Capitalism - Feudalism without the Kings

Tax the Rich

 

Movie Monday - Lola

 

Tomorrow, I will be voting for a flawed US presidential candidate, Barack Obama, because  I will not vote for an amoral US presidential candidate, Mitt Romney.

 

As I've said before, Obama has been a disappointment to the liberal/progressive community but a Romney presidency would be a catastrophe to this country and the world.

 

I'm also afraid that a Romney win will spell victory only for the ignorant, the bigoted and/or the greedy since I can't see one reason, other than those I listed, for anyone to vote for this man. As you watch interviews with people at a Romney rally telling why they are voting for him, their replies make no sense. They can't list his economic or foreign policy; they just know he would be better for the country. Truth be told, remove the camera and the mike from these interviews and you might get the honest answer: Romney is a white man. (And I cleaned that up.)

 

This time, I can't soothe my soul and make a Pyrrhic statement by voting for a third party candidate. Time is running out for this country and the stakes are too high. Our brand of capitalism and consumerism has brought us to the cliff. I don't know if we can turn back. But I do know if we elect Romney and Ryan, we will be taking the leap into oblivion.

 

However if you can believe it, I'm still an optimist. So much so that I didn't want to watch the end of Lola by Rainer Werner Fassbinder because I wanted to believe that good could triumph over evil; that the status quo of corruption and greed in the post-WWII German society, which is the backdrop of this movie, could be changed and that protagonist, von Bohm, would maintain his incorruptible value system.

 

Of course, that might have happened with another director but Fassbinder's vision was to hold a mirror to a corrupt society and Lola (1981) is the third movie chronologically in his trilogy (The Marriage of Maria Braun, Veronika Voss) to do just that.

 

Taking the basic plot from The Blue Angel (1930) which has a "cabaret singer" seduce and ruin a stuffy professor, Rainer honestly presently the singer this time as the prostitute she really is and spends less time on the personal ruin of the professor character (building inspector, von Bohm) and more time on the theme of what happens to a moral man in a corrupt society.

 

The plot in brief: The town hires an honest building inspector who begins to question the corrupt practices of his department. Unknown to him, his housekeeper's daughter (with whom he becomes enamored) is not a "chaste" woman with a young daughter but a singer/prostitute in a club run by one of the biggest crooks in the town. Von Bohm's downward spiral, unlike TBA, is not a social/economic one. His spiral is rather a fall from grace, a moral descent and a corrupt society is there to stop his fall and welcome him in.

 

Unlike TBA, where Emil Jannings as the professor is reduced to a washroom attendant, Rainer is more equivocal with his ending. Armin Mueller-Stahl, in the role of building inspector, marries the whore who then precedes to cuckold him before their honeymoon. But Rainer does not leave you with the disturbing notion that von Bohm has been ruined. In fact, you're left to assume that he has just learned to "go along to get along" since his wedding to Lola (a very well-connected prostitute) is attended by all the town's upper class and just before this event he and town big wigs are seen at the ground breaking ceremony on a project he had vehemently opposed.

Rainer is less interested in individual corruption and more interested in the endemic corruption of society which he believes cannot be erased.

Ever so subtlety and disturbingly, he ends the film with a shot of Lola's very young daughter, lying provocatively in a hayloft. It happens so fast you might miss it but Rainer is saying: It continues.

I've left out so much like the use of color, the superb acting, the nuances of situations, the moral equivocation which permeates everything. No one comes out of this movie "alive" yet even the traditional villain (this time with beard, not moustache) is not without charm and humanity. 

For me, watching this movie just a few hours ago in the middle of the night on Turner Classic Movies is the perfect coda for this US election season. I wanted to believe von Bohm would be redeemed by the final reel and I also knew this couldn't happen. As I know, and von Bohm learned, the world is as it is. But perhaps, against everything Rainer was trying to convey with this trilogy, I found a trace of hope at Lola's ending. Things change for the bad; they can also change for the good.

On that note, I'll be back on Wednesday when, barring polling snafus, the world will know if the US electorate decided to set the doomsday clock back or forward.