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The show: Fear Society

FEAR SOCIETY (Venice Biennial 2009 - official program Pavilion of Urgency (Jota Castro) - Chiara Agnello - Rainer Ganahl

written for a publication of FEAR SOCIETY

 

(not edited)

On Fear and Toxic Assets or Happiness is not always fun


In Fassbinder's 1973 film 'Angst essen Seele auf' (Fear eats the soul), fear is woven into love, loneliness, racism, and ageism in postwar social repression of the 1970s in Germany. This powerful love drama unfolds in Munich, between a young black Moroccan man, Ali, a 'Gastarbeiter' (a so-called 'guest worker', a migrant worker) and a thirty year older lonely German widow, Emmi, a mother of three and ex-Nazi. Emi's deceased husband was a former Polish forced worker who left her nothing but a meager pension. In order to get by, she had to make ends meet with extra cleaning work. The disgusting racist stress on the couple ruins Ali, who falls sick from a stomach ulcer. It is a sickness that ironically relates to the title of the film; being that, angst eats not only the soul, but also, the stomach. With a little fantasy and exaggeration, this film could be seen as a slow motion frozen tableau of an unlikely couple bound to instantaneous sex in a situation of angst, stress and duress. The violence of fear in this film is pinpointed by its grammatically incorrect title taken from a scene, when the couple first realize where things are heading. 'Nix weinen. Nix Angst. Angst essen Seele auf' (No crying, no fear, Fear eating soul) - and your stomach.


But the really uncanny and scary part cames a decade later, in 1982, with the suicide of the main actor, El Hedi ben Salem M'Barek Mohammed Mustapha in a French prison. This erotically and racially exploited and fetishized 'man of the market,' as Emmi described him in significant shorthand to her friends did this after the murder of three people under the influence of alcohol - and most likely out of  stress and angst. It's only too tragic-comic that Ali's life took such a cinematic turn and ended the lives of four people, including his own.


The epigraph of 'Angst essen Seele auf' reads: 'Happiness is not always fun' and has become true for the several generations of American consumers who are now forced to understand that their bills are due, their investments (if any at all) are worth little, and most of their purchases are unneeded and unwanted. The grammatically correct but mostly unread small texts on contracts and credit cards have a life of their own and remind us of another film title by Fassbinder: 'Love is Colder Than Death,' from 1969. Around that time, credit cards, the way we know them, (M
asterCard founded in 1966) became an industry, just in time for the baby boomer generation.


This generation became sexy consumers in the 1960s, gained economic and social power in the 1970s and claimed political access in the 1980s. By the 1990s the American Baby boomers along with Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, (Bush - the master of fear politics), in the driving seat literally ruled the world.Unlike their predecessors, boomers have no direct memory of the economic misery experienced during the Great Depression or World War II and were accustomed to prosperity and endless expansions. Rolling on credit became as intrinsic to the American dream as apple pie - by the way also payable here by plastic, something no shop in Europe would accept since they insist on minimum spending and even often insist in charging you the credit card fee shops have to pay, something not legal in the USA. 


In the 1980s, Thatcher and Reagan followed up erasing all institutional memory of poverty and misery and started to do away with unions, social safety nets and the social welfare state. The idea of the state as a common good became synonymous with corruption, inefficiency, and big unnecessary spending. For Reagan the state was the problem not the solution. Even Bill Clinton (like Tony Blair in GB) scaled back many state functions and was a big liberalizers. Keynesian economists and politicians were driven out of town and took with them the market and bank regulations that often dated back to the Depression years. Lobbyists streamed in and established an industry that threatened the very nature of democracy pushing the word of the people back into cash registers, since only economically firm industries could successfully lobby and advertise for the vote of the consumer.


With the demise of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, capitalism became such an unstoppable globalized ballpark that even the largest Communist state on earth, China, has became one of the biggest (state)-capitalist players - anticipated to soon compete directly to dictate the rules of the game. In the current days of this severe economic crisis, the boomer generation has seen large parts of their considerable savings, (mostly in equities and funds as well as in real estate) gone up in smoke. Their health deteriorates without much of a health care system in place, while their power and economics dissipates. Ironically, they helped to render health care networks irrelevant and denounced them as 'socialized medicine' while convinced that they would live forever!! Hillary Clinton, a boomer, lost in the latest American presidential elections to a black Generation X man. However, everybody is now witnessing a tectonic shift in geo-political power and the distribution of national economic might, almost equivalent to the changes brought on by global warming and the scarcity of basic raw materials, energy and water. These core issues had been far too long ignored by many decision makers of that boomer generation.


The cost of this denial, this inaction and the quasi-cinematic suspension of disbelieve is vast. Ever bigger cars are being produced at a time when war and oil start to rhyme, and wake up only when car companies file for bankruptcy; creating ever more complex investment vehicles and credit default swaps designed to hide the underlying risks; ignoring basic economic rules as if in anti-gravitational space to make 'buy now, pay later' the golden plastic standard; pushing dangerous rate-jumping subprime mortgages on people for houses they can't afford; not insuring people for health care at a reasonable price but instead insuring exotic toxic assets as A. I. G. did; privatizing social security and blocking the state as the largest buyer of health care products from negotiating prices; outsourcing for decades nearly all jobs and productions to China and elsewhere and not anticipating the consequences; not investing in basic infrastructures over decades and wondering why they collapse; alienating the world with arrogant power politics and preemptive wars without considering the possibility of failure; heating up the planet and then wondering over melting glaciers, changing sea levels, migrating animals and epidemics; observing a human induced massive extinction of species without asking the question when homo sapiens will be affected by it; creating ever bigger unhealthy companies and hoping that they are too big to fail;  artificially inflating housing markets with foreign sponsored cheap credit so that house owners mistake their properties as cash machines that are automatically recharged. Happiness is not always fun - particularly when credit severely dries up and banks don't even trust banks! 


Lets return to some more drama. In february 2009, William Foxton, a former British army major committed suicide after losing his life savings in Bernard Madoff's ponzi scheme. Foxton, unlike Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet (who killed himself in December 2008 for the same reason), wasn't a professional or institutional investor but an individual who packed his savings into feeder funds of Madoff's secret empire not even knowing anything about mister Madoff - the biggest fraudster in modern economic history. Thus the relatively abstract term 'Credit Crunch' takes away lives and one understands that behind all this financial lingo there are tragic facts, faces and fates. These kind of news segments that rotate through our news cycles reveal a network of interdependencies and world wide collateral damages. The same goes for all Icelanders and the many thousands who transfered money via their computers into high interest accounts located in the middle of the Atlantic. All these local institutional and individual savers are now left with cold fish-skin. The investments and money are all suddenly gone and we don’t know what it means - except when we catch those tragic headlines next to 'Artery clearing systems' or '4 Nato Troops killed in Suicide attack').


Angst and economy have a lot in common. Both are systems dealing with scarcity: the scarcity of food and love, goods and products, services and security. We address scarcity internally with fear and angst and deal with it externally through our economy that produces, exchanges, distributes and consumes products and services we think we need and want. But they are also abstract and difficult to grasp if we look at it from a broader perspective. The 'Homo Economicus' is really a neurotic, self-obsessed, anxiety ridden, gender confused and hysterical person, resembling more test tube rats in pain than the presupposed rational beings who make only informed decisions based on their best interest. This is why there is so much 'Schadenfreude,' (the pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others,) in the downfall of our financial system even though we are all hit and feel the pressure. 

Unfortunately, 'Home Economicus'  turns into a pathetic, fearful 'Homo Empiricus,' (the empirical man). Many, if not all people, make crazy decisions, against their own self-interest in the short or long run, with an economic logic that borders those who throw money from the 5th floor while running down and waiting for twice the sum to arrive. Fear, food and fun spiced with greed and gluttony mix in the stomachs and our souls very well. It allows us to swallow the elegant and sublime alphabet soup of structured corporate finance like CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligation), CDSs (Credit Default Swaps); MBSs (Mortgage-Backed Securities) or ABSs (Asset-Backed Securities) before we need financial medicines that also comes in acronyms: TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program), TALF (Term Asset Lending Facility) and EESA (Emergency Economic Stabilization Act) or even the IMF (International Monetary Fund) -- an organization that provides bailout for entire states.

These days, Fassbinder's characters would most likely have lived slightly different lives. The woman might have inherited some money or even a pension from one or several funds for WWII slave labor compensation. Both might have had more credit so that the economic drive for that unusual marriage would have been minimal. On the other hand, today, marriage is still a partial solution for paperless immigration and pressure would have been high on Ali to reach some kind of an immigration-solution which wasn't addressed in the film. Today, people from Africa are kept away from Europe with all possible means resulting in hundreds of dead bodies after trying to dangerously cross the sea with boats, trucks or otherwise. Detention centers for illegal immigrants are also no fun in exchange for an imagined happiness. Again, the sad irony in Europe's mediatized fear of immigrants lies in the underlying fact that low child birth rates and overaging are producing a threatening population decrease that will make it difficult to keep up competetivness, productivity and the financing of inter-generational contracts like pensions and other obligations. Many more people will be retired than working - hence creating not an imagined problem but a real one. Unfortunately, since 9/11 the public image of Arabs has taken a negative spin but it doesn't get as bad as in the film where Arabs (and other migrant workers) are referred to as 'pigs' – or in the broken German of Ali 'Arab nix Mensch' (Arab -- no human). Today, depending on where you are, racism in Europe might be experienced less severely or at least less directly today than 40 years ago which could have opened different avenues for Ali. This improved climate - less xenophobia, less racism, less homophobia - may have prevented his desperate acts of a triple murder and suicide. Needless to say, it's hard to speculate on these tragic events but the climate has improved somewhat for at least those minorities who are successful in society, living in tollerant niches. After all, Ali was an admired movie star.

These days Ali's religious background may have been more of a topic than in the 1970s, since today, stereotyping and fear is distributed very much along the Muslim/non-Muslim line. His homosexuality and intimate relationship with Fassbinder would have played much less a reason for social pressure and stigma and may have even prevented Fasssbinder from overdosing on drugs -- in 1982, almost immediately after the suicide of El Hedi ben Salem. Fassbinder's own death in the temporal proximity of El Hedi Salem rendered the Real into a cinematic suspension of disbelief returning to this Munich genius. The Boomer generation was politically and economically adventurous and reckless. But they did create a more globaly tolerant and inclusive climate towards social, sexual and racial minorities; hence lowering the level of angst felt by many. Whether these Americans who weren't at all exposed to New German Cinema but saw John Cassavetes' films and the dramas of Gina Rowlands -  will be able to retire like their parents in Florida or on other sunbelts with nostalgic music and films from the 60s and 70s - like their parents did with entertainments from the 40s and 50s - is yet to be seen. Currently, having their life savings severely reduced they will undoubtly line up again  - in disbelieve - for low paying jobs.

 

Rainer Ganahl, May 2009, New York

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The show: Fear Society

 

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