As has been well documented, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's career as an artist and provocateur began in the radicalized theatre scene of late-1960s West Germany (cf. Shattuc). Highly influenced by the Living Theater (which toured West Germany around that time, while in exile from the United States) and its loosely Artaudian brand of theatre, Fassbinder and the Action Theatre troupe he was part of began to work out an aesthetic that Jane Shattuc has labelled shock (84). This aesthetic was based on the twin axes of pop cultural fetishism and agitational/confrontational/anti-bourgeois politics. Thus, Fassbinder and company' s demonstrated fondness for pop cultural commodities contrasted sharply with what Shattuc characterizes as an altogether more apolitical American pop sensibility (90). Indeed, they well understood the politics of such commodification largely as result of the cultural colonialism practiced by the United States in Germany after World War II. In addition, their Dadaand Artaud-inspired confrontationalism was acute. Utilizing these twin axes, Fassbinder was trying to formulate an irreverent aesthetic that would ignite tensions and call seemingly everything into question. Action Theatre productions could be wildly chaotic: their version of Goethe's Iphigenie featured quotations from Chairman Mao and Paul McCartney, assembled exactly like scenic quotations out of comic strips or the Living Theater, according to one contemporary critic (Shattuc 95-6); their production of Axel Caesar Haarmann ended with Fassbinder himself turning fire hose on the audience a la riot police (Schattuc 96). When Fassbinder made the nearly complete transition from dramatist to film director, he continued to maintain his belief in the critical power of the (pop) cultural commodity. This belief stands in stark contrast to the Frankfurt School's theory of the culture industry, which was certainly one of the most influential social c ritiques circulating within post-war West Germany. This c ritique was most forcefully and eloquently laid out in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of