monopoly
by Douglas Messerli
Rainer
Werner Fassbinder (writer and director) Die
Dritte Generation (The Third
Generation)
The Third
Generation is
one of Fassbinder’s most difficult works, in part, because it is a comedic
rendition of terrorists. Rather than the dark, monomaniacal underground figures
of film and legend, the director’s vision of a terrorist cell superficially
similar to the German Baader-Meinhof terrorist group (Fassbinder himself knew Andreas
Baader as a teenager, but later disapproved of Baader’s tactics) is quite the
opposite. Here, the squabbling young middle-class members spend more time on
elaborate modes of communication—reminding one a bit of Jean-Pierre Melville’s version
of underground heroes of World War II in Army
of Shadows (1969)—than accomplishing any direct acts of terrorism.
These young, often confused and always
terrified anarchists—Susanne Gast (Hanny Schygulla), Petra Vielhaber (Margin
Carstensen), Hilde Krieger (Bulle Ogier), ringleader August Brem (Volker
Spengler), Paul (Raúl Gimenez), Rudolf Mann (Harry Baer), and Franz Walsch (Günther
Kaufmann)—dance, fall in love, smoke endlessly, and, far more ironically, spend
hours playing monopoly. The director, moreover, portrays their meetings with a
jarring world of loud television intrusion and constant interruptive dialogue.
There is hardly moment in their lives of quietude and peace.
Their relationships with others, some with the
enemies they are seeking to destroy, are equally brutal and meaningless:
Susanne works for the industrialist P. J. Lurz (Eddie Constantine) and is
having a kind of S&M relationship with police-head Gerhard Gast, her
father-in-law, who is protecting Lurz from possible terrorist attacks. Paul, a
new recruit, assigned to stay with Hilde, rapes her, but immediately after
becomes her lover.
Rudolf, who rents the largest Berlin
apartment of the group, has taken in a hopeless drug-addict, Ilse Hoffmann (Y
Sa Lo), whom the other group members insist has to go, blaming Rudolf for what
they believe must be his Catholic conscience. As the group is called together
for a meeting with the code “The world as will and idea” (a phrase from
philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer), they mill around Rudolf’s apartment, only to
be met with further confusion as Ilse’s former lover, Franz, shows up with a
clearly homosexual acolyte, a theorist-reading young aristocrat Bernhard von
Stein. Rather than admire this young free thinker, the cell members mock him
for his reading of Bakunin. Yet the evidently kind-hearted Rudolf accepts them
generously also as roommates—again against the sentiments of the group.
Fassbinder links their episodic meetings
with sexual comments penned on Berlin bathroom walls. And, indeed, it appears
that the coarse language of both the heterosexual and homosexual toilet
statements is appropriate to the absurd sexual posturings of The Third Generation’s cell members: at
one point a couple stand in an embrace while Paul masturbates to the television
set, and two women hold hands.
What this absurd group does not perceive
is that their major supporter is Lutz himself, in an attempt to stage a coup so
that his company might sell more surveillance computers. In short, the
industrialists are supporting the terrorists in order to create a bigger
industry for their own protection—with no Edward Snowden even on the horizon yet.
As Ghast sickeningly pontificates: “Capitalism invented terrorism to force the
state to protect it better.”
Obviously, murder is necessary to create
the proper publicity. Paul is shot dead in a Japanese restaurant, and the cell is
forced to regather in order to find a way to financially survive and for the individuals
to gain new identities. Petra and other of the terrorists rob a bank, the very
institution in which her husband works. To escape she must shoot her own
husband dead. Seeking new identities, the group hits up a government office,
Rudolf so terrified in the process of the robbery that he pees his pants. But
back at his home there is even more bad news: Franz’s Ilse has overdosed and is
dead.
Memorizing their new identities, the
group scatters. Only the confused and totally innocent Bernhard remains to
answer Officer Gast’s endless questions. But the policeman’s, themselves, leads
him to wonder where all the others might have gone, particularly his beloved
Franz. Following August, he observes a meeting with the industrialist Lurz, who
hands over more money for the group’s finances.
Having set up the newcomer Franz as the
traitor, August tells his supposed comrade, Bernhard, where Ilse has been
buried, while alerting authorities where they might find him. Despite Bernhard’s
attempt to warn his friend, Franz is shot and killed. Gast makes certain that
Bernhard is killed as well.
August instructs Petra to bomb a location
while warning the police of the event, where she too is intercepted. The few
remaining cell-members, dressed in clown-like costumes, kidnap Lurz, who
perceiving it still has part of his secret plan, willingly smiles into the
camera as again and again, they attempt to tape his appeal to the world to be
freed.
What Fassbinder has established,
obviously, is that the industrialist world and terrorists both need one another
and are equally responsible for the other’s existence. Viewers in Frankfurt
beat up the projectionist upon the film’s opening; audiences in Hamburg threw
acid upon the screen. My friend Pablo, who introduced me to the works of
Fassbinder, and who is a great admirer of his work, told me that after about a
half-hour through this movie he got up and walked out, suggesting that he
couldn’t even determine the character’s relationships; I suggested that if he
had stayed for the entire film, these might have become more apparent, but I do
sympathize with his feelings early on in the film.
For me, this film, like all of
Fassbinder’s work I have seen to date, was absolutely spellbinding, this one
being a comedy that dramatically (even with its radically disjunctive leaps)
reveals the relationship with power and those who might like to usurp it. It is
after all, a mirror image. Monopoly is the name of the game.
Los Angeles,
April 5, 2016
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