November 4, 1974 [Ali: Fear Eats the Soul/Angst essen Seele auf]

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant was extravagant—almost decorative in its excesses—no: more like a sculpture made from sharp objects still moving. But Fassbinder's chisel strikes All That Heaven Allows with heavy strokes, foregoing the softer blows of Sirk's Technicolor and Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman. Fassbinder replaces Rock's reassuringly manly gardener with a stolid anxious Moroccan, pot-bellied and unblinking—but also sort of a catch, muscled and affectionate. And Jane Wyman's eager-for-love, well-to-do suburbanite becomes a puffy cleaning woman, Emmi—yes as sweet and lost as Wyman, but also blotchy and stiff. And what happens when I accept their love as much as I accept their blocky, assertive normality? The movie invites me to see them more clearly, and the fear that runs beneath. 

 As the hammer continues to do its work, more re-shapes emerge: Wyman's upper-crust coterie becomes Emmi's fellow charwomen—but still they keep their noses upturned as high and sure as Jane Wyman's cocktail set. And Emmi's children gape at Ali as though he had two heads (or horns?), and then, remarkably re-inventing All that Heaven Allows's Merry-Christmas scene, the TV replacing Rock (Wyman’s stricken face reflected in its blank gaze, like the wife in The Fly confronting her new husband), the son deliberately kicks in Emmi's TV set—only to later bring her a new one, as part of a sequence that goes beyond Sirk into a more sober view of the weight of conformity and the mercenary heart of prejudice. And just as Emmi and Ali return into favor with the world (after all, there's work to do and babies to sit for, and Ali can haul stuff around like a circus strongman), they feel a rift between each other, widened by race. He is driven to plodding adultery—abetted in part by Emmi herself, who also begins to allow the world's prejudices to seep in. She makes minor but telling comments about his "foreignness," and, in a quietly painful scene, even invites her friends to feel his muscles, as though he were a an oddly appealing pack animal. Ali collapses—like Rock Hudson's sudden tumble down the mountain—from stress, the pain of racism simultaneously made physical and internalized as ulcers, literally eating at him. The film ends like Sirk's, with Emmi standing over her man, determined to help him—but fearful that the pain will not go away. And the movie respectfully steps aside so that we can taste the fear that draws them apart, the pain bright and sharp, the room quiet.