grim tales
by Douglas Messerli
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
(screenwriter and director) In einen
Jahr mit 13 Monden (In a Year with
13 Moons) / 1978
I found Fassbinder's In a Year with 13 Moons such an
overwhelmingly rich film that it is hard to know where to begin. Perhaps the
somewhat occult explanation at the beginning of the film, despite the fact that
Fassbinder seems to negate it throughout, will help to explain the
contradictory realities the film presents:
Every seventh
year is a lunar year. Those people whose
lives are
essentially dominated by their emotions suffer
particularly
strongly from depressions in these lunar years.
The same is
also true of years with thirteen new moons,
although not
quite so strongly. And if a lunar year also
happens to be a
year with thirteen new moons, the result is
often a
personal catastrophe.
This claim, based on a conversation Fassbinder had with an astrologer
shortly after the suicide of his lover, Armin Meier, in 1978, the same year of
the movie and a lunar year with 13 moons—an event which occasioned the making
of this remarkable picture—prepares us for the series of events which happen to
Erwin/Elvira Weishaupt (stunningly performed by Volker Spengler).
As a young child, Erwin was given up by his mother to a Catholic
orphanage, so we find out later in the film when he/she and his prostitute
begin their quest to understand Elvira's problems; as a young boy the nuns were
delighted with the shy and handsome Erwin and, ultimately, through the
encouragement of the head nun, Sister Gudrun (played by Fassbinder's mother,
Lilo Pempeit), a couple became interested in adopting him. But upon seeking
legal permission from his mother, Sister Gudrun perceived that the mother had
been legally married at the time of the adoption, and gave up the child without
consulting her husband. Now the mother is terrified that her husband may find
out about her actions—he is, evidently also a violent man—and will not agree to
making it known. Accordingly, despite the love Erwin feels for his potential
parents and they for him, the church cannot go forward with adoption, and the
loving couple disappear from his life. The charming young boy turns into a
lying, stealing teenager, unable to understand why he has been rejected.
Fassbinder's telling of this history, in which the family, state, and
religion have unintentionally conspired to refuse him love, is not a thorough
explanation of Erwin's condition, indeed, does not even psychologically explain most of Erwin/Elvira's later
actions. His presentation of this information is less like a revelation,
accordingly, than a kind of staged confession, in which the nun who tells the
tale, moves back and forth across the garden as Erwin, now a female, Elvira,
and her friend Die rote Zora (the Red Zora) stand in the foreground; and, even
before the tale is completed, Elvira is seen to have collapsed. But it does
help us to imagine the hero's strange confusion and desperation to be loved.
Indeed, throughout the quest through which Elvira journeys in this film,
people reveal equally strange stories, myths, tales, and absurd fragments of
information that when layered upon each other recreate the distressed and
conflicted being at the film's core.
In the very first scene, we witness Erwin in an early-morning park,
dressed not as Elvira, but as a man, so lonely, that he tries to pick up
another man. As the love-making begins, however, the younger man discovers that
Erwin is not a male "John," as he expected, but a woman, a being
without a penis; disgusted, he shouts to his fellow workers to join him in
punishment.
The bloodied Erwin staggers home only to discover his long-time lover,
Christoph, has returned, this time to leave forever. But before he goes,
Christoph also takes time out to verbally and physically abuse Erwin/Elvira,
insisting that she/he look at herself in the mirror to see the fat, ugly human
which he must daily face. In short, Fassbinder's hero is an outsider even to
outsiders like men in the park and the homosexual Christoph. As Zora later
declares, the strange thing about Elvira is that she/he is not even gay!
In fact, the young Erwin underwent a convenient marriage, finding in
Irene a woman, not only willing to accept him later for his
"changes," but a person who remains his life-long friend. His
daughter from that marriage still calls him "daddy." It is apparent,
however, that the love between man and woman was not enough. So desperate for
love was Erwin that he befriended a small-time crook, Anton Saitz, going so far
(so we discover in Fassbinder's written story upon which the film was based) as
being willing to go to jail for him. However, Saitz, who as a young boy
survived the horrors of the Belsen-Bergen concentration camp, is purely
heterosexual, and cannot return Erwin's interest. A passing statement that he might be able to love him if only he
were a woman sends Erwin on an insane trip to Casablanca, where he undergoes an
operation, removing all signs of his masculinity. Now dressing as a woman, he
returns to Anton, who still rejects him, spinning the new Elvira into the
series of events about to be uncovered.
Irene also visits her ex-husband on this crucial day, adding her vitriol
in response to an interview that Erwin/Elvira has recently given about those
long-ago days, and which has just been published in a magazine. Irene is
terrified that the now wealthy gangster-businessman Anton may attempt to get
even for the interview by somehow harming their daughter.
It is this third attack upon her being that sends Elvira and her
prostitute friend on the quest to discover the past and, ultimately, to
apologize to Saitz for revealing it.
Bit by bit, we begin to piece together a chaotic string of events, no
parts of which seem to belong together, symbolically involving not only the
entire city of Frankfurt but the whole of post-World War II Germany. Fassbinder
brilliantly exposes this discordant world through cramped images of beings
caught up in a society of brutal noise and radically shifting realities. Erwin
describes his first job, where he worked as a butcher simultaneously with
Fassbinder's presentation of hideous images of the slaughtering of cattle, the
draining of their blood, and the removal of their hides—all accompanied by a
Handel organ concerto while our heroine speaks calmly of the peacefulness of
killing and quotes Goethe.
Another scene played out in which Elvira is entrapped in the dark
confines of a bar filled with ringing pinball machines, as she encounters the
man who attacked her that same morning. It ends with Zora arriving to take her
sobbing friend into another, even stranger, location: the apartment of a man
living with a silent muscle builder. Within in his dark room, filled with
lighted candles, he, dressed only in undershorts, sarcastically refers to his
horrors of the past and his fears of going out of the house, ending the
encounter by breaking down into tears himself.
When, after the encounter with Sister Gudrun, Elvira tries to sleep,
Zora tells her a story similar to a Grimm Brothers' fairy-tale, but ending with
a Fassbinder-like twist. An evil old witch has lured two children into the
forest, transforming the boy into a mushroom and his sister into a snail. When
the snail grows hungry, the brother encourages her to eat of him, the mushroom,
as the girl readily bites off first his ear and then his leg.
After Elvira falls asleep, Zora turns on personal tapes of Elvira and
her former lover, and flips television channels between a talk show of
Fassbinder's description of his own troubled youth, a soap opera, and the news
of Chilean dictator Pinochet's "great achievements." At other times
American pop-singer Connie Francis, singing in German, alternates with pieces
of Nino Rota's music for Juliet of the
Spirits and other Fellini films, the parallels between Fellini's suffering
housewife and Fassbinder's confused lover becoming apparent.
When Elvira finally visits the tower in which her wished-for lover
resides, she encounters in the ground-floor bar a man, dying of cancer, who
after being fired by Anton Saitz, has spent months staring out the window at
Saitz's office. As she climbs the stairs—in a reversal of the Rumpelstiltskin
story—to reach her lover, she encounters a series of empty rooms, where she
briefly falls asleep once more, to be awakened by a man come to hang himself
who invites her to watch.
Everywhere she travels, there are people suffering as badly as she,
individuals who unable to find love or, as Elvira describes it from a dream she
has had, have had simply too brief of friendships, symbolized to herself as
graves marked by short dates.
She reports the stranger's suicide to a cleaning woman whose major
activity seems to be looking through a keyhole, laughing loudly at whatever
she is witnessing. The woman shrugs her shoulders and returns to her voyeurism.
After passing through what seems like an interminable series of empty
rooms, itself a nightmare-like image of the Frankfurt economic
"miracle," Elvira is met by Saitz's chauffeur, who, in imitation
Cerberus, guards the entry to Saitz's little hell. But even here the director
turns the dramatic situation into an absurdly comic event.
At first it appears that, without one of the codes, Elvira will be
refused entry. Yet she finally does make a guess, horrible reminder that it is:
Bergen-Belsen, the A-pass. And she enters. When she is shown into a room with
several men within, she turns to ask the now-genial chauffeur, which one is
Saitz. The irony is earth-shattering; after changing his-her entire being and
life for the man, she cannot now even recognize him.
When told that he is the thin man in
tight tennis shorts, she is forced to watch an even more grotesquely comic
manifestation of power. While a Jerry Lewis/Dean Martin movie, You're Never Too Young, plays upon a
television, Anton forces his male staff to reenact parts of the tennis court
scene, a piece filled, in the original, with a chorus of marching cheerleaders
led by the singing duo. Elvira joins in. Their performance is hilarious, but
also mad. There is not even evil here. Reality is too strange for that.
Elvira reveals his
former name, Erwin, which, at first, seems to mean nothing to Saitz. But after
she presents him with a photograph of the young Erwin, he does realize who this
woman is, but seemingly remembers only that she could make coffee as good as
his mother, suggesting they make a trek to Elvira's apartment so that she can
serve it up. At the apartment, Zora is sleeping upon Elvira's bed. While Elvira
moves off to the kitchen, Anton moves in on Zora, who readily accepts him in an
embrace. Elvira returns to witness them in the sexual act.
Cutting her hair, redressing as a man,
Erwin returns to his wife and daughter, hoping that he might possibly begin
over. It is, quite clearly, too late for that. The girl will soon be off to
college, and his former wife, although still a friend, cannot now accept him as
a man.
The author who had interviewed Elvira,
finds Erwin waiting on the staircase of his apartment. But when asked if they
might have a talk, he gently sends him away. It is too late an hour.
Having moved through life so impulsively
and full of passionate need, all is now too late for the man without any
remaining identity. He is not really a woman, not really a man, not even quite a
transsexual or a transgendered being. Erwin/Elvira is no one—and yet is
everyone who has ever needed love. One by one the people who might have offered
him this gift, gather at this door, now guarded by the Cerberus-like chauffeur.
Inside is Anton and Zora, evidently locked in when this hero returned to slit
his/her wrists. No one in particular is guilty; yet everyone is obviously
guilty for the death of the shell they now witness.
Los
Angeles, August 18, 2010
Reprinted from International Cinema Review (September 2010).
