James Pate
The Fassbinder Diaries
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Seven Corners for publishing the following pieces (some in a highly different earlier versions): “Extraction #1,” “The Fassbinder Diaries: Day 27,” “The Fassbinder Diaries: Day 733,” “Imperial Tangos #1,” “Imperial Tangos #2,” and Imperial Tangos #3.”
I would also like to thank Action Yes for publishing an early version of “Exhibit B:” and Everyday Genius for publishing “Pig Beach.”
The Fassbinder Diaries
But hate is a passion
and that’s near to love anyway.
Part One. The Ascension of Veronika Voss
Warm Dark and Dark Cold
The first scenes are silent. The footage is grainy, as if the world being shown has gone through a storm of broken glass shards. As if the air has been delicately mangled. There are figures on the ground, squirming, and it is impossible to tell if they are outside or inside. They could be in an abandoned factory or in a very spacious bedroom or in the middle of a meadow in the middle of the night. We are watching them in the dark. I mean we’re in the dark ourselves. Dust floats in the light from the projector. It is a warm dark. Outside, there is a cold dark.
The figures squirm as if they were trying to wrest free from their shadows. There is mud and white streaming rivulets. There is grain in the abandoned spaces and white streaming light dripping from the middles.
The director has arranged the scene on two levels: there are things that blink and things that remain still. The light blinks and the mouths of the figures blink and some of the limbs blink back and forth out of the dark areas of the scene into the lighter areas. But some mouths seem to be crusted over. And all of the eyes are crusted over. Or maybe they aren’t crusted over. Maybe the figures never had eyes. Maybe only a few had mouths.
The entire factory or bedroom or meadow dripping light from its lips. Or maybe delicate drops of acid have eaten the scene. There are figures on the ground, silently squirming. But it’s impossible to tell if they are silent because they are silent or if they are silent because this is a silent film. We are watching them in the dark. It is a black-and-white dark. Outside, it is a black-and-white dark.
The Ecstasy of Mama Roma
One night Franz and Mieze are watching a black-and-white Pasolini film. It is the movie where the mother is a prostitute and the son is a young criminal who eventually dies in jail in the shape of Christ. Not that he is crucified. But the director has made him look crucified. His arms are out and his face is a slice of bronze reflecting a distant light.
Mieze after the movie says ____, and Franz after the movie replies ____. The curtains are closed. The curtains are the color of blood cells.
And later that night they are in bed, Franz with a beer resting on his stomach, his head on the pillow, his eyes on the ceiling, Mieze on the edge of the bed polishing one of her boots, she is whistling, he is trying to figure out what song it is, it sounds familiar, but he can’t, no he can’t figure out the tune, and he doesn’t ask her. Mieze looks up at Franz and thinks about the last scene of the film, the way the film suddenly goes blank, suddenly goes white, it made her think of that line by Percy Bysshe Shelley, the one about the bright singular white light of eternity, something like that, something along those lines, she can’t remember precisely.
A window in Berlin. A train in Chicago inching toward at a halt. A thread of black smoke rising in a certain scene in Memphis. Toward numerous night skies.
Return of the Holy Beasts
I was watching the film about the Catholic school, a French film with atrocious subtitles. I was twelve and in the living room of an otherwise empty house.
I was of a certain age. I had recently turned a certain age. There were dripping noises inside one part of my head and red thoughts inside the other. There was salt in my mouth I couldn’t spit out. There was sand in my head I couldn’t brush away. The curtains were closed. The carpet was pink. The lights were out. The wallpaper was yellow.
In the movie the fierce nun spanks the demure student. Or maybe that’s the Japanese movie, the one where the evil old nuns make the pretty young nun take off her blouse. Where the fierce older nuns then tie a crown of thorns around her torso. The School of the Holy Beasts. A film I saw in Chicago, in a theater where I had snuck in Vietnamese sandwiches.
I was twelve or twenty-two. In one dark room or a later one. The Japanese nun hiking through the French woods. The French boy jerking-off under a blossoming cherry tree.
Having arrived at the age where a fine violet shade lingered in my head. Where I imagined other shades in other heads. Nights heavy as damp sand and nights light as drifting sand. The scene in the French film where the shivering rain-soaked girl finds the Nazi flag in her father’s drawer. The taste of pork and cilantro in the silent and serious and ever alert theater.
And the curtains remained closed. And the stand of the lamp remained orange and curved. And the chair containing myself continued to be crimson and heavily stuffed. And the wallpaper even in the dimness consisted of yellow flowers from which countless animals stared.
Retroactive Nights
Could it have ever been resolved retroactively? Not very easily. So we went to Naples. It was fun and tiring and boring and scary and hot and noisy and occasionally windy and perpetually dusty. We temporarily had some money because of X, not much, but enough for two maybe three weeks. When the sun fell it kept falling. When night arrived it kept arriving. That was how things played out there. Or that was my thinking at the time. The men were scraps of wind with red dots inside. The women were noises emitted from a crisp red light. Could it have ever been resolved retroactively? Not very easily. So we grew hot and noisy and our heads turned windy, a breeze hazy with dust. There was a man begging by the train station. He looked like Jesus, had Jesus been fat. Dante stood in the middle of a piazza with trash at his feet and graffiti on the shops around him. We had coffee across the street, under the palm trees. One of us wondered how many people had been killed in Pompeii. None of us knew the answer. It was fun and boring and tiring and scary, like red lights, and then purple lights. Our heads sizzled fatly in the sun. Could it have ever been resolved retroactively? No, not very easily. So I had dreams that turned me inside out, dreams that tended toward red fields, and then purple valleys, toward thighs the color of tongue, dreams that left me gasping for more much as I feared them, dreams inside of red rooms, dreams behind purple curtains. I was a red fish, with a purple spear in my throat. In Naples we played games. We played games with our fingers and our eyes and our knees. We played devil games and coma games and surgical glove games. We played inferno games and trash games and windy games and dusty games. Could it have ever been resolved retroactively? Not so very easily. Our money continued with a commentary of its own. With a politics of its own. This season of rash investments and ashen expenditures. The higher bills we thought of as X and the lower ones as Y. The taste and therefore vomit of money. So we played with the devil’s hand. We played with the devil’s palm. We shaved the devil’s hair. We saw the porn film with seven devils and nine birds on the small TV in our hostel room. We watched the devil’s mouth blink. We watched the devil’s cock piss. We watched the devil’s cunt piss. We watched the devil’s thighs quiver. Could it have ever been resolved retroactively? Not easily. Or that was my thinking at the time. The sun continued to fall behind us, leaving our cold fat in the dark. Our investment sizzled into ash. Most of the shadows stood with their doors open, a fine pink dust blowing through.