Fassbinder, Rainer Werner - Barbara Leaming
BARBARA LEAMING
In the past Fassbinder's films have often been concerned with isolated people—with the outsider. In Fear of Fear, once again the central figure is set apart—she is a woman whose world is largely a world of family, a family that perceives her not only as an outsider, an intruder, but more importantly as someone "abnormal." For them, there is no question of what it is which constitutes the norm, for her sister-in-law explicitly and flatly states, "We are normal." They are the ones certainly who hold power; they are then the ones who determine the norm. Yet it is not even this outsider status within her husband's family which seems to mark the critical point in Margot's passage towards madness. There is a far more crucial sense of strangeness, of alienation, which she feels: her failure to identify with her own image. And it is this alienation from image—and hence from role—which provides the central structuring device of Fassbinder's...
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