There are only two ways to begin an essay on Rainer Werner Fassbinder: with sex or with death. Everything else is scenery. This one begins with death. At the 1982 Venice Film Festival, a pirated copy of Fassbinder’s death mask reportedly made the rounds of hotels and cafes, smuggled in a plastic bag like a kilo, like takeout. Juliane Lorenz, a film editor moonlighting as Fassbinder’s wannabe widow, commissioned the mask after the director died at thirty-seven—prematurely, but still right on cue—that June. (Stroke was the official cause of death, his indefatigable cocaine diet a likely comorbidity.)
Lorenz had envisioned a reverent artifact, something like Goethe’s varnished nineteenth-century death mask, but what she got was less dignified. By the end, Fassbinder was bloated and unkempt. His uniform of sunglasses and fedora looked like Stasi drag and did nothing to hide his lifelong pockmarks. (Pickle Face was the schoolyard taunt.) Neither did the scraggly beard that seemed plagiarized from the hapless men of Ukiyo-e prints. And, yet, the death mask must have exerted a fetishistic pull. Imagine Venice’s glitterati ogling it in their luxury suites as they chain-smoked. Finally, they had come face-to-face with Europe’s last wunderkind in a stillness that was entirely anathema to him.
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