Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Fox and His Friends
1975 · Rainer Werner Fassbinder · Fox and His Friends on Sightlines
In the expensive apartments there is nearly always something in the way. A banister, a doorframe, a spray of flowers standing on the table between the lens and the man who is talking. Michael Ballhaus shoots the rich rooms of Fox and His Friends so that Fox is never quite in the clear. He stands behind the furniture of people who own furniture. It is not a flourish. It is the film's entire argument, made several dozen times in composition before anyone says anything cruel out loud.
The story fits on a handbill. Franz Biberkopf, billed at the fairground as "Fox the Talking Head," wins half a million marks. A well-mannered rich man named Eugen takes him up, takes him in, and spends him. Fassbinder plays Fox himself, one of the very few times he gave himself a full lead.
Deleuze has a distinction that makes the machinery visible, and it isn't the one you'd expect from a director who loved melodrama. He separates realism from naturalism. In realism you get a milieu and people who behave in it: someone perceives a situation and acts, and the action changes the situation. That is the movement-image at full power. Naturalism works differently. There the milieu is a crust, and beneath it Deleuze finds what he calls an originary world. Not a location but a condition, a zone of raw appetite where nothing is exchanged, only taken. Characters in that world are not agents. They are carriers of a drive, and the film that holds them has one shape, a line of slope: an irreversible run downhill toward exhaustion.
Deleuze's examples are Stroheim and Buñuel, where the originary world announces itself as squalor, swamp, rot. Fassbinder's move, and it is his own, is to relocate it upstairs. You expect the fairground to be the pit: the sawdust, the booth, the man paid to be looked at. It isn't. The fairground is where Fox came from and where he is thrown back. The originary world in this film has good sofas. It serves wine. Its inhabitants have taste, and their taste is the instrument. The German title says it flatly: Faustrecht der Freiheit, the fist-right of freedom, jungle law. Fassbinder found the jungle in the drawing room and filmed it at room temperature.
Once you see the slope, the scene order stops looking like a plot and starts looking like a drain. The win. The courtship. The shopping. The dinners. The collapse. Each episode is a transaction wearing the clothes of affection, and none of them reverses anything. Thea Eymèsz's cutting refuses to accelerate. Scenes are held as near-tableaux, long enough for a humiliation to finish happening in front of you, which is a different experience from watching one land. You are kept in the room.
What fills those held shots is what Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, calls the gest: a posture that makes a social relation visible. Not a feeling. A relation. Fassbinder's stage training shows here more than anywhere. He blocks Fox lower than the others, off-centre, outside the part of the frame the composition actually cares about, and directs the ensemble to stare with almost no affect at all. Nobody performs contempt. They perform seating arrangements, and the seating is the verdict. Peter Chatel delivers Eugen's cruelty in the register of good manners, which is why it never reads as villainy and never stops working.
Fox's body is doing something else. Deleuze's cinema of the body is about postures that carry duration rather than advance a story, and Fassbinder puts his own coarse, ungainly, wholly unvain body at the centre of it. The man was billed as a talking head. The film is about what the world does to the rest of him.
The frames themselves are closed sets in Deleuze's sense: compositions treated as systems, where everything included is information. Ballhaus makes the bourgeois interiors into vitrines, glass and polished surface, the people arranged among the objects like stock. One object carries the whole relation, which is Deleuze's narrow sense of a symbol: the apartment Fox pays for and decorates. He buys it, he furnishes it, and it is not his. It was never going to be his.
A caution, because a lens should have limits. Those mirrors are not crystal-images. Deleuze's crystal is a mirror where present and memory become impossible to tell apart. Nothing here is undecidable. The reflections simply multiply the room's contents and put Fox among them, priced. Everyone in the film knows exactly what is happening. Fox knows too, a little later than everyone else.
The friends of the title are the coldest joke in the film, and Deleuze has two names for it. The circle behaves as a dividual, a group filmed as one body with one appetite, absorbing and draining and discarding in unison and with lovely manners. And it makes concrete what he means when he says that in modern political cinema the people are missing, that the collectivity a film might speak for does not yet exist. In 1975, with liberation promising a community, Fassbinder said that class cuts through the minority exactly as it cuts through everything else, and that being despised by the same society buys you no solidarity at all. Then he cast himself as the one being eaten, so that the author's view and the character's sit inside a single body and you cannot finally tell which side of the transaction he thought he was on.
What this did to narrative: it kept Sirk's architecture and removed the payment. Melodrama normally settles up with you, in tears or justice or at minimum a swell of strings. The music here is sparing, the acoustic flat and exposing, the ending unredeemed. You watch analytically and are destroyed anyway. It is also among the earliest films to treat gay life as a social field organised by money rather than as scandal or pathos, which is a formal invention as much as a political one, because it lets a minority story be told with the tools of economic tragedy.
The debts are precise. All That Heaven Allows taught Fassbinder that furniture can pass judgement. Written on the Wind gave him the mirror-and-glass framing that turns people into decorative objects, which becomes Ballhaus's vitrine. Imitation of Life supplied the skeleton outright, a person used up by those they hoped to join, with money swapped in for race. Nearer to hand, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant proved that blocking alone could map dominance inside a single room, and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul pinned its lovers behind doorways and stairwells and taught the ensemble that flat stare. Fox takes the grammar outdoors, into shops and fairgrounds. Effi Briest rehearsed the same reflective, observational long take on a woman destroyed by a code she cannot read, which is Fox's condition exactly, except his code has prices on it.
Two threads run forward. Ballhaus carried this vocabulary to Hollywood and to Scorsese: the reframing camera, the surface that reflects, the room composed as a system. And the name. Franz Biberkopf is Döblin's doomed proletarian, and Fassbinder would later adapt Berlin Alexanderplatz at monumental length. Fox is the study for it, drawn at life size.
Watch it again for position. Where Fox is standing in each room, how far from the centre, how many objects the camera has set between him and you. The film finishes its argument long before the dialogue catches up, and its cruelty is that it never raises its voice to tell you.
Concepts in play
- impulse-image — Fox's 'desperation for love and affection' and the circle's appetite for his money drive a film with no reversals; the ensemble takes rather than exchanges, in the flat, affectless register Fassbinder directs.
- naturalism — The dossier names it outright: 'a modern naturalist tragedy in melodramatic dress,' with Franz Biberkopf borrowed from Döblin as the decent man ground down by a merciless social order.
- originary-world — The tasteful bourgeois interiors, not the fairground, are where predation is law: the original title Faustrecht der Freiheit ('the fist-right of freedom,' the law of the jungle) names the drawing room as the savage world.
- derived-milieu — Two material worlds are contrasted and staged as passage and expulsion: the cramped, gaudy fairground, bar and shabby flat against the expensive interiors of Eugen's class.
- entropy / degradation — The film progresses through discrete stages with no reversal — 'the win, the courtship, the shopping, the dinners, the collapse' — an innocent 'courted, elevated, systematically fleeced, and destroyed.'
- the-gest — Fassbinder 'repeatedly stages characters at social distances that encode power — Fox physically lower, off-center, or excluded from the composition's dominant space,' with the ensemble's stylized affectless mode turning emotional violence into social routine.
- attitudes & postures — Fassbinder plays Fox 'coarse, needy, physically ungainly, and utterly without vanity,' held in Eymèsz's measured, near-tableau cutting that lets humiliation accumulate in real time.
- the closed set (cadre) — Ballhaus frames Fox through doorways, banisters, shop windows and furniture, with foreground flowers and glassware pressing between viewer and characters, turning the apartments into vitrines.
- symbol — The apartment Fox pays for and decorates, along with the tailored clothes, car and antiques, functions as an instrument of class translation that ultimately rejects him.
- dividual — The affluent gay circle absorbs, drains and discards Fox as one unit, the supporting stock company performing in a uniform affectless mode.
- people-are-missing — The film insists 'against the grain of gay-liberation optimism' that homosexuality confers no exemption from capitalism's predations: the rich exploit the poor especially among the marginalized, so the 'friends' of the title are the community that does not exist.
- free-indirect-discourse-political — Fassbinder directs and plays Fox in one of the very few full leading roles he gave himself, lending the film an autobiographical charge so that author and exploited character occupy the same body.