Fassbinder, Spectatorship, and Utopian Desire

Abstract

This essay takes up troublesome question of Fassbinder's rapport with his audience and argues for a dialectical understanding of relationship between viewer and screen. My purpose here is to attempt to define position assigned to audience in and by a Fassbinder film and to assess possible effects of this positioning-how film engages us in attending to its images and stories; how it involves us in a process that produces pleasure, desire, cognition; how it implicates us in imaginary and ideological relationships. Questions of visual fascination, identification, and subject positioning have already received considerable attention in commentary on Fassbinder's work as well as in recent discussions of psychoanalytical theories of spectatorship and ideological theories about audience-effects.' In taking up these issues here I will argue that ideological impact of Fassbinder's films is best assessed in terms of a dialectical model of viewer/screen relationship-one that assigns an active role to audience in reception process and attempts to disengage visual pleasure from its one-sided association with voyeuristic-narcissistic experience. My concern is to show how a dialectical conception of spectatorship allows us to see beyond pessimistic and politically regressive effects sometimes attributed to Fassbinder's films and to foreground latent utopian force that a dialectical reading makes available. The shift in recent film theory from textual concerns to considerations of subject-effects and various forms of spectatorship provides a number of approaches in attempting to theorize impact or effectivity of a film: we may choose to remain within film-text, giving priority to its visual and narrative organization, and construct an implicit or model viewer based on positions of identification inscribed in text; or we may choose to leave text and, giving priority to the basic cinematic apparatus, attempt to determine how viewing experience is shaped by machinery of cinema itself; or we may devise various methods for investigating and evaluating perceptual responses of actual or historical audiences. Thus we may set out to study determining role of film-texts and positions they offer us (based on narrative strategies and on deployment of materials); or we may set out to study determining