AFTER HIS UNTIMELY DEATH IN 1982, AN ENTIRE MICROECONOMY OF GERMAN FILMMAKING COLLAPSED OVERNIGHT
Fox and His Friends (1975) is a tragic drama by Rainer Werner Fassbinder about a working-class man who wins the lottery, only to be exploited and destroyed by his bourgeois lover and his circle of friends
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
First things first: the title is meant to be ironic. Fassbinder’s companion piece to “Bitter Tears,” made three years previously, reverses the social dynamics of that film. Here, Fassbinder casts himself against type as Fox, a working-class gay man who unexpectedly wins the lottery. Suddenly welcomed into an affluent gay social circle by an older sophisticate (Karlheinz Böhm, who starred in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom in 1960), Fox falls in love with the cultivated Eugen (Peter Chatel), whose financially troubled bourgeois family proceeds to relieve him of his newfound fortune. Fox believes his wealth has purchased him entry into a world of love, sophistication, and social acceptance, only to discover that love and acceptance are precisely what is being sold to him
This is one of Fassbinder’s cruelest and most emotionally devastating films, yet, paradoxically, also one of his funniest. What initially appears to be a doomed gay romance gradually reveals itself as a merciless study in class exploitation. Fox has money but lacks the cultural vocabulary, manners, education and social confidence of the bourgeois world he longs to enter. Eugene possesses all these things but desperately needs Fox’s capital. Their relationship becomes a transaction in which economic exploitation masquerades as refinement, affection and even love. The Tragedy is that Fox, for all his naivety, genuinely loves Eugen, while Eugen regards Fox as someone to be improved, patronized and ultimately discarded.
A fascinating portrait of gay life in the 1970s, the film is particularly remarkable for its refusal to romanticize the gay community as a sanctuary from the prejudices and cruelties of heterosexual society. Fassbinder recognizes that gay men are perfectly capable of reproducing the same hierarchies of class, taste, respectability, privilege, and exploitation that govern the wider world. Indeed, sometimes we do it even more ruthlessly. We, queers, can be such dreadful snobs.
Perhaps the film’s most radical achievement is that homosexuality itself is never presented as the problem. The characters’ sexuality is simply taken for granted. Fassbinder neither condemns nor celebrates them for being gay; he judges them by their behavior, their values, and, above all, their capacity for cruelty. The result is not merely a great gay film but a devastating examination of the human tendency to confuse money with worth, sophistication with superiority, and possession with love.
Fox is one of a half-dozen great movies Fassbinder wrote and directed in the decade leading up to his premature death.
The name of Fassbinder’s character was taken from Alfred Doblin’s 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, which the director later adapted for television.
Fox was photographed by the great German cinematographer Michael Ballhaus before he immigrated to the United States.
