Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

With Rainer Werner Fassbinder, you can't separate the message from the messenger. A Fassbinder film portrays the terrible deficiencies of human nature from the vantage point of a man who was deeply scarred psychologically and terribly deficient in his own personality. Part of what film-viewers see in his films is a searing, brutally honest depiction of human greed and corruption and the other part is the warped psyche of a distressed filmmaker. If one is looking for Truth in a Fassbinder film, one needs to be careful not to dismiss the message out of hand, simply because of Fassbinder's deficiencies, but to recognize as well that his deeply cynical perspective is a reflection of his own depression, drug addiction, anger, and sadistic tendencies.

Historical Background: Fassbinder helped lead the resurgence in German filmmaking during the seventies. He produced over forty films, despite committing suicide in 1982 at just thirty-nine years of age. His early films were low-budget art-house style films, of which two of the better ones were The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) and Effi Briest (1974). He reached the height of his reputation beginning around 1978, with the release of The Marriage of Maria Braun. It was the first film in a trilogy of films dealing with the German "economic miracle" – the amazing resurgence of the German economy after its devastation in World War II. Lola (1982) was the second offering in this cycle and Veronika Voss (1982) the concluding piece.

Fassbinder's bitterness and cynicism was simultaneously political and personal in nature. Like many other Germans born after World War II, Fassbinder felt deep guilt in relation to what he learned about his country's role in the War and the Holocaust. He wondered how could such atrocities have taken place and what did it reveal about the nature of humankind. Furthermore, he was convinced that Germans had not truly learned from their experience in World War II. He viewed the reconstruction effort as simply a substitute for the previous war effort. The German people, in his view, still only cared about the pragmatics of productivity and success and little about the emotional needs of people as human beings.

Driven by this deep cynicism, Fassbinder dropped out of high school, dressed sloppily or in leather, and rejected conservative social values with a bisexual lifestyle. Fassbiner's personal relationships were characterized by bitterness, rage, and jealousy. Fassbinder was hostile and depressed, turning to drug and alcohol abuse. His amorous relationships were typically transient and abusive. Fassbinder felt that genuine "love" did not truly exist and that marriage was merely an institutional device to ensnare adults into societal productivity.

As an artist, however, Fassbinder's quest for truth was uncompromising. Out of his bitterness evolved an intensely critical focus on the perverse aspects of human society, past and present. Fassbinder films dealt with such issues as crime, the Nazi past, aberrant personalities, drug abuse, racism, homophobia, and capitalistic exploitation. Certainly these topics all relate to real societal problems worthy of exposé and public indignation. Most humanists and political leftists could agree with Fassbinder to that extent.

The problem with Fassbinder's oeuvre, however, is that his reflection of societal ills is combined with his own deep sense of cynicism, hopelessness, and despair. Societal ills and psychological deficiencies, in Fassbinder films are presented as insolvable conflicts. Those who attempt to address such problems, such as the character Robert in Veronika Voss, are portrayed as inept and inconsequential do-gooders, motivated mainly out of some misguided personal need to view themselves as saints or knights-errant. Fassbinder's message, in the end, is that people are no damn good, exploitation is the essence of human relationships, and the desire to dominate is so thoroughly entrenched at all levels of social interactions that no amount of pretense of humanism has any real bearing. Fassbinder films typically culminate in the death or despair of one or more of the principal characters. Fassbinder himself followed the progression of his final film in committing suicide in 1982. Veronika Voss can be viewed as a kind of suicide note, since the form of Fassbinder's own death closely parallels that of Veronika.

Thoughtful people should not want to accept Fassbinder's message at face value, but there's still something to be learned. Fassbinder was himself irrevocably scarred by the same deplorable aspects of human society that he exposes in his films. We can learn from a Fassbinder film both by attending to what he has to say and thinking about why he felt compelled to say it. It's the same principle as the idea that you can learn about why and how people embezzle by studying the psychology and strategies of an embezzler. We shouldn't look to a convicted embezzler to write our laws and policies in relation to embezzlement, but the people who write such laws still need to understand how embezzlers think and operate.

The Story: The story for Veronika Voss was based loosely on the life of Sybille Schmitz, a famous sultry German actress who was in her glory during the Nazi years of the thirties and the war years. She had starred as early as 1930 in F.W. Murnau's film Vampyr, but with the rise of the Nazis, she found work mainly in the black-and-white melodramas produced by the Nazi-regulated UFA film studio. After the war, the actors who had worked with the Nazis were blackballed. Unable to find work and deprived of their previous star-status, some, like Schmitz, turned to drink and drugs.

It is ten years after the end of the war, and Veronika Voss (Rosel Zech), though still recognized by older movie fans, is an out-of-work has-been. Her marriage to screenwriter Max Rehbein (Armin Mueller-Stahl) has fallen apart. She claims publicly to be in negotiations with various studios for parts, but she is so strung out on morphine that she can't even manage her lines when she is given a bit part in an up-coming film.

She is under the "care" of a psychiatrist, Dr. Marianne Katz (Annemarie Düringer). It turns out, however, that Dr. Katz is some kind of evil monster who has intentionally addicted Veronika to morphine in order to force her to sign over all of her property. Otherwise, the next injection will be withheld and poor Veronika will suffer agonizing withdrawal symptoms. We learn that Dr. Katz has the same racket going with a bunch of other "patients" as well. Her waiting room is always packed. An elderly Jewish couple, the Treibels (Peter Luehr, Brigitte Horney), survivors of Treblinka, run out of money and commit suicide rather than deal with the horrors of narcotic withdrawal. Dr. Katz ingeniously facilitates the suicides by giving her clients a hefty supply of sleeping pills to take as she cuts off the morphine.

Early in the film, Veronika encounters a kindly man, Robert Krohn (Hilmar Thate), as she is walking about in the rain in a state of hysterical distress. The gentlemanly Robert offers Veronika a share of his umbrella, "shelter and comfort," as Veronika calls it. They talk a bit during the subsequent bus ride and, the next day, Veronika contacts Robert by telephone, setting up a breakfast date. Robert has no idea that she was once a leading actress. Robert lives with a girlfriend, Henriette (Cornelia Froboess), but there is apparently no commitment between them, since Henriette puts up no fuss about Robert initiating a relationship with Veronika, though she's a tab jealous.

Veronika needs money for her next fix and devises a clever little scheme. She asks Robert to loan her 300 marks for a brooch, then returns it for the cash, as soon as he's out-of-sight. Robert later looks Veronika up and they spend a night together at her home (already signed over to Dr. Katz). Robert is a sport reporter for a local newspaper and, discovering that Veronika is addicted, decides to try to help her out. He enlists the help of Henriette and, having figured out Dr. Katz's scam, the two try to gather enough evidence to close her operation down. They are thwarted, however, at every turn. The head of the Department of Public Health turns out to be in cahoots with Dr. Katz. There's also a black American g.i. operating a drug ring out of Dr. Katz's office. Robert and Henriette, in tandem, turn out to be no match for the sinister Dr. Katz and her loyal assistant, Josefa (Doris Schade), and the whole business turns out badly for Robert, Henriette, and Veronika alike. No happy ending here, obviously, since this is Fassbinder.

Themes: My initial reaction to Veronika Voss was to wonder why Fassbinder is wasting his time on an example of human corruption which, though it may exist or have existed, is far from rampant: physicians intentionally addicting and killing clients in order to take control of their property. It certainly can't be high on the list of prevalent social ills. If we take the issue metaphorically, however, there are significant societal parallels. One example would be the drug-addicted prostitutes found in large cities around the world, presumably encouraged in their slide into addiction by their pimps to ensure the pimp's control over the prostitute's life. Another, much more widespread parallel to the situation in Veronika Voss is the American tobacco industry. The tobacco companies spend $8 billion dollars a year glamorizing and promoting tobacco use, with most of that advertisement aimed expressly at children and adolescents. That advertising is intended to encourage young people to become addicted to a product that will ultimately kill half of those who use it. The motivation is, obviously, financial profit. The federal government, in the United States, does nothing meaningful to prevent this conscious, intentional effort to addict our nation's children, despite the fact that 450,000 people each year in the U.S. alone are dying of smoking-relating ailments. That's more than one-fifth of all of the deaths in the country each year.

It is hard for viewers to develop a lot of empathy for Veronika because her problems are partly of her own making. She collaborated with the Nazis and, reputedly, had an affair with Goebbels. After the war, she failed to adjust her personal agenda in accordance with the reality of her situation. She should have moved on with her life rather than clinging to the hope of renewed stardom. She must have been complicit in becoming addicted to morphine, since it seems unlikely that she was forcibly injected. Some viewers, however, will recognize that there is also culpability in Veronika's destruction at two other levels. There's Dr. Katz and her associates who are encouraging and profiting off Veronika's addiction as well as the public officials who refuse to take action to halt the problem.

The same three levels of responsibility apply to the tobacco problem in America. Smokers are complicit in their own deaths because they chose to smoke, even if exposure to advertising was a factor in their choice. Some of us choose not to smoke, despite exposure to that same advertising. Usually, those of us who choose not to smoke had the benefit of counter-education in relation to smoking from our parents and/or schools. It's hard for America to muster the will to address the tobacco problem because smokers don't support more stringent controls on tobacco (after all, they're addicted and need access) and non-smokers understandably feel unaffected by the issue, one way or another.

The tobacco companies are culpable because they encourage addiction both through advertising and by intentionally increasing the addictive properties of tobacco with additives. The tobacco companies are not merely helping to meet a natural demand that people have for their product; they are inducing that demand to increase profits, despite knowing that they are killing people in the process.

The governments in America (federal and state) are culpable, as well, by failing to take the steps necessary to protect the American public – especially our children. In France and the United Kingdom, it is no longer legal for tobacco interests to advertise. America has been unable to take that step because the tobacco lobby is so powerful and any politician who dares to oppose tobacco interests soon has an opponent backed by huge donations from the tobacco companies. The inability to address the tobacco problem is perhaps the preeminent example of how the policies of our so-called democratic government are controlled by economic interests rather than public interests – the wealthy capitalists rather than the victimized poor and middle classes. This is what Fassbinder was trying to get at. Not only do we have some pretty terrible examples of problems in our society attributable to unconscionable exploitation, many of those problems are seemingly intractable.

I say "seemingly intractable", however, because where I disagree with Fassbinder is in his sense of hopelessness. Positive change does sometimes occur, though the pace of that change is depressingly glacial at times. Take the issue of slavery. There are still millions of people enslaved in various parts of the world, one way or another, but slavery now exists as an aberration rather than as an accepted institution. Humankind, taken collectively, rejects the concept where once it was the norm. In America, some people opposed slavery more than fifty years before Lincoln's emancipation proclamation. Some of those abolitionists lived and died without ever observing the fruits of their efforts, before the Civil War brought slavery to an end. They could have easily concluded, as Fassbinder does, that all their efforts were for naught. Progress is sometimes so slow that one does not enjoy the luxury of seeing the results of one's efforts in one's own lifetime. One sometimes has to operate on the faith that the good fight is worth fighting, even when progress is not obvious. The problem inherent in the advertising and promotion of tobacco addiction may seem insolvable at present, but there are indicators of slow but steady progress if one looks closely enough, such as the recent changes in the laws in England and France that now prohibit advertising tobacco products. Fassbinder does us all a service when he relentlessly hammers away at the ills of human society, but he does us all a disservice when he saps the will to struggle against those ills by promoting his cynical perspective of hopelessness.

Production Values: Fassbinder has used a clever device in the cinematographic concept for this film. He has filmed it in black-and-white so as to mimic the kind of film that the fading movie star protagonist might have appeared in during her heyday in Nazi-approved melodramas. He also adds some interesting optical effects, such as star-like reflective images in some of the frames. Another neat gimmick is that the bulk of the film is rather darkly shaded while the scenes in Dr. Katz's office are starkly white, to the point that some of the details are bleached out. I think this ethereal effect in the doctor's office is intended to suggest narcotic stupor and euphoria. Otherwise, the black-and-white photography is only mediocre, in no way on a par with that seen in films of Eisenstein, Renoir, or Dreyer.

My views in relationship to the script of Veronika Voss are implied in points I made above in the "Themes" section of this review. The weaknesses of the script are (1) that few viewers will view the issue of corrupt physicians as a particularly pressing societal problem or associate it metaphorically with the more relevant problems of addiction to illicit or legal recreational drugs; and (2) that Fassbinder's cynicism and pessimism are potentially damaging to the will to fight for change among viewers who fail to understand that the cynicism of the film reflects only Fassbinder's own depression and hopelessness rather than an inevitable reality in relation to societal problems.

I thought the performances in this film quite effective. Rosel Zech made a believable fading diva. She was especially magnificent in two scenes: her failed comeback as an actress and her swan song at the film's conclusion. Hilmar Thate, who played Robert, had an "everyman" kind of role, so if I say that he did not stand out in the role, I mean it as a complement! Cornelia Froboess was lovable as the loyal girlfriend, Henriette, and Annemarie Düringer was chilling as the heartless Dr. Katz. Düringer's other credits include The Lacemaker (1977).

Bottom-Line: There's not much reason for the average viewer to seek out this film. It has the potential to be depressing to viewers because of Fassbinder's deep sense of alienation and hopelessness. It's a must-see, along with the other two films in the "economic miracle" trilogy, only for those wanting a deeper understanding of the work of a troubled but original director. Veronika Voss is in German with English subtitles and has a running time of 105 minutes.

Recommended: No

Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age