By all accounts, Douglas Sirk’s 1950s melodramas rocked Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s world when he first saw them in the early 70s. In “Imitation of Life: On The Films of Douglas Sirk,” a 1971 essay on Sirk included in the Criterion edition of Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, Fassbinder presages his own late-career turn towards films centered around female protagonists by marveling at Sirk’s unique way with women. “In Douglas Sirk movies the women think,” Fassbinder writes, as if this plain realization has knocked the wind out of him. “I haven’t noticed that with any other director. With any.” He also marvels at the Hollywood director’s ability to subvert dominant society via low art, sneaking radical critique into “films that people in Germany with his level of education would have smirked at.”

What Fassbinder must have seen that those academic stiffs would have missed, was that Sirk needed the smirk in order to mask what he was “really” up to. When Fassbinder reworked Heaven’s basic plot and ideas into his own Ali: Fear Eats the Soul 18 years later, he dispensed with the beard. Refusing to allow the audience the option of wallowing in redemptive fantasy and ignoring the subtext, he brought the tragedy up to the surface where it couldn’t be missed.

Douglas Sirk was Hollywood’s first master of intentional but nearly imperceptible irony. He was surprised when the studio loved the title All That Heaven Allows––he had intended it as a downer, a reference to the “stingyness” of Heaven, both in terms of the rules it imposes on applicants, and the all-seeing eye that enforces them. Thus, the perfect summing up of the fim he made, a story of how happiness is wrecked by busy-bodies and gatekeepers.

All That Heaven Allows eventually gets around to Sirk’s trademark stylistic indulgence, but with its opening shot––a long, slow descent down from a dull sky into a generic bedroom community, set to singularly somber score––the first thing you notice is how sedate it all is. Most Hollywood films of this era, especially romances, weren’t confident enough to announce themselves this gently. The whole set up of the picture effuses restraint…until Jane Wyman, grey hair just visbile around her temples under a dyed-red halo of curls, goes home with her hunky young gardener (Rock Hudson) on the second date. As Fassbinder says in his essay (and I’ll use the actors’ names rather than those of the characters, because he does), Jane and Rock understand that they’re good, just people and that “the world around them is evil,” but it’s an evil that’s so buttoned-up and mundane that the only recourse is a sudden smash of passion.

“Nothing’s important except us,” goes Rock’s mantra of romantic solipsism. Jane, unready to bury her head in the sand of illicit romance, freaks out and runs away. Taking cues from her community, she begins to accept her fate: she understands that a woman of her age is supposed to deny her desires and live out her days in front of the TV. That is, until she stars suffering from chronic headaches. Such an obvious 50s/Freudian thing, physical pain as manifestation of sexual/romantic frustration, but even in this cliché of clichés, Fassbinder sympathizes. “Jane goes back to Rock, because she keeps having headaches, which happens to all of us if we don’t fuck often enough.”

Physical need may trump societal anxiety for a while, but it’s not a cure-all. Fassbinder begins his own version of this story with a neon blue title flashed across the screen: “Happiness is not always fun.” This seems more or less equivalent to his reading of Sirk’s philosophy on relationships: “Human beings can’t be alone, but they can’t be together either.”

 Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is a story of outsiders, in which what it means to be “outside” or “alone” is constantly being redefined. Others who considered the film upon its Criterion release noted Fassbinder’s persistent framing devices: doorjams, stair cases, window frames keep our lovers boxed up and behind bars. Less frequently noted is sometime-stage director Fassbinder’s habit of using actors as architecture. When a wide shot indicates that a couple are alone, a wider shot reveals that they’re being watched by a wall of onlookers. When an outsider enters a room, they almost invariably confront a tableau of frozen stares. Every social interaction begins with freeze tag; it turns into a game of chicken.

Though not a strict remake of Heaven, Fassbinder reduces Sirk’s story to its most base elements, a few concentrated touchstones for him to amplify the hell out of. The class issue that served as the only speakable barrier between Wyman’s rich, respectably attractive widow and Hudson’s studly plebe is done away with: both young mechanic Ali and aged cleaning lady Emmi are wage slaves, their community resolutely blue-collar and service oriented. But Sirk’s dozen year age gap between lovers is doubled, and Ali is not only decades younger than Emmi, he’s also black. And Arab. And an immigrant in a Munich that’s blatantly hostile to “Auslanders.” For his part, Ali early on equates Germans to slave masters in the same Tarzan-esque, broken-German monotone that later delivers such memorable quotes as “Me pay cola,” and “Me sleep with other woman.”  Meanwhile, though Jane Wyman is not, by modern standards, much of a MILF, comparatively Ali’s Brigitte Mira is grotesque, a stubby sack of flesh, her face a patchwork of yellowed, sagging bags.

In short, there’s absolutely no superficial reason for Ali to be attracted to Emmi, and a host of reasons why a woman in Emmi’s position would turn a man in Ali’s away. This is a mark of Fassbinder’s genius: he convinces us that these two lonely, desperate souls see something in one another that no one else sees––even if it’s just a reflection of their own respective social and emotional traumas––and that this invisible bond will be powerful enough to continually draw them together, even as external forces and internal anxieties threaten to tear them apart. “Her, him and the world around them,” Fassbinder wrote of the dynamic in All That Heaven Allows. “That’s a pretty shitting starting point for a great love.”

It becomes clear right away that “the world around” Ali and Emmi aren’t buying their relationship as “a great love,” although they’ll take it as an easy target for their deeply-ingrained racial frustrations and petty jealousies. Fassbinder accelerates the coupling process, having Ali and Emmi form a unit very quickly in order to allow more time for the playing out of their humiliation. They meet in a bar that Emmi has accidentally stumbled into; he walks her home in the rain; she invites him to spend the night; he does. Two scenes later, Emmi’s confessing to her horrified daughter and racist scumbag son-in-law (played by Fassbinder, natch) that she’s in love. Emmi tries to brag to her fellow cleaning ladies that a young foreign guy found her attractive (although she significantly cleans up what really happened), and they act like she’s complaining about immigrants. “Nothing’s sacred to them, not even old age.”

Maybe Ali and Emmi don’t really buy it themselves until their loose connections to the world around them turn to shit. Emmi’s neighbors try to evict Ali, her children refuse to accept him, and––in a neat update to Sirk’s use of television as the tool with which the younger generation placates the older––her son becomes so enraged by the relationship that he kicks in Emmi’s TV. More alone together than they ever were apart, Emmi convinces Ali that they should go away for awhile, that those who have rejected them will miss them once they’re gone.

Her prediction turns out to come true, but only to the extent that anyone is able to put aside their prejudices when self-interest demands it. Happy to be accepted by her peers once more for whatever reason, Emmi’s attitude towards Ali shifts into carelessly condescending fetishization. A strange colonial drama begins to play out: Emmi––who speaks wistfully of the days of the “The Party,” almost innocently taking Ali for a honeymoon dinner at Hitler’s favorite restaurant––prizes Ali’s exoticism, and at the same time prods him to assimilate into her world of old German white people. By the time she’s inviting her elderly lady friends to gather round her husband and touch his muscles, Ali’s had it. He goes looking for a girl who will cook him some couscous.

Sirk also split his lovers up over a question of conformity versus intimacy, but he ultimately gave Jane and Rock an implied happy ending: he’s literally thrown himself off a cliff running to her, and he wakes from a concussive sleep to find her by his side. Fassbinder didn’t buy it. “It isn’t a happy ending, even though they’re together, the two of them,” he insists in his essay. “A person who creates so many problems in love won’t be able to be happy later on.”

His own ending is much more ambiguous. There’s Emmi by Ali’s side, but she’s weeping, and the whole atmosphere reeks of dread instead of relief. Even when born from the desire for respite from our rotten communities, couplings are too infused by the toxins of their social context to ever fully transcend it. The penultimate scene of Fear is what nails it home: Ali and Emmi clinging to one another on the dance floor, Emmi writing off infidelity as a lesser sin than insensitivity, Ali oblivious to all but Emmi as if hypnotized…and then he collapses, hands clutching his heart. Happiness is not always fun, huh? By the time we fade out from Emmi convulsing in tears, it’s impossible to not come away feeling like love is a social disease.

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Previously in the My Year of Fassbinder series:

The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant