Germany, 1975
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Stars: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Peter Chatel, Adrian Hoven
This is an uncelebrated and relatively ancient wonder written, directed and performed by everyone’s favorite cokehead leatherqueen, Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Fassbinder plays Franz Biberkopf, a chunky dimwit who works in a corrupt travelling circus playing sideshow attraction Fox the Talking Head, an act we unfortunately never get to see. Fox’s blue-collar sexuality wins him easy sex, and when he wins five hundred thousand marks in the lottery, he soon becomes the top attraction among a group of revolting bourgeois poofs who think he’s a complete turn on, and an easy-pickings money tree.
Blind to their motives, poor Fox thinks he’s found the life of his dreams, and goes along with his new friends’ every deception, lending massive sums of money left right and centre to prop up failing businesses, or purchase truckloads of hilariously ugly 70’s German clothes and furnishings. Every last mark is siphoned off by his crafty lover Eugen (Peter Chatel), who's pulled every legal string in the book and gets to keep the lot when Fox’s well runs dry. Tense and confused, Fox visits the doctor and gets given a bottle of Valium 5mg, which comes in handy later when Fox hits rock bottom.
So Fox And His Friends is ostensibly the familiar Fassbinder milieu. The lower classes think it’s only natural to climb into the middle class, but when they get there, find they’re more miserable than ever, and really nothing more than worker bees for the unquenchably materialistic bourgeoisie. Fox’s lottery win gives him admission to a moneyed world, where his money’s welcome, but he’s not. Once he’s out of cash he’s sent straight back where he came. He can’t fit back in there, so he’s left in a penniless, classless twilight zone, the mortal purgatory of the greedy modern world. It’s very like Ali: Fear Eats The Soul, made a year before , where a transgression of racial lines led to the permanent social displacement of lonely Emmi, who lost her way following her heart. (El Hedi ben Salem, who played Ali, plays a dignified Moroccan in Fox And His Friends, while Brigitte Mira, Emmi, pops up as a dark haired shopkeeper.)
Fassbinder’s perceptive focus on the rampant consumerism of the time, the shifting of class boundaries and resultant social tension is no new ground then, and as well, all looks a bit old fashioned. The real highlight of Fox And His Friends for viewers today is a classic, simple story, Fassbinder’s endearing performance, and a remarkable approach to gay content that is, so far, at least thirty years ahead of its time.
Multitasking superbly, Fassbinder imbues Fox with a mental simplicity but a wise heart. Fox is not at all fluent in social mores, but he does know the importance of laughter, and enjoys drinking, fucking and gambling more than almost anything else. Once he discovers that he’s been tricked by his own fate, he goes mad and kills himself, like a gay (proletarian) Oedipus Rex. Despite Fassbinder’s plain looks and pasty complexion, he makes Fox almost sexy, and the character’s vulnerability is affecting and endearing.
Fassbinder fills up his Sirk-ian melodrama with gay guys, but doesn't note the transposition. The first time we see Fox, in the film’s opening scene, he plants a moist tongue kiss on his lover, who’s being carted off by the police. Eugen’s parents don’t skip a beat over their son’s male partner, and a pair of US Army men are similarly blase - when a drunk Fox propositions them, they snap from asking him about whores and girls to wondering if he’s a good fuck in the bat of an eye.
Fassbinder presents being gay as something people are, rather than something that they do. His gay characters have the same flaws and problems that his straight characters do - to coin a p.c. buzzphrase, homosexuality “is simply not a issue”. Now isn’t that the aim of so many earnest but embarrassing pro-gay films (and the main drive of gay pride)?
Fox And His Friends is an ignored template for gay cinema and general gay culture, both of which have become hog tied by simplistic and counter-productive politicking and bellyaching.
