Matthew Martens

22May12

Another thing Fassbinder won't let us kid ourselves about: the liberating possibilities of multiplicity. The sense of the Nabokovian source does not survive the translation to cinema -- we know with a certainty that Hermann's double is no double; the ambiguity of the unreliable narrator becomes more obvious and less interesting here. What we are left with is an insistence upon essences, and that they will always out.