THE LINE OF LEAST RESISTANCE
by Douglas Messerli
by Douglas Messerli
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (writer and director) Rio das Mortes / 1971
True, both of the above named films appear
to make that homosexual bond more transparent than does Rio das Mortes,
and the female figure in this case seems far more ambivalent about her attempts
to revenge her lover’s abandonment. The figures of Rio das Mortes,
admittedly, are less well-defined, both by the writer-director and by their own
persons, than the gangster-driven figures of Love Is Colder Than Death and
Gods of the Plague. Mike, Günter and even Hanna are, socially and
economically-speaking lower-class, individuals who have never looked within and
have little conception of their lives or their roles in it. Hanna, as she
continues to assure her obviously bourgeois mother, simply wants to
marry—despite her vague attempts to educate herself and possibly embrace a
feminist position. Mike—bored by his work as a journeyman laborer, spending
most of his days re-tiling the bathrooms of wealthy clients, payment for which
he gets only a fraction—has no perception of any alternatives. His schoolboy
chum, Günter, although having vowed that he will not join the military, is, by
his own retelling, mindlessly drawn into the navy, and now is working as a
salesman, pretending to his customers to provide travel bonuses if they will
purchase his company’s products over a period of several months. Neither have
any imagination, as their attempts to put together funds to travel to Peru soon
reveals. As Günter summarizes his behavior throughout his navy stint—“I took
the line of least resistance”—the very same tack we have observed Hanna taking
with her mother in the very first scene of the movie. Throughout their lives, these
three individuals have basically done what has been expected of them
Similarly, upon accidentally reencountering
one another once again—Günter having entered the house to try to sell Hanna his
products—their immediate response is a rough-housing wrestle that ends with
Günter splitting his pants. The utter electrical thrill the two have in rubbing
their bodies together is obvious. And even if they never come to realize why
they are so desperate to escape the worlds in which they are currently trapped
by joining up with one another to fulfill their ridiculous childhood fantasy,
we immediately sense that it has nothing at all to do with buried treasure,
Peru, or any other logical motivation. Indeed, when they are asked to make
their journey fit some normative pattern— when they are required to recast
their adventures in terms of a farming venture or a scholarly inspired trip—they
utterly fail. Cotton and native culture and artifacts have absolutely no
bearing on their need to fly away together. And it doesn’t matter a hoot
whether they end up in Peru or Brazil. There is no gold to be found except in
Günter’s possible recognition of the beauty of Mike’s long golden locks. Only
Günter’s seemingly refined mother (nonsensically played by Fassbinder’s own
mother, Lilo Pempeit) seems to recognize their actual intention when she offers
up the money she has saved for her son’s marriage to help pay for his trip to
what her son and friend misconceive as the land of the Mayas! For it is a kind
of marriage they are seeking, an coming of age adventure for which Mike is even
willing to give up his beloved car—an obvious symbol of male virility and
sexual allure. The scene, in fact, in which he sells the car to auto salesman
(Ulli Lommel) is so filled with sexual innuendo that, when Mike hands over the
key to the car, he might as well be also offering up a tool to unlock his
pea-green pants.
Fassbinder makes it quite clear throughout
that if these three believe there are truly heterosexual they are utterly
deluded. Hanna will clearly never find fulfillment, even in the sexy dancer she
encounters in a bar—played, with great irony, by Fassbinder himself.
Fassbinder’s work is quite openly a gay and
lesbian fantasy, a film which associates its central figures’ sexuality with
the clown-like efforts of someone like Buster Keaton’s absurd efforts to win
his incompetent and prejudiced girlfriend in The General or the operatics
of a born-diva like the multiply married Lana Turner who, when her daughter
killed her own gangster husband, dramatically “collapsed”—as the newspapers
described her grand gesture—an act of such ridiculousness that gay poet Frank
O’Hara would mock it in his “campy” poem "Lana Turner Has Collapsed.” Even
the landlady who comes to collect the rent sings a song from Madama
Butterfly, as if to rub in Hanna’s own loss of her navy man, Günter, with
who whom she
has just spent a sexless night.
Although Hanna intends/pretends to play out
a drama of revenge by showing up at the airport to shoot the two men who have
now abandoned her, she is so indeterminate in her action that they escape
behind a luggage wagon and then the wing of the plane itself. Returning the gun
to her purse, she reapplies her lipstick, suggesting perhaps that she has
suddenly realized that she is now free to pursue her own hidden sexual desires
with Katrin.
If the desires of these unwitting and
unthinking beings are absurd and ridiculous, however, they are absolutely
sensible when put into the context of the film’s other figures, nearly all made
even more incredible through their pretense of knowledge regurgitated from
almost senseless books about the process of education, from economic theories
that tie up the relationship of Brazilian religious figures with those of the
country of Columbia, and emanate from the purposeless, personal assignment of
roles—Güther is to be the cameraman and Mike the “friendly” mountaineer to
Joaquim’s scholarly researches of the Peruvian landscape. These supposedly
intelligent individuals of the upper class, well integrated into the German
society, know even less about reality, Fassbinder demonstrates in this comic
work, than the completely unperceptive clowns who take the path of least
resistance.
We might imagine, at least, that when their
feet reach the ground in Peru, the two men will “wise up,” rubbing their bodies
together in a more purposeful manner in order to scratch the itch of their
unrealized desires.
Los Angeles, September 25, 2014
No comments:
Post a Comment