fassbinder’s absurdist comedy
by
Douglas Messerli
Rainer
Werner Fassbinder (writer and director) Santansbraten
(Satan’s Brew) / 1976, USA 1977
Satan’s Brew is now the 27th
film of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s I have reviewed, and, in one way or another,
I have loved every one of these movies. Even my beloved Hitchcock has not fared
so well: I do not like several of his apprentice films, and the films from The Birds forward are disappointments
that cannot compare with his greatest work of the 1940 through 1960’s Psycho—although I do know that there are
plenty of critics who might disagree. But Fassbinder, far more difficult to
love that Hitchcock, has not ever completely disappointed me.
How in a brief period of 13 years
Fassbinder created so many amazing pieces of cinema is nearly impossible to
comprehend: generous support by the German cultural community, governmental and
private, a repertory-like group of actors with whom he worked, and lots and
lots of drugs and sex probably helped. But it still doesn’t explain the genius
of this director.
For years now I had been waiting for
Netflix to add the 1976 film Satansbraten
to their list; but when it never came about, I finally found it on the new
Criterion streaming service and quickly determined to watch it. Now I think it’s
one of my very favorites, since it involves absurdist drama traditions, from
Artaud and Ionesco to more contemporaneous theatrical artists such as Harold
Pinter and Edward Albee with whom I feel a deep commitment.
It is a heady mix of theater of cruelty,
farce, and social critique that seems so different from Fassbinder’s other
films that some critics, as quoted in Andrew Grossman’s excellent essay on the
film, argued for its total exceptionalness in Fassbinder’s short career. As
Grossman quotes film historian Thomas Elsaeeer, for example, the movie is “a rare
attempt at comedy from a filmmaker who, as commentators have noted, is entirely
devoid of humor.”
Christion Thomsen, a critic devoted to
Fassbinder’s films, described it as “ultimately nihilistic,” summarizing that “the
film is light years away from the time when Fassbinder tried to be positive and
constructive and present alternatives to the reigning misery.”
I can’t explain how these important
critical figures have seen a Fassbinder who I have never experienced. But, for
me, the great director’s films have almost always been filled with humor and a
great deal of campy satire. I might almost suggest that Fassbinder’s ability to
turn his miserable character’s life into humor is one of his signature
qualities. How else to explain the crazy Bonnie and Clyde-like robberies of Love Is Colder than Death, the fetishized
murder of the hero of The American
Soldier, the absolutely crazed societal replay of popular American films in
In a Year of 13 Moons, the
melodramatic breakdown of Petra Kant (right out of Djuna Barnes), the crazy adventurers
of Rio das Mortes, the absurd
gathering of his regulars in Behold the
Holy Whore—and the list goes on? If you haven’t a good sense of humor, then
you might never comprehend Fassbinder’s darkest films.
It’s simply that in Satan’s Brew Fassbinder opens up all the spigots, turning up the
gas, so to speak, on his completely ridiculous figure, Kranz (a marvelous Kurt
Raab), a writer, evidently of some note, who has been unable to write anything
for years and is now totally broke and unable to even obtain another advance
from his publishers.
Kranz obviously stands for the temporary
or perhaps permanent writer’s block that perhaps every writer in the world must
face and one time or another (except perhaps for Fassbinder and, alas, me). If
he is logorrheic, he is also logophobic, unable in the world he now inhabits
with his several domineering prostitutes to communicate—except through his
terribly bitter fights with his long-suffering and insufferable wife Luise (the
indomitable Helen Vita), who not only allows him to have numerous affairs with
his prostitute-lovers but continues to argue for her own rights for sex as his married
partner. Their conversations, at times, appear to be lifted out of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which
in 1976 Fassbinder would have been well aware.
All of this is even more exaggerated by
the household existence of Kranz’s brother, Ernst (Volker Spengler), a man much
like the mad Reinfeld, Count Dracula’s assistant, with flies, attempting not
only to collect them but, after naming each of them, and through masturbation
to mate with them. At one hilarious moment Kranz admits to his brother’s obsession,
suggesting that he hasn’t succeeded, to his knowledge—“at least yet.” When the
unpaid furniture dealers come to collect the chifforobe, they almost take the
shy brother, hidden away in its confines, with them.
In fact, Kranz is a kind of Dracula,
using the women from whom he begs for sex also as sources of possible income—a
reversal of the usual “john,” using even a prostitute, sold to others by her
husband, as a possible source of income. Another prostitute, into heavy bondage,
writes checks out to Kranz as he threatens (and possibly does) shoot her to
death with her own gun.
Yet, when the detective, investigating the
incident, shares a foot tub with Kranz and joins his and his wife for lunch, we
can’t even be sure that her death wasn’t also just a sexual fantasy.
As Grossman perceptively writes:
What
becomes normative in Satan’s Brew is
not a state of bourgeois passivity, but a panicked desperation that, taken to
its “extreme,” unbridles characters’ ids and returns them to states of
irrational infantilism. If the sociopolitical revolutions (of the 1960s, we
assume) in which Kranz once believed have died away, he can now do little but
succumb to a rising capitalism that bloats appetites but never sates them. Thus
afflicted, Kranz is part-beast, part-child, his attempts at dignity dissipating
as the film goes on. He is a pressure-cooker of frustrated desires, and
sexually hopeless. We laugh when the degraded yet “normal” Kranz, spying
through a keyhole on a female friend as she scratches her buttocks, exclaims,
“I want to screw you like a stoat!” He then complains incredulously to her
husband, “Your wife doesn’t want to sleep with me!” Perhaps we initially
mistake Kranz’s joyful desecration of monogamy for a poet’s iconoclasm. But
Kranz is also a beggar, and when he asks his married friends for a loan, his
unaffected artist’s ways become indistinguishable from a vagabond’s
destitution; it is only when he repays his debts to the couple that the husband
is happy to whore his wife. Yet Fassbinder’s humor is impersonal, political —
when we laugh at Kranz, we really laugh past him, and at the meretricious
culture that has made human appetites an allegory for degeneracy.
Louise, meanwhile, becomes desperately
ill with cancer—well-earned in her world of absolute servitude—who is taken
away to the hospital, with even the retarded Ernst realizing the desperateness
of the situation.
Finally, Kranz himself, in his total
downward spiral, realizes he has lost the only person who truly might care for
him in the real world in which he lives. And he admits for the first time in
the film what she has attempted to proclaim throughout: “You’re my wife before
God and man!” But in so doing, of course, he admits that his entire life has
been a fraud, that he, his poetry, and his identification with George is an
absurdity no longer able of being supported. Her death is his death. The comedy
is over.
Los Angeles, May
12, 2019
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (May 2019).
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