INSATIABLE AFFECT
[Fassbinder] deployed filmic means to create a very specific form of "historical" memory, among which his use of melodrama and violent juxtaposition of contrasts, sentimental pop songs and improbable coincidences have a strategically important place. Thus, the "effects of melodrama, sentimentality and prurience" form a part of Fassbinder's aesthetic and moral universe, prompting the question of whether they do not in his work constitute "limits" which any discussion of representation may have to confront, including one that wants to approach German Fascism, Auschwitz, and the relationship between Germans and Jews. For what terms such as melodrama signify, however much they may be coloured by negative judgements of taste and decorum, is an affectivity, and therefore an aspect of subjectivity crucial not just to the cinema. These emotions, one could argue, ought to legitimately belong to any engagement with matters of life and death, on the part of those to whom history has given the role of readers or spectators [and auditors], but also for those who are charged with passing on compassion and preserving memory.[65]
This extended passage comes from Thomas Elsaesser's 1996 Fassbinder's Germany, his swan-song study of the director whose passing fourteen years prior had critics ringing the death knell of the movement at large. Wolfram Schütte's famous obituary used somatic terms that effectively transformed a disperse movement into a single body—mimicking how melodramas were being read as "body-texts" at the time:
Alexander Kluge would be its synthesising intelligence, Werner Herzog its athletic will, Wim Wenders its phenomenological power of perception.
― 64 ―Werner Schroeter emphatically underscores its emotional side, Herbert Achternbusch is its rebellious stubbornness, and Volker Schlöndorff its craftsman. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, however, would be the heart, the beating, vibrant centre of all these partial impulses, these different aggregate states of its energy. … He was the pounding heart. Now it has been stopped.[66]
The publication of Elsaesser's book coincided with what was basically the death of melodrama as a hot object of study in cinema studies. There as well the topic seemed to have run its course. Folks had had their say; some seemed embarrassed for their indulgent "readings against the grain," for having espoused radical politics, for failing to consider melodramatic traditions outside North Atlantic cultures, and for downplaying historical and institutional contexts. For whatever reasons, melodrama had suddenly become as unfashionable as the New German Cinema.[67] In view of that shift, Elsaesser's assertion that Fassbinder's cinematic world view was "essentially melodramatic" is striking.[68]
As his earlier reference to proper decorum reveals, critics closely scrutinize cinematic style when the topic of an appropriate means of representing and addressing the past is raised, particularly when the past is Germany's. Affect and emotions play large roles in these debates, particularly when the supposedly more "tasteless" forms and styles of melodrama, hysteria, and kitsch are involved. This is not the kind of emotion that comes from identifying with characters, but rather the kind that arises from the melancholic strategies that simultaneously encourage and deny our affective responses. As Elsaesser argues, they show that even at their most unruly and distasteful, emotions and desire instigate our involvement with our memories and with those of other people. Since these desires, and the pasts with which they are involved, do not go away (for desire always exceeds its object), objects are all that's left to work with. Hence Fassbinder's admiration for making films "about things, not people" is a bit misleading, since it is only through "things" that people are made.
Psychoanalytic theorists of film spectatorship in the 1970s and 1980s did not put emotion and affect on the table for discussion. Surprisingly, this also characterized melodrama scholarship of the time. Ever the good modernist soldiers, academics distrusted people's emotional connections to film texts, arguing that emotional involvement meant depreciated analytical abilities, and a lack of critical "distance." To this day, melodrama's affective features, as well as those of cinema more generally, remain undertheorized.[69] The relationship between emotions and bodies is significant here for, as Linda Williams observes, emotionalism is often associated with the
Melodrama is set clearly apart from tragedy through its dependence on the sensation of shock—and on shock to induce sensation per se. In tragedy all the reversals and catastrophes grow logically out of the original dramatic material. In melodrama, however, they arrive unexpectedly: Disaster is not precipitated by profoundly rooted character traits … or the deep structures of reality [e.g., myth] but by purely fortuitous events. … If tragic events unfold with the appearance of inevitability, the accidental nature of melodramatic occurrences implies that things could always have been different. … It torments one with an excruciating sense of "if only this had not happened."[71]
Somatic though it may be, the sensation Coates describes is tied up with feelings more than anything else. That is what produces the "excruciating sense of ‘if only this had not happened.’ " Like most scholars of the New German Cinema, Coates does not idealize these hypothetical possibilities, for alternatives do not necessarily point to better or even desirable conditions. Indeed, the movement is renowned for constituting alternatives out of the very systems that oppress, as with the exploitative gay subculture of Fox and His Friends or the female pirates who adulate their tyrannical leader in Madame X. Ultimately the drive to find utopian "elsewhereness" is intensified because the New German Cinema produces few depictions of it. I believe that this is true for melodrama as well, as it searches for its utopias-that-never-could-have-been. As Gilberto Perez remarks apropos of Ophuls's Letter from an Unknown Woman, Joan Fontaine plays "a woman in love with an illusion that no reality can dispel."[72] But where Ophuls uses tragedy to expose the danger of that belief, Fassbinder does the same thing in The Marriage of Maria Braun through irony.
It should be noted that refusing to depict solutions is not the same thing as refusing their importance. As Coates states, "One of the consequences of melodrama's inevitability is its potential endlessness." When he goes on to note that "melodrama's form is dictated by insatiability,"[73] he reveals how close melodrama is to melancholia, whose personages are also dominated by the desire for things to have "happened differently." That desire is punched up all the more since it refuses to disappear and persists in boisterous displays.
When Santner addresses the "lucid melancholia" of postwar intelligentsia, he helps show that refusing to let go of the object is not always a