the talking head
by Douglas Messerli
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
and Christian Hohoff (screenplay), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (director) Faustrecht der Freiheit (Fox and His
Friends) / 1975, USA 1976
Despite its tragic
ending depicting the death of its hero, his body being robbed by young
children, I read Fassbinder's 1975 film, Faustrecht der Freiheit (Fox
and His Friends) as a dark comedy, a work that, in many ways, relates to
his Petra von Kant, particularly in the melodramatic pitch of the
latter’s language, which takes it to the edge of the theater of the absurd.
In Fox and His Friends,
however, the hero, Franz “Fox” Biberkopf (played by Fassbinder himself) speaks
in a completely naturalistic way, while those around him talk in the affected
language of a British drawing room comedy; they are, after all, striving to
represent themselves as coming from a kind of bourgeois notion of the upper
class, at the same time that their accents, furnishings, clothing, and all
other aspects of their lives reveal their middle-class roots.
Only Fox speaks somewhat normally, although
he is regularly described as stupid and uncouth. He is, after all, a true man
of the proletariat, a working-class clod who plays a character in the carnival
act of his friend and lover, who in the very first scene of the film is
arrested for tax evasion.
In the carnival Franz plays what is
described as a “talking head,” a man who supposedly has lost his body, except
for his head, which, as “a miracle of science” has been magically kept alive.
Apparently, he talks to the audiences, answering their questions and explaining
his unusual existential condition.
We never get to see the real act, but we
do observe Fox going through the rest of his life as a kind of “hollow man,” an
empty being whose only tool of survival is his somewhat street-smart skills
which allow him to con friends out of money and to engage people like Eugen
Theiss (Peter Chatel), his soon-to-be lover, with sharp barbs and quick-witted
dismissals when he is accused as smelling badly and gaining weight (Fassbinder,
so the story goes, dieted heavily before playing Fox)—all failures of the body.
Early in the film, as he insinuates
himself into the lives of the seemingly wealthy young men he meets through a
gay antique furniture dealer, Max (Karlheinz Böhm), it seems that he might even
outwit these nasty snobs; after all, he has just won 500,000 marks in the
lottery, and his sense of new financial possibilities seems almost to make him
able to stand up against their snooty dismissal of his clumsy and uncouth
behavior. But, in the end, Fox is only, as his real name Biberkopf suggests, a
"beaver-head," a hard-working mind that has the ability to assimilate
little in the way of imagination. And it is precisely that lack of imagination
that prevents him, despite his alcoholic sister Hedwig’s and his old bar
friends’ warnings, to see through the pretense of his new acquaintances.
Eugen, his new lover, has little skill
when it comes to thinking, but, compared with Fox, is a person who celebrates
the body, a handsome and fairly well-dressed gay man—if you can forget some of
the outrageous combinations of patterns and textures of his suits and ties, all
of which
betray his lack of any
true sense of style—who has been taught to present himself in a comely manner,
with a well-spoken voice in both German and, so he claims, French. When the
couple later travel to Morocco, however, it becomes apparent that Eugen cannot
speak the latter language fluently, while Fox communicates with an Arab hustler
with a few words in English.
The lover’s only achievements of the mind
relate to his and his family members’ abilities to trick those less fortunate
out of their finances and possessions; if Fox is a busy beaver—working for the
bookbinding company of Eugen's father even though he has loaned them the money
for their survival and is now the legal owner—Eugen and his father are born
vultures. And much of the second half of the film is a painful testament to how
they cheerfully strip him of his money and any common dignity he might have had:
first, through the loan to save the company, then, when Eugen is thrown out of
his apartment for housing, through the purchase of a condominium and
furniture—some of the most absurd combinations of period furniture, patterned
wallpaper, and ridiculous objects (including a circular set of attached
red-leather chairs, each facing slightly away from the others) imaginable.
Fassbinder's set designer should have received an award just for uncovering
these garish and tasteless creations.
Soon after, Eugen insists upon a new car.
Later, supposedly to reignite their love, the two take the trip, as I
mentioned, to Northern Africa. All is paid for by Fox.
Yet Eugen and his father take their abuse
even further by repaying Fox's loan through his salary and forcing him to sign
away the rights to his property. When Eugen explains the situation to Fox, the
father responds to his son, "by principle you are right." This
man—who unlike Fox's sister, who drinks at home, does his drinking at the
office—can't even conceive what the word "principle" means. His only
code of conduct is survival.
Eugen's former boyfriend moves into the
apartment, and Fox is locked out.
Certainly, these scenes do make us cringe.
But we must remember that the money Fox has used to get what he hopes might
represent love and propriety has been won on a fluke with a few marks stolen
from the local florist, "Fatty" Schmidt, a character who clearly
brings up Fox's sense of guilt later in the film as Fatty tries to console him;
Fox strikes the man in what, to use a rephrasing of the original German title,
seems almost to be a "fist-fight for freedom," the freedom, at least,
from being reminded of his past.
Fassbinder's portrayal of Fox is
brilliantly subtle, particularly as he begins to spend his money. His
repetition of "cash, cash," as the bank teller queries him when he
demands the 100,000 marks to loan to Eugen's father, is spoken with extreme
nervousness and agitation; and later, as Eugen imagines the rooms of the empty
condominium being filled with furniture, Fox turns away with a horribly
sickened look on his face. It is as if, throughout his spiraling return to
poverty, he is aware of what is happening but unable to prevent succumbing to
his lover's demands. Like Petra in Fassbinder's earlier film, there is a kind
of absurd joy even in the tortures of love. His busy head, filled with
ridiculous aspirations, is slowly being drained of consciousness, and near the
end of the film he goes as far as to visit a doctor, reporting his symptoms.
Finding nothing outwardly wrong with his patient, the doctor proscribes Valium,
a drug which may help to relieve his real anxieties, but which can result in
further confusion and depression.
Broke, Fox returns to his old haunts,
where he meets up again with two American soldiers he has once tried to pick
up. Since they are now in his gay bar, he cheekily asks them once more if
they'd like to join him, to which one of them asks how much he is willing to
"pay." With that question, Fox, turning away and hanging his arms
around a friend's neck, cries out, "Pay? Pay?" pointing up the irony
and absurdity of the life he has led; once the hustler, he has become the
consumer, a man, as it puts it, "who pays for everything," not only
with money but with his life.
The very next scene is played out in an
over-lit subway where Fox lies dead, killed evidently from an overdose of the
Valium. Two well-dressed young boys, vultures in the making, rob him of the
money he has received for selling his car, a gold watch, and even his jacket.
Two of his former friends, seeing the body and pronouncing him dead, quickly
scurry away, not wanting to get involved.
How did this comic tale of an absurd life
suddenly turn into a tragedy one has to ask? Of course, in many of Fassbinder's
films, that is just what happens. People with such outrageously dramatic views
of life, with hopes out of proportion to possibility or reality, true dreamers,
in other words, who live in their heads instead of inhabiting their entire
bodies, are often unable to survive. But it could also be as Jim Clark has
suggested on his on-line review of this film:
“That metro/subway stop
is unnaturally—eerily—clean and quiet. Everything is blue and white, even the
clothes worn by all the characters who pass through. ...Nothing earlier is as stylized.
So, is this just a "Valium-5"-induced nightmare vision? ...Has Fox
learned, from his devastating experiences, that the glitzy
"lifestyle" he has just lost was what was destroying him? So
maybe—just maybe—Fox is ready to begin putting himself back together.... If the
final scene is just a nightmare.”
It could be that Fox has finally been able
to add some true imagination to the pipe dreams that have filled his head. But
even if Fassbinder meant it as a "real" act, we have to remember that
little else has been real in Fox's life.
Los Angeles, August 4, 2010
Reprinted from Green Integer Review (August
2010).
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