Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (1970) When Frank sees his first love

She is running the shark and ray petting exhibit At the Brooklyn Aquarium at Coney Island. She was unphased, swarmed With too-short kids and adults Trying to clamber over the glass walls And touch the skittish yet graceful sea creatures in the tank. But still, Louie and Gladys the yellownose skates And Jo-Jo the sand shark each swim right up to Her. This isn’t surprising to Frank. Back in school she used to be able to call the squirrels In the Quad right up to her And feed them bread crusts out of the palm of her hand. A girl with such command over mindless beasts such as squirrels, sharks (And Franks,) Must be very special indeed. And aside from a small growing set of crow’s feet from too much sun, The past fifteen years just slid off Her shoulders with her unraveling golden hair— She was as innocent and pure as always. The same young gal he had tutored in chemistry, And no wedding ring! Seeing Her was definitely a change in the endless rut that Frank had been on for only just as long as his whole life. He clung on to such small little joys like a character in a Fassbinder film. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the much disputed king of New German cinema, for those not in the know was an acerbic, homosexual and homophobic, hard drinking, hard drugging director, but prolific as all hell. He produced 44 films in the short 36 years, before his death. In 1982, He was found ODed on cocaine with an unfinished script in his hand. He was work-hard/play-hard to the very end. Aside from some better known pieces that someone might have seen such as The Merchant of Four Seasons (1972) and The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), there are some seminal, lesser known pieces. One of these, Why Does Herr R Run Amok? was put on DVD by Fantoma in May 2006. As many of his films, the rhetorical Herr R. deals with issues of alienation, discontent and society. Herr R. is a frumpy, awkward draftsman. His job is a bore, his wife a bit of a nag insistent upon his next promotion and his kid is a bit of a terror in the days before Ritalin. We follow Herr R.’s buttoned down adventures for 85 minutes, squirming in our seats as his boss snubs him at a party, as his son’s teacher explains his homework problems, as teen girls in the record shop giggle as he describes the mystery song he’s trying to find on .45--- and then finally, well---Herr R. runs amok. (forgive the spoiler but it is given in the title after all). No need to spoil the film. But cheers to Kurt Raab as the long suffering R. in a complex yet subtle portrayal. Watch him closely. What’s more, Herr R. is shot in a stark, unflinching documentary style. The Dogme95 films of the last decade and the endless slew of pseudo-documentaries now all over the place, owe much to Fassbinder. Cameras are as if intruding on the Raab Family reality show, with improvised but natural dialog, joke telling, and arguments. All the while Herr R. is trapped and squirming in his bourgeoisie rut… But seeing Her made Frank want to believe in something after all these years, as if every one of his wrong turns had been for a reason. But that wasn’t true at all. Because if it was…well, if the universe were sending him through years of trials and tribulations just to bring him to this point in time and space, then surely he was being taught a lesson in patience. This didn’t seem quite the right moral. Frank Trautman admitted he had been young and fickle back in those days. He flung his affections and attentions at another girl at the first sign of hassle with Her. Since then the girls came and went. Mostly went. And they got weirder and meaner as time progressed and Frank had learned to be tender often in the hard way. Fate and tenderness had always made Frank out to be a fool. He tolerated, coddled each problem, and learned the concept of “endearing.” And with each woman, kindness was a weakness to be exploited. He had learned patience, but only to substitute immediate failure with prolonged misery. Yet, he never found patience to be a virtue. Fate had only taught him a lesson in running away. And yet again:… No wedding ring!