In Fassbinder's film Martha, there is no redemption, no hope, no prospects. Martha visits Rome with her father. Her father is an asshole. He dies on the Spanish steps - this is the beginning of an odyssey of gruesome humour (or whatever one wants to call it) and Fassbinder's twisted sense of melodrama. He takes us to the dark & rotten heart of heterosexuality. There is nothing to be found there, except violence, degradation and pain.
Martha "finds love" in Helmut (I kept thinking of a particular Swedish author and couldn't stop seeing him in Helmut). The introductory scene of their encounter is a promise of romance. They glance each other, while the camera goes round and round, capturing the moment of exhilaration. Then they don't see each other for a while. They meet again, marry, and everything is instantaneously fucked up. We see them riding a rollercoaster together. Martha is scared shitless, while Helmut's face is glimmering with self-satisfaction. The lights are glaring. It is a perfect scene that sets the mood for the rest of the film, its baroque gloom.
Helmut and Martha are puppets in a violent play of the subordinated female and the violent, consuming male who wants his woman to submit to him - in an absolute sense. Do they desire each other? There is no room for desire here. In a telling scene Martha is sun-bathing. Helmut has prohibited the use of sun-oil. She falls asleep and wakes up with burning skin. This is the only point at which we see real excitement in Helmut. Her pain and disorientation turns him on. In this scene, there is Helmut and there is Female, subjugated Body (Helmut is, of course, wearing a suit).
Helmut manipulates Martha's life. She is forced to quit her job. She is imprisoned in their home which is the art of bric-a-brac through and through. Helmut, who is of course an engineer (the engineer epitomizes something, for sure) wants her to read a book. It is a book about dam constructions. She reads it after some violent persuasion. With a voice full of resignation and bitterness, she quotes some passages from the book, sitting back-to-back on the couch with her husband. It is a powerful, yet funny, scene.
After watching the film, I had a conversation with my friends about whether the film was "exaggerated" or too stylized. Personally, I wouldn't say it was. Or: it was stylized for sure, and the distancing effects are intentional, but this only helps bring home the point. The brilliance of the film consists in its lack of comforting elements. But doesn't that make it lose something in terms of realism? That depends on what kind of "realism" you look for. Like Jelinek, Fassbinder strips heterosexual violence down to its bare, naked bones, where what we see is strange and commonplace at the same time. We recognize the patterns - but Fassbinder shows how the relation between Helmut and Martha is also unsettling because it is so far removed from emotions, contact and openness. Here we have MAN WANTS WOMAN! in its brutal form.
There are hints of awareness on Martha's part, but these are only hazy hints and she's got a whole world that does not understand her (there are also hints of understanding in the relationship with a co-worker, but Fassbinder does not leave open the door to Happy Heterosexual Love in this movie). The heterosexual woman is a masochist, and the heterosexual man is a sadist who wants his lover to die. Fassbinder himself apparently said that he wanted to show that marriage is a sadomassocistic institution. The heterosexual lovers lose their sense of reality and what they gain is mutual paranoia, something that is emphasized towards the end of the film as fantasy and reality are increasingly blurred. As I understand the film, there is nothing to be understood in the relation between Martha and Helmut. Fassbinder is not dealing with psychological masochism or sadism. We are confronted with a condition of society, in which questions about "willing submission", "force" and "violence" are on a par. In this society, we become interchangeable Men and Women. There is no room for desire, or love, in this place.
The actors are fabulous. They are puppets because that's what life has made them. Their faces are like grotesque masks (the atmosphere of the film is sometimes that of a horror movie). But although we have these alienating aspects of the film - the humor, the melodrama, the colors - the strange thing is that we are still bothered by the fact that Martha and Helmut are people. Fassbinder analyzes the absurd world of heterosexuality in which there is Man and Woman and that is that, end of story.
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