apparently casual approach to sex as simply shocking, revealing the cultural decadence of the Weimar Berlin, to others such as me, it represents a disconcerting desperation of all those involved. Sex in such a world, even in the lurid perversity of the block-long open brothel through which Franz often wanders on his way to and from his apartment, seems less licentious and alluring than it suggests a kind of bored detachment from all real sensuality. Even the barker for the Great Whore of Babylon has difficulty finding clients, as we watch him, upon one occasion, dispassionately kissing and snuggling up against one of his own transsexual “offerings.”

     What is almost just as interesting about Döblin’s and Fassbinder’s representation of Berlin is the complete absence of the numerous gay and boy prostitutes with which the city seems to be teaming in other works I’ve written about in this volume. In fact, Franz’ strange determination to sell the homosexual texts of the noted homosexual scholar Magnus Hirschfeld, ends in an absolutely homophobic furor from his current girlfriend.

      Of course, we might explain the absence of such other sexual interests in Fassbinder’s work as having to do with his refocusing upon the relationship between Franz and Reinhold. One of the major questions of the film, accordingly, has to do with comprehending just what that relationship is. Why, in a world (which includes the viewer) where everyone recognizes the serpent-like evil-doings of Reinhold Hoffmann (Gottfried John) does Franz—even after he himself having lost an arm after being thrown from a truck by the villain—remain so loyal to this hound-eyed, doggèd villain. Despite what appears in the film to be an immediate connection between the two beings, very much like sudden attraction that occurs between gay males who immediately like what they see—wherein, in this case, Franz mistakes him for a man who, like himself, has served time in prison—Fassbinder determinedly insists “it’s by no means a question of something sexual between two people of the same gender: Franz Biberkopf and Reinhold are in no way homosexual—they don’t have problems in this area even in the broadest sense; nothing points to that."     

 

    While superficially that may be true, Fassbinder, however, goes out of his way to hint at sexual intimations between them. They do most of their talking together and plotting in the bar’s men’s bathroom, each of them simultaneously urinating and often sharing a towel after. Yes, they talk often about women, they speak without saying it of Reinhold’s disgust of women, his misogynistic attitude to them. For Reinhold cannot bear to have a woman companion for more than a week or two at most before he becomes utterly disgusted by his current mate. While Franz clearly loves women (although, as I noted above, sometimes rather passively), he is not without his own sexual eccentricities. As more than one critic as noted, his name, Bieberkopf, meaning “Beaver head,” when connected with the obscene description of a woman’s vagina, might be retranslated, as former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger recently described gays, as being a “girly boy” or a man with womanly mind and behavior. Indeed, when Mieze has appeared to leave him, we witness this determinedly heterosexual dressed up in his lover’s clothing, lip-stick smeared across his face (an image repeated, more recently, in Clint Eastwood’s 2011 film J. Edgar, in which the seemingly homophobic FBI director, who spent nearly every evening with his assistant Clyde Tolson, dresses up as his own mother after her death).

      Indeed, we need only to think back at the image of Franz’ face smiling up with a near insane admiration of Reinhold the moment before this satan attempts to toss his friend to his death, to realize that there is definitely something queer about their friendship. While the novel hints at Reinhold’s later love for his Polish prison roommate, Fassbinder, in his Epilogue, absolutely revels in Reinhold’s gentle kisses and embracement of his naked male lover, suggesting that only now has Reinhold begun to comprehend why he was previously so disappointed with his women lovers, pretending to himself, as he was, to enjoy heterosexual love while denying what he himself could not even have imagined, the pleasures of male flesh.

      For Franz, his love of Reinhold is not actual sexual desire but an aspect, perhaps, of his personal machoism, his basic desire to be punished by someone for the sins he continues to be unable to resist. If Reinhold is a sexual being for him, it is as an agent of torture and even death; unfortunately, without his even knowing it, Franz has offered up his beloved Meize to the Anvil himself—in a very sexually bizarre situation—by hiding Reinhold in his own bed in order to demonstrate how loyal to him his Meize is. Like a scene out of some Mozart opera, his lover instead admits of her love of another man, in reaction to which Franz nearly acts out Reinhold’s later murder of the sweetest and most honest being in Berlin Alexanderplatz.

      If Reinhold is a near mythical force in this work, however, like all of the work’s characters he is also suggested as having a human history, which, in order to comprehend his destructive gestures, we need to know. But here, unlike Franz, we get only little hints. Surely his belief that he is among the sinners and his insistence that Franz accompany him to, quite unbelievably, a Salvation Army meeting, to which Reinhold reacts with fascination and utter terror as the sinners are called forth to sit upon the sinner’s bench, reveals some of his inner confusion. We know he’s evil; he knows he’s evil. But why does he still seek out redemption? Might we ever imagine Iago to seek out serious solace, even for a second, within a church pew?

      And then there is Reinhold’s stutter, an affliction so severe that, at moments in the film, he becomes nearly speechless, particularly when encountering Franz after the “accident.” The stutter can only hint at a vast disconnect with the world about him, an apparent childhood incident that, despite his dangerous behavior, shows up his fears and weaknesses. Franz, it is clear, loves Reinhold, in part, because of his tortured conscience and his inability to speak straightforwardly with dramatic authority. Reinhold, of course, is a kind of precursor of the Nazi world that is already on the horizon, a kind of Hitler without the bluster and bluff. A man who, despite all of his evil intentions, expressed himself in terms of someone who was tortured and suffered—which, of course, was much the way Hitler, as he expressed it in Mein Kampf, portrayed himself.

      Who was Reinhold before the events of Berlin Alexanderplatz we necessarily ask? And so too does the trying judge ask Franz: “Did you know about his past?” Franz pleads no knowledge—and as far as I can tell, we get no clue by fiction’s end. Was he too, like Franz, severely traumatized or, like a bad seed, simply traumatized others from his birth?

       Yet, these very scenes, we must recall, coming as they do in Fassbinder’s “over the top” Epilogue may be merely imaginary, a thing of Franz’ delirious imagination. While I would argue that Fassbinder’s grandiose cinematic melodrama makes for brilliant movie-making, his semi-surreal Epilogue creates all sorts of problems, particularly in its use of kitsch and often outright silly Jungian, Freudian, and psycho-babble metaphors expressing Franz Bieberkopf’s psychological breakdown and the reconfiguration of his sanity. While Fassbinder, at moments, brings many of the work’s multi-faceted images together, weaving them into a slightly different warp and woof of previously more naturalistically presented “reality,” many of these images seem like a bit like tourist snapshots of an incredibly amateur production of the German Oberammergau Passion Play. Angels, male and female, walk Franz through a kind of circus-like recounting of his life.  Franz, as Christ, is hung upon the cross before all the women he previously loved, He, Meize and others, are hung up upon butcher’s hooks and eviscerated like cows and pigs. Reinhold whips him while a sun-glassed Fassbinder crouches around the corner. Again, we hear stories from Job, the famed tale of Abraham offering up his son to God. Frau Bast carries a puppet of Bieberkopf wearing a Nazi armband. An Atomic bomb explodes in the background, with music by Janis Joplin and Lou Reed accompanying it, as everyone melodramatically falls to the ground, the angels scurrying in to carry them off.

   In other scenes, German psychologists of the day offer up trite evaluations of Franz’ condition, suggesting shock therapy or even a complete abandonment of any attempt to save him from starvation.

     In short, this “hyper-dramatic” ending turns much of what the director has carefully built up through naturalistic-expressionist depictions into pure camp, almost as if the director were throwing up his arms in despair of trying further to deal with his everyday hero. Upon his cure, as Döblin also put it, the character no longer matters. He is now hired as an ordinary watch man, akin to the prison guard who first sent off into this post-Edenic world. Although Franz is determined to be on the lookout, guarding the wealthy garage of cars, we can be sure that, once again, he will be unable to figure out what’s going on. And the film ends with a flourish of the Horst Wessel Lied, the Nazi Party anthem—

 

            Clear the streets for the brown battalions,

            Clear the streets for the storm division!

            Millions are looking upon the swastika full of hope,

            The day of freedom and of bread dawns!

            Millions are looking upon the swastika full of hope,

            The day of freedom and of bread dawns! —

 

clamoring against the strains of the Communist Party’s Internationale!

      If, in the end, accordingly, this great film seems almost to spin off into a series of contradictory possibilities, Fassbinder and we, quite obviously, having the advantage of Döblin in knowing precisely what happened. And given the consequences of the next decade, Franz—except for his representation of the German everyday man—truly is inconsequential. Yet those who have seen other, earlier Fassbinder films, know that the director is hardly disinterested in how Franz came out of the war. In film after film, Fassbinder returns to Döblin’s highly influential film, a work which he himself describes as not only helping him to “ethical maturation” but literaly permitted him survival during his turbulent puberty:

 

                 …Berlin Alexanderplatz didn’t only help me in something like

                 a process of ethical maturation. No, it also provided genuine,

                 naked, concrete life support when I was really at risk during

                 puberty, because I was able to apply the story to my own

                 problems and dilemmas, oversimplifying, of course; I read it

                 as a story of two men whose little bit of life on this earth is

                 ruined because they don’t have the opportunity to get up the

                 courage even to recognize, let alone admit, that they like each

                 other in an unusual way. Love each other somehow, that some-

                 thing mysterious ties them to each other more closely than is

                 generally considered suitable for men.

 

     If dozens of questions still remain unanswered at the end of Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, we still have many others of works to turn to in order to help comprehend the complex tale which we have just experienced. In one of his earliest films, Love is Colder Than Death (1969), a character named Franz (played by Fassbinder) shares a prostitute with a male criminal friend to whom he clearly more attracted than the woman. In the 1970 film Gods of the Plague, another Franz (Harry Baer this time around) is released from prison and, like Döblin’s Franz attempts to start a new life, but soon through his relationship with another man and the criminal underworld is swallowed up into a destructive world from which there is no escape. The American Soldier (also from 1970) shares many of the same patterns of sexual longing between two long-time male friends as between Franz and Reinhold, again ending in a gangster-like violence. Beware of the Holy Whore although set in a Spanish hotel, presents its characters very much in the same kind claustrophobic world inhabited by the figures of Berlin Alexanderplatz. The central character of The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971), like Franz, is forced to live by selling fruit on the street, and, after beating his wife and suffering a heart attack, is left, like Franz incapable to keeping his wife away from another vendor he has hired to replace him.

     Finally, in Fox and His Friends (1975)—the work most obvious in its parallels with Döblin’s book—Fassbinder again takes on the role of a character named, this time full out, Franz Bieberkopf, who, working as a carney mind-reader Fox, wins the lottery only to fall in with better-off gay acquaintances who trick him out of all his winnings and leave him presumably to die face down on the underground floor.

     And, indeed, in nearly all of his films Fassbinder weaves in elements of the great Döblin fiction. In short, one might argue that his longer Berlin Alexanderplatz, were it not so determined in its attempts to winnow down the actual plot of the 1929 work, was merely another version of his ongoing commitment to explore a Germany filled with Franzs, men who never growing up, are easily fooled by the society spinning around them. Yet if Franz is ever the fool in these works, he is also a kind of Christ, a holy fool for whom we cannot but feel love and some real sympathy. For he is every one of us who dreams of being more than we know how to be, who imagine joining a society that is more caring and purer than the one in which we must everyday make our peace. In his incurable optimism Franz may be an idiot, but he is a hero in his ability to transcend the crude cynicism also central to Fassbinder’s campy, melodramatic worlds. As I have argued for Stella in Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, (see My Year 2002) Franz is the being who brings all the other hysterical types seem almost real, anchoring Fassbinder’s great cinematic achievement to life here on earth.

 

*While watching Berlin Alexanderplatz I kept having a strange feeling that I had previously seen the actor who plays Mieze, Barbara Sukowa. By the time I finished the last episode of Fassbinder’s work, I realized that indeed, Barbara, married to our artist friend Robert Longo, had been a guest in our house.

 

Los Angeles, August 24, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2015)

 

Phil Jutzi | Berlin-Alexanderplatz / 1931

wobbly man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alfred Döblin, Karlheinz Martin, and Hans Wilhelm (screenplay, based on the fiction by Alfred Döblin), Phil Jutzi (director) Berlin-Alexanderplatz / 1931

 

Given the 90-minute run-time of Phil Jutzi’s 1931 version of Alfred Döblin’s fiction Berlin-Alexanderplatz, the film is quite intelligent in its focus on Franz Biberkopf (Heinrich George) and his re-entry after four years of prison back into Weimer Republic Berlin life. From its first early scenes when Biberkopf finds himself suddenly outside the doors of Tegel Prison almost wishing he might return, and through his dizzying streetcar journey back to his old neighborhood, we recognize that in the Berlin we are shown just what the murderer now faces in the terrifyingly reconstructed world where even the trolley lines are being torn up along with seemingly half the city as it is remade over after the War into the modern Berlin of not only Döblin’s panoramic fiction but that of the writings Joseph Roth, Irmgard Keun, Hans Fallada, and Heinrich Mann as well as the films of Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, G. W. Pabst and so many others who showed us just how it sped into the dead end of Hitler’s Nazi nightmare.

 

    Returning to his favorite bar Franz is greeted as if he never left, and almost immediately takes up with the prostitute Cilly (Maria Bard) who perhaps a bit less mysteriously than in Fassbinder’s later version is immediately attracted to him. Jutzi’s figures are harsher and less attractive than Fassbinder’s characters, and we comprehend that at least Biberkopf, within the world presented to us through the bar-life dominated by Reinhold (Bernhard Minetti) and his gang of robbers, is more loyal and even honest.

      Biberkopf, ever the fool, is determined to make a better life after his murder of his beloved Ida. But the brutally of the street world he quickly encounters makes it nearly impossible to survive, particularly given his sensitive nerves and the taunts of Reinhold’s men sent out to make certain that he does not succeed and accordingly will be forced to join up with them.

      Even Cilly is pressured to pull him into the gang, although she does her best to keep him free of Reinhold and to herself.

     What Jutzi’s film is lacking, however, is the broad range of detail of the original fiction, the multitude of other jobs Biberkopf takes up only to abandon, and the dozens of minor characters, including his landlady, all of which and whom subtly push him into Reinhold’s arms.

      The metaphor I used is intentional because, although this film much like Fassbinder’s seems to erase all evidence of male and female homosexuality in the notoriously sexually liberated hothouse environment of Weimar Berlin, Jutzi’s film nonetheless does make it clear that there is almost a homoerotic attraction between the two unlikely “friends.”

      At this point, Reinhold has not come to terms with his sexuality, and Jutzi’s film doesn’t allow him to follow Reinhold into his later prison life and the arms of his prison lover. But even here we see an evil being recognizing in the mass of flesh that defines Biberkopf as a malleable force which he might reshape into his own image, a sort of sexual servant who if nothing else can take over his women when, as he always does, he tires of them.

  

    Despite the mockery of Biberkopf by his gang members, Reinhold sees something in the heap of German flesh that he recognizes as crucial in his underworld life, not only a kind of “yes” man but a gullible and likeable Berlin bully who might serve as another aspect of his leaner and intellectual self. In a manner that even Fassbinder didn’t quite manage, Jutzi makes it apparent that Biberkopf and Reinhold are mirror opposites of one another, the “other” lurking within each of them that might bring them both into a fuller life.

      That doesn’t mean, of course, that once Biberkopf is bullied, societally driven toward as an outsider, and subliminally catapulted into the evil world Reinhold represents, that the fool will not suffer for the error of his ways. Biberkopf with lose his arm—when Reinhold pushes him from the moving auto when his men believe they are being followed by the police to whom the newcomer has reported them—and will lose the devotion of Chilly—who is convinced her lover is dead as he recuperates in a hospital bed. But strangely that only draws him closer to the satanic figure.

      In the wonderful cabaret scene of Jutzi’s film, Biberkopf, dressed in a new suit and now surrounded by women and champagne thanks to his share of cash through participating in one of Reinhold’s capers, tells his dinner companions to get lost as he makes room for his friend, eagerly leaning into conversation with Reinhold while his girlfriends are forced to hover nearby in anticipation. Nothing much happens in this dramatic “conference” with Reinhold, but Biberkopf’s “opened armed” participation says everything about his devotion to his imagined brother.

      It is only when Reinhold rapes and murders Biberkopf’s new lover, Mieze (Margarete Schlegel) that the absurd idiot turns against Reinhold and finally finds some sort of resolution within the dead society in which he still must survive resolutely selling a roly-poly or wobbly doll toy that no matter what you do, stands its ground just as the “beaver faced” simpleton hopes to be able to. 

 

Los Angeles, June 1, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).