Sally O'Rourke
Essays
The Melodrama as Critique of Racism and Capitalism in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
Filmmakers have used cinema to delineate their political and social visions almost since the medium was invented. During and after the First World War, the American film industry benefited from European nations too distracted and cash-poor to devote much interest to producing movies. Although Germany had served as a major film center before the war, Hollywood productions nearly dominated cinemas throughout North America and Europe. To compete with these American films, European cinema became more overtly artistic and political to a degree Hollywood could not match until the collapses of the studio system and the Hays Code of censorship in the 1960s. West German cinema simultaneously became influenced by the genres of American films and strove to create a viable alternative to the popular, easily-digested entertainment of Hollywood. Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1974 film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst Essen Seele Auf) demonstrates this combination of 1950s-style Hollywood melodrama with a critique of German racism and capitalism after the post-World War II Wirtschaftswunder.
The plot of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul concerns a 60-something German cleaner, Emmi, who stops in an unfamiliar bar to avoid the rain. Ali, a much younger Moroccan immigrant worker and regular at the bar, accepts a dare from his friends to dance with Emmi. The couple discovers a mutual sense of loneliness, and end up retiring to Emmis apartment. Ali moves in with Emmi, who is accused by the landlord's son of breaking her lease by housing a paid lodger. Thinking quickly, Emmi declares that she and Ali are getting married, which the landlord's son accepts. Ali then agrees to marry Emmi, and they have a quick court wedding. They soon find their intercultural relationship treated with nothing but scorn and derision. Emmi's children abandon her, and her fellow cleaners ignore her. Frustrated, Emmi begs Ali to go on vacation with her to escape all the stares and bad treatment. On their return, the attitudes of their former tormentors reverse instantly: her children ask her to baby-sit, her coworkers include her in their lunchtime conversations, and their neighbors, admiring Ali's strength, ask for his help in moving their belongings into the couple's spare basement space. However, this acceptance somehow drives Emmi and Ali apart. She begins showing him off to her friends like an animal, and he starts an affair with the barmaid at his former hangout. One night, Emmi finds Ali in the old bar, where they dance and forgive each other for the bad things each had done. However, Ali suddenly collapses and is taken to the hospital, where the doctor reveals he suffers from a potentially fatal stomach ulcer.
Fassbinder's use of melodrama in Ali, a genre typically considered to be women's films or escapist entertainment, may seem an unusual decision for making a political statement about 1970s Germany. However, Thomas Elsaesser explains that the melodrama is a more complex genre than commonly believed:
The melodrama, at its most accomplished, seems capable of reproducing more directly than other genres the patterns of domination and exploitation existing in a given society, especially the relation between psychology, morality and class consciousness, by emphasizing so clearly an emotional dynamic whose social correlative is a network of external forces directed oppressingly inward, and with which the characters themselves collide unwittingly to become their agents. (quoted in Mayne, 1977, p.67)
Melodrama's often-criticized artificiality stems from a need to visually lay out the two sides of a psychological conflict (Gemünden, 1994, pp.70-75). The relationship between Emmi and Ali, and their innocence and transcendence of social barriers, represents the Good side of the conflict, while the racist and economic obstacles thrown in their path by outsiders define the Evil half of the debate (Mayne, 1977, pp.66-67). In addition, Fassbinder once commented that "[f]ilms from the brain are all right, but if they don't reach the audience, it's no good" (Gemünden, 1994, p.69).
However, Fassbinder also subverts the genre in two key areas. The first involves the persistent use of estrangement techniques, such as framing shots within a doorway or having characters look directly into the camera (Ruppert, 1981, p.23). These actions serve to jolt viewers from their position as voyeurs and to remind the audience that they are watching an allegory, not a realistic movie. The ending of Ali also departs from standard melodramatic form by not providing a closed ending (Ruppert, 1981, p.23). The film ends without the audience knowing if or when Ali's stomach ulcer will kill him, and whether Ali and Emmi will continue to live happily together. Peter Ruppert writes that
instead of ending with the anticipated melodramatic solution - a utopian resolution of the social and personal tension the film has set up - Fassbinder shifts our attention to the ongoing problems of migrant workers, making it clear in the process how personal happiness intersects with social and economic factors. (1989, p.44)
By doing so, Fassbinder forces his audience to recognize the sociopolitical messages apparent not only in Ali but in melodramas in general, especially those by German émigré Douglas Sirk, whose film All That Heaven Allows inspired Ali (Gemünden, 1994, p.75).
The more overt of the two major social criticisms present in Ali concerns the German people's attitudes toward foreign workers. Throughout the film, Fassbinder shows the negative treatment that the couple faces, whether it is being stared at, ignored or shunned. Emmi's son-in-law complains that foreign workers steal German's jobs, while her neighbors pretend to be worried that Ali is taking advantage of her. The neighborhood grocer refuses to serve Ali and bans the couple from his store. However, the couple sticks together despite (or perhaps because of) the antagonism of the outsiders. As Gerd Gemünden writes, "The unconventional sexual longing typical of melodrama is, for a brief moment, celebrated as the possibility of soaring above the limits imposed by society" (1994, p.75). Emmi, at first hesitant about marrying Ali, questions her coworkers about their opinions of foreign workers. Because they only respond with stereotypes that Emmi knows do not apply to her future husband, she easily dismisses any doubts she has about their marriage (Reimer, 1996, p.286). However, even Emmi eventually falls prey to the ubiquitous German cultural attitudes about foreigners. When Emmi and Ali return from their vacation, Emmi brings her coworkers over to meet her husband. She shows off his muscles, informs them of his good hygiene and, when he gets upset at this objectifying treatment, apologizes for his foreign mentality (Mayne, 1977, p.63). By showing that even a normally unprejudiced person such as Emmi can engage in racist behavior, Fassbinder demonstrates how the attitudes of a whole culture, and the fear of being ostracized from this culture, can eat the soul of a person.
The less obvious, but perhaps more important, theme of the film is how uncontrolled capitalism can also eat a person's soul. Emmi's family, coworkers and neighbors eventually reaccept the couple, but only when it is personally convenient (Mayne, 1977, p.71). By embracing the couple and treating Ali as a human being, the outsiders seem to be doing the right thing. However, their reasons for making the change are the wrong ones: they exchange their personal beliefs for economic benefits. Emmi's daughter needs free child care, her neighbors need free movers and extra basement space, and the corner shopkeeper needs their business. Fassbinder would later repeat this criticism of the German shift from social concern to economic preoccupation, which ignited the Wirtschaftswunder, in his later film, The Marriage of Maria Braun.
Emmi and Ali also symbolize the treatment of Germany's marginalized underclass (Reimer, 1996, p.282). Emmi, as cleaner, and Ali, as foreign mechanic, exist at the bottom rung of the economic ladder as German society's labor force. When their family and friends shun them, it echoes how German society excludes the working class from German culture while still relying on the workers for the economy to function (Mayne, 1977, p.71). Fassbinder's criticism of German economic behavior culminates in Ali's collapse and illness at the film's end. The doctor informs Emmi that her husband developed an ulcer from the stress of being an immigrant worker. The film implies that the stress not only stems from the intense amounts of labor immigrant workers must perform to earn a living wage, but also from their internalization of the racist messages and attitudes that they confront daily (Gemünden, 1994, p.69). The doctor also advises Emmi that nothing can cure Ali permanently. Because he is lower class and an immigrant, he is tied to working the same menial, stressful jobs until his ulcer ultimately perforates and kills him. The doctor's comment ties in with Fassbinder's message that the members of the lower class in West Germany serve only to be exploited from the day they start working till the day they die and can work no more.
Fassbinder uses Ali to illustrate both the ethnic prejudice and the economic drive to symbolize the state of German society in the years after World War II. His criticism is brutal: this is a society that will treat its underclass like trash, and will only stop if its profits start slipping. Emmi and Ali, and their real-life counterparts, cannot escape from the social class to which they are tied, even if staying means certain death. However, Fassbinder presents no obvious alternatives to how West Germany could function otherwise. As a result, the film takes on an even greater level of bleakness: Germany's underclass will be abused and exploited, and that is how it will always continue to be.
Works Cited
Gemünden, Gerd (1994). “Re-Fusing Brecht: The Cultural Politics of Fassbinder’s German Hollywood.” New German Critique, 63 (Autumn), 54-75.
Mayne, Judith (1977). “Fassbinder and Spectatorship.” New German Critique, 12 (Autumn), 61-74.
Reimer, Robert C. (1996). “Comparison of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows and R.W. Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul: Or, How Hollywood’s New England Dropouts Became Germany’s Marginalized Other.” Literature Film Quarterly, 24 (3), 281-287.
Ruppert, Peter (1981). “Applying Reader-Response Analysis in Literature and Film Class.” Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German, 14 (1), 20-26.
_____ (1989). “Fassbinder, Spectatorship and Utopian Desire.” Cinema Journal, 28 (2), 28-47.
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