Books, Arts & Manners: De Mortuis

The twentieth New York Film Festival opened with Veronika Voss, the penultimate film of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died last May of an accidental overdose of drugs. (The last film, not yet shown here, was Querelle, based on Jean Genet’s violently pederastic novel, Querelle de Brest.) Recently, too, we got Fassbinder’s antepenultimate film, Lola, the second in the socalled trilogy of which The Marriage of Maria Braun was the first, and Veronika Voss the last installment. All three got mostly rave reviews, and Maria Braun was also a popular success in our bigger cities. When RWF died at the age of 36, the photographs in the world press showed the face of a man easily 25 years older than that (draw your own conclusions), and the obituaries, especially in Germany, carried onasifa genius of Goethe’s magnitude had died.

Let me say it flat out: in a world of shamefully overblown reputations, Fassbinder’s international celebrity strikes me as one of the most grotesque cases of overinflation. At least the frog in the fable who tried to inflate himself into an ox had two things to recommend him: he did his own blowing up, and he got his comeuppance by bursting. Fassbinder, though his death may be vaguely comparable to the frog’s, was blown up into something bigger than an ox—a zeppelin, perhaps—by other people: primarily critics, film buffs of the more pretentious sort, and trendy enclaves everywhere. That is worse than auto-inflation, though, to be sure, Fassbinder’s arrogance was monumental enough in its own right. I met him once briefly in New York, and was astounded by his rudeness, which he wore as consistently and defiantly as the obligatory black-leather uniform. I also observed him at some length (from a safe distance) at one Berlin Film Festival, where his behavior was only slightly better than at a gay bar, in which he brutally mauled a man with a bottle stump—and later mendaciously pleaded poverty to have his fine reduced.

JS

About the Author

John Simon

Featured Tags

The twentieth New York Film Festival opened with Veronika Voss, the penultimate film of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died last May of an accidental overdose of drugs. (The last film, not yet shown here, was Querelle, based on Jean Genet’s violently pederastic novel, Querelle de Brest.) Recently, too, we got Fassbinder’s antepenultimate film, Lola, the second in the socalled trilogy of which The Marriage of Maria Braun was the first, and Veronika Voss the last installment. All three got mostly rave reviews, and Maria Braun was also a popular success in our bigger cities. When RWF died at the age of 36, the photographs in the world press showed the face of a man easily 25 years older than that (draw your own conclusions), and the obituaries, especially in Germany, carried onasifa genius of Goethe’s magnitude had died.

Let me say it flat out: in a world of shamefully overblown reputations, Fassbinder’s international celebrity strikes me as one of the most grotesque cases of overinflation. At least the frog in the fable who tried to inflate himself into an ox had two things to recommend him: he did his own blowing up, and he got his comeuppance by bursting. Fassbinder, though his death may be vaguely comparable to the frog’s, was blown up into something bigger than an ox—a zeppelin, perhaps—by other people: primarily critics, film buffs of the more pretentious sort, and trendy enclaves everywhere. That is worse than auto-inflation, though, to be sure, Fassbinder’s arrogance was monumental enough in its own right. I met him once briefly in New York, and was astounded by his rudeness, which he wore as consistently and defiantly as the obligatory black-leather uniform. I also observed him at some length (from a safe distance) at one Berlin Film Festival, where his behavior was only slightly better than at a gay bar, in which he brutally mauled a man with a bottle stump—and later mendaciously pleaded poverty to have his fine reduced.