Where�s the Goddam Valium?: Rainer Werner Fassbinder�s Fear of Fear

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In the mid-1970�s, German auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder directed two movies dealing explicitly with the subject of fear; they were: Ali: Fear Eats the Soul(1974), which I reviewed in September of 2012, and Fear of Fear (1976), which I watched this evening and am reviewing right now.  Fear of Fear was made for German television (amazing the stuff that got made for television in Europe; I can�t image people like Fassbinder or Bergman or von Trier getting to make television movies and miniseries in the United States) and stars Fassbinder regular Margit Carstensen as Margot, a pregnant German housewife who appears to be going insane.  Now, let me say right off the bat that it�s no surprise she�s going insane; her husband, Kurt, is an indifferent, ineffectual idiot, who can�t conceive of how she could be unhappy, because she�s young and pretty and married to him, after all.  They live downstairs from Kurt�s mother and sister, whose bigoted, meddlesome attitude to their daughter/sister-in-law makes the intrusive neighbors in Rosemary�s Baby seem positively charming (they at least hid their evil plans under a veneer of friendliness).  They come into Margot�s apartment whenever they please, they force their cooking on the beleaguered couple, and we eventually find out that even the furniture in Margot�s and Kurt�s apartment belongs to the in-laws.

A few weeks before she gives birth, Margot starts to show signs of mental deterioration.  Her vision becomes blurred and distorted (and this is perhaps my only complaint with this film; too much of Margot�s �insanity� just looks like there�s something wrong with her eyes and she would be better of seeing an ophthalmologist than a psychiatrist), she suffers from attacks by a great and overpowering fear whose origins she can�t trace, and she looks at herself in the mirror and experiences the existential dread that I suspect we�ve all felt from time to time�and maybe not dread, necessarily, but rather perplexity�and she says, �Me.  Me.  Is that me?  Is that me?� Because why should it be her, or you, or anyone?  God, mirrors again, fucking mirrors, this movie is full of them, Margot�s apartment is just bursting at the seams with mirrors, it�s like a regular Borgesian horror show.
 

Margot with mirrors.

The saddest part of Margot�s mental illness is the incompetent response from virtually every other person within the world of the film.  As I mentioned above, her husband is a fucking moron, and he thinks she�s fine, because she looks fine.  Her in-laws think that she doesn�t know how to run a household and that she�s neglecting the children (in addition to the baby that she delivers early on in the film, she also has an insufferable four-year-old, so there�s another reason to go insane).  Her husband finally starts taking her to doctors.  The first doctor says (in this order): �You�re fine, you�re overly sensitive, you need to rest, here�s some valium.� And he says (and I quote!): �Take it whenever you feel on edge.� Yes, mother�s little helper is presented to her as a whenever drug.

And so she starts taking valium�a great deal of valium�and when she abruptly runs out of it, she runs to another nearby doctor, who is happy to provide her with valium without a prescription, and who also plies her with alcohol and makes it clear that he would like to have sex with her.

Ok, so this second doctor is clearly just ethically deficient, but let�s go back to the first doctor (Dr. Auer is his name).  Dr. Auer doesn�t appear to be overtly malicious or predatory, but he�s almost as indifferent and ineffectual as her husband.  He�s one of those doctors who can see a person falling apart right in front of him, and he just doesn�t give a shit.  Maybe he�s become desensitized to it.  Maybe if you see enough patients falling apart and prey to nameless fears, you just stop giving a shit, it doesn�t register anymore.  And so you can say, �What, you�re fine, you�re young, you�re pretty, here�s some valium, I will do no follow-up with you, you�re fine, now go about your business.� And this becomes coupled with the sickening obligation that so many of us feel to be happy.  In a developed country like Germany or the United States, a person has everything (materially, and not always, but let�s middle-class and up) that she or he could possibly desire.  So if you�re still discontent under these circumstances, then there must be something wrong with you, even something morallywrong.  Dr. Auer is one of those people who fundamentally don�t get it.  They float through life on a cloud of complacency and intellectual incuriosity, and they just don�t have the imagination to conceive of all the different ways of seeing the world that other people possess.  And why should they view that as a problem?  They�re normal, after all (Margot�s mother- and sister-in-law are often hung up on issues of normalcy.  The sister-in-law, with a smug look on her face, says (positively beaming with pride!): �We�re normal.� As if that was something to be so fucking proud of.  Congratulations, you�re average, your mother must be so proud (oh, but her mother�s on the normalcy kick too, so she is proud).

Fassbinder knew social anomie and personal angst like his predecessor Douglas Sirk and his contemporaries, Ingmar Bergman and Nagisa Oshima.  Fear of Fear is another delightful, blistering attack on the morally bankrupt societies that drive people mad.

Post-script:
The title of this piece comes from the scene in Annie Hall in which Alvy Singer�s second wife, following an aborted coitus with him, leans out of bed and searches about on the floor for her anxiolytics, exclaiming, �Where�s the goddam valium?!� It�s one of my favorite lines in the movie.