Fassbinder's Despair at MoMA

Last night, I headed into town for a short visit to MoMA and a screening of Fassbinder’s Despair. Senses of Cinema describes the film simply by putting it in a clump of Fassbinder work that it calls “increasingly garish.” I’d say that’s about an accurate a two-word review of the film as you’re going to get. Going in, I knew basically nothing of Fassbinder and even less of Despair. Scripted by Tom Stoppard, it’s an odd work, stagy, overcooked, full of absurd comic menace; it’s not quite right to call it ludicrous, but it’s in the vicinity.

It’s a story of a well-to-do but thoroughly mad chocolatier (shades of Willy Wonka?) who begins to hallucinate a double, most often while have sex with his pigeon-brained slut of a wife. He sees his own face on a drifter, convinces the drifter to help him commit a crime, and then, after dressing the drifter in his own clothes, shoots him, thinking that others will find the drifter and believe it to be him (they do not). Stoppard squeezes in some clever wordplay here and there, and there’s an enjoyably manic quality to the production, which plays on the protagonist’s madness with its willful disregard for audience expectations. Still, it’s an odd duck, at best a spectacle of stylized mania, but more often just a thin curiosity.

MoMA’s theater is large and comfortable, with ample legroom and good sightlines; it feels more like a theater at which you’d see plays at a medium sized college. The audience was, I think, somewhat befuddled by the movie (lots of murmurs of confusion wafting through the air on the way out), but, as is to be expected, attentive and quiet—rousing only to issue a collective “you’ve got to be kidding me” when a baby started crying as the lights dimmed (the parent and child exited immediately). Still, it’s somewhat irritating that the theater walls are painted bright white, which creates extra reflected light during the screenings. Also, the theater is located underground, which results in the rumble of subway trains passing by (or, perhaps, below), every few minutes or so. I live near a subway line and tune it out accordingly, but it’s still unpleasant to encounter in a movie theater.

It’s a bit of a change coming to museums in New York from D.C., where most of the major museums are free (and others, like the Philips collection, are fairly cheap). MoMA, though, opens its doors for free on Friday nights. This is wonderful, of course, and I greatly enjoyed and highly recommend the Jeff Wall photography exhibit (more on that later, perhaps), but I think I may avoid MoMA's free Fridays in the future. The line to get in fills an empty lot next to the museum, meaning it takes 20-30 minutes to get in. And once in, the place is utterly packed. It’s noisy, chaotic, filled with gawkers and jabbering tourists; it’s like walking around Six Flags during a holiday weekend—in other words, not at all an ideal atmosphere for looking at art. What’s more, the staff seems displeased with how packed and unruly the place becomes, and, while not openly hostile, they’re a bit snippy and surly with the guests. For $75—less than the cost of four visits, I think I’ll join next time I go and, except for film screenings, skip out on future Friday nights.