This
is an uncelebrated and relatively ancient wonder written, directed and
performed by everyone’s favorite cokehead leatherqueen, Rainer Werner
Fassbinder.
Fassbinder plays Franz Biberkopf, a
chunky dimwit who works in a corrupt travelling circus playing sideshow
attraction Fox the Talking Head, an act we unfortunately never get to
see. Fox’s blue-collar sexuality wins him easy sex, and when he wins
five hundred thousand marks in the lottery, he soon becomes the top
attraction among a group of revolting bourgeois poofs who think he’s a
complete turn on, and an easy-pickings money tree.
Blind
to their motives, poor Fox thinks he’s found the life of his dreams,
and goes along with his new friends’ every deception, lending massive
sums of money left right and centre to prop up failing businesses, or
purchase truckloads of hilariously ugly 70’s German clothes and
furnishings. Every last mark is siphoned off by his crafty lover Eugen
(Peter Chatel), who's pulled every legal string in the book and gets to
keep the lot when Fox’s well runs dry. Tense and confused, Fox visits
the doctor and gets given a bottle of Valium 5mg, which comes in handy
later when Fox hits rock bottom.
So Fox And His Friends
is ostensibly the familiar Fassbinder milieu. The lower classes think
it’s only natural to climb into the middle class, but when they get
there, find they’re more miserable than ever, and really nothing more
than worker bees for the unquenchably materialistic bourgeoisie. Fox’s
lottery win gives him admission to a moneyed world, where his money’s
welcome, but he’s not. Once he’s out of cash he’s sent straight back
where he came. He can’t fit back in there, so he’s left in a penniless,
classless twilight zone, the mortal purgatory of the greedy modern
world. It’s very like Ali: Fear Eats The Soul,
made a year
before , where a transgression of racial lines led to the permanent
social displacement of lonely Emmi, who lost her way following her
heart. (El Hedi ben Salem, who played Ali, plays a dignified Moroccan
in Fox And His Friends, while Brigitte Mira,
Emmi, pops up as a dark haired shopkeeper.)
Fassbinder’s perceptive focus on the rampant consumerism of the time,
the shifting of class boundaries and resultant social tension is no new
ground then, and as well, all looks a bit old fashioned. The real
highlight of Fox And His Friends
for viewers today is a classic, simple story, Fassbinder’s endearing
performance, and a remarkable approach to gay content that is, so far,
at least thirty years ahead of its time.
Multitasking
superbly, Fassbinder imbues Fox with a mental simplicity but a wise
heart. Fox is not at all fluent in social mores, but he does know the
importance of laughter, and enjoys drinking, fucking and gambling more
than almost anything else. Once he discovers that he’s been tricked by
his own fate, he goes mad and kills himself, like a gay (proletarian)
Oedipus Rex. Despite Fassbinder’s plain looks and pasty complexion, he
makes Fox almost sexy, and the character’s vulnerability is affecting
and endearing.
Fassbinder fills up his Sirk-ian
melodrama with gay guys, but doesn't note the transposition. The first
time we see Fox, in the film’s opening scene, he plants a moist tongue
kiss on his lover, who’s being carted off by the police. Eugen’s
parents don’t skip a beat over their son’s male partner, and a pair of
US Army men are similarly blase - when a drunk Fox propositions them,
they snap from asking him about whores and girls to wondering if he’s a
good fuck in the bat of an eye.
Fassbinder presents being gay as something people are,
rather than something that they do.
His gay characters have the same flaws and problems that his straight
characters do - to coin a p.c. buzzphrase, homosexuality “is simply not
a issue”. Now isn’t that the aim of so many earnest
but embarrassing pro-gay films (and the main drive of gay
pride)?
Fox
And His Friends is an ignored template for gay cinema and
general gay culture, both of which have become hog tied by simplistic
and counter-productive politicking
and bellyaching.
