{"id":2867,"date":"2023-07-11T16:35:32","date_gmt":"2023-07-11T20:35:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jappersandjanglers\/?p=2867"},"modified":"2023-07-11T16:41:54","modified_gmt":"2023-07-11T20:41:54","slug":"clown-car-gladio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jappersandjanglers\/2023\/07\/clown-car-gladio\/","title":{"rendered":"Clown Car Gladio"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a>
Fassbinder and Hannah Schygulla looking cool and clownish.
Source: Wikimedia<\/a>
Creative Commons License<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

A recent book review<\/a> asks: \u201cThere are Herzog memes, but no Fassbinder memes. Why is that?\u201d The answer, I think, lies in the scowling, gleeful sardonicism of his movies. His work is always prophetic, topical, and utterly alien. Form and content coil around each other, comingling even as they snap at each other\u2019s underbellies. Inevitably, they turn on themselves too. All is soon strangled. Even more-straightforward works like Ali: Fear Eats the Soul<\/em> (1974) and Eight Hours Don\u2019t Make a Day <\/em>(1972) befuddle otherwise typical subject matter. In the latter, for example, workers win a labor dispute at their factory only to realize that, in a way, they\u2019ve made themselves do the bidding of their masters.<\/p>\n

Nowhere is this melodramatic Verfremdungseffekt <\/em>clearer than in 1979\u2019s The Third Generation<\/em>, a film about an ineffectual cadre of Marxist terrorists who spend most of their time arguing, bullying, and carrying out what today we\u2019d call \u201ce-mail jobs.\u201d Susanne Gast (Hannah Schygulla) is secretary to P.J. Lurz (Eddie Constantine), a wealthy businessman in the computer industry. Petra Vielhaber (Margit Carstensen) teaches high-school history and meets her radical students\u2019 questions with mealy-mouthed declarations of scholastic objectivity. The group\u2019s leader is August (Volker Spengler), a fugitive who runs from apartment to apartment, imposing himself and giving directions. Their plan seems to be some kind of robbery or kidnapping; they even bring in a gunman, Paul (Ra\u00fal Gimenez), who doesn\u2019t do much but domestically abuse Petra. In their off time, they play Monopoly.\u00a0 Everyone rushes everywhere and nothing happens.<\/p>\n

Matters are even worse than they seem. August, their leader, is actually in cahoots with Mr. Lurz, who seems to be encouraging terrorist activity to boost sales of surveillance technology. We glean this early on when, assigned a police escort, Lurz and an officer joke about corporate leaders creating terrorism to drive up profits. The truth, however, only comes out when August, clad as a woman, arrives at his boss\u2019 office, looking for money to kidnap the boss himself. Lurz hands it over, financing his own abduction. The cadre, of course, succeeds, dressing as (literal) clowns for the occasion. \u201cPatty Heart heard the burst of Roland\u2019s Thompson gun and bought it!\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

We close on Lurz, surrounded by annoyed terrorists trying to get the lighting and sound just-so for a ransom video, repeating the same message over and over again. He seems entirely unperturbed, even happy. I wonder why?<\/p>\n

That all sounds, I suppose, like a tight, if goofy political thriller. It is not. The film cannot bear silence, with radios, TVs, songs, singing, talking, and more often overlaid to the point that it all begins to feel a bit like an MK Ultra experiment. Fassbinder\u2019s camera is cold and distant, even though the action is often quite funny. So, for example, we get a scene of long shot of a game of keep-away, the cadre tossing around a book by Bakunin, reading its heterodox prose and giggling as they stiff arm the text\u2019s owner and maintain him at arm\u2019s length. No one ever interacts with an actual worker of any kind. Each section is prefaced by quotations of bathroom graffiti from around Berlin. Topics include a submissive man looking for a master, a back-and-forth about foreigners and Nazism, and bragging about sexual prowess. The team\u2019s code word, so that they know the operation is about to start, is \u201cThe World as Will and Representation<\/em>.\u201d One member asks his far-right grandfather if he knows what that means. Answer: something old nihilists used to say before the wars. Every generation needs a war.<\/p>\n

Fassbinder\u2019s war, it seems, was on his society then and ours now. He understood, based on this movie anyway, programs like Gladio before they were even made public. His alienated camerawork and constant din suggest a world dominated by screens, mediated always by inescapable groupthink and ironies invisible to those too deep in the game. At the same time, he doesn\u2019t stake out some other political position here or in his other movies. His cynicism runs deep, but emerges from romantic sentiment, a defeated hope staggering on. I find that position appealing, sure. But it all seems a bit ruthless for memes, even by Herzogian standards.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A recent book review asks: \u201cThere are Herzog memes, but no Fassbinder memes. Why is that?\u201d The answer, I think, lies in the scowling, gleeful sardonicism of his movies. His work is always prophetic, topical, and utterly alien. Form and content coil around each other, comingling even as they snap at each other\u2019s underbellies. Inevitably, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2640,"featured_media":2870,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1731],"tags":[1772,1793,203,3836,3833,1769],"class_list":["post-2867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","tag-black-comedy","tag-fassbinder","tag-germany","tag-leftist","tag-political-thriller","tag-satire"],"yoast_head":"\nClown Car Gladio<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A recent book review asks: \u201cThere are Herzog memes, but no Fassbinder memes. 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