Movie: The American Soldier

Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

35mm b/w, 1970

“The American Soldier” Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film of 1970 is a parody of the American macho man on the one hand, and on the other, it portrays the pathos of the early life of an unfeeling man and his ironic death.

 The movie catches the protagonist between the two stages, the one determining the other and the tragic hero moving relentlessly towards a death that has been written a long time back for him. In this period Ricky is shown as a cruel, unfeeling, sadistic, narcissistic, killer who treats both life and women with contempt. There is only one concern: to somehow survive without getting caught. There is neither remorse nor self-examination when he causes somebody’s death, there is no desire to help a woman as she weeps and commits suicide right before his eyes, there is only a desire to get away from her because that alone would help survival. Even the woman who is willing to give up her whole world for him is suspect: he must kill her because she, too, might be a lead to his wherabouts. One suspects that he returns to his early home expecting it to bring some feeling out of him but even that fails because it has remained the same, there is nothing for him to weep the loss of. The return to his mother and brother is another attempt on his part to see if somebody still wants him to return to the human fold, but reminded of his early years, he tries a sexual kiss with his mother who reminds him that his brother is in the room: it was this, we begin to suspect, that was his undoing, his confused and abnormal illicit relationship with his mother that had made him regard women contemptuously. His confusion about sex as a child caused a sexual relationship with his brother who has become a semi-neurotic, semi-retarded 30 year old, at least ten years his junior. Both his mother and brother do not reassure him of their love and they fail to draw him towards a normal morality; they fail him and his emphasis on survival and contempt for right and wrong become even more marked. Now he as an adult Ricky cannot trust even the one person he trusted a little while ago: a woman who wanted to leave everything for him.

The four scenes involving the waitress are the most memorable: in the first scene he grabs her and kisses her until she loses all perspective of reality and stands dazed, willing to subsume herself, but rudely he throws her out after the kiss; again he orders food and she serves it and he kisses her long and hard and suddenly pushes her contemptuously to get him the bottle of whisky, she fetches it and he insults her to get out of the room; in the third scene she enters his room and sits on his bed while he makes love to another woman and she narrates a tragic story of another woman who was destroyed by loving a man; in the fourth scene after he finishes making love he and the woman stand in the corridor while the waitress begs her lover Pierre over the phone not  to abandon her and she weeps plaintively; he watches her stick a knife in her stomach and he quickly rushes past her with no feelings and no desire to help, only a desire to leave the spot and the nuisance of women. It is his relationship with women that are the most telling of all: his wanting fat women is a reaction to his own slim mother; his inability to be true to his childhood sweetheart Inga, his cruelty to the waitress, his sadistic pleasure at humiliating a prostitute by shooting blanks at her body as she lay there in fear, his killing of the only woman who trusted him and whom he trusted to a certain extent but not enough to jeopardize his life. Finally, like a tragic hero it is the mother who comes very late to fetch him back, the same mother who seduced him and who, tragically, calls out his name at the wrong time and ends up distracting him in he middle of a shootout. He dies just as life was beckoning to him and the mother is the first and last cause of his tragedy. The unfeeling man dies without a whimper but in his dying moments is embraced by his semi-retarded brother who he had no special fondness for.  Even in his dying he cannot break free from his past and dies encircled by something he had contempt for. He is a mouse in a trap.

It is in his relationships with women the misogynist reveals himself; in his killings the man who hates life stands exposed; it is only through his sadism that he finds joy:  he laughs only when he humiliates woman who tries to out-smart him; but even such an unfeeling man , there is a slight gentleness towards the corpse of the woman who trusted him too much for her own good. But he is as doomed as Faustus, it is as if Fassbinder wants us to feel that man is helpless in the hands of destiny and there is no escape, that life itself is sad and unfair and that the innocent suffer again and again. It is in his sadism that he finds his freedom to be human, to be free to laugh sardonically.

A fascinating film with performances that are vignettes rather than full-blooded, characters that seem like surrealistic drawings. The film must be watched as it reveals a man through his relationships with women. The remarkable film explores the workings of the mind of the sadistic misogynist. In the bleak film there are no smiles, no friendly gestures, there is always the undercurrent of suspicion and mistrust, of fear and hatred.  And in the end the static figure of the mother in black symbolizes the tragedy of life: the evil live, the innocent die. A moving portrayal from Fassbinder, one not easily forgotten.