551 - Berlin Alexanderplatz, Part 12, Germany, 1980. Dir. Werner Rainer Fassbinder.
The Serpent in the Soul of the Serpent.
It is as if Mieze knows she is going to die, and she is resigned to it.
She is still with Franz.
Why?
In the last episode he tried to kill her, and now she wants to bathe him.
We might say she is codependently attached to him. Addicted.
Some of viewers may be done by now. This is an abusive relationship, and it is not pleasant to watch. One just wants Mieze to leave this world and this man and find a place where she can be safe and free. And yet she is a part of it. With her own baggage. All of the principal characters are part of it. A part of this misanthropic, contemptuous world.
Mieze wants to see the bar where Franz goes and the men he meets there. She wants to infiltrate every part of his life. He resists. He says, "I don't want you to mix with scum like that." The irony being that she is sitting there in his apartment with him. Mixing with him.
She responds, "Why not? If you can mix with them I can mix with them."
So he takes her to the bar and she meets the usual suspects--Maxie and Meck and Reinhold and Bruno and Pums--and it no longer seems the same to us. The light flares are there now as an obligation, but the whole place seems dark and pointless. The snowball has started rolling. The train has left the station. They have passed the point of no return. They are on a downhill slope to their final doom.
Meize has a conversation with Meck and Franz. Meck feels remorse to be seeing Franz after all that has happened. He knows he betrayed their friendship. Franz introduces them by saying, "He used to be my closest buddy." Meck lowers his head in shame.
Reinhold watches from across the room with disgust. "He is running around again, full of himself, and showing off with his woman. As if there were anything special about it. She was pretty revolting the other day, blubbering when Franz beat her."
Now that is cynical.
But then he continues, "But maybe I will take her away from him yet."
Reinhold and Franz started their relationship with Franz taking women off of Reinhold's hands. Now Reinhold wants to reverse it without Franz's knowledge, and in a hostile manner.
Reinhold conspires with Meck to steal Mieze from Franz. Meck does not want to do it, but Reinhold blackmails him by threatening to tell Pums where the missing mink coat went from last time. He wants something, and he is ruthless in getting what he wants.
Meck sits with Mieze while Franz goes to the restroom. He invites her to see him on Monday. She thinks he is being friendly.
On Monday morning as Mieze is getting ready to leave to go with Meck, Franz sits around moping. At first he refuses to talk to her. Then when he does he speaks nonsense. She tries to explain her point of view but ends up leaving him behind pouting in the apartment.
When Meck and Mieze arrive at the place, she sees Reinhold and immediately knows it was a set-up. She is not stupid. She castigates him and then makes the most of it. When Meck leaves she castigates Reinhold as well.
Reinhold and Mieze spend the rest of the episode walking in the woods. The same woods where Franz and Mieze walked when they were first in love. When we observed a shift in the color palette and the musical score and the tone of the film. Where they played hide-and-seek and he fell and she came to help him. In that moment of promise when the sun beams broke through the canopy and shone on them. Before the dusk descended and the dark enveloped them forever.
This time is different. It is a strange, perverse kind of wooing. One is not sure why Mieze goes along with it. She knows why Reinhold has called her here, why he tricked her into thinking it was Meck who invited her and then pulled a bait-and-switch. But she comes anyway. As if resigned to accept her lot. As if fate consists of the will of others. A life of passive and unceasing acquiescence.
The walk in the woods begins with their walking past a stone cross, looming large in the foreground.
Infusing the scene the irony.
Fassbinder may intend to portend death. A cold boulder gravestone blocking our view of the path.
But he also declares with or without intention that the hope of salvation is ever available, calling out, in the lives of these characters. Yet they walk past it unaware or unconcerned. Missing the very thing that will transform their lives forever.
Indeed, during the conversation Reinhold brings up The Salvation Army again, for the fourth episode in a row. Only this time he flips it and accuses Franz of trying to get him to go there and go to the sinners' bench. Reinhold does a lot of psychological projection in this scene, blaming everyone but himself, even ultimately accusing Mieze of luring him into the woods to pump information from him.
Reinhold has an anvil tattoed on his chest. When she asks him why, he says it is his coat of arms. "Because someone has to lie down on it."
The light flare sparkles in his eyes as much as it ever has, but it betrays the fact that there is no light in his eyes, no light in his soul, no life in him at all, and we wonder if anyone in this film has light or life inside him. Even Mieze, who has been sweet and tender and longsuffering, seems ultimately driven by a lack of self worth, a willingness to be a casualty to the exploitation of others. Even Eva herself, who has loved Franz through thick and then, seems to wander through life without direction or purpose.
Reinhold's wooing of Mieze is clumsy and unromantic, boorish and brutish.
Twice he stops himself. Pulls up short. He demands that she leave.
"Now beat it. I don't assault women. In all my life, I've never done that."
He may believe what he is saying, but his standards are significantly lower than most of society's. For many people, he may be assaulting her as he is saying it.
The two verbally abuse one another. He calls her a "cripple's whore." She calls him a "dirty little swine."
They move back and forth, each acting as if he is going to leave but then returning, each moving towards the other sexually but then pulling back, each fighting the other, physically, verbally, and emotionally.
He reveals to her that he is the one responsible for pushing Franz out of the truck and causing him to lose his arm. He admits that the goal was to kill him, to have him get run over by the car driving behind them. She loses her temper. Screams. Attacks him. Calls him a murderer. He accuses her of luring him here.
The whole scene is long and steadily paced and difficult. It is unromantic and abusive. It is equally misanthropic and misogynistic.
It presents a world that is without hope, with a low view of humanity, with a denial of the existence of grace.
It showcases the world described by Ephesians 2:12. People who are strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world.
While all the while it is being offered to them freely. As they walk past it, choosing rather to indulge in masochistic heartache and self-imposed sorrow.
Reinhold and Mieze do not love themselves enough to protect their own hearts. As is the case with most of the people in their circles.
He leaves her in her torn skirts, alone on the forest floor, lying in the dead leaves.
In the rot.
And the decay.
* * * *
She just had to see your joint one time before she dies.
Franz is a good guy. Despite having messed up so much in his life, basically he is a good guy.
Thanks for the bouquet. Even if they are not true, I have a soft spot for compliments.
Afterwards, we can take a stroll in the woods if you like. We can chat a bit and walk. It is lovely out here in the woods.
I've been here with Franz. We love going for walks out here.
Right now I feel wise, like a preacher or a politician or something.
Do you really have to resort to stupid tricks, Mr. Reinhold?
You never know ahed of time
With me, Mr. Reinhold, you don't need any tricks. You can talk straight with me.
To every thing there is a season
A time to be born and a time to die
To evertyhing there is a season
A time to kill and a time to heal
A time to rend and a time to sow
For evertything there is a season
There's nothing finer under the sun than laughing
It is dangerous to walk too long without speaking.
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