Ulcerated Immigrants and Various Handfuls of Dust: Rainer Werner Fassbinder�s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul: It Sure as Fuck Does

Translate this Article...

 

*This post discusses major plot details�specifically, the ending�of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul*

T. S. Eliot has a famous line�well, I think he stole the kernel of it from Joseph Conrad, as he stole many of his best lines�but he has a famous line in The Waste Landthat goes, �I can show you fear in a handful of dust.� Evelyn Waugh thought that this was an excellent line and, despite his general rejection of modernism (and modernity in general, while we�re at it) used it as the title for his 1934 novel, A Handful of Dust, which is probably his best work.  Now, Eliot and Waugh couldn�t have known it at the time, but the phrase �fear in a handful of dust� would take on a new and terrible meaning following the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  We can find fear in a handful of dust if we have reason to believe that that dust has been irradiated (the dust of Chernobyl, the dust of Fukushima) not to mention the transformation of white powder as a source of mail-borne terror following the anthrax attacks (remember those?) (And, as long as I�ve mentioned Hiroshima, isn�t it terrible that nuclear energy was first used to kill and mutilate people on an industrial scale before its later, marginally safer application as a source of peaceable energy?)

In Rainer Werner Fassbinder�s 1974 film, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf in German; the �Ali� appears to have been a later addition to English language releases), the titular Ali (El Hedi ben Salem) ends the film doubled over in agony from a perforated stomach ulcer.  Fassbinder�s film depicts the love and marriage of Emmi, an aging German cleaning lady (Brigitte Mira), and Ali, a Moroccan immigrant laborer, and all the racism and resentment and hatred they face from pretty much everybody.  Near the beginning of the film, Ali says to Emmi, apropos of fear, �Fear not good.  Fear eat soul� (this is a translation of �broken� German into �broken� English).  And by the end of the film, as Ali�s stomach devours itself and, in my imagination, grinds itself into little particles of radioactive dust, we can see that there was an element of literal truth in the assertion that fear eats the soul.  A doctor informs Emmi that immigrant workers come to the hospital with ulcers all the time, because of the stress; he doesn�t say where the stress comes from, but living in a society where most people have a visceral hatred for you is probably a factor.  The doctor further says that, although he can treat the ulcerated immigrants in the short term, their status as foreign workers doesn�t allow them time to convalesce (presumably because they need to be working constantly in order to justify their presence in the country) and so he expects Ali will be back in the hospital again within six months with another perforated ulcer.

Something seems to have eaten the soul of the real-life El Hedi ben Salem (his full name was El Hedi ben Salem m'Barek Mohammed Mustafa, which is also his full name in Fear Eats the Soul, where he says that Germans just call him Ali).  Wikipedia offer lamentably little information on the subject of ben Salem, but this brief summary of his life is tantalizing and evocative:

El Hedi ben Salem was the lover of Rainer Werner Fassbinder from 1971 to 1974, though he also had a wife and five children in Morocco. During this period, he played several roles in Fassbinder's films. He is best known for his role of Ali in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. While intoxicated, Salem seriously injured three people by stabbing. He was deported to France, where he killed himself in prison.

Now there�s a line worthy of Hemingway at his most irritating: �While intoxicated, Salem seriously injured three people by stabbing.� I wonder what destroyed him.  People are so fragile, there are ever so many things that can destroy them.

El Hedi ben Salem, in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.

Fassbinder himself didn�t last all that long either, although you wouldn�t know it from his amazingly prolific output of some forty feature-length films in a period of thirteen years between 1969 and 1982 (truly, he was the Takashi Miike of his day, at least in that respect).  During that period, he had turbulent relationships with lots of men and women, many of whom he physically and emotionally abused; based, again, on Wikipedia, it looks like at least ben Salem may have fought back.  Oh, and ben Salem wasn�t his only former lover to commit suicide; Wikipedia mentions �Armin Meier (1943�78), a former butcher who was almost illiterate,� who was cast in several Fassbinder films and committed suicide shortly after Fassbinder broke up with him.  Fassbinder himself died in 1982 from a lethal cocktail of alcohol, sleeping pills, and cocaine.

I will conclude with this light-hearted anecdote which I first encountered on Strangewood, a delightful movie tumblr full of cinephiliac stories, pictures, and trivia: Wim Wenders recounts an incident involving Rainer Werner Fassbinder; I quote in full:

�I met Rainer Werner again at the Oscars here in Los Angeles in 1980. An unexpected sight, with his bow tie and tuxedo and everything. I�d never seen him like that. It didn�t really suit him. He had heard that I had trouble with Coppola about my film. We were looking down at all this Hollywood hustle and bustle. He put his arm around my shoulder and said: �I know you�re having serious trouble. If you want me to beat Coppola up, just show me where he is.� And he would have. I did my best to keep him away from Coppola. I think he would have punched him right in the nose.�

Now, violence is repellant to me but I can�t help but be amused by the prospect of a coked-up little guy like Fassbinder assaulting a Hollywood big-shot like Coppola.  Perhaps it�s not surprising that someone who lived like that died the kind of death that Fassbinder did.  We must recall that cocaine, like anthrax, is a white powder, and that we can find fear in a handful of dust.