Saturday I was standing in the checkout line at the Barnes & Noble across from Lincoln Center, which was lined with DVDs for last-minute, late-decision purchase. But the DVDs weren't the usual Blockbuster hits. One whole rack was alloted to German Language DVDs, and among them was a cluster of Fassbinder movies.
I have to admit I did a mild double take. Even if I had been able to foresee DVDs and digital downloads back in the Seventies when Fassbinder was pumping out films as fast as Joyce Carol Oates novels, I never would have reckoned that someday they would be handy checkout items--collectibles. Even then Fassbinder movies were relative rarities on the art circuit until the breakthrough hit The Marriage of Maria Braun, and these B&N items weren't even the best-known Fassbinders--we're talking Satan's Brew and Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven. Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven as an impulse buy! What it italicized for me is how much of what's considered underground/fringe/outre/rarified migrates--matriculates--into the mainstream until it's part of the cultural ecology. The Daily News carries a feature in its Sunday comics section called Biographic, an illustrated mini bio of some celebrity personality. This week This week's Biographic was devoted to Halle Berry ("Born on August 14, 1966, Halle Maria Berry was named after the landmark Halle's department store in her native Cleveland, Ohio"); no biggie. But last week the subject was New Order, which recounted the history and evolution of the Manchester band from Joy Division after the suicide of its lead singer Ian Curtis, which forms the basis for the film 24 Hour Party People, starring one of my favorites, Steve Coogan.* Again, it never would have occurred that Joy Division/New Order would someday be a featurette in the funny papers and nobody would even blink.
The other thing that struck me about the Fassbinder checkout films is how well I remember them even though I haven't seen most of them since they were originally released, including lesser-known titles that never turn up on cable and are seldom reshown, such as Chinese Roulette, Beware of a Holy Whore, and Fox and His Friends. The latter I saw with Tina Weymouth of the Talking Heads, though I can't remember why we chose that film of all others to attend--not exactly a fun outing, what with its sad-sack gay protagonist, played by Fassbinder himself, who is preyed upon by friends, lovers, and ratbag relatives after he wins a lottery and ends up as a gutter ball in the game of life. Manny Farber: "The final scene--Fox lying dead in a garishly lit subway, his pockets being rifled by a pair of twelve-year olds--is appallingly unremarked. Two of his ex-lovers passing by trying not to notice, the cobalt-blue tiled station, combine to stamp Fox's unimportance." I was probably one of the first people in the country to see Effi Briest, which was screened for me because I was doing a piece on the Fassbinder retrospective for the Voice, a piece that I made a complete botch of because I just didn't have the cultural-political-historical background to understand the German postwar milieu that...oh let's just stop now that I've used "postwar milieu" in a sentence. Point is, the piece never ran but three decades later I can still recall the film's fade to whites, its formal cadence, Hanna Schygulla's ivory features.
Also in the checkout rack was The Bitter of Tears of Petra Von Kant, another movie I've seen in its entirety only once and yet three decades later can still hear and picture Petra's calling her lover's name like a crying refrain ("Karin...Karin!"), the mute servant out of Genet, the drag-queen bad-taste dream of a boudoir with silent mannequins functioning as an ironic chorus as the lovelorn lesbian drama pouts and frets its hour across the stage until the figurative curtain is brought down to the croon of "The Great Pretender," a tableau as newsprinted in my memory as the scratchy-opera-record languorous-cigarette interlude in that miserabilist masterpiece The Mother and the Whore.
I picked a copy of Petra out of the rack--"The Masterworks Edition"--and slow-footed it to the cash register, making my own impulse buy. Curious to see if the movie "holds up" (whatever that means--the whole of what holds up, what doesn't, and what constitutes "holding up" opens a can of aesthetic issues), I'm also piqued by the mystery of why some movies that didn't mean that much to me at the time (another example: Peckinpah's nearly gangrene Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia) have shown more staying power in the mental attic than many movies that did. Or is the sloven force of the mid-Seventies itself that won't let go? I don't feel nostalgic about Fassbinder, but I feel nostalgic about the juicy-rotten period that made a Fassbinder possible--and a CBGB's too.
*And includes one of my favorite movie lines--when Coogan puts wise a rocker who wants to branch out into jazz improv with the immortal words, "Just remember, my son, jazz is the last refuge of the untalented."
