the dutiful daughter, the suffering wife
by
Douglas Messerli
Rainer
Werner Fassbinder (screenplay, based on a story by Cornell Woolrich), Rainer
Werner Fassbinder (director) Martha /
1974 (German TV), 1994 (USA)
Although loosely
based on a story by noted noir author Cornell Woolrich, Rainer Werner
Fassbinder’s TV film Martha more
fully mines the melodramas of marriage by Douglas Sirk—the major character of
this film, Martha Hayer, named similarly to American actress Martha Hyer, even
lives on Douglas Sirk Street in Constance, Germany—and the far earlier Patrick
Hamilton play and 1944 film, Gaslight.
Although there are no missing jewels involved in Fassbinder’s film, it
certainly becomes clear that Martha (Margit Carstensen), like Gaslight’s Ingrid Bergman, has married a
manipulative liar and sadist not unlike the character played by Charles Boyer.
Even before her marriage, however, the
middle-aged virgin, Martha, is represented as a kind masochist, easily
accepting the verbal abuses of her father (Adrian Hoven) and, we soon after
discover, the tyrannical insanity of her mother, obviously induced by years of
abuse and neglect she herself as suffered. Indeed, men in Fassbinder’s world
are represented as brutal patriarchs: even before she reaches the lobby of her
hotel to meet with her father for a tour of Rome, Martha is met with a “Libyan”
intruder (Fassbinder’s lover El Hedi ben Salem), ready to rape her, the desk
clerk having sent him up because he has thought he has observed Martha
previously “wink at him.”
Her most unloving father dislikes her
even touching him, and quickly has a heart attack and dies on the Spanish
Steps, after which the gigolo “Libyan,” having followed Martha and her father,
steals her purse, with all her travel money. Martha is so psychologically
unhinged by the event—both terrified and, quite understandably, relieved—that
she leaves her father’s body on the steps as she runs off the German Embassy
for help.
It is outside the embassy where she
briefly encounters her future husband, Helmut Salomon (the handsome Karlheinz
Böhm who played beautiful young villains in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom of 1960 and Fassbinder’s own
Fox and His Friends of the next
year), which the director theatrical represents with a series of camera spins
around the couple. Inside the embassy she calls her mother to report her father’s
death only to hang up on her when the mother Gisela Fackeldey) begins to cry.
Almost as if to celebrate, she bums a cigarette from the Embassy secretary
(Kurt Raab), which declares is her first time at smoking.
Back home at Constance, the head
librarian, Herr Meister (Mr. Master in English) calls her into his office to
demand that she marry him, who when Martha demurs immediately calls in his
other assistant, Ilse (Ingrid Caven) and proposes—this time successfully—to
her.
What quickly becomes clear is that
Fassbinder, although very much embracing the marriage melodrama of Hollywood
cinema, is also deconstructing it similarly to what he did to gangster movies
in Love Is Colder than Death and the
Western in Whity. And much like those
films, Fassbinder creates a fine balance between satire and sympathy, a high
theatricality and realism that might surely confuse those who like their movies
to more easily define themselves. In Martha
one is never sure, given the heroine’s absurd situations, to laugh or cry.
Neither does that heroine, herself, who reencountering
the handsome Saloman and Ilse’s and Meister’s wedding party, accepts his
proposal for marriage. Almost from the very beginning we perceive him as a kind
of monster, declaring his love to her while simultaneously appears to be
seething inside.
While on their honeymoon in Italy, he
demands she get a deep tan which ends predictably in a terrible sunburn, which
she suffers out on a bed while he insists upon a quite painful sexual
intercourse.
Returning home, she discovers that,
instead of her intention to live in her family home, her husband has rented a
mansion where there has formerly been a murder. Having now become a regular
smoker, she is requested by her new husband to smoke only on the veranda. He
has given notice, without her knowledge, that she wishes to give up her
librarian position. And soon after, as she attempts to cook what he has claimed
to be his favorite dish, pig’s kidneys, he declares that he is allergic to all
offal. Soon after he is insisting that she listen only to the sacred the
Flemish composer Orlando di Lasso, declaring her favorite, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor as “slime” (a joke,
clearly, on the actor, Böhm himself, whose father the famed German conductor,
Karl Böhm, often performed Donizetti). It is only a matter of time before he
insists that, during his business absences, she not leave the house. He demands
also that she read an absolutely boring treatise on engineering so that she
might better understand his job.
But the worst events of their marriage
are his savage sexual assaults, where he clearly bites and pummels her. He is,
as Martha’s new librarian friend, Mr. Kaiser (Peter Chatel, with another name
that hints he may not be the hero we imagine him to be) suggests, is a true
sadist. Yet Martha cannot bring herself to condemn her husband or, more
importantly, to leave him, attempting more than ever to submit to his demands.
It is, oddly enough, only when Salomon
suggests that he has returned home early—to find Martha not in the house—and
has brought her a present, that Martha finally breaks down
psychologically,
claiming that he is trying to kill her. We are never told or shown what that
present might have been—Fassbinder leaves it our imagination or as evidence of
Martha’s own psychosis—but we certainly might conjure up all sorts of
possibilities. Clearly, Martha has reached her limit, returning immediately to
Kaiser to demand that he take her away.
Kaiser, much like Bergman’s savior Joseph
Cotton in Gaslight attempts to rush
her out of danger’s way; but unlike the Cukor film, Fassbinder’s escape results
not in salvation but in further imprisonment, as their car crashes, killing
Kaiser and leaving Martha permanently crippled, who is returned, via
wheelchair, by her Aryan captor to their home, while the doctors and others
cluck contentedly that she will now be properly taken care of.
It is a painfully ironic and yet almost
comical ending, wherein evil wins out easily, with the society’s blessing, by
locking away another “hysterical” wife.
Fassbinder
is never easy on any institutional situation, be it conventional or not (even
the highly unconventional human inter-relationships of Fox and His Friends, Ali:
Fear Eats the Soul, and In a Year
with 13 Moons end badly). Martha is
simply another example of where traditional societal views destroy human
attempts of loving.
Los Angeles,
October 7, 2016
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