Guest Lecturer: Brad Prager, Professor, University of Missouri

October 24, -

 

What's the Fear of Fear of Fear? Another Look at R.W. Fassbinder's Middle Period

 

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Fear of Fear (1975), the prolific and revolutionary director’s twenty-third feature-length film, was promoted as a “case study” – it presented itself to viewers as an examination of a middle-class homemaker’s recurring panic attacks, her dependency on valium, and, eventually, her nervous breakdown. The film is rarely mentioned alongside Fassbinder’s more renowned works, and, at the time of its premiere, some reviled it. One major reviewer wrote, “I don’t remember any other film by Fassbinder that I found so bad, so superficial, so embarrassing.” 

What was at the heart of the disdain for Fear of Fear? Did the resistance to the film stem from Fassbinder’s unconventional orientation toward psychoanalysis, from the abstruseness of his feminism, or were the negative reactions rooted in something else? Throughout his career Fassbinder read and was inspired by Freud: was Fear of Fear intended as a systematically constructed profile of a narcissist, or was it a critique of those who turned her into one? The resistance to Fassbinder’s film likely had to do with the conclusions drawn by his case study.

 

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Brad Prager