In this episode I ramble on about Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1978 film Despair starring Dirk Bogarde.
In 1930s Germany Russian emigre Hermann Hermann has problems: with his chocolate factory, his wife, his wife's 'cousin', the National Socialists and holding himself together. When he meets a man who he believes to be his double he hatches and a plan to solve all his problems at once.
“If this had been the ruling way
Who knows what I might have done.
My thoughts are easy led astray
by any shining sun.”
Those four lines were found in one of the many notebooks that
were in plastic shopping bags beside the body of an old,
possibly, no probably, homeless man, when he was discovered by
a jogger early one morning down by the bridge at Heuston
Station and Parkgate in Dublin. I believe that he was what
they called, or had been in his early life, a Menshevik, a
faction within the Russian revolution that was more moderate,
more true to the socialist ideal than the Bolsheviks, a group
who adhered almost to the Johnson family code (the good Bum’s
and thieves code) as espoused by William Burroughs.
‘A Johnson honours his obligations. His word is good and he is
a good man to do business with. A Johnson gives help when
needed. A Johnson minds his own business.’
It sounded to me like a perfect blueprint for a political
system when I first read it; still sounds like that to me now.
I allow myself to imagine, with my safe lack of real
historical expertise, that this was basically the philosophy
of the Mensheviks, that they represented a genuine chance of
something like an ideal socialism. Of course that is
pleasingly dramatic but it doesn’t demand anything from me.
Afterall the Mensheviks are gone, whoever they really were,
and don’t ask for anything from me except a dreamy sort of
melancholy, nostalgia for a fantasy.
Of course none of this about the old man, I call him Nickoli
Raisov in my mind, is true. I made all this up and once I
made it up it took root in my head and now it lives there and
acts like it's true… and like it owns the place. It definitely
has squatters rights.
