Amsterdam University Press

Chapter Title: Murder, Merger, Suicide The Politics of DESPAIR

Book Title: Fassbinder's Germany

Book Subtitle: History, Identity, Subject
Book Author(s): THOMAS ELSAESSER
Published by: Amsterdam University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46mt94.6

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 3. Murder, Merger, Suicide
The Politics of DESPAIR

'The only emotion I respect is despair' 'DESPAIR is the most hopeful

movie I've made']

Negative Identity
In Fassbinder, the cinema appears as a magnificent, but also always magnificently failing,
efficiently deficient, identity machine. As his characters try to place themselves or arrange
others in configurations that promise a heightened experience of self, it is never by means of
a self-centred, inward-looking, boundary-drawing insistence on identity, but across as con-
tradictory a field of identifications as Fassbinder's narratives can devise and his camera can
capture, providing characters with insinuating others and antagonistic doubles, each with a
bewildering array of mirroring possibilities.
Explicitly and implicitly, identity is also the subject of DESPAIR, the film from
1977 that represented Fassbinder's first bid for international recognition, which necessitated
a change of genre (the European art film), different financing (induding a German tax-shelter
company and a French consortium), an international cast, and English language dialogue.
These fairly drastic changes outline some of the external conditions of existence of Fassbin-
der's cinema in the late] 970s, the outer envelope, so to speak, of an authorial identity, at
once dispersed across an apparently heterogeneous output of two dozen films, as many theatre
productions and several tv series, and concentrated in the cultural capital that being a 'major'
2
European auteur commands. When Fassbinder undertook the filming ofVladimir Nabokov's
novel on which DESPAIR is based, the director seemed ready for stardom: New York had
discovered him in 1975, glowing profiles had appeared in Paris in 1976, and no film festival
seemed complete without the latest Fassbinder. His original mini-studio system had become
less incestuous by the addition of trained professionals, induding, apart from Michael
Ballhaus, Peter Marthesheimer as producer and Rolf Zehetbauer, Bavaria Studio's top art
director. 3 With DESPAIR, the sawdust and tinsel glamour of his earlier work became the real
glamour of multi-million budgets and solid production values (the film cost six million DM,
compared to Fassbinder's previous average of 4-500,000); the script was written by Tom
Stoppard, then a celebrity second only to Harold Pinter in the literary script stakes; with Dirk
Bogarde he had under contract a star associated with Joseph Losey, Luchino Visconti, Alain
Resnais and Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter. Together with Andrea Ferreol, Bogarde
ensured international distribution for the film, which was shot partly on the sets built for
Ingmar Bergman's The Serpents Egg in Munich.

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 IfFassbinder's films had been about entrapment and imprisonment, vicious circles
and double-binds, his change of genres from the gangster film via family melodrama to the
European art film reflected, to be sure, his appreciation of the different contexts of reception
open to his films, but also a new understanding of the cinema as just such an identity machine,
an 'apparatus' poised between thematizing the power of images in the realm of interpersonal
relations, and itself embodying a form of symbolic power, affecting ideas of identity and the
versions of history by which individuals locate themselves in space and time. In Fassbinder's
melodramas, from THE MERCHANT OF FOUR SEASONS (1971) MOTHER KUSTER'S TRIP TO

HEAVEN (1975) and FOX AND HIS FRIENDS (1975) to MARTHA (1973), EFFI BRIEST (1974) and
BOLWIESER (1976), the protagonists' motivation centred on how to escape from the family
and its substitutes including heterosexual, lesbian, and homosexual double-binds. The films
consumed themselves imagining ever new ways of breaking the hold of the exploitative
mechanism of the family under capitalism (MERCHANT, FOX) or bourgeois codes of honour
(EFFI BRIEST) or mores (MARTHA), and they found their fonn, their unified perspective by
asserting and maybe even celebrating the failure and futility of such an escape. By talking
about the family, they also talked about Germany, albeit more by implication and shared
assumptions.
With regard to identity in the realm of the intersubjective, the melodramas, even
more than the gangster films, problematised identity as a crisis of perception, the self
constantly undoing and renewing itself in the struggle between the way the characters
perceive themselves and the way that others perceive them. As we saw, the films dramatised
the impossibility of an identity either within or without the family as the beginning of a new
subjectivity ~ male subjectivity, but quite often also a specifically female subjectivity - often
defined as resistance or refusal to inscribe the self securely into the space of the fictional
universe of looks exchanged and looks retained. Anxiety, desire traversed the narratives as
an interruption, leaving the traces of excess, in some sense irrecuperable, but none the less
finally held and articulated within the conventions of classical narrative, as the pathos of
waste, loss and misunderstanding.
The other benefit Fassbinder's melodramas drew from Sirkean classicism was the
way questions of identity and subjectivity could be tied to class, money and social status,
besides being oedipal dramas of patriarchy. From a political perspective (the 'politics of
representation'), melodrama appeared progressive for bringing together and pointing out
connections between three different spaces usually isolated from each other: the social space
of the middle class, the physical space of the home and the small-town community, and the
emotional space of the family. In other words, melodrama implicitly challenges the split and
separation between public and private, so fundamental to bourgeois ideology, and thus
towards the end of an era it rejoined a problematic dating back to the eighteenth century and
the rise of bourgeois tragedy. Nonetheless, radical though it may have been to pinpoint the
repressive effects ofclass, patriarchy and economics on the family in the West German context
of the 1970s, recourse to this model of political melodrama also made Fassbinder enemies

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among the German left when he seemed to be implying in films like FOX AND HIS FRIENDS
or MOTHER KUSTER'S TRIP TO HEAVEN that left-wing convictions and capitalist politics were
not that different when it came to measuring the misery inflicted by emotional as compared
with economic exploitation. Yet this dissenting view, namely that sexual politics were more
likely to be the key to the class struggle, rather than the other way round, proved in the end
more politically astute and prescient
To his admirers as well as his detractors, the move implied by DESPAIR seemed an
opportunist one, trading 'relevant' German issues for 'Euro' -decadence, and recognizable
working-class characters for aristocrats drawn from literature. From another vantage point,
though, the genre Fassbinder turned to with DESPAIR was one where the problem of identity
has a long history. The post-war European art cinema, in such classic examples as Alain
Resnais' LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD orPROVIDENCE,4 Federico Fellini 's 8 1/2, Visconti 's DEATH
IN VENICE, Bergman's PERSONA or Michelangelo Antonioni's L'AVVENTURA or RED DESERT,
had always been preoccupied with the (grand-)bourgeois ego divided against itself, the split
personality, or the sense of a person suddenly falling out of the symbolic order altogether.
DESPAIR aligns itself with this tradition: its setting and social context are unmistakably upper
middle class, its hero is a refined, aristocratic dandy, who suffers from a 'dissociated
personality' disorder. Identity, for Hermann Hennann, proves to be a negative entity, an
unsustainable state, and his journey is one that involves him in gradually shedding all its
bourgeois vestiges and trappings of civilized life, exchanging them for identifications, as
fragile as they are fraught with danger, towards a self even more stripped and bereft than is
usual in the works of the directors Fassbinder was compared with.
The other aspect of the European art film DESPAIR took over was stylistic: its
s
general distrust of depth of field shots. Partly because it suited his own stylistic preferences,
and partly because it drew attention to vision and perception, Fassbinder opted for a
mise-en-scene notable for the number of rack-focus shots and zooms. This choice returns to
the early films' predilection for a flattened picture plane by shooting at right angles to a wall
or arranging the figures frontally to face the camera. DESPAIR appears to adapt for the screen
one of the literary concerns of Nabokov's novel, namely the modernist interrogation of the
status of fictional heroes, the disjuncture between authors, narrators and characters familiar
from Proust, Joyce or Faulkner. Yet in a film concerned with dissociation, with false
recognition and misperception, such an emphasis on different picture planes and their collapse
literalized one of Fassbinder's own themes: the impossible inscription of the protagonist in
the fiction considered as the space of perspectival representation. Instead of having a character
who acts upon events, the very notion of agency is at stake, as the hero slides off, but is also
blocked by surfaces. 6 The lack of depth creates a visual field that defines itself - with one
notable exception - not 'within' the picture, but between audience space and screen space,
so that the action exists 'in front', 'inside' as well as 'behind' the characters.

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A Tale for the "Viennese Delegation'?
Based on Nabokov's emigre novel, written in Berlin in 1932,7 which Tom Stoppard's script
treats both faithfully and very liberally, the story concerns Hermann Hermann, a chocolate
manufacturer of Russian origin, living in Berlin with his empty-headed flirtatious wife Lydia
and her cousin Ardalion, a pseudo-bohemian painter with whom she has an affair, while he
scrounges off Hennann's rapidly depleting income, as his family business is sliding into
bankruptcy. After an unsuccessful attempt at negotiating a business merger, Hermann happens
to meet at a fairground mirror-maze a vagrant in whom he detects a perfect resemblance to
himself. Over the subsequent weeks he hatches a plan which involves bribing Felix, the
vagrant, into putting on his clothes and acting as his double. Felix finally accepts, is then shot
by Hennann, who had instructed his wife, after telling her about a mysterious, criminal
brother, to collect Hermann's life insurance premium and join him in Switzerland. The scheme
fails, mainly because the police have no reason to believe the dead man to be Herrnann
Hermann. A clue left at the scene gives away the identity of the victim, and it is merely a
matter of time until Hennann, now living under Felix's name, is tracked down by the police
in his Alpine retreat. The film ends with him making a speech 011 his arrest, in which he claims
to be an actor playing a criminal.
Such might be the plot synopsis. But in the network of symbolic actions that make
up the narrative of DESPAIR, the situation is more complex, and two features in particular
differ from the novel. The first concerns the fact that Felix, the double, bears little physical
resemblance to Hermann,ll and the second is reflected in the historical setting, which is now
fairly precisely located in the Berlin of 1929-1930, with the gradual, perceptible-impercep-
tible rise of Nazism very much in evidence. 9 For a Fassbinder film, the narration makes quite
unusual demands on an audience, with imagined scenes and flash-forwards abruptly inter-
spersed in the narrative flow, the inserts confusingly presented without marking their
difference in status. 1O The film had a troubled production history (having been extensively
re-edited the night before it was shipped to Cannes), and it generally received a mixed
11
reception when it opened commercially in 1978. If a first viewing, therefore, gives the sense
of a lavish but erratic literary adaptation, from which no clear narrative voice or, rather, too
many different authorial and stylistic voices emerge, 12 a closer analysis suggests that there is
in fact a logic, but dislocated, in order to bring out a structure which, though present in
Nabokov's novel, is tighter and organised with a different problem in mind.
Nabokov, reputedly, was no adherent of 'Freudian' models of human motivation,
and he may well have intended Hennann Hennann's journey into madness to be a riposte to
a psychoanalytic case study (Nabokov's Chocolate Bunny to Freud's Wolf-Man, as it were),
spoofing or baiting what at one point in the novel he calls the 'members of the Viennese
delegation'. Fassbinder - and Stoppard - on the other hand, give Hermann's chief anxiety
ample space to deploy itself, so that his condition can easily be diagnosed as impotence. In
the first instance, sexual: his inability to satisfy his wife, or deal with the impudent flaunting
of phallic potency on the part of his wife's cousin. At another level, however, sexual impotence

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is itself a metaphor for other kinds of impotence, notably economic and political, in the light
of which Hennann's worry about his sexuality becomes both symptom and repression of the
symptom. The film recounts his struggle to cope with this double burden, in a series of
confrontations at his office, with his wife, talking to Ardalion, and anxiety attacks that
overcome him at a business meeting with his rival, and during a coffee break at an outdoor
cafe.
To call 'impotence' the common element that unites these obliquely presented,
causally disconnected episodes is to state perhaps too categorically the dilemma that the
narrative is designed to explore. For the question the film raises is the following: what exactly
is the problem that makes the 'discovery' of his double and the plan to switch identities appear
to Hennann Hennann as a way out and a solution? [n an obvious sense, he is another
Fassbinder hero who feels trapped and who plots escape: and once again, the escape seems
to trap him further and more decisively. As in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, or in the famous
'Appointment in Samara', destiny manifests itself in the movement to evade it. What,
however, singles Hennann out is his evident reluctance to be drawn into the game that assigns
to him the role of the jealous husband, or to act his part in the triangle made up of himself,
Lydia, his wife, and Ardalion, her lover. So reluctant is he in fact that he represses all
knowledge of her incestuous adultery, and instead imagines himself a masterful and irresist-
ible mate. In one of the scenes where he surprises the two together in Ardalion's studio loft,
he is frantically searching for nothing more appropriately inappropriate than one of Ardalion 's
'excruciatingly bad' paintings, representing a briar pipe and two apples, but which turns out
to show an ashtray and two roses.
Hennann's 'repression' of the signs of his wife's brazen infidelity is not without
consequences: he experiences a split, a dissociation, and at night is given to watching himself
make love to his wife, as he sits and at the same time sees himself sitting at the other end of
the hallway. This 'seeing himself double' is the initial fonn his condition takes, and follows
what, after the credit sequence, is the first scene in the film, in which his wife, naked, moves
towards him, her left ann raised, provocatively spraying her shaven annpit with perfume.
Her entry can be seen as a metonymic representation of the threat that runs throughout the
film: the display of 'nothing there' in the context of sexual desire. Lydia's gaze invites his,
but he responds by stepping demonstratively behind a voluminous annchair. To put it like
this, however, is to make a correlation between shot and countershot which the film actually
interrupts by a marked spatial dislocation. There is no eye-contact, not even negative, between
the two characters: both glance directly into the camera, but each shot is held too long to
produce a sense of contact, nor is there a cutback to Lydia. It is the spectator who has to make
a choice of either bridging the gap that the mise-en-scene opens up or - and this is typical of
the film's visual field generally - of constructing the spatial coherence in a different sense,
by treating for instance the camera itself as another character.
Elsewhere, Lydia's appetite recalls to Hennann that of his mother 'stuffing
chocolates into her silly face'. Again, a 'Freudian' reading offers itself: anxiety produces the

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image of the voracious, phallic mother as a defence against the incestuous feelings towards
her, his own oedipal pathology mirrored in and transferred to Lydia via the incestuous
Ardalion: a desire so strongly disavowed as to make Hermann impotent. Shaven armpit or
briar pipe, Fassbinder gives the viewer several visual clues towards reconstructing the
dynamics of this disavowal: Hermann's search for the briar pipe tries to negate the threat
represented by the shaven armpit, hoping to substitute for the lack a fetish object that can
represent it metaphorically. This is the structure in which Felix figures as the double: in one
sense a substitute for the painted briar pipe never found (an allusion to Magritte's 'ceci n'est
pas une pipe'?), and in another sense the schizo- alternative to the paranoid double vision of
watching himself watching. At the same time, Felix is an ego-ideal, and everything Hermann
is not: young, virile, physically strong, and free of family or social obligations. He also voices
a misogyny that Hermann dare not admit to: that women are fickle, deceitful, adulterous. By
changing places with Felix, Hermann can put himself in the position of a successful husband
without having to fulfil the role in action. Animated by an overpowering desire to liquidate
his social persona, and slip out from under a host of impossible demands, Hermann wants to
exchange a faltering identity for a fixed one, controlled and circumscribed by the negation
of his former self from which it springs. The murder of Felix is a symbolic suicide, but also
an execution, in which Hermann can punish himself in the act of shooting Felix, assuming
the role of dominance and submission simultaneously. Shooting himself by proxy, he
eliminates his own inadequate self, to be reborn, on the 'other side' - here represented by
'neutral' Switzerland - into a life of rugged independence rather than castrated misery. The
kind of revenge Hermann has in mind is prefigured in the story he tells Lydia about the
allegedly criminal brother: he poisoned his mistress, which makes her the symmetrical
equivalent to the chocolate-eating motherlLydia. Probably regarded by both Tom Stoppard
and Dirk Bogarde (as well as Andrea Ferreol) as a grand'guignol fantasy of middle-class
mid-life crisis,13 it does indeed wear its textbook Freudianisms a little too blatantly not to
deserve a bit of tongue-in-cheek humour and self-irony which Fassbinder was either unable
or unwilling to supply, to the evident bemusement of the critics and deep disappointment of
the participants. 14 But this is to put oneself perhaps too firmly on the side of Nabokov and
Stoppard, fixated as even a parody would be on the Freudian reading. Fassbinder may have
had other ideas - bringing to the fore his radical critique of 'positive' notions of identity, as
well as his political agenda, tracing moments of crisis in Germany's national identity. These
concerns can perhaps best be studied by looking at a number of particular scenes, starting
with the exchange of identity between Hermann Hermann and Felix.

Seeing Double
How crucial the shooting of Felix is can be judged by the fact that is shown twice, to bring
out the simultaneity and the contradiction of the two positions, in which the homosexual
sub-text becomes a kind of intermediary structure between two impossibilities. The process
of transforming Felix into Hermann is shown as the progress of love, expressed in physical

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gestures, acts of silent exchange. The close-ups of hands, feet, ears, neck, scalp, toes, as
Hennann trims, .!haves, pedicures and washes Felix before dressing him in his clothes,
underscore a heavily eroticised ritual, a love-making which the fatal shot in the back
consummates. The murder comes as a point of relief, and Hennann's divided self fuses
momentarily in the image of love and death mutually experienced.
As Hennann fires the shot, Fassbinder frames Felix in medium close-up looking
into the camera, and almost inaudibly he whispers 'Thank you' as he sinks down. The ringing
of the shot is overlaid with the ringing ofthe doorbell in Lydia's apartment; in rapid succession
we see the police investigation, the funeral, Lydia being paid the insurance premium. Finally
Lydia, dressed in white, is seen coming towards the camera with open anns, calling
Hennann's name, as he stands, also in white, with his back to heron a bridge by Lake Geneva.
When he turns round it is Felix, not Hennann, but Lydia seems not to mind, and the two
embrace passionately. We realise that the scene has been a flash-forward, a wish-fulfilling
fantasy scenario, in which the plot is doubly successful: the police fall for it, and Lydia has
accepted the substitution. Felix does indeed replace Hennann at her side, and she authenti-
cates the switch by taking him as her lover: female desire has been focused again, and thereby
contained. The duplicity of the scene lies not only in the fact that it is 'imagined'; it is a
subjective, point of view scene, but one in which the marks of this subjectivity are like the
linguists' grammatical shifters ('I', 'you', 'here' 'now') running through and across the
characters. Beginning with Hennann's point of view (split between his image in the back-
ground and Felix's 'thank you' in the aural foreground), the scene changes to Lydia's point
of view via a complex field, made up by a series of glances exchanged between the detective,
Ardalion's portrait of Hennann, and the insurance broker, a series of male glances in which
Lydia figures as the product, the result, the mediator that brings the spectator to Felix's face
looking at the camera and signifying the erasure of Hennann. Thematically, we are given
Hermann's vision of his after-life, except that in tenns of narrative expectations, Felix appears
where Hennann should be. The scene is thus a series of transfers and substitutions, in which
Hennann's subjectivity is cut completely loose from any notion of coherent character,
investing the whole of the fictional space and assuming an exalted omnipresence.
That it is an impossible escape from his predicament is confinned by cutting back
to the scene of the shooting in the woods. The camera set-up is now different, we no longer
have a close-up of Felix's face, there is no beatific expression or any whispered words. The
sequence of events stops with the detective glancing at the portrait and disclosing that the
man found dead is merely wearing Hennann's clothes and holding his passport: no further
resemblance. Does this mean that in order to break out of his bind, Hennann would have to
be Felix and Hennann, interchangeably and simultaneously? In one sense, Felix is the
'solution' to the dual constraint of public and private self. To Hennann, unsuccessful
businessman and impotent husband, Felix represents the Faustian pact - an idea also found
in Nabokov, who clearly let himself be inspired by Gennan Expressionist cinema, replete
with doubles, somnambulists, and frustrated bourgeois willing to sell their shadow, or even

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their immortal soul. Bourgeois individuality, represented by Hennann, would thus emerge as
an irresolvable contradiction, and the 'double' stands merely for the figure symbolizing this
contradictory inscription of such subjectivity in the social order.
In an obvious sense, of course, Hennann Hennann does not want to inscribe
himself in the social order at all: he wants out. But why go to the trouble of devising such an
unlikely plot and want to leave behind a double? It seems that Fassbinder, here even more
than in his contribution to GERMANY IN AUTUMN, exposes a historically situated subjectivity
to the dilemmas and options confronting it in a period of momentous change, the years
between the Great Crash and Hitler's coming to power, which for modern Gennany condense
themselves to something like an 'originary' trauma. What the Freudian plot puts before us is
that Hennann's disintegrating personality lays open processes of identity-fonnation - which,
in time travel fashion (or like the psychoanalytic cure), we can inspect in both directions,
Hennann un-done and re-done. The crucial fact here is that Hennann has 'chosen' his double,
as much as that the chosen double does not look like him.
As often in Fassbinder, the moment of choice is linked to a moment of love, with
love in turn both shattering and giving succour to identity, once the lover ventures into the
terrain of identification, leaving behind his social roles: here, the bourgeois symbolizations
of self. In this respect, Hennann has little else to lose, and by befriending Felix, though
apparently the very opposite of a love relationship, based as it is on deception, bribery and
broken promises, he nonetheless goes through a number of stages, not all that different from
courtship and seduction. As a homosexual romance, it could be fuelled by mimetic desire,
with Hennann wanting to discover likeness, except that it should be he who remakes himself
in the image of Felix. On the other hand, it is not evident that homosexuality requires desire
for the same. Fassbinder himself had always insisted that he did not fall in love with people
like himself, even if he made them play aspects of himself in his films. ls Given the eroticised
blend of violence and tenderness surrounding the scene in the woods and the death of Felix,
one might think of it as a fantasy of 'incorporation', but ultimately it seems to stand for an
act of identification in the more technical sense of regressing to a state where Hermann is no
longer aware of separateness and difference from the other.
However, to understand in what sense Hermann's choice has a political side, one
has to regard his move as that of a narcissistic object-choice. Just as in GERMANY IN AUTUMN

Fassbinder's skill in pointing out the gaps in his mother's position makes her 'cover' the
political contradiction (a democracy resorting to violence in order to protect itself from its
citizens) by choosing a Ftihrer ('but a kind and benevolent one'), so Hermann Hennann
'covers' his untenable position as husband and head of a failing chocolate business by
choosing a double (but one that does not look like him): at issue in these acts of shielding or
masking is how violently they draw attention to the process itself, or rather to the gap which
the act of covering cannot bridge.
Yet this is what makes the narcissistic element involved so important. For although
the narcissist may be in love with his own image, it is not necessarily evident what this image

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is: is slhe locked into hislher own image as ideal ego, or has slhe invested in others as
ego-ideals? In one case, subjectivity will find itself in conflict with the social order and its
representations, in the other it will align itself with that order, provided society succeeds in
circulating such ego-ideals. Hennann Hennann, it would seem, belongs to the fonner, which
gives his narcissism a politically subversive potential, while 'Fassbinder's mother' represents
the latter.

The Break-up of the Bourgeois Subject

The allusions to Nazism in DESPAIR have been criticised, mainly by Nabokov scholars, as a
gratuitous vulgarisation and travesty of the original's restraint, given that all these scenes had
to be added to the script. But this is to ignore how deeply politics are embedded in the film,
and with it, a crucial aspect ofFassbinder's view of modern Gennan history. Nazism appears
as both the reverse side and the complementary aspect of Hennann's private hell: to contract
out of the sexual and social demands and to split into a paranoid/schizo-self is in the film
symmetrically related to contracting into monopoly capitalism, fascism, and Hitler. The
narrative pointedly aligns a sexual crisis (Hennann's mamage), an economic crisis (the Great
Depression, because of which the 'family finn' can be salvaged only by a merger) and a
political crisis (the resignation of the last social-democrat Chancellor MUlier, hastening the
collapse of the Weimar Republic and the emergence of the National Socialists).
Two figures in whom Hennann mirrors his own options are his production
manager ~ also called Muller ~ and the director of the rival chocolate firm. In both cases, the
conversation revolves round the politics of the day, to which Hermann can only reply with
private confessions, in one case about his mother, and to the chocolate manufacturer about
living with forged papers. Thus, in the subplot, the personality split is metonymically related
to economics, the change from private enterprise manufacture to monopoly capitalism, the
proletarianisation of the middle classes, ready to believe in the world-lewish-Bolshevik
conspiracy as a way of venting anxiety and resentment. The white collar supervisor Muller
is clearly paranoid about foreigners, lews, the Versailles Treaty, and in order to allay his fears
about the future, he joins the Nazi party. Muller, in other words, chooses the Nazi as his
(ego-ideal) double, and when he appears at the office dressed in an SA uniform, the analogy
with Hermann (exchanging clothes, switching roles and identities) is made explicit.
However, the connection works more subtly when MUller is first introduced. The
morning after Hermann has been watching himself making love to his wife, she drives him
to work in their limousine. Hermann, in the car, plays seductively with the hem of her skirt
to expose some thigh, and busies himself on her gloved fingers: in the context of the previous
night's debacle, the scene functions as a fetishisation and substitution for the potency he failed
to muster (the close-ups are inversely matched by the subsequent close-ups of Hermann
manicuring Felix). They kiss, and Hermann goes up the steps to his office, not without casting
a miserable glance back at Lydia, who immediately checks her face and mouth in the rear
view mirror of the car in a gesture which recalls (as does the display of the armpit) Bunuel's

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heroine in UN CHIEN ANDALOU. We cut to a shot inside the office where Muller, looking out,
is actually looking at his own reflection and straightening his tie as he sees his boss arrive.
This gesture is symmetrically related to Lydia checking her mouth - both assure themselves
of their sexuality in a gender-specific and fetishising manner - and Hennann, who is outside
the system of their mirror-glances, acts as the defennent that brings the gestures in relation.
He is the mirror in whose reflection they compensate for the lack they perceive in him. The
subsequent scenes, where Hennann and Muller talk politics, end with Hennann's face
reflected in the glass partition of the inner office, while Muller's face in profile superimposes
itself across the glass pane from inside, once more aligning the two, but also keeping them
apart. The exhibitionist petty criminal from Fassbinder's early films assumes in Muller a
particular historical identity: that of the Gennan petit-bourgeois, over-identifying with the
State, and making a public spectacle of his good behaviour and confonnism. Compared with
Muller, Hennann's paranoia is sanity itself, and to narcissism as repressed paranoia in
Hennann corresponds an exhibitionist display of aggression in his supervisor.
Hennann's discussion with the rival chocolate manufacturer, after establishing
verbally an analogy between chocolates and German politics (with a number of Stoppardian
'on-colour' puns), is primarily developed visually by the way background and foreground,
inside and outside, are systematically juxtaposed. The scene shows the manufacturer directly
challenging Hennann's identity ('Is Hennann your first name or your surname?'), and it ends
with Hennann caught (and breaking down) in an elaborate play on political colours: 'I was
a Blackshirt fighting the Reds in the White Anny, then I fought the Brownshirts in the Red
Army, and all I am now is a yellowbelly in a brown trade'. Brown evidently being the
emblematic colour of a false identity, it condenses politics, repressed homosexuality, the
chocolate business, from each of which Hennann tries to escape into madness/exile/neutral
tenitory.
On the visual plane, the conversation is doubled by a view of the factory assembly
line, which turns out little brown men in chocolate, all replicas, veritable choc-troops of
political doubles, ending like piled-up corpses in a box marked rejects. Fassbinder's image
of the fascist state preparing for war and exploiting private paranoia for public conformism
considerably deepens a passage in the book where Nabokov's Hermann explains the political
significance of the double in terms that recall, more than anything else, a scene from Fritz
Lang's METROPOLIS:

It even seems to me that my basic theme, the resemblance between two persons,
has a profound allegorical meaning [...} In fancy, 1 visualise a new world, where
all men will resemble one another as Hermann and Felix did; a world of Helixes
and Fermanns; a world where the worker fallen dead at the feet of his machine
will be at once replaced by his perfect double smiling the serene smile of perfect
16
socialism.

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Nabokov, in these lines, distances himself derisively from his narrator. Fassbinder, who takes
his hero more seriously, uses the assembly line as a metaphor for the imbrication of big
business, depression economics and the intrusive, para-military state. This connection
between private and public life is reiterated in the scene where Hennann, about to seal the
letter which will bribe Felix into donning Hennann's clothes, hesitates as he watches just
such a line of brownshirts hurling bricks at the window of a Jewish butcher's shop. Their
frustration at not being able to smash the window (rhyming as it does with an earlier scene
where an irate Mtillerbeats his fists against the wall in the office) acts as a relay in Hennann's
mind for the decision he is about to take, Felix now figuring explicitly as the (phantasmatic)
supplement to fill the space left by a political impasse as well as the personal one; conversely,
Hennann's presence at the scene, his gaze, once more serves to inscribe his dilemma into the
specifically historical space of nascent Nazism.
The economic dimension, in so far as it revolves around an analysis of fascism as
the extreme political fonn of state capitalism (an analysis thematized by the decline of
Hennann's family finn), enters the narrative in a peculiarly compressed play on words: the
pun on 'merger/murder', twice repeated, which involves the merger between two people and
the merger of two finns, conflated with a murder that is suicide, and a police state that will
murder an entire race, for fear of merging with the hated 'other'. The extreme condensation
which Fassbinder here employs to make the private intersect with the economic as well as
race may not altogether redeem what is perhaps a laboured pun, but it does point to the
paradigm that generates the narrative, detennines the logic of the otherwise opaque plot, and
is responsible for the elliptical and fragmented storyline. For the pun also suggests that
Hermann's dilemma is founded on a double negation, structured symmetrically: to the
disavowal of his wife's adultery corresponds the disavowal of any difference between himself
and Felix. The two acts of repression (murder and merger, 'threat of castration' and 'denial
of difference') confront each other as mirrors, and the paranoia associated with the fonner is
countered with a continually renewed temptation, at once consummated and forever barred
with the murder of Felix, to 'regress' to the latter.

The Shattered Mirror and Defective Suture

More exactly, DESPAIR structures both Hennann's disavowal and the double-bind in tenns of
a defective or partial vision. At one level, the narrative logic is structured along very classical
lines, obsessed as the film is with repetition, symmetry, inversion and doubling. In this respect,
there is an equivalence between Hennann not recognising what is going on between Lydia
and Ardalion, and being over-anxious to discover similarity between Felix and himself. Thus,
another structure, about recognition and miscognition, about vision and point of view in
general, underpins the narrative as analyzed above, also detennined by castration-anxiety and
the denial of difference. In other words, the logic that articulates the plot and accounts for the
dislocations of DESPAIR'S linear narrative is itself shaped by a critique of cinematic repre-
sentation and its visual metaphors.

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 I have talked about DESPAIR as if the film ended soon after Hennann shoots Felix
in the woods. It does not. Whereas Lydia virtually disappears with the flash-forward that
shows her accepting Felix as Hermann, the latter's stay in Switzerland is depicted at length,
first as a process of physical deterioration of exterior appearance, but also almost literally as
Hennann 'falling to pieces'. Most striking are the scenes at the Swiss hotel where his false
position and false identity, his silence, make him an object in other people's speculations, a
fragment in their discourse. The process culminates in a sequence that shows a shattered
mirror, shards of a broken wash-bowl, and Hermann 's hand holding into the frame a passport
with Felix's photo. The shots 'rhyme' with the opening credit-scene, where on a reflecting
glass table top in Hennann's kitchen, he breaks raw eggs into a bowl in order to mix Lydia
her favourite cocktail. This resume of the plot, a visual reminder of the fragility that makes
up his identity, is juxtaposed with a particularly graphic 'return of the repressed': the clue left
at the scene of the crime, and which points to Felix's identity (and thereby Hennann's), is a
solid, carved walking stick; and Hermann's manic laughter when he discovers how the police
are being led to his hideout is that of a man who has also read his Freud. The Oedipal trap
seems to open only on to a series of intenninable and potentially endless substitutions for the
initial configuration: briar-pipes, lipsticks, walking-sticks - so many fetish objects circulat-
ing within the narrative, 'liberated' as absurd clues and ridiculous traces by the shattering of
the self. The film has no closure in tenns of the dilemma it poses, and while on the surface it
moves towards the false ending of the police thriller (detection and capture), psychologically
Hermann is condemned to endless repetition, narrative space itsclfbecoming the mirror-maze
where he encountered Felix and now his own shattered image.
This hall of mirrors atmosphere seems to conjure up the ending of Orson Welles'
LADY FROM SHANGHAI. 17 But in DESPAIR it is not only indicative ofJilm noir's male paranoia
towards femmes fatales, which Fassbinder here parodies. We are also, pace Nabokov, in the
world of lorge Luis Borges' labyrinths, with their Escher-Iike trompe-l'oeil effects, and
Mobius-strip involutions. As in THE BIITER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT, it is the narrative itself
which provides the maze, presenting to the viewer a complicated kind of stereometric shape.
Each position taken in the overall design can be inverted or is shown to be reversible, available
for occupation by different characters in turn. Whether one thinks of the power-play between
Petra and her maid Marlene, the reversal of roles between Karin and Petra, the two couples
in CHINESE ROUI.EITE, or the Hermann-Felix relationship, the more general point is that it
underscores the extent to which in a Fassbinder film, identities are nothing but shifting places
in a configuration, and as such can be re-placed, if not re-played. The human chessboard
situation of CHiNESE ROULETfE puts it graphically, as does the end of THE MERCHANT OF FOUR
SEASONS, when Hans' employee and ex-friend (again, as in DESPAIR, where he is Felix, a role
played by Klaus Lowitsch) at first displaces and then replaces him as father and husband.
The realization of such expendability is almost intolerably poignant, and the
misfortunes that befall Hans or Fox (another pawn replaced without being missed) make the
films in which they are the heroes cnd in a moral black hole (literally, in THE MERCHANT OF

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fOUR SEASONS, by an open grave). But the relentless negativity especially of FOX AND HIS

FRIENDS, where substitution adds the insult of existence disavowed to the injury of humili-
ation, has itself a reverse side, suggesting that the bleak ending might lend itself to a more
enigmatic or ambivalent interpretation, as in DESPAIR, where the hero 'chooses' to be replaced,
thereby retrospectively giving also the substitutions in the other films a less negative slant.
Turned around, on its axis as it were, every human relationship in Fassbinder appears capable
of utterly changing both its meaning and value. Not only the male-female polarity seems to
Fassbinder totally reversible, 18 but also the dialectic of the exploiter and the exploited, of the
weak and the strong, of the haves and have-nots (as in DESPAIR, where Felix is at the opposite
extreme of the socio-economic scale from Hennann). This makes the narratives, despite their
relentless negativity, their downbeat or tragic ending much more mysterious, and - as
Fassbinder always pointed out - also more hopeful. In DESPAIR, hope and despair seem to
hinge on how we read Hermann's desire to find a resemblance between himself and Felix,
which in turn, becomes as much a question of our viewing expectations, as of our belief in
mimetic love or the reversibility of power-relations.
Puzzling, for instance, is the fact that we are never able to 'get close' to the central
character. Throughout, identifying with Hennann is systematically blocked and disrupted, a
fact noted by most critics,19 since one instantly notices that Felix is no physical double of
Hermann, but finds that this superior position of knowledge over the hero is never acknow~
ledged by the narrative, it eliminates any suspense and registers more as an exasperation than
a willingness to be intrigued by his 'mistake'. Also puzzling is the fact that Hermann's look
does not act as a focus or to give direction to our attention, nor does his motivation become
clear. His desire is not evident from the movement of the plot itself, for both the sexual and
the economic motives are indirectly presented, while the motive we are given in their place,
financial gain from an insurance swindle, hardly satisfies. This lack of apparent motivation
affects the audience's response also to Lydia, whose occasional nudity is offered to the
spectator's gaze, but at no point valorised by male desire. Nor does she exist 'in her own right'
as a character. Her role is bracketed by the stereotype of the silly vamp, the exaggerated
parody of the alluring female ("Intelligence might take the bloom off your carnality" Hermann
says to her at one point). What intervenes between the look and its object is - as in the opening
scene already discussed - the camera: an unlocalised immaterial character, a substitute, but
covering neither the spectator's point of view nor that of the protagonists. In addition, the
few times we see events from Hermann's perspective, this vantage point is undermined by
the fact that his vision is so evidently defective regarding crucial elements of the narrative:
he sees at once too little and too much.
These two features may, to a spectator expecting a Hollywood-type narrative,
merely seem part of the empty formalism so often disliked in European art cinema. But I
would argue that DESPAIR reworks quite radically what has undoubtedly been the most original
aspects ofFassbinder's style from KATZELMACHER onwards. The split of the spectator's point
of view, on the basis of which classical cinema constructs the congruence between 'to see'

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and 'to know', has always been tom apart rather than sutured in Fassbinder. Instead of
motivating the look of the camera via point of view shots and letting these create the visual
field, thus building a homogenous fictional space, Fassbinder plays off seeing against
knowing or vice versa, mainly by three types of shots. Frontal shots of characters looking
(glance-object shots) but without shots of what the character looks at; tableau-like static
compositions which by their very symmetry 'cite' an invisible observer (who is outside the
fiction, because the shots are never claimed by any of the characters within the film, and
because they are organised around an internal frame, accentuatingperspectival space); finally,
inversely related to the previous type, shots where another spectator perspective is constructed
within the action, through a character or characters whose main function it is to observe and
20
who 'anchor' the scene by their presence and gaze.
The point of this defective suture in Fassbinder has always been twofold: to make
his characters' dilemma a function of their roles and self-images, as if to say, my protagonists
only behave like this because they are being looked at, but if they were not being looked at
they would not exist. 21 And secondly, to implicate the spectator in this process as a third term
whose invisible presence is no longer that of the voyeur. 22 The paradox of Emmi and Ali in
FEAR EATS THE SOUL has already been discussed. Yet the most striking case is no doubt THE
BITIER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT. As the drama of self, double and other unfolds between
Petra von Kant and Karin, the spectator becomes ever more aware of Marlene as hislher
double within the film. But instead of the narrative taking the spectator's look, via the camera
position, and delegating it to, circulating it among and exchanging it with the characters'
points-of-view and their off-screen glances, Fassbinder un-couples looking, so to speak, from
narration and motivation, and instead, 'embodies' it, and thus doubly locates it, in the fiction
and outside, creating a kind of material excess or surplus. In PETRA VON KANT, Marlene's
silence is the 'tain' or blind spot in the imaginary mirror that is the screen, her hovering
presence seemingly endowing her not only with secret knowledge but an eery power to 'call
off the show', to blot out the picture or block out the view, an impression accentuated by the
theatrical 'proscenium' space created by filming at right angles to the picture plane.
The one section in the film where Marlene is absent throws into relief her function
during the rest: when Petra, on her birthday, has a nervous breakdown, it seems as much due
to the removal of Marlene's look as having to confront her mother, representing as it does the
absence of control, a moment of totally fragmented and dispersed subjectivity no longer held
by the power of Marlene's 'phallic' look, in contrast to the cacophony of female voices
associated with Petra's mother and her daughter. At the same time, this section follows most
closely the compositional rules ofclassical narrative, with its point-of-view shots, eye-contact
and the spectator sutured into the representational space. Fassbinder seems to be identifying
'Hollywood continuity editing' with the presence of (oedipal) family drama, as if to cite once
more Sirk (and the theories of the 'male' look) by designating classical narrative as 'patho-
genic'. PETRA VON KANT ends when Marlene, asked to give up her role of silent witness and
enter into the sphere of words, walks out rather than speak. Yet this presence virtually outside

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or at the edge of the fiction is offered to the spectator not as a figure of projection, but merely
as an increasingly uncanny awareness of a double. To perceive this manoeuvre also makes
the viewer realize that Marlene only appears to be the puppeteer who holds the strings to the
mechanism called 'Petra von Kant'. As soon as we recognise our double, we become aware
of the 'narrator', and in an attempt to gain control over the film, we need to phantasmatise
an author, another instance of control, controlling us. We are plunged into the abyss of the
en-abyme construction which the film opens like a trap. If the dedication in PETRA VON KANT
reads: 'to him who here became Marlene' (dem, der hier Marlene wurde), in DESPAIR, the
dedication could be 'to him who here tried to give up being Hennann,.23 Who, among the
audience, realising that the dedication addresses 'him', would either wish to become Marlene,
or have the strength to give up being Hennann?
Another example of a Fassbinder film in which such an absent gaze is both named
and erased is THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN. As Maria's perennially absent husband,
Hennann (once again played by Klaus Lowitsch) has a role similar to that of Marlene in
PETRA VON KANT. His disappearance to the front, and his non-return after the defeat of Hitler,
become a necessary condition for Maria's story, not only in the sense that there can be no
narrative without rupture or absence, but that his absence is the very condition of her love for
him. The ideal of true love, on which Maria bases her career, is only disturbed by his periodic
return: from the war, from prison, from making his fortune in Canada. What she does she
does for Hennann, but only on condition that his place remains empty - but fixed by the
temporality and space where someone once was. Absence turns her object-choice into an
image, which - expelled and phantasmatised into an idee fixe - becomes the guarantee of her
identity, self-alienated but secure. Maria represses the return of the source of idealisation,
thereby also repressing the knowledge of the source of her economic wealth and sexual power.
Her life and identity appear under the sign of a marriage whose consummation is forever
postponed and deferred - necessarily so, and in several senses, as the following chapter will
show.

SelfaReference as Self·Representation?
Fassbinder has, I would argue, adopted the self-referentiality of the European art-film in
DESPAIR, in order to rework also the thematic concern of his own cinema. What in the previous

films was largely a matter of presenting the spectator with mirrors of himself as a voyeuristic
presence, albeit complexly effaced and staged, becomes in DESPAIR a matter of analyzing
more historically detenninate relations. The breakdown of identity and its relocation in
shifting identifications as described above lead to a filmic mise-en-scene that does more than
merely 'distance': it also 'places' .24 At one stage, Hennann and Ardalion are engaged in a
discussion of Lydia in a restaurant. The scene is initially framed as an over-the-shoulder
two-shot with Hennann facing in the general direction of Ardalion and the camera. Ardalion 's
back fills the left-hand side of the frame. The camera then starts a slow travelling shot to the
right, which we have to read as a subjective shot from Ardalion's point of view. As Hennann

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continues to talk, the camera has become stationary, and suddenly Ardalion re-enters the
frame, but not, as expected, from the left where we last saw him, to 'claim' the point-of-view
shot; instead he enters from behind Hennann, on the right, and Fassbinder cuts at just the
moment when Ardalion completely obliterates Hennann in the frame. The point here is not
that Hennann has been talking to himself, but that Ardalion has, as it were, delegated his look
to the spectator via the camera and thereby marked as a conspicuous absence the point of
view of the spectator. Hennann's predicament is that Ardalion has 'set him up' just as
Fassbinder has set us up.
Later in the same scene, Hennann is talking about his dissociations to a man he
believes to be a psychoanalyst whom Ardalion has introduced him to, against the background
of one of Ardalion 's paintings depicting a village in the Alps. It turns out that the stranger is
in fact an insurance broker, and Hennann has once again been duped into living in a world
set up and controlled by Ardalion. In just this way the shots where the camera forces the
spectator to claim a point of view not motivated internally by a character are also moments
of dissociation for the spectator where hislher identity as invisible observer is called into
question. While the scene challenges us by drawing attention to a gap that can neither be
repressed nor filled, we nonetheless in the end have to rely on Hermann, doubly duped, to
put us right, in his final address to the spectator, which becomes the point at which the
spectator is forced to realise that the film as fiction only exists by virtue of that fundamental
repression which is the disavowal of the camera as camera, the audience as audience, the
actor as actor. But Fassbinder operates this Brechtian reduction only in order to once more
invest it with another question which makes the ending of DESPAIR very baffling indeed. After
confronting his shattered self in the broken washbowl and cracked mirror, the final scene has
Hermann step out of his room to make his speech of surrender to the police who have
surrounded the chalet. The fragmented composition gives way to a frontal shot, a direct stare.
But the speech itself and the stare are, within the fictional framework, clear signs that
Hermann is now insane, himself convinced of the story he had been telling Felix about
needing him as an understudy. Hennann's terminal madness, his final identity outside society,
outside the law, takes the shape of thinking of himself an actor in a film: which is, of course,
what Bogarde/Hermann is at this point, and about to take leave - of his fantasies, his sanity,
his role, in fact, of the film itself.
This 'stereometric' tilt, whereby the proof of madness in the story we have
witnessed turns out to be the truth of the cinema when considered as a mere illusionist device,
both 'places' Hermann's parting words and makes them once more incomplete. On the face
of it, the short speech is taken almost directly from Nabokov's novel:

Hold the policemen, knock them down, sit on them. A famous film actor will come
running out of this house. He is an arch criminal but he must escape. I want you
to make a free passage for him. I want a clean getaway. That's all. I'm coming
out. 25

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The passage of time and the vagaries of English usage have added a meaning to the final
26
sentence that even Nabokov might not have anticipated. Hermann does not just come out
of the house, he also comes out of the closet. But Fassbinder added a line to Nabokov's text.
Before the frame freezes on the words 'I'm coming out', Hennann says: 'Don't look at the
camera', and with this act of naming, Hennann comes out of being a character in a
self-contained fiction. The shot frames HennannIBogarde's face looking into the camera, and
at its edges the barrels of guns are visible, though not those who hold them, obliging us, the
audience, to fill their place.
With Hennann's speech, the film attains its closure by substituting one frame of
reference for another. The triangular relationships of Lydia/ArdalionJHennann~Felixare

replaced by another triangle made up of actor/camera/spectator, explicitly named and thereby

tenninating the fiction. If Hennann (whom the murder of Felix has reduced to silence, exile
and cunning) attains an identity on the side of madness, this madness also allows him to
reappropriate language as the final gesture of a successful transfonnation. Only now does the
play of 'grammatical shifters' which I analyzed in the flash~forward come to rest on that
archetypal shifter, the personal pronoun '1'. Yet the instance of enunciation is nevertheless
elsewhere: it must, by the logic of what has been said, be located as and in the metteur-en-
scene, the auteur/author. 27
What can one conclude? Hennann's choice of insanity and his journey into
madness equate the enigma in the narrative - who is Hennann, what is his problem? - with
the enigma of film narrative: what is the function of a fiction film? 'Lifting' the fundamental
repression at the end means abandoning the space of the cinema as the psychological or
ideological 'safety-zone' of an identity-machine, for it puts out of action the apparatus that
generated the 'fiction-effects' and 'subject-effects' in the first place, by exposing the cinema
machine's violent, aggressive, and shattering side. 'Representation' and 'image' are the
systems of lack which the cinema both covers up and fetishises for the benefit of the spectator.
In other words, in DESPAIR the fictional character, at the point at which he avows himself to
be an actor, turns out to be the 'paranoid' construction of the spectator, necessary to make the
cinematic apparatus bearable at all. Fassbinder's peculiar mise-en-scene, his use ofthe false
point-of-view shots and of spatial dislocation, takes away the narcissistic supplement of
paranoia that makes identification pleasurable in the classical narrative. We can paraphrase
the process by allegorizing DESPAIR as a discourse about cinematic identification itself: the
film represents the spectator, who 'murders' the fictional character by taking him over,
dressing him up in the appearance of his idealised self-image. On the other hand, the spectator
commits 'suicide' in order to live (temporarily) in the actor and through him. What Hennann
acts out in the murder/merger paradigm are not only 'his' fantasies, but also the spectator's,
and Felix is to Hermann what Hennann is to the spectator - the other that is made into the
same, at a cost of considerable violence and repression. Fassbinder has literalised the psychic
position of the spectator vis-a.-vis the screen by indicating its pathological side: the pathology
of bourgeois identity-crises that determines - or is it determined by? - the construction of the

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classical narrative text. The two interlock and mutually predicate each other. In tenns of the
film, Felix functions as the Fetish, the substitute for the ultimate signifier in this system, the
condition for the unification of the subject, and the guarantee for the kind of pleasure that
DESPAIR seems destined to frustrate. This is why in this meta-text, Felix and not Lydia is the
male hero's object of desire, and why at the same time this desire is camouflaged in a thriller
plot with noirish genre elements: underlying any cinematic representation, including the
oedipal dramas of identity, is a 'dissociation' machine functioning antagonistically vis-a.-vis
its socially sanctioned, culturally approved uses. The defectiveness of DESPAIR as a classical
text is precisely what allows it to deconstruct that text, in the guise of an apparently confusing
tale of doubles that do not resemble each other.
The final image achieves closure by its 'zero-ing' of representation and that which
is represented: nothing is there except what you see. Dedicated to three artists, among them
Antonin Artaud, who wanted to abolish the distance between actor, part and performance,
the film has come full circle at the point where the notion of fiction and spectacle is replaced
by that of 'perfonnance' as the zero degree of representation. Yet the very logic of the
literalisation I have been describing implies, as already indicated, that the author remains in
the text and cannot 'come out' either in propria persona or from 'behind' the characters.
Fassbinder's film, so dedicated to clarifying the relationship between image, perception,
camera and spectator, has as its 'structuring absence' also, it seems, the problem of the
self-representation of the author.
My account of the ending is still incomplete. The Alpine scene in which it takes
place can be recognised, not without a certain shocked surprise, as the landscape prefigured
in the painting of ArdaJion that we see, half-finished, on the wall of the restaurant. And as the
police surround Hennann's hideout one sees briefly, almost at the edge of the frame, Ardalion,
with an easel, 'finishing' his picture. So while in one respect Hermann 'returns the look' and
addresses the camera head-on after having sought to appropriate it as a mirror, in another
respect DESPAIR, too, is a film in which the closure is achieved by leaving a substitute gaze
in the frame. More ironic still, the last scene can be read in terms that make both Hermann
and Ardalion delegates of the author's look, even though in the fiction, they functioned as
each other's adversaries, in a power-struggle less over the possession of Lydia than over who
is 'setting up' whom. Hence a certain ambiguity after all, also about who exactly is whose
double in the film. Is Hermann's speech as he 'comes out' a call to anns against illusionism,
against representation, or for the ruses of modernism and its modes of deconstructive
narration? DESPAIR is an art film, in so far as its self-reflexivity, its use of Ardalion's 'bad
painting' as a frame-within-a-frame-within-a-frame, are a comment on 'representation' from
within the perspectival-illusionist paradigm; yet it is an anti-art film in so far as the impasse
of Hermann's 'coming out' demands a more radical re-thinking of this specular paradigm
itself. From onc side of the divide, Hermann's fate is one of 'despair', but from another, it is
'eine Reise ins Licht', a journey into light: the light of over-exposure, the kind of 'fading to
white' which Fassbinder takes up more fully in VERONICA VOSS. In DESPAIR, the realisation

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that Hemmnn may be leaving the space of the narrative is undercut by the knowledge that he
is still inside the world of Ardalion, another space of representation: there is no 'outside' to
this 'inside'. Or is there?

Beyond Ihe Family: the Benevolenl Eye of Ihe Slale?

Traditionally, the dynamics of the screen as mirror, and cinematic vision as miscognition, of
fetishizing the look and suturing the spectator, of self-estrangement and the necessary
repression of the look of the camera have been interpreted as determined by, but also effacing
the construction of the basic cinematic apparatus. The 'apparatus' figured as the 'final term'
both of cinematic modernism's attack on perspectival representation (in the form ofart cinema
self-reflexivity) and as the model that could explain the 'successful' working of illusionism,
its reality-effect and the construction of subjectivity in Hollywood classical narrative. 2H
In Fassbinder, too, as we just saw, there is an acute sense of the cinematic apparatus
as having 'basic ideological effects', but there is also, as indicated in the previous chapter, a
very particular regime of the look which at once intersects with the various 'modernist',
'Brechtian' and 'deconstructivist' critiques, and largely displaces them in his own practice,
by emphasizing the failure of the 'phallic' look, and its reinscription - negatively, through an
exhibitionism to which, strictly speaking, no voyeurism corresponds, and in the fonn of what
I have called a response to a 'demand' that emanates from something 'beyond' as well as 'in
front of' the image. Although it may ultimately not belong to the register of the 'visual' at all,
the solicitation nonetheless is connected to both the problem of the look and to subjectivity.
What DESPAIR now suggests, precisely because even more radically than Fassbinder's
previous films it deals with a crisis of vision, is that the gap between knowing and seeing
figured as an impossible alignment of the look and its object may connect to a historical
trauma. For in DESPAIR the problem of vision, of the look intersects with a historical setting,
the political and economic crises of the early 1930s in Germany - thematized in the ripple-
effects of the pun 'merger/murder' and the tragic-comic encounters of Hennann Hennann
with his supervisor MUller and the chocolate baron Mayer.
The ultimate link of these two seemingly so distinct articulations (the crisis of
vision/the crisis of politics) must be sought in the family, or rather, in the perennial attempts
to escape the bourgeois, patriarchal family as a viable instance of gender-identity, but also as
a viable socio-symbolic unit. This, too, relates to the cinema: classical Hollywood has always
been about 'family entertainment' and has re-told oedipal dramas, whether 'coming of age'
stories of adolescent males or crises of female identity under patriarchy, as in the women's
films or family melodrama. In the work of directors such as Sirk, the intensity of the conflicts
produced ruptures in the classical mode itself, to become legible as a critique of the institution
and its values. In Fassbinder, Sirk's critique finds itself even more exacerbated, so that the
cinema comes to stand in a demonstrably antagonistic relation to the family, and this in several
respects. First of all, his films invariably figure families, but depicted as sites of emotional
exploitation, violent power-struggles and schizo-inducing double-binds. Secondly, the char-

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acters' attempted escape from the family focuses on the crisis in symbolic relations outside
which find their typical expression in this 'need to be seen', itself the narcissistic 'solution'
to the problem of not being able to establish affective bonds around a 'nonnal' Oedipal
development. In the absence of constructing identity within the family, the need to be
perceived, to be confirmed, to be looked at takes over the tasks of regulating and at the same
time disturbing the articulations of subjectivity. This means that role-playing, spectacle, the
street - actions, events and places where the look is symbolically traded - become privileged
spaces that actually structure identity outside the family, and in effect replace the family as
an identity-generating institution. According to Fassbinder, it was the cinema that became a
surrogate family during his adolescence, an alternative space of socialization, affect, identi-
fications, the working out of conflicts.
A film like DESPAIR on one level depicts a de-socialisation process in the way that
Hennann Hermann gradually 'loses touch' with his domestic life, his business, the world
around him. In his frantic bid to reposition himself 'differently' in the field of vision-
substituting someone else to play his roles and switching outward appearances - he responds
to a situation which was overdetennined in several respects, being at once a family crisis, a
business crisis and a political crisis, all of which Fassbinder, as we saw, translates into the
register of sight, vision, perception, deception. That it concerns a crisis of the visual field
itself is shown by the parallel re-socialization process of his supervisor Muller, choosing to
reinscribe himself into the social symbolic of Nazism, present in the film mainly as a new
order of visibility (unifonns, colours, street action). Evidently, Muller's experience of
subjectivity, that which allays his crisis of identity is to become an object newly visible,
presumably not necessarily for anyone in particular, but under the gaze of an absent Other,
fantasized as 'the nation', 'history', 'manifest destiny', the moral imperative: any abstract
entity, provided it can be conceived as possessing the power/the reflection of an 'eye'.
In Fassbinder's films, as argued in the previous chapter, both conformism and
non-confonnism are subject to the rule of wanting to be seen, even though their respective
economies differ. The dynamics, as argued in subsequent chapters, gives rise to an acute and
complex critique of the representations of the 'other', whose most immediate implication
concerns what could be called the fascist public sphere and its 'subject-effects'. Increasingly
in the late 1970s, and explicitly when working in the genre of the international art film, the
'need to be seen' is identified by Fassbinder with German Nazism, as a social formation that,
especially in its initial 'revolutionary' phase, heavily invested in spectacle, in pageants, the
politics of the street, with a simple, cunningly stylized visual iconography prominently
displayed on flags, fa~ades and public places. At the same time, because Nazism's claim to
power was as a non-confonnist rebellion, in fact an oedipal challenge to the symbolic father,
in the form of the succession of Chancellors (of the Weimar Republic) perceived as weak,
floundering and ineffectual, its social revolution was initially fuelled by a critique of
patriarchy, voiced in such all-male groups as the SA. Thus, even Nazism responded to the

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crisis of the family, although from a para-military, male-bonding, ultra-chauvinistic perspec-
tive.
In DESPAIR, the two asymmetrically related 'solutions' to the break-up of the
Weimar symbolic order represented by the respective choices of Hermann Hermann and
Supervisor MUller fonnulate a problem, whose relevance goes beyond the film. What.
Fassbinder seems to be asking, was Nazism for the German middle class, for the petit-bour-
geoisie and the working-class, all of whom supported Hitler? We think we know what it was
for those actively persecuted by the regime, for those excluded or forced into exile. But for
the 'a~political' Germans, who were addressed and solicited as included? Might not the
perverse pleasure of fascism, its fascination have been less the sadism and brutality of SS
officers, but that of being seen, of placing oneself in view of the all-seeing eye of the State?
This eye must not necessarily be imagined as a look: the order of the visible as a whole
(unifonns, swastikas, iconography) figures as this eye's mirror. Fascism in its social imagi-
nary encouraged a moral exhibitionism, as it encouraged denunciation and mutual surveil-
lance. Hitler appealed to the Yolk, but he always pictured the Gennan nation as standing there,
observed by 'the eyes of the world'. The massive specularisation of public life, famously
diagnosed by Waiter Benjamin as the 'aestheticisation of politics', might be said to have
helped institutionalise that structure of 'to be is to be perceived' which Fassbinder's cinema
never ceases to interrogate.
Evidently, the question of what 'seduced' GeOllans about Nazism has been asked
many times, and the suggestion made here about the importance of specular relations does
not presume to be a contribution to this debate. One obvious objection, for instance, would
be that the figure of the FUhrer is such a potent symbol of paternal authority, and the demand
for absolute obedience to him so clearly authoritarian, that it is difficult to imagine how this
might fit the thesis advanced above for HeOllann Hennann and Supervisor MUller, namely
of a kind of 'mirror-stage' intervening between the subject and its symbolizations, bypassing
the 'oedipal' foOllation.
However, an author who has studied the psychic make-up of Nazi support, and
whose books enjoyed such wide circulation in the 1970s that Fassbinder is bound to have
known them, seems to corroborate at least part of the argument of Nazism's appeal having
been as a response to the crisis of the bourgeois family. In Society without the Father and The
Inability to Mourn, Alexander Mitscherlich put forward an account of the social psychology
of Nazism as well as of Germany during the 1950s post-WW II reconstruction effort - the
periods of German history Fassbinder became most interested in - which diagnoses as
common traits what Mitscherlich calls 'regression to the pre-Oedipal stage' and the choice
of a 'narcissistic love object'. Nazism, according to Mitscherlich, had such wide appeal
because it represented a 'regressive' solution to the 'fatherless society' brought about by
advanced capitalism's division of labour demoting the male's role as sole provider and
weakening parental authority.29 Instead of (male) egos formed in Oedipal conflict, Nazi

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bonding encouraged 'manic-depressive' personality structures, alternating between feelings
ofomnipotence and worthlessness. Into this structure, the leader fits, but not as a father-figure:

[The mass leader], surprising as it may seem, [... J is much more like the image of
a primitive mother goddess. He acts as if he were superior to conscience, and
demands a regressive obedience and the begging behaviour that belongs to the
30
behaviour pattern of a child in the pre-Oedipal stage.

Hitler, in other words, projected himself not as the Uber-Vater or patriarch, but as the dutiful
son of a beloved mother, and thus in the role of the primary love-object, prior to and outside
Oedipal division. The original attachment to the mother is revived and rescued in the
attachment to abstractions like 'nation' and 'race' (both female nouns in German), in whose
loving gaze the male can mirror himself. According to Mitscherlich, this pre-Oedipal bond
also helps to explain why the collapse of the Third Reich did not provoke the kinds of reactions
of conscience, guilt and remorse that 'the eyes of the world' after 1945 had expected. In The
Inability to Mourn he writes:

Thus, the choice of Hitler as the love object took place on a narcissistic basis; that
is to say, on a basis of self-love [...].
After this symbiotic state has been dissolved, the millions of subjects
released from its spell will remember it all the less clearly because they never
assimilated the leader into their ego [... ], but instead surrendered their own ego in
favour of the object [...]. Thus the inability to mourn was preceded by a way of
loving that was less intent on sharing in the feelings of the other person than on
confirming one's own self-esteem. 3 !

But here we need to remind ourselves of the distinction made earlier between the two types
of narcissism, involving the ideal ego and the ego ideal, and the void or gap which narcissism
is designed to cover, signifying the presence of that look that does not see, but also fonnulating
a demand that can 'shatter the self', as it shatters Hennann Hennann. The cinematic apparatus,
stripped of its mechanisms of identification and the functioning of its reality-effects is thus
closer to the look that does not see, that is to say, the 'void' of representation, needing to
'cover' itself by narrative. The classical system of circulating the look, in other words, makes
the void 'see', by framing it and investing it with mobile, motivating points of view. In
Fassbinder's cinema, at some points, the shield is made to slip, sometimes in an explicitly
political context, as in the moment of crisis analyzed in the previous chapter, where in
GERMANY IN AUTUMN Fassbinder's mother asks for the return of a benevolent dictator, which
is to say, the caring look.
Why did West Gennans rebuild such a conservative and conformist society after
1945? If one follows the logic of Mitscherlich's argument, the German economic miracle was

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sustained psychologically by defence mechanisms against the loss of the ego-ideal and the
narcissism of self-hatred and melancholia. 32 In a sense, this is the story told in THE MARRIAGE
OF MARIA BRAUN, whose heroine's ambiguous strength lies precisely in her 'inability to
mourn', while keeping her ego-ideal intact, via the fiction of the absent husband in whom
33
she has invested (and secured, becaused barred) the gaze, even without him knowing it. As
ifin a trance, her self-estranged exhibitionism calls upon the scene benevolent eyes, including
those of Chancellors Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Schmidt, all of whom gaze in ghostly
fashion out of portraits whose frame once contained that of Chancellor Adolf Hitler.

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 This content downloaded from
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