God knows, I should have made a New Year’s Resolution that would have actually bettered my day-to-day quality of life, but instead, I made a New Year’s Resolution to become fully versed in the work of two filmmakers with whom my overall level of familiarity is, really, shameful: Pier Paulo Pasolini, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Because Fassbinder’s work is generally much easier to find on DVD, I’ve decided to start with him and move on to Pasolini after I’ve watched everything I can get my hands on. So as I watch his films, I’ll write about them here. I’ve made a conscious decision not to research the films before I watch them in order to offer my spontaneous impressions, so it’s probably best to look at each installment of this project as more of a close reading/viewing diary than a review, per se.

This week, I begin with The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant.

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Petra Von Kant (Margit Carstensen) is a “fashion designer” who spends half the day in bed meticulously adjusting her face paint and having long conversations with guests while her live-in assistant Marlene (Irm Hermann) finishes her sketches. Petra is addict-thin and a bit mannish; in the film’s first act of three (all of which take place entirely in Petra’s stifling apartment), she hides her own thin hair under a wig that’s very late-Judy Garland. Marlene has Dietrich hair and a Deitrich air, but with the face of a Marion Davies or a Clara Bow. She’s obviously slumming––she’s obviously inherently too good for housework––and from the first scene, it’s obvious that she’s chosen to be here instead of somewhere better, because there’s something about the power balance between her and Petra that Marlene likes.

And Petra stokes Marlene’s feelings, but for her it’s not about like but about luxury. Between the female mannequins sprinkled around her flat and the explicit lifed-size homoerotic mural on her bedroom wall, she’s surrounded by nakedness, and still she seems, if not asexual, certainly a-sensual, fastidious and cold. Petra’s role in her relationship with Marlene is not really about her own pleasure: she does what she does to provoke Marlene’s passion not because she particularly cares, but because she can.

In the first part of the film’s first act, Petra’s in a kind of emotional non-space, enjoying the almost imperceptible peace of being without desire, of not wanting anyone and thus being impervious to the flip-flop of pleasure and pain. She goes on and on about her divorce, but she obviously doesn’t feel the loss of her ex-husband, because she’s so eager to talk about pushing him away. She’s so removed from it that she’s able to rationalize it: she says she had given up on the marriage when she realized that their love wasn’t “beautiful”, which she defines as “always knowing what’s going on in yourself and in the other person.”

The problem of other minds rears itself once again—the idea that even if we can begin to comprehend that another person is not just a body but also a brain, our only method of decoding what’s going on in that brain is by listening to what they say and observing what they do, and since both words and actions are open to interpretation, it’s all a pretty shitty substitute for actually being able to read minds. Petra proves just how naïve she is by seeming to really believe that it’s a problem that can be solved by the exchange of one mate for another.
Whatever she believes, it’s upended soon enough. Petra’s just finished unloading her ugly, petty thoughts about her ex-husband to the blase Sidonie (Katrin Schaake), when in walks Karin (Hanna Schygulla), a blonde bombshell in a shag–trimmed suit. If everything about Petra is cold, white and sharp, Karin is the opposite––a walking cuddle. Sidonie scoots back on the bed, watching with an eager smile as Karin takes her place next to Petra. Transfixed, Petra invites Karin to come back the next night for a casting couch dinner. When they meet again, Petra tells Karin that she’ll help her make it as a model but she’ll also need to fight on her own. Karin says she’s too lazy to fight–she “prefers lying in bed, reading novels or magazines.” As if understanding that she needs to prove what she *is* willing to do, when Petra drops the needle on a Walker Brothers record, Karin breaks into a bizarre dance: feet planted, hips swaying, hands practicing the gestures of a beauty queen. “I love you,” Petra says. Karin asks for “time.”

Petra grants Karin’s wish, and we jump forward several months. By this point, Karin has made herself comfortable. True to her word, she’s reading magazines in bed whilst Petra (in a new wig, an absurd red 60s stewardess job) putters around, offering blind encouragement, mixing breakfast gin and tonics. Of course, Petra has taken the Marlene role in Karin’s life, but instead of listening through a protective pane of glass, as Marlene did whilst Petra told the story of her failed marriage, Petra’s planted on the end of the bed whilst Karin tortures her with stories of her night with an “insatiable big black man with a big black dick.” Imagine his black hands on my white skin,” she teases, flatly. They’ve only just started their second drinks.

Is she making it up to drive Petra crazy? She doesn’t seem smart enough to have much of a plan, although she’s certainly petty enough to take pleasure from Petra’s pain. The scene allows Petra to come to the worst kind of realization: she comes to understand that her “love affair” with Karin was a delusion from the start, and yet she can’t shake the obsession. “Of course I BELIEVE you love me,” Petra says, “But I don’t really KNOW. That’s what’s making me ill.” And Karin’s happy to feed the delusion. Once she’s got Petra where she wants her, Karin softens: “He wasn’t really a black…more of a brown.”

By the time the final act opens, Karin is long gone. Sprawled almost on all fours on her shag carpet, in an emerald green evening dress and blonde wig resembling Karin’s hairstyle, Petra’s alone but for a gin bottle and a phone. She mutters through drooling tears––ostensibly to the not-present Karin, but just as much to herself––”I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!…I’ll make you suffer!” This is Daniel Plainview with a different chromosome. But she’s not yet finished: as a final act of humiliation, Petra makes an overture to Marlene. The slave immediately packs her bags––it’s not hot anymore. Stanley Cavell says love is all about acknowledging the other’s desire, but Stanley Cavell doesn’t know much about masochism.

The DVD cover tagline of Bitter Tears is “sex is the ultimate weapon,” but of course, it’s only about sex at all insofar as it’s about the relationship of sex to everything else. Love (or lust, or obsession, or whatever) reduces the haves to have nots. It empowers those with less––whomever feels less––and allows them to upend the social order. In love (or whatever), a plebe can drag a queen down from her throne, and into absolute ruin. There’s something thrillingly anarchistic about this––social/economic power is never fixed, because crushes have the power to wreck us all. Fassbinder gets off on that aspect of it, without letting us avoid the agony of it. The final act explodes into over-the-top camp hilarity, but it’s also really, really sad.