Sometimes a film can tell us more truth by simply telling a story rather than with a self-serving "agenda"

 

It appears that theater chains and Disney are still trying to shove The Marvels down people's unwilling throats as the only film this weekend being shown on at least 4,000 screens. The film only continues to tank,  becoming the first MCU film to drop out of the top-5 in its third weekend. But that's not my "problem," and although Iman Vellani says that is not her "problem" either, she should consider the effect on her career, adding The Marvels debacle with her own Ms. Marvel show being the worst-rated MCU show on Disney+.

But thank god there are other ways to pass the time if films are your thing.  It took me awhile to make the decision to spend the money on it, but since Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Satan’s Brew is only available on Blu-ray on the UK distributor Arrow Films recently released third 7-film Fassbinder collection of mostly his lesser-known films, I figured I should just do it before it went OOP and third-party sellers began their extortionist ways.

Satan’s Brew is Fassbinder’s only true comedy in his entire oeuvre,  and a “screwball” comedy as black as black can get—meaning that it is not a proper introduction to those unfamiliar with Fassbinder’s work, as people will think he must have been “nuts” to make a film like this. But then again, I suspect people would also be left with the same incorrect of assessment of Martin Scorcese's output if the first film of his they saw was After Hours.

I really didn’t need the rest on Blu-ray, but I had never seen one of these films, Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven, and having now done so, it provides just another reason why Fassbinder is my favorite director. Some people compare Mother Kusters examination of irresponsible tabloid journalism in West Germany at the time to that of The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, but in Mother what eventually happens to Mother Kusters (in the German cut) is ultimately more tragic as Fassbinder also critiques the political opportunists and radicals that use her for their own purposes.

The film begins as we learn that Mother Kusters’ husband had just killed a supervisor at work, apparently after being  told that he was going to be part of a mass lay-off at the business he worked at, and then killed himself. Mr. Kusters had never intimated that he might do this to family or coworkers, so it was assumed that he had just “snapped” when he heard the news. 

Many saw the incident as the powerlessness of workers in a capitalist society. Mother Kusters’ home is invaded by journalists who claim they just want the “truth”; here a photojournalist promises to write a sympathetic article as he takes photos of Mother Kusters as she sadly conducts her daily existence, reflecting on life without her husband:

 

Instead, the article that does comes out portrays her husband as a deranged monster, which of course angers Mother Kusters. She is soon left without anyone to console her as her adult children all leave her alone in the house. This leaves her vulnerable to opportunists who wish to use her; she is contacted by an apparently well-off married couple who profess to be sympathetic to the “cause” in which her husband died, and they write an article from the perspective of the abused “proletariat.” 

They turn out to be members of the German Communist Party, and they invite her to speak at a sparsely-attended meeting, where Mother Kusters gives a heart-felt speech about what a good man her husband was and how he was abused by an unjust system against the working class—or at least that was what she was told by her handlers:

 

But afterward she encounters a young “radical” who tells her that these people are frauds and he can help her get real “justice.” At least part of that seems to be true, when Mother Kusters is essentially told that her usefulness to the Party is over, as her purpose was to provide campaign fodder for the coming election. With no one at home to advise or keep a watch on her, Mother Kusters decides to seek out the radical activist, who unbeknownst to her hatches the idea of an armed invasion of the office where the photojournalist works and hold everyone hostage until "their" demands are met. Mother Kusters obviously didn't sign-up for this:

 

For European audiences Fassbinder discarded the climax that he originally filmed, although he chose to ad a written coda (rather than filming it) that told viewers that after the terrorists left the building with their hostages, Mother Kusters was shot by unidentified parties (probably the polizei), but even then Fassbinder could not help but add a note of sarcasm to her death, as it is implied that her daughter, who is a singer, uses the occasion as a publicity stunt as she poses to be photographed cradling her mother in her arms:

 

 

Sorry, wrong “movie.” Fassbinder decided to keep the original filmed ending for the American release, and here we see him treating the radicals not as “terrorists” but as buffoons who stage a sit-in that is ignored by everyone inside the office:

 

The radicals themselves get bored sitting there pointlessly and leave Mother Kusters alone in her thoughts. In one ending (for the European release) she goes to “heaven” as a “martyr” for the “cause,” but the other “heaven” is when the janitor walks in and tells her he can’t leave unless she does, but she can come back the next day if she wants; he is a widower and lonely too, and their conversation eventually ends with the implication that she will move on with her life and they will be a couple:

 

Contemporary American critics saw the film as a "comedy" because of this ending, but the ending that Fassbinder used instead for the German release of the film gives the exact opposite interpretation of the proceedings, given the reality of what was going on in West Germany at the time.

Although Fassbinder was himself critical of what he regarded as a society that had not yet come to grips with its Nazi past (even electing a former Nazi, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, as chancellor in 1966), and was not unsympathetic to the aims of the radical left, he could not help but critique what he saw as the ultimate pointlessness of the activities of the radical political and student movements—especially those that sought to achieve their aims through violence. 

The Baader-Meinhof Gang, which had come into existence a few years earlier and had a similar evolution as that of the Weather Underground in the U.S., isn’t mentioned specifically, but as in  The Third Generation, Fassbinder saw their activities to be counterproductive if not clownish, and its "third generation" had not learned from the mistakes of the first two.

That was then, and this isn’t the “revolutionary” Sixties which spawned not just radical left groups like the Weather Underground and the SLA (the group that kidnapped Patty Hearst), but in response to changes in society also came neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups engaged in bank robberies  and murder like The Order in the Eighties and the Aryan Republican Army in the Nineties—the latter which was suspected of aiding and bankrolling Timothy McVeigh.

The difference between the “left” and the “right” terrorists was that “left” claimed to seek change in an unjust society, and what the right was “seeking” was somewhat unclear, trying undo “change” and reestablish  white privilege and control as the law of the land. The conservative Eighth Circuit Court in Texas is doing its part “lawfully,” by further damaging the Voting Rights Act, declaring that only the federal government (you know, like a Trump administration) can file lawsuits charging racial discrimination in voting laws because the Act doesn’t “explicitly say” that private persons or organizations can do so.

But as Fassbinder implied in Mother Kusters, who can you really believe or trust in this day and age who legitimately represents “justice” that at least has a moral and ethical angle that isn’t entirely self-serving or hypocritical? Take for instance the "MeToo" movement, which has become little more than a vehicle for self-serving narcissists out for revenge for mostly imagined or misinterpreted  "wrongs" done to them.

Why would anyone would "trust" the motivations of the likes of  House Speaker Mike Johnson and Marjorie Taylor Green, who are aiding and abetting far-right conspiracies with the highly selective release of the invasion of the Capitol Building by the January 6 insurrectionists? One far-right YouTuber interpreted one video as showing the insurrectionists were being “respectful” of law enforcement; OK, so what was so “respectful” about breaking down doors to get into the Capitol Building in the first place and interrupting lawmakers? 

If anything, the events of January 6 were counterproductive, because it embarrassed some Republican Senators who previously intended to question the election results. How far-right conspiracies develop out of willful ignorance of the activities of the insurrectionists is shown here:

 

By the way, “RT” stands for Russia Today, which is the Kremlin propaganda organ whose principle function in the U.S. is sow chaos and disrupt a functional democracy, which of course is why so many Republicans appear to be Russian propagandists themselves and supporters of authoritarian government. 

Of course propaganda can go both ways. Since the beginning of the Israeli-Hamas conflict, Jewish groups in this country claim that antisemitic acts have increased almost 400 percent in this country, which is a bloated way of saying four times more than normal. But as we see, what an "antisemitic" act is can merely be criticism of Israeli use of force in Gaza or anyone expressing support for Palestinians.  Regardless of the side you are on, it just seems more like gaslighting and suppressing freedom of speech.

Where this country is going is very worrisome. A new NBC News poll show Trump leading Biden by 48 to 37. Frankly, I wish Biden would not run for reelection and ride off into the sunset with his dignity intact; at the present time, it really does seem as if his age is clouding his judgment. But the poll also showed that a “generic” Democratic candidate other than Biden would be instantly ahead of Trump by a 46-40 margin.

What does that mean? The only “logical” explanation is that many people are not using their heads when making their decisions, just their “gut” feelings. The majority wants an alternative to Trump, they just don’t think that Biden is the "man" anymore because they don't "trust" his ability to make "judgments." I suspect, however, that some of this has to do with whether they "trust" Kamala Harris if Biden passes away during a second term, if she is still the vice president. 

A majority of people know that another Trump administration would be a nightmare turned all too real, given his stated zeal to exact “revenge” on all his perceived “enemies” rather than learning anything from his moral and ethical failures. That this country has allowed itself into a "pick your poison" choice shows just how disastrous it was to elect a completely unfit individual like Trump was in the first place.

What is worse is like those people with political agendas in Mother Kusters, Trump doesn’t really give a damn about “the people” in the individuality—he is only using the generality to advance his own domestic terroristic agenda, because a supreme narcissist only uses the hot air of blind supporters to inflate his own sense of grandiosity.

Of course the result of all of this is no one has any “trust” in the “system” because everyone is pointing the finger at someone else, or whoever they are told to. No one trusts the motives of the other, although the motives of Republicans are certainly more destructive than Democrats on the surface. Maybe people would just be happier if they said we don't want what any of you are selling, and vote for anyone who claims to be a "moderate" without a partisan agenda causing divisiveness and hate.

So you see you can learn something about the world from films that do not preach to you or have an "agenda," but just show you the world as it is, not they way you imagine it to be.