just in case my e-mail didn't work

A Brief Comparison
Douglas Sirk’s 1955 melodrama All That Heaven Allows and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 take of the melodrama Ali: Fear Eats the Soul are two drastically stylistically opposite yet kindred films. They both ultimately deal with two people who love each other but cannot utilize that love to overcome societal conventions. Rather, the women involved cannot fully surrender to love; the men seem to have pretty solid ideals. Both directors manipulate the cinematic medium to convey very strong stances. Sirk disguises his rhetoric with accessible emotion; Fassbinder slaps you in the face with his rhetoric using Brechtian techniques. Essentially, they are the same film, dealing with (mostly) the same issues but one is Hollywood at its finest and the other is anti-Hollywood.
Yet, Sirk’s film is not entirely Hollywood. It is superficially Hollywood and surely made a pretty penny because of that, but one may argue that it could be parodying the mother that birthed it. In any event, Sirk most certainly knew who his audience would be—scopophiliatic Americans; people who are, ironically, blinded by the pleasure of looking. However, he does attempt to educate the masses. One can almost laugh at his use of clichés (i.e. deer =nature, mink coat=success) to hammer in his rhetoric to a blissfully oblivious populace. And what is his rhetoric? All That Heaven Allows is a fiction depicting/critiquing (depending on who is watching) the realities of 1950’s American petit-bourgeois society—the downward spiral of womanhood after they are married off to Suitor #1 (or #2, or #3…), the boredom that births the pitting of woman against woman (i.e. the gossip chain), the utter rut one experiences when they allow themselves to be played by the game of life instead of being an active player. Sirk depicts this maddeningly to a tee. But he offers an alternative in Ron, played by Rock Hudson. The idea of Ron is the counterargument to the “ideological safety valve” that some view All That Heaven Allows as. To the ignorant this film can be seen as a portrayal of society without challenging it but it is not. Sirk was trying to make clear that Ron’s way of life is right and Carrie’s way of life is awful. Ron’s Tao is explicitly revealed in the Shakespeare reference (“To thine own self be true”) and the Thoreau excerpt Carrie reads. Carrie’s Tao is revealed when her children buy her a television for Christmas. Thank divinity that Carrie chose Ron at the end. From a feminists’ viewpoint, it is a pity that Ron’s character had to be the man and Carrie’s character had to be the woman but Sirk was trying to make a profit and that character-sex-swap might have been a little too before its time.
Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul was made in the 70’s (twenty years after) and in a different country than Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, thusly it was made unabashedly and without the façade Sirk constructs to appeal to an audience. Fassbinder assumes his audience is willing to participate in thinking rather than using the cinema as means for an escape or as means to identify. In his assumption, he adopts Bertold Brecht’s theory of distanciation to separate the raw emotion from the raw facts of life. Firstly, his purposeful use of ugly actors achieves the audience in noticing the absence of beautiful people, which is a step in the right direction for the audience noticing something. Secondly, he uses extreme tableaux to prevent the audience from getting too wrapped up in plot and also to provide a moment of reflection upon what may have just occurred (and what it might mean) and appreciation for his stark aesthetic. In terms of plot, Fassbinder’s film is different than Sirk’s in that his is less concerned with the elite versus the enlightened and more concerned with race and economic issues. Emmi is but a cleaning lady, but Ali is a Moroccan migrant worker, the lowest of the low. Also, in All That Heaven Allows, the character of Ron is very sure of himself and his ideals but all that Ali is sure of is that he wants cous cous. Both Ron and Ali share the dislike in being objectified (both seem rather disinterested in their respective partner’s want to “show them off”) but at least men are being objectified for once.