More precisely, I saw her as the prototype of an insecure glamorous woman who is utterly bored with her looks but has traded on them all her life, so that she doesn't know how to substitute patience and discipline for the shortcuts they have given her. And yet, I had listened eagerly enough. My mother had trained me from childhood to listen to a woman's troubles. I had slipped into the Oedipal situation, complete with larger virile man in the background whom she complained did not understand her. In the end, I had listened to Gudrun with the same engrossment with which I might have watched one of Fassbinder's films about women in crisis, such as Fear of Fear , in which a gaunt, elegant blonde becomes increasingly isolated and anxious.
Life is the continuation of film by other means.
She had greatly enjoyed our last conversation, she said, and called just to chat. It struck me at the time that she was lonely for a writing guru or a brotherly confidant, neither of which role I wanted to play with her. You see, I was in the market strictly for a lover. Despair proved to be a turning point in my appreciation of him. Though I never reneged on my passion for his earlier movies, it was one of those films that jolted me out of a particular auteur worship.