Extraordinary Games
The ending is fabulous. The beginning is even better. We’re in an office, high up, looking out over Berlin. There is a computer; and a television
set showing a film we can barely see - cops and robbers, heist, thriller;
something violent for sure. Although
it could be, and this is not impossible, this movie! There is a person in the room watching the TV, although they
are hidden from us in a high backed chair; the sort favoured by successful
executives. We notice the
credits. Then our eyes become distracted
by them. Typed onto our cinematic
screen they look like randomly scattered letters on a computer’s monitor. It takes time to see the underlying
order: gaps are being filled in to form names - of the characters; of the
actors; of R.a.i.n.e.r. W.e.r.n.e.r
. F.a.s.s.b.i.n.d.e.r., who now chucks in quotes from the famous and the
unknown; stencilled graffiti daubed straight onto the camera lens. The subtitles add an extra layer of
visual data.
These titles are fantastic! They combine with the TV images, the hidden viewer, and the
electronic score that is the aural equivalent to seasickness, to overwhelm our
cognitive capacities. Too much
information with too little meaning that overloads our ability to process it,
and so we give up trying to work out what is going on. It is like hearing jazz for the first
time: too much music to take in.
But times have changed since John Coltrane first revolved
around our turntable, and we called him a charlatan: “He’s just making noise,
man!” For although once again
experiencing cognitive free fall our instincts have been trained; and now we
are comfortable with our momentary confusion, trusting this strange German;
knowing that he will create sense in the end. Jazz an old friend, who pops around each evening for a long
chat and a funny cigarette.
The opening scene is brilliant, although we have no idea
what it means. We are excited but
tense, uneasily aware that we are lost; and then… we sag under the weight of
unprocessed information when another bundle of data is added to our mental
burden: on the screen, nestled amongst the film credits, there is a quote from
Helmut Schmidt, thanking the legal apparatus for not inquiring too deeply into
legal niceties; and thus for allowing such things as Mogadishu. The reference would have been obvious
to his original West German audience, but it is a mystery to us; although we
suspect it is to do with a counter-terrorism operation. Such semi-obscurity is perfect for a
film that resonates with our contemporary politics, even though it is depicting
a foreign time. For this is a
deceptively familiar world. The
most obvious example of this temporal ambiguity is the computer, a crucial part
of the plot. It looks antique, and
is believed by the public to be a threat to civil liberties, the government
thought to be using it as a means of social control. Computers, that is, are associated with the state
bureaucracies; one more alienating invention, like filing cabinets and standardised
forms. How different from
today! Two generations of
technological revolution separate us from this movie. Since then the personal computer and the Internet have
significantly changed the culture; to become part of the essentials of daily
living, as necessary and mundane as freezers and washing machines; they have
also replaced the car as the symbol of a
largely illusionary freedom.i So different! Yet the resonances remain… For although our governments still want to peek into our
lives, it is the large corporations who are today’s most intrusive snoopers;
the state not interested in our eating habits or the brand of toilet paper we
flush down the loo.
The credits include graffiti from a public toilet. The first of many that will litter the
screen. There is so much
information in this opening scene!
It is a warning of what is to come.
Overload. There
are many scenes where so many things happen at the same time. There is a group of people in a room;
divided into couples they are talking about different subjects, while a girl
shoots up, a man reads, and the television broadcasts a political
discussion. Again the TV! We cannot escape its presence. It is ubiquitous in this film. Even when it is malfunctioning, those
old fashioned lines rolling across the screen, it remains on: movies, news, and
endless discussions, mostly we think about politics and political philosophy,
and terrorists, of course – those modern demons who Fassbinder exposes and
dissects so mercilessly. When Ilse
picks up her guitar and adds her voice to the mix August looks defeated. Too much data! Not even he can handle it.
This is an extraordinary film. It sums up the 1970s in a few hours, and appears to confirm
later assessments of this decade, which argue it was dominated by a culture of
protest. Rebellion was everywhere!
…the revolt against the
‘throw-away’ society united, inter alia, rebellious Sussex students, Enoch Powell, the campaigners against
Covent Garden redevelopment, Sir Alec Douglas Home, US black militants,
assorted strikers and preservationists.
Suddenly everyone seemed to be – as Randolph Churchill once said of
Harold Macmillan – ‘tremendously on our side’. (The
Age of Insecurity, by Larry
Elliott and Dan Atkinson)
Everyone was protesting, and they were protesting against
everything! It is precisely this
atmosphere that this film captures; The Third Generation set in a world of tiny sects where protest exists
merely for itself. A person is a
terrorist because it is something to do; a mere reflex conditioned by one’s
immediate environment, like learning a few facts at a university lecture or
buying a blouse from a store on the Ku’damm.ii It is a habit like so much else, like
the very routines of the ‘system’ these rebels are purporting to
overthrow. Although what
they do is less like capitalist work than capitalist advertising: there is
little substance in their actions, it is nearly all style. Thus they act out the rituals of a
terrorist cell - the secret meetings, the code words, the vague plans of social
transgression - without actually carrying out any terror. Empty practices that have no real
content. It is a game, whose rites
the group use to convince themselves of their own authenticity. They have created a fantasy which they
believe in, but which in practice only operates on the periphery of their
conventional middle class existence – family, career, and their consumer desires,
are the determining influences on
their actions and personalities.
If they had been lucky these characters could have continued
living with these contradictions for a very long time, even forever; their
nihilist ideas never tested against the realities of their actual
experience. Unfortunately for them
their luck runs out. It is because
their dream comes true and a “real” terrorist joins the group.
At last they must act!
When they decide to kidnap a prominent businessman they
question the purpose of their actions.
It is the first time they have done so, and they cannot think up a
coherent reason for what they do.
They no longer know what they believe in; their ideology dissolved into
instinct and reflexive opinion, which has no content, and which is at odds with
their mature lifestyles. After
some desultorily discussion they eventually settle on a reason for the
kidnapping: “it is the thing to do, isn’t it?” They are also unhappy about having to behave like the real
thing. Nevertheless, their habits
(ritualistic attendance in a communal activity) and self-image are forcing them
to act like proper terrorists; although faced for the first time with a
concrete action their instinct is to avoid it.
Circumstances are against them. Their own received opinion, their “underground” lifestyle,
and the machinations of August, who engineers a situation that forces them to
go on the run, overcomes their initial reluctance to commit an act of
terror. All the content of their
youthful ideas has evaporated under the benign heat of their successful lives,
and yet those ideas still control them, so that they have a compulsive force in
a crisis (Fassbinder’s key insight).
This group has manufactured an image of themselves that they still
believe in, and yet this belief has no purchase on their current ways of
life. They are conventional
members of the middle class, a place where ideas are treated merely as sign
posts to situate people within the social world. A homely place where ideas are not taken very seriously –
their content is superficial, and mostly ignored. It is why the decision to act is so hard for this group, who
discuss and argue, and finally convince themselves that they must do something,
eventually deciding to kidnap P.J. Lurz; because Susanne works for him. It is the only thing they can think
of! And only then can they
decide on a reason: the release of all political prisoners in West Germany. Because it is expected of them.
Obviously.
When I read The Age of Insecurity I felt that the authors were exaggerating, for the
anti-business culture couldn’t have been that strong in the 1970s, as it
recovered very quickly in the following decade; while the mainstream parties
were never captured by either the anti-capitalist Left or Right. Their analysis is indeed superficial,
and depends on a media version of the period, which reflects the hysteria of an
age when the corporate state cracked; and the existing methods of industrial
production and social democracy appeared to be failing. The culture wasn’t anti-business so
much as despondent and critical about the establishment’s ability to manage the
economy, which many people believed was irredeemably breaking down; largely, it
seemed, because of the inefficiencies of the liberal state (the Left wanted to
increase its power to remove those inefficiencies, while the Right sought to
reduce its size and influence).
Social democracy was in crisis.
There was “too much democracy”, to quote a celebrated think tank, and
there followed the inevitable reaction, which started in the middle of the
decade; with a rebalancing of the society away from state control of industry
towards “private” control by large corporations and the multi-national
institutions that support them.iii By the time of Elliott’s and Atkinson’s
book the balance had changed massively, and society itself was at the service
of these corporations, who have come increasingly to structure it;
manufacturing the culture and producing its ideologies; humans now viewed as
competitive individuals who can only thrive in a market environment; creatures
of instinct who reflexively respond to stimuli, such as adverts and glass
windows full of fancy objects...
To Fassbinder this image of a prevailing radicalism was a
myth. Stop. Walk back to the film, sit down and
watch it… These characters are
living inside a myth that they believe to be real; although they only adhere to
its outer forms. Trapped by this
myth they make the mistake of enacting it; the reason why they look
absurd. It is as if Bugs Bunny and
Mickey Mouse appeared on our streets and started behaving like you and me. Indeed, forced by the pressure of
circumstances, this is exactly what happens to this group. A fantasy has invaded their lives, a
fiction has suddenly become reality, and they can no longer tell the difference
between it and social fact; a delusion marvellously captured in the last few
scenes, when the characters step out of their make believe world to kill real
people. Their radicalism is a myth, but it is a myth that has been made to come
true.
Fassbinder knew his fellow citizens too well. Until the crisis their terrorism is
only an act, and has very little to do with the concrete reality of their daily
lives. They would prefer it to
remain this way. But they have
made a mistake… they have dipped a little too deeply into the radical waters,
and have exposed themselves to the machinations of the powerful, who can, when
the occasion demands, pick them up, and take them back to the television
studios, where they will make them look like real terrorists.
The film starts in the Berlin office of a businessman whose
wealth relies on the social panic caused by left wing terror. This fear can overcome the public’s
resistance to computer processing of personal data; seen as a threat to
individual liberties. In fact, it
is because of concerns about government intrusion into privacy that there is
currently a slump in the market – you won’t sell a single computer in Germany
he tells an American colleague.
However, a new terrorist outbreak would remove these worries…
Protest can be good for business! And the more extreme the better. Terrorism a game the establishment plays best, for it will
decide how we should interpret public events, being by far the most powerful
manipulator of image and message.
The terrorists also like playing games – chess, monopoly,
familial melodrama, piggy in the middle…
They behave like adolescents, but no longer have the adolescent’s
intense seriousness. So many of
the things they do go nowhere. Edgar
is a composer, but makes music that no one will hear. Petra pretends to suffer from domestic violence. Susanne has an affair with her
father-in-law so as to feel the authenticity of self-loathing – she is playing
the role of the fallen woman.
Hilde plays at being a lesbian; Rudolf a good Samaritan; and
August? He plays so many roles:
terrorist, government stooge, transvestite and chameleon. He plays just to play. His whole life is a performance.
When they are not working, or shopping, or living inside
their own imaginary fantasies, these characters get together in their terrorist
cell. They meet up, play games,
suffer from paranoia (every knock on the door they believe is the police), talk
about new members; and recruit an innocent (without the least scrutiny!);
because he was in the army and can make bombs. It is like a group of old friends who regularly meet
through a shared common interest; such as the local tennis club. Here is terrorism as leisure activity.
And so, no doubt, this merry go round would continue until
they retire – Rudolf & Co. the first terrorists to get a pension from the
state. Then their luck leaves
them. Lurz needs an upturn in
business, and he has contacts in the left wing underground – August. He desperately needs some terrorist
activity, believing, rightly, that the images they generate will increase
sales; knowing that the threat itself will be illusionary. A panic is good for business, providing
the authorities can control it.
Profit (and power) relying on a series of fictions whose authors are now
the corporate executives… Musing philosophically Lurz says that he loves movies
because they tell the truth through lies.
The lie is the truth, he proclaims, and the truth the lie. His colleague is surprised: “I didn’t
think someone like you thought like that.” Exactly! This
is a new kind of capitalist class, which seems to have grown out of the 1960s. Images and old ideologies will tell us
very little about them, or about anything at all, if we want to be scientifically
accurate. Yet everywhere in this
movie there is abstract political discussion and the ubiquitous television
set. Ordinary life is being
colonised. The TV an occupying
power in the private spaces of these characters; transforming reality even as it
retails it: the code words, the bank robbery, the final kidnapping, are all
lifted from its omnipresent screen.
These are media terrorists who are saturated with this fabricated world
which will eventually take on its own reality and explode onto Berlin’s
streets. Lurz is a seer. Fictional characters are walking out of
television shows to cross roads and catch buses; travelling to Germany's cities to act like typical citizens in their squares and cafés. The TV is manufacturing its own strange
truth.
At regular intervals graffiti taken from public toilets
appears on our screen. Here is the
detritus of sexual intrigue and vicious prejudice; as well as mass
pointlessness. They are a running
commentary on the action; suggesting the cynicism and falsity that underlies
these manufactured worlds – the private one of the terrorists, and the public
one of Lurz. The group’s
“political” actions and the state’s propaganda the equivalents of a quick fuck
in an underground loo – both are a conditioned response to outside
stimuli. Ideological opinions
little more than sexual invites; crude and banal, and repetitiously
formulaic. Rudolf & Co. are
copying a public world that exists inside their living rooms but from which
they are excluded; the television screen an impassable barrier between them and
the professionals who actually run the country. Here are spectators who have become inauthentic by copying a
simulacrum of real life; although they are unaware of this obvious truth, as
their fictional roles are completely severed from the reality of their ordinary
lives. They are children playing
at adult politics. Then the
grown-ups arrive, and suddenly the group takes on an actuality it never had
before; because political professionals, by using them for their own purposes,
inject real life into their activities.
It is the corporate state that gives them authenticity! Although it cannot control all the
consequences of its intervention: Lurz unable to foresee those last brilliant
scenes where reality is turned into a TV studio and he is transformed into the
show’s central character.
Hilde breaks down when she hears Paul is dead. We are shocked. Paul was a boorish tyrant who raped
her; shattering her own illusions about independence and personal choice – she
thought she could freely choose her sexual partners. Was she in love with him? Her reaction suggests this is so, although their affair
fulfils a different kind of fantasy: Hilde needs to feel degraded. It is part of her quest for
authenticity. Humiliation removes
all the social constructs; and so by stripping off her social fictions she is
able to suffer her naked (thus truthful) pain. Her conversation with August is revealing: Hilde says that
she is jealous of Paul’s death, which releases him from this painful and
pointlessness life. It is
ennui. Surfeited with themselves
they need regular injections of purpose and excitement; whether it be a
terrorist act, sexual intercourse or a consumer hit. Tellingly Rudolf takes in a junkie. Ilse yet another comment on the
spiritually impoverished nature of these characters: they are drugged up on
radical politics; the middle class’ heroin.
We can read too much into events. Fassbinder knows this.
He knows everything! He is
especially sceptical about the corporate press. Is all the TV talk simply media silliness; the experts’
views cheap materials to fill up broadcasting time? Are the toilet obscenities a satire on this commentary;
which is little more than debased opinion? I think they are.
People will always find reasons to justify they actions; when mostly
there is no reason to them at all.
This offers rich possibilities for the press, allowing a few specialists
to earn a good living by making up simple meanings for events whose truth is
either very complex or utterly banal.
Meanings can be elusive or non-existent.iv Things can just happen, Susanne can
decide to kidnap her employer, because it follows from the logic of the
situation which crystallises the bad habits acquired over decades. A group of friends fall into radical
politics, probably during their student years, but are unable to climb out of
them because it has become a way of life.
They have been rutted into an instinctive routine; the content of their
politics withering away with time, until they are like those Catholics who have
no faith but still attend every Sunday service.
On the threshold of middle age Rudolf & Co. are similar to any other
group of long time friends, except instead of hill walking or squash they play
the terrorist game. This gives
them kudos: providing they don’t act they can feel superior to the rest of
their generation. They are quite
the dandy! Here is the
significance behind the first part of the film, and the reason we found it
strangely aimless: their kind of terrorism is just another domestic routine;
social clutter filling up an uninspiring and purposeless life. All camouflaged, of course, by the
meaning they give to it.
They are easy meat for the authorities.
Lurz and August need each other. August is the actor who needs a theatre. Lurz is the capitalist whose fortune
depends on political violence. The
police commissioner is the useful tool, “protecting” Lurz, even when he doesn’t
need protection, because it creates the perception of a terror threat; increasing
the population’s unease. But the
commissioner is only one of this executive’s instruments. This group of middle class terrorists
is another. With no ideology and
no coherent purpose they are the raw material that will be processed by the
establishment’s political machine.
Big business rules, and the state is its junior partner, and both need
large profits to function efficiently.
Anything that can produce a return will do. Even terrorism.
It is thus inevitable, given the personalities of these characters, that
it is Lurz who is the only real terrorist in this film. Because only he can make things happen;
the police raid that kills Paul – the first act of (public) violence in the
film – arising from his need to destabilize public opinion. Here is the secret of the 1970s:
concrete acts, a terrorist attack or a union strike, are less important than
the images and discourse, the media atmosphere, that can be created out of
them. Power residing in the
ability to manufacture appearances; and where nearly all the film crews are
employed by the corporate state.
Even this group’s own ransom video will be broadcast on mainstream
television, who will translate it into the establishment dialect. Believing themselves authentic Rudolf
& Co. turn out be characters in someone else’s TV show.
Paul, who looks like a gangster from a 1940s Hollywood
movie, and behaves like stupid peasant, is idealised by the group because he
has returned from Africa. We
assume he has been training with real guerrillas; and so combines two
contemporary myths in one: the flight to a Third World paradise and
international Revolution. These
were the drugs of choice for many left wing intellectuals of the 1970s; addicts
not politicians, shooting up on dreams of authenticity.
The police are the terrorists? Yes, I believe this is so. For Fassbinder has uncovered another truth about radical
politics: random acts of violence need a trigger; and this often comes from the
authorities, because they have particular instrumental reasons to act; like
Lurz’s need to sell computers in a depressed market. In contrast the terrorist cell lives rather aimlessly. Too freighted with ideology, and with
no coherent political plan apart from carrying out some spectacular atrocity,
they float through the days as they wait for the perfect moment to commit their
act of terror. The result? It is they who tend to be pushed by
events. Passive creatures
dependent on someone else to shout: “do it now!”v
In an extraordinary scene the police raid Rudolf’s
flat. Bernhard, who has learning
difficulties and reads Bakhtin, explodes into repetitive verbal patterns as he
is overwhelmed by the arrogant presence of the officers, and their disrespect
for personal property. Order is
disintegrating, and the cause is the all too organised authorities. Here is the truth at the core of this
work, which is counter-intuitive, and seemingly insane. It accounts for the tincture of madness
that is attached to Bernhard, a member of the aristocracy, and the one person
who knows the whole truth and condemns it. But he is impotent, a West German Cassandra. In contrast: Lurz, August, and the
Police Commissioner are specialists of manipulation, amoralists who can make
people believe that fiction is fact.
All the rest are innocents.
The final scenes are brilliant. A real hold up is disguised to look like a fake one. And we are left with Lurz talking
straight to camera, seemingly a prisoner, yet in reality selling his own
business… Illusion has become
reality, and the computer market is about to take off to the moon.
(Review of The Third Generation)
[i] See the excellent article
in the TLS about the potentially totalitarian nature of the
Internet. One of the interesting
things about this piece is that demonstrates how many present day commentators
have forgotten what was the main liberal critique of the Soviet Union: it
became an authoritarian state because of its utopian ideology.
[ii] In one scene Hilde tells a student that she can only
teach objective facts; subjective interpretations must be left at home. It is her way of avoiding a discussion
about the political nature of modern Germany. This scene can be read in many ways…
·
She is an obedient
member of the state.
·
She agrees with the
extreme leftism of the student, but is wary of exposing herself.
·
His political position
is one that no longer excites her; and a discussion could make her uncomfortable
– she would have to confront her own indifference.
·
All ideas, outside the
official liberal democratic consensus, are subjective. Thus all thought and action against
that consensus is portrayed as individual preference; a kind of ideological shopping
trip.
The latter interpretation is the most interesting, and
suggests an explanation for the violent reaction against the mainstream
culture: people no longer own the public space in which they live. It is an impersonal, an “objective”,
environment which we can enter only if we leave our personalities
behind. To be credible actors in
public life we have to perform the role of the “objective” liberal. Once inside this “system” such
impersonality can cause resentment amongst those few who retain their
individuality. Outside, where
there is no restraint, the ideologies can grow like exotic fauna, though they
exist without any public significance.
This creates resentment of a different kind.
[iii] The best book on this phenomena is Harold Perkin’s The
Rise of the Professional Society. He argues that this period saw a battle
between two kinds of professional: the public and the private; the latter
resentful, at a time of falling profits, of the taxes raised to pay for the
former. The mistake Elliot and
Atkinson make is to equate the public professional with an anti-capitalist attitude. For sure, there is a different ethos,
but at the same time these professionals (civil servants, local authority
administrators, solicitors, doctors, journalists etc) are both part of
capitalism – they help make it work – and dependent upon it.
[iv] Gus Van Sant’s great movie on Columbine
captures this brilliantly. Often
there is no meaning to events.
They just happen. In one
scene we see a documentary about the Nazis; an obvious explanation for the
actions of these kids. But they
are not interested in it. The TV
simply background noise as they concentrate on unpacking their guns.
[v] We saw the same thing with the London riots two years
ago. The evidence appears to be
that it was police provocation that started them; after which they took on
their own
independent life.
Many thanks for your thoughtful review. One point; the film playing through the credits sequence is The Devil, Probably, Robert Bresson’s 1977 tale of disaffected Parisian youth.
ReplyDeleteYou are right. I've just read Christian Baad Thomsen's book, Fassbinder; The Life and Work of a Provocative Genius, and he confirms it.
ReplyDelete