The desire pose: 'Katzelmacher' (1969)
An early Fassbinder film confronts the physical tension and posturing in sexual envy.
Katzelmacher (1969), dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Germany
When Gunda leans on the fence where Erich and Paul sit, insulting their new Greek neighbor, she doesn’t just lean, but does a little spin and props her arm up so decisively that her pose seems both as natural as sleep and as wooden as a mannequin. Natural because of how easily she slides into it, without a second to adjust, and turns her head to join the boys in slander. Wooden because nobody has ever leaned so decisively; the moment is blocked as a square peg. A white flash burns her outline into the wall behind her and she stands there forever.
“How does he look?” Erich and Paul ask their friend, who rooms with the Greek. “Better than us.” “Better how?” “Better built.” “Where?” “His dick.”
The silence that follows burns with envy and confusion, and now they all start to fidget. A vibration rises—in Paul fiddling with his sunglasses and Gunda putting her leg down—but does not overflow: they hold their positions. When the back of my neck flushes at someone beautiful on the train my posture stops feeling natural, even if I don’t move an inch. I want what they have, my attention, and I suddenly feel me drawing myself into a shape: standing, one leg over the other, weight to one side and leaning on the wall of the car. Just being noticed bends me this way: by seeing me, you have stamped me into position, turning any move I make into an act. I strike a pose without moving, thinking of you looking at me and I look at myself from inside me… how does one look at oneself from within one’s body? By freezing, in shameful self-awareness, and standing at attention.
When we experience the kind of sexual envy that Gunda, Erich, and Paul experience towards the Greek—as when someone notices us and we both want them to look and hope that they don’t see that we want them to look—or when we envy someone else’s beauty—we harden. Every motion, even breathing, announces our alertness. All we can do is pose. It’s all anyone in Katzelmacher does: they lean on the fence, sit slumped in chairs, hold themselves still even when naked in bed, and lean on the fence again. And while they pose they whip each other with desire: “Rosy takes money for sex,” “Elizabeth lets the Greek sleep in her house,” “Marie has started dating the Greek.” Though their heat bubbles energy to the skin, their jealousy demands restraint, so they spend the film locked in place steaming.
The film exposes a relationship between desire and posing that I think shows itself in every insecure interaction.1 At the beach, I suck in my belly and stand against the sun. At work, I lean on the countertops, cross one arm completely over the other, and stare out across the street. On the train, I stare at my book in my lap with a leg swung over my knee. When you look my pose will show you how beautiful, how cool, and how unbothered I am. I don’t care that the Greek is better built or has a more beautiful dick. I’ll lean on the fence and look out somewhere, silent and bored, and swap my face on his body in my head.
This doesn’t only happen under sexual tension (though Katzelmacher runs so fiercely on it). My friend Ben told me that today, sitting in the kitchen of his office because his usual desk was taken, every time someone came in he felt his unconscious movements become deliberate without changing anything about them. The fact of being seen contains the body; suddenly whatever energy that would otherwise direct the next movement becomes trapped under the surface of an unintended articulation. I didn’t mean to make this movement such a signal! My whole body vibrates trying to hold itself to my direction.
The confinement magnifies when desire or jealousy intrude: the body blushes in its shell. It screams “admire me!” and hides its face, it starts to remember to breathe, loses where its tongue should sit in its mouth, and tries to swallow silently.
When Irm Hermann2 turns her back to the camera and freezes in front of the door, she grabs my attention and I do admire her, not because she is statuesque but because she defies action. Maybe this pose is the exception that proves the rule. She waits in front of the door, slumped as a hanging arm, and holds the knob. The tension that sears the skin when her friends cling to the fence directs itself outward, towards an object, but doesn’t make it move; she never opens the door. A moment of rest that may ask “admire me,” but definitely says “command me,” make me move. I bristle as the screen stamps my outline onto the couch now, time suspended and Hermann holding a pose so immobilized by others’ looking that it immobilizes the film itself. She redirects the energy that desire contains: if I have to wait here while you watch me, you, frozen gawker, have to wait here too.
She yells, “Don’t touch me!” at her boyfriend. Erich, Paul, and the gang get rid of the foreigner by beating him, cracking the pressure valve and crossing the boundary of touch that separates desire from action. They finally get to put their hands on him, he who has made them all so terribly jealous, then they all go right back to their positions on the fence. (“That’s how you have to do it with [foreigners]… and it’s for Germany.” “That’s right.”) The whole paradox of the desire pose, which demands we move our bodies to not move them and trap energy to express it, locks them in repetition; they end up exactly where they started, cutting around from the fence to the bar to the apartment and back, moving endlessly and not going anywhere.
I want so badly to pick up the screen and shake it like a snow globe, to dump these people out of it and watch them roll across the floor. They leave me empty and cruel, like a shriveled up leaf on a still green stem.
See other films from: 1960s | Germany
Cross Dissolve is my blog about film, how it makes me feel, and how I see it reappear in my life—how movies and living dissolve into one another. Please subscribe if you enjoyed today’s entry. Thank you for reading!
Love, Tyler
We don’t do this kind of posing with people who we are absolutely sure love us, like our closest friends or our partners. If we did, it would confuse them, because we should have nothing to prove.
There is also Hermann’s one partially closed eyelid. When I take pictures of myself the camera on my phone flips my face and the sudden asymmetry makes me feel monstrous. One of my eyes always closes a little more than the other. Lately I noticed this in my friends and, during the Oscars, someone famous (I don’t remember who). Do we all have uneven eyes like this? They might make us more beautiful because they challenge our beauty, making it self-defiant and unhiding.