All that heaven allows

Fassbinder after modernity

If Ian Penman’s Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors disappoints somewhat, it’s partly for the unfair but unavoidable reason that it isn’t quite the book I’d write in the inexistent circumstance of me being someone else and things being completely different. Fassbinder’s films, on first contact, shook me and persisted as emotional and conceptual currents more than any filmmaker I’d encountered since my second run-in with Godard. (Film bro excellence! Not a woman in sight!) And yet, I’m not in any position to write a book about his work, even as the perennial urge to approach at least an essay, that oh-so-modest form, has popped up after a couple of digestifs: there’s huge swathes I haven’t seen (and that are hard to see without Karagaga or decent German) and a few I have that lingered in the unjudgeable realms of the “OK I guess” or “wasn’t really conscious during the runtime” (the repulsion that made me turn off Satan’s Brew after 10 minutes unfortunately discounts me from badmouthing it). More troubling is the sense that the deep contradictions at the heart of Fassbinder’s films are not only irreconcilable but unamenable to an elaboration that holds any appearance of elegance, (subterranean) order, style as an independent power of “concept engineering” (to use Deleuze’s term). Even the best academic literature—such as that of Thomas Elsaesser, Kaja Silverman and Jean Shattuc—has to sacrifice style for even a reasonable conceptual containment of what arises from them. (Silverman is the most adventurous prose stylist of the three, but not for that reason necessarily good.) The problem is exacerbated by the occasional creeping feeling that the overdetermining strength of my own reactions to Fassbinder’s combination of complexity and elemental force, precision and nonlinear explosions of deep agon, were just a love of confusion, of things that couldn’t be put together but gave the appearance of a holistic emotional texture. Anything longer than a tweet would appear as a shiny but oddly insubstantial set of new duds for the emperor.

So I should have yielded myself up, pride cast aside, in praise of Penman’s monograph. And yet, and yet… as its intelligence tracks through Fassbinder’s body of work like the termites of Manny Farber’s famous metaphor, moving in indiscernable patterns, I wanted each piercing insight (the book’s “guiding metaphors”, to use Brian Dillon’s term) to be condensed and heightened, even polished a teensy bit. The book explicitly sets out its ambitions—to avoid dutiful academic pince-nez peering, “[c]elebrating the extortionate whole or appraising each individual atom”; to complete, in a partial way, the book Penman aimed to write after Fassbinder’s death—and its constraints—to be written in three to four months without fags or booze—and it moves obviously and strongly enough within those coordinates. And yet, and yet… the result lacks most of the mercurial sheen of his prime NME and post- work (much of which is only available to readers with access to Rock’s Back Pages or a run of the relevant magazines) and rarely meets with the looping motion and visionary burnishing of the best of his LRB essays. (At its weakest moments the book partakes of the worst of the latter, which have an air of Stuart-Maconie-for-the-Frieze-crowd, down to the technical mistakes.) The fragmentation and slashed sentences, first encountered in Penman’s great 2009 essay on Michael Jackson, make up superficially for the sense that its repetitions aren’t accompanied by that much difference. Hence it seems like the book’s advertised urgency—“get straight to it and get going right away. The very opposite of what Robert Musil called an aesthetic of postponement”—is at odds with its form, which invokes at every moment The Arcades Project—a work that consisted exactly of the endless revision of its components, and needed to include its own solidifying method in a separate section (Konvolut N), like a Derridean supplement. The feeling that there was a more lithe, fizzier book lurking in the shape of the existing one was confirmed on revisiting Penman’s own 1987 review of Robert Katz’s Fassbinder memoir Love is Colder Than Death (included in Vital Signs, a volume as uneven as the Old Kent Road). Some of Thousands of Mirrors’ best lines, and the most compelling structural lineaments of its fascination with the Fassbinder myth that it helps construct, come from that very piece. And yet it was precisely the spectre of that younger Penman and his addled adoration of “RWF” that needed to be overcome in the book, a process that produces a certain sober flatness but also some of its deepest emotional currents, as IP comes to terms with what survives of an aesthetic of pessimism, burn-out and the vanished counterculture in late middle-age. All the features that other reviewers have soy-faced over are there, of course, but do I like the form they’ve taken? A whisper: “and yet, and yet…” In that sense, I’m probably exactly the wrong audience, one with too many expectations, ones that carried me as a fan and bitter malcontent over the last two decades from autodidact reading to guttersnipe writing.

Reading Roland Barthes’ The Preparation of the Novel recently, I was struck by his central idea of the passage from the small form—the piercing detail, the meaning-obliterating satori, the Notation of everyday life—of the haiku to the extended form of the novel. The book collects Barthes’ written materials for his final lecture series at the Collége de France in 1979-80 and forms a sort of circumlocution of the problem that movement presented for him as he considered writing a novel: how to treat undefended specificity or contingency in the vast gap that apparently separates it from the armoured “epic of a disenchanted world”, one that nonetheless (as Barthes noted in ‘The Reality Effect’) depends on just such detail. Proust forms his great example of “the Novel”, in part because À la recherche dramatises its own gestation out of such floating images: it’s the novel of wanting to write a novel, one that ends with the narrator beginning the very text we’re reading, emerging from the precious kernel of mémoire involontaire (“the satori (the Madeleine) produces an extension—the whole of In Search of Lost Time unfurls from the Madeleine like a Japanese paper flower in water: development, drawers opening, infinite unfolding”). In a certain sense, Thousands of Mirrors forms Penman’s own Preparation of the Fassbinder monograph he didn’t write in the 80s, something that works through the scattered materials that could potentially compose it, its indirection a function of the way each moment gestures towards—prepares—a work that is not, even by its closing sentences, even there. Despite the device of numbering the paragraphs (many of which are really paragraph fragments), its logic is neither additive nor that of the “constellations” Benjamin saw his similarly categorised index-cards forming. The closest comparison I have would be with Wayne Koestenbaum’s essay ‘My 1980s’ and book-length subjective study of Jackie Kennedy Jackie Under My Skin: a kind of first-draft casualness that renders effective the odd, suspended tone, in which explanation, causality and even the slowed tempo that forms “close reading” appear only in the shadows of their absence. (I have a similar ambivalence about Koestenbaum’s work, which seems at once to launch straight into the theoretical level of criticism without showing its working, while never actually being “critical”, in a form of ‘surface reading’ before it was a thing. Its surface is slick and pitted in a dazzling way but it refuses to become more than a set of localised effects.)

It’s telling that Barthes was thinking about these things not just “midway upon the journey of my life”, as he invokes from Dante, but at the opening of the neoliberal revolution in Europe. He wouldn’t live to see the PS landslide of 1981 and Mitterand’s u-turn in 1983, but he alludes in the lectures to the gathering New Right consensus in the French media. The shifting structure of feeling of that period involved a move to a valourised smallness, against the tyranny of modernist “grand narratives”: the (entrepreneurial) individual, the “minor”, “molecular politics” and the minority concerns of “new social movements”. But Barthes doesn’t just uncritically resurrect the small haiku against the lumbering novel; the novel is “a vast, extended canvas painted with illusions, fallacies, made-up things, the ‘false’ if we want to call it that: a brilliant, colorful canvas, a veil of Maya punctuated by, scattered with Moments of Truth that are its absolute justification”. Such moments—the “that’s it!” that he identifies as the core of haiku, the satori of its resistance to meaning—are, in À la recherche, “moments of Death and of Love”, made possible by the accumulation of detail about the ordinary life of the narrator’s grandmother long before the agonising scene of her death in Le côté de Guermantes. It was just these moments, the piercing emergence of the referent, that would die away in the simultaneity of postmodern time, along with the politics of form that had accompanied Barthes’ notion of “writing degree zero”. (This is one of the persistent misconceptions about the theory of simulacra: “truth” and “meaning” don’t disappear, they proliferate and metastasise, readily available in a commodified everyday life. “Authentocracy” and liberalism quailing about “post-truth” are in this sense paradigmatic postmodern ideologies.) The passages that interested me the most in Thousands of Mirrors address Fassbinder as an artist of that same transition. The crisis of social democracy and the long aftermath of the 60s’ failures appear in the book as the memory of punk and, behind it, Krautrock, with which Fassbinder is bound in a sulphite flash: “New music from Germany in the 1970s wasn’t identifiably rock or classical or safely avant-garde: wasn’t comfortingly rebellious or raucous or even deliberately futuristic…. Taking the malediction out of technology, lifting the malign spell, exorcizing its dark recent past…. Sensing the radical otherness in so-called Muzak. Some kind of fascinated, half-hypnotized but relaxed interface with advanced circuitry. Hearing the future leak through. The last dying rays or embers of modernism, and the first signs of something else entirely.” Having started out in the most fringe anarchist theatre, “[h]e ends up entangled in an early 1980s constellation of multimedia, television screens, VHS tapes, mountains of cash and a morose kind of non-stop 24/7 chemical dependence.” It was a form of subjectivity he had imaged in World On A Wire, a leisurely, opiated move through endless levels of simulation, of mirrored surfaces that become metaphorical mises-en-abyme. Nearly a decade later, Querelle moves to the heart of the universe of illusion: cold, affectless, a world of effects without causes, where events lose any sense of narrative consequence, where love and death have become as flat as the resplendent, fake sunset skies of the studio set.

All of this—Collége de France professor Barthes, Japanese poetry, Proust’s cork-lined room—may seem far from Fassbinder’s world of lager-guzzling, rent boys, desperate infatuation and overdose deaths. And indeed, this is just another way for me to not write about Fassbinder, to keep the dreadful task at bay, in endless preparation. But it does seem to me what the method of Thousands of Mirrors gets at, perhaps inadvertantly, as a book deeply saturated with memory (a memory that’s not always just personal: as Penman put it in 1995, “Electricity has made us all angels. Technology (from psychoanalysis to surveillance) has made us all ghosts”). Before the disturbing endgame of Querelle, “Death and Love” form the very kernels of Fassbinder’s films, between which, at their best, they move in a manner unlike any others. I’m not just thinking about the scene transitions of, say, In a Year of 13 Moons, which hard-cuts between terrifying, intense set-pieces and brooding static shots arranged according to a puzzling quasi-astrological schema, but the extraordinary command of space and camera movement that’s always metonymised for me in several spellbinding crane shots in Petra Von Kant.

While Fassbinder’s appears to be a world where the middle class has banished memory—all the snobbish characters are the children of the small businesspeople in Douglas Sirk’s A Time to Love and a Time to Die, complaining that their labourers supplied from the local KZ-lager aren’t working hard enough—as Penman points out it lurks under every surface: “History returns to us in déja vu flashes, clips and ripples, leftover dream garble. A feeling of being haunted by someone else’s reverie”, “Nature is absent, by and large, from this world. No one is impatient to go back into that dark Germanic wood. Beneath the model town… unspeakable traces, tainted soil, spoiled dreams.” His childhood, as Penman reminds us, would encourage such forgetting: ditched by incompetent bohemian parents, living in squats, teaching himself how to make films on the social fringes of a fake nation. That presence comes to the fore finally in the BRD trilogy, ending with Fassbinder himself sat next to the faded movie-star of his childhood, Veronika Voss, in the opening of the last film he released in his lifetime. The crisis that precipitated the neoliberal revolution was, at least in western Europe, the culmination of the contradictions produced in this period by the effort to keep capitalism going with a restive working-class and an unsustainable post-war boom. The collapse of that old world of memory was also an opportunity, but a deeply ambiguous one. It appeared in Penman’s own journalism as an autodidact sally against punk’s turn towards flat agitprop, scripted in a wonderful, if sometimes perplexing, theoretical-rhetorical shimmer, dithyrambs to dance, colour and irresponsible pop. (The proper history of the so-called “Penman-Morley years” of the British music press remains very much to be written.) In Fassbinder, it appears as a Janus-faced version of what Penman calls “[t]he recurring modernist idea or fantasy or project of waking everyone… A dream of forcing people to give up their dreams.” Owen Hatherley is right to emphasise this side of Fassbinder, in which the mass media of European social democracy allowed estranged (in the Brechtian v-effekt sense) a far wider public than the supposedly more pluralistic narrowcasting of our own time. But he underemphasises the internal dialectic of this, in which the realisation of the promise of post-war “popular culture” turns, as the rate of profit fell, against “the people” themselves—a process already apparent in The Third Generation, where the would-be RAF members hoping to shock some saps awake are all acting in accord with a plan none of them understand, in the interests of computerised multinational business. Enlightenment reverts to myth.

This is the value, for me at least, of Thousands of Mirrors, if one that emerges only obliquely from the book. It historicises the tragic valence in Fassbinder’s work, which Penman himself is now deeply ambivalent about. (He quotes Rosa von Praunheim saying of Fassbinder “[h]is main message, that life sucks, found sentimental expression in every movie he made. I try to do the opposite, to show people who had a hard time throughout their lives but were able, with courage, optimism and vitality, to continue the fight for our right to be different”. As if optimism were something inherently admirable, a gold sticker on the children’s wall-chart of the spirit.) The culture industry’s efforts have inevitably obscured the dialectical currents of the period under the publicity of revival and reissue (as people note every so often, the 80s revival has been going on more than twice as long as the original decade). Thousands of Mirrors offers a glimpse, every so often, of something otherwise elaborately buried, and Fassbinder’s own singular individualism—the death-mask of beard, fat and sunglasses, the persona of “RWF”, his own provincial Warhol—blurs into a mirror-ball facet of the collective history of art.