Genre, Gender, and Gaze: Postmodern Parody in Roth ’ s Baader MURIEL CORMICAN U NIVERSITY OF W EST G EORGIA In this essay I examine how genre, gender, and the gaze function in ways that suggest criticisms of both the main character of Christopher Roth ’ s 2002 film Baader and a general film-viewing public. A close reading of the elements of the film foregrounding the complexity and depth of Roth ’ s interactions with the characters and events of German domestic terrorism (including their media representation) will serve, I hope, to recuperate the film from a negative reception that has sometimes reduced it to little more than a pop-cultural embrace of revolutionary energy and cool, brash, antiauthoritarian masculinity. The recuperative project is an important one because this film is formally quite complex and thus has the potential to open up questions and issues that are sometimes too easily subsumed by a hegemonic national narrative that rejects avenues of exploration suggesting any recuperation of members of the RAF and of a radical leftist political agenda. It is also important because it forces us to examine memory-making films in general, the role they play in contemporary German national identity narration, and the problematic limits of seeing such films in terms of how much they adhere to an «approved» ideological approach to aspects of the German past. In her reading of Schlöndorff ’ s Die Stille nach dem Schuss, Stefanie Hofer argues that Schlöndorff ’ s film is, at least in part, an exploration of the identity crisis that the 1998 elections ushered in for the 68ers. They now had more representatives in the Bundestag than ever before but only at the cost of compromised ideals. «Pragmatismus, Mäßigung und Realismus,» Hofer argues, «haben den heroischen Gestus der Radikalität, des Diskonsensus und vor allem des Idealismus abgelöst» (126). Indeed, whatever fringe, radical, politically active culture Germany had in the sixties, seventies, and even eighties seems to have been swallowed up by precisely the forces Hofer mentions: pragmatism, moderation, and realism. And Germans in general, perhaps because of the fall of the wall and/ or Germany ’ s leading role in the European Union and/ or the events of September 11, 2001, are less sympathetic toward idealist antigovernment ideologies than they were in the past. This is reflected, I would argue, in the kinds of films that have been made about German domestic terrorism in the past ten years and in the often negative reception of those films in the popular press, based, in many cases to be sure, on poor and inaccurate readings but nonetheless published and circulated. Baader can serve as a case in point. Although 1970s terrorism arose at a particular moment and in relation to specific historical forces - the Third Reich, the Vietnam war - Baader (among other films such as Was tun wenn ’ s brennt and even Die Stille nach dem Schuss) foregrounds specific human characters and types, self-stylization, and specifically gendered behaviors as the impetus behind people ’ s involvement in the domestic terrorism of the seventies and deflects attention away from the legitimate and considered ideological justifications the individuals involved might have had. Yet despite the fact that Baader is guilty of offering a reductive and trivialized view of the RAF, Roth has been criticized for paying homage to Andreas Baader and his cohort and has been accused of focusing on Baader ’ s coolness in order to elevate him to a kind of hero status. In Andrea Dittgen ’ s words: «Hardly anyone much liked Baader (2002). . . , in which director Christopher Roth combined terrorism with pop aesthetics, showing Baader as an urban guerrilla and macho lover, venerating him as if he were Jesse James in a Western. Roth even gave him a fictitious death in a violent shoot-out with the police» (25). Others who criticized the film for its use of pop aesthetics to make terrorism chic, its positive mythologizing of Andreas Baader and the RAF, its overly sympathetic portrayal of Baader and/ or its lack of historical authenticity include Ekkehard Knörer, Stefan Aust, author of the seminal Der Baader-Meinhof-Komplex, and Isabelle Reicher. 1 The reviews and interpretations of the film that condemn it for turning Baader into a hero and for sympathizing with the RAF should cause resistance for two main reasons. First, what if the film did actually render Baader a hero or depict him sympathetically? Does a critique of a film based solely on its alleged lionizing of Baader not imply a censorship of certain political positions and a refusal to allow for political positions beyond a set of politically correct and acceptable ones? Readings that reject the film for demonstrating the «wrong» sympathies imply that the only appropriate approach to the RAF and its representation is a critical one that labels the players mindless and dangerous terrorists and wipes its hands of them. Such readings betray what I see as a problematically hegemonic view, one that denies the kinds of complexity we need in any discussion of terrorism past or present. In fact, I would argue, this particular kind of negative reception makes the same mistake that Roth suggests, by means of his formal choices, the press, the government, and the peace-keeping authorities made in dealing with the APO in the late sixties: condemning without listening, excluding and marginalizing as dangerous what contains legitimate critiques, and grasping at and enjoying 18 Muriel Cormican with one hand what we cast off and denounce with the other. I hope to elucidate those formal choices and how they function here. Secondly, it is very difficult to see how any medium-appropriate analysis of Baader could arrive at the conclusion that Baader is depicted in heroic terms in the first place. Surely such interpretations are based on a failure to account for the formal complexities that make the film immensely interesting in its representational strategies and its ideological and historical insinuations. In my discussion of gender and gaze, I hope to demonstrate that if Baader comes off as cool, sexy, and heroic, it is only in scenes that Roth uses to suggest that this was how Baader saw himself. In the end, what the viewer gets is a parody. We laugh at Baader ’ s self-stylization because we see in it things that he was unable to see such as his recreation of gender inequity to enhance his own authority. In much of the reception of German cinematic renderings of the German past - be it of the Holocaust, the former East German state, or the RAF - memory making - how to do it appropriately, sensitively, accurately, respectfully - has played a large role, and understandably so. Representing relatively recent historical events and figures inevitably touches the lives of real people affected by those events and intrudes on the interests and careers of actors on the national stage who deal in the currency of national identity and ideology. Not infrequently, therefore, one comes up against receptions and readings of a variety of what I will call memory-making films that treat the films almost exclusively as ideology delivery systems - much like a cigarette is a nicotine delivery system - readings that reduce the films to calculated interventions in the service of a particular political agenda and that accuse the films and/ or filmmakers of presenting viewers with a skewed and problematic prepackaged perspective. There is a sense in which collective memory is treated, at least in public discourse, as what Michael Rothberg, in his book Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, calls «competitive» memory. Introducing and elaborating on a concept that he calls multidirectional memory, Rothberg offers an alternative way of understanding collective memory and memory-making in various contexts: «Against the framework that understands collective memory as competitive memory - as a zero-sum struggle over scarce resources - I suggest that we consider memory as multidirectional: as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive not privative» (3). A shift in perspective of the sort suggested by Rothberg ’ s concept allows us to see that the generation of memories about or, in the case of Roth ’ s Baader, the playing with memories of one aspect of the past does not necessarily block or falsify memory of other aspects but might, in fact, enhance or comment critically on the same. Seeing memory as multidirectional in this way can help 19 Genre, Gender, and Gaze move us beyond questions of a film ’ s adherence to or deviation from historic detail or of its apparent sympathies and open up spaces in which more accurate close readings of the film might occur. I want to emphasize that I am not undermining how understandable and necessary the former questions are, only positing that they are not enough. Whereas viewers close to victims of the RAF (or any terrorist) attacks are likely to be outraged by any positive depiction of the RAF (even if that positive depiction is, in fact, parodic), it is objectively the case that the members of the group were still human beings who lived, thought, suffered, loved, and died as we all do. And it is also the case that, as much as memory theory and memory studies, memory-making films such as Baader present - often in more accessible form - complex propositions and questions rather than easily digestible, nationalist nuggets. Many of the memory-making films I am thinking of here (Der Baader Meinhof Komplex, Der Untergang, Die Stille nach dem Schuß, Aimée und Jaguar, Das Leben der anderen, and so on) deal in realist aesthetics and endeavor to present accurate approaches to historical contexts and events even when the story itself is fictional. As texts, these films invoke historical, political, and ideological «truths» in a manner that respects them as incontestable and promises to enhance the viewer ’ s understanding of them through a series of «what ifs» about the lives of a set of fictional or historical figures who moved in these «real» contexts. The editing choices Roth makes and the fact that Baader quickly becomes a parody means that it differs in an important way from many other German memory-making films, however. It refers not to an incontestable, external, historical truth about Baader but only to another set of texts and narratives about Baader, including Baader ’ s own. Thus in the same moment that Roth hints at a sexy, cool, admirable hero called Baader, he retracts that representation and offers another. In my reading of Roth ’ s formal choices (his editing, comedic invocation of the genre of the Western and his subtle comedy in general), his depiction of gender relations within the RAF, his nods to Godard ’ s Breathless, Arthur Penn ’ s Bonnie and Clyde, and Klaus Lemke ’ s 48 Stunden bis Acapulco, and his treatment of the gaze, of looking, I advance the argument that this is a self-reflexive, postmodern parody that forces attentive viewers to question their reception of the images presented. Roth ’ s character Andreas Baader is over-the-top in every sense of the word and thus little more than a caricature, let alone a hero. From the beginning of Baader, Roth ’ s self-reflexive, postmodern approach to the material is evident in how he works to undermine suture and to fragment the viewer ’ s perception. By means of disjunctive editing, a dissonant soundtrack, the character Gudrun Ensslin ’ s direct address to the camera, and rapid cuts among black and white as well as color pop-culture images, 20 Muriel Cormican historically authentic film footage, and his own fictional reincarnations of the members of the Baader-Meinhof group, Roth interrupts viewer identification and draws attention to the process of representation, both his own and the media ’ s in general. In the introductory sequence, two formal elements in particular stand out for their implied commentary on the content. First, a listlike compilation of faces and events and the media representation of those faces and events from the sixties and seventies offer only a convoluted narrative that allows no easy access unless one is already fairly familiar with the history of the period. The montage of authentic images of the Vietnam war, Joan Baez, protests in Berlin, the Shah, and Mick Jagger creates primarily atmosphere. We get a sense of a punk, exciting, aggressive, antiestablishment youthful movement but have to work to piece things together into a coherent statement. 2 Second, the staid, fictionalized images of intellectually engaged RAF members in a pastoral setting, shot on hand-held camera and with ambient sound, are juxtaposed to the fast-paced, authentic images and events, shot more elaborately and commercially and set here to the sounds of MC5 ’ s punky, abrasive, and somewhat misogynist «Kick Out the Jams.» Coherence is again undermined, and distancing techniques of this sort continue to crop up throughout the film: overlapping editing, ruptures in narrative time, and jump cuts that lend a jagged rhythm. The sense of uncertainty that these techniques create replicate the position of the historically contemporaneous viewer for whom the bombardment by the media must have seemed overwhelming and confusing. It also forces the viewer to interact more with the material, to put the jigsaw pieces together to form a recognizable picture. The stark contrast between the media images of the faces and events of the time and Roth ’ s depiction of the RAF depicting itself on hand-held camera in the opening black and white images in the countryside suggests a variety of representational choices and the possible complicity of the media in adapting what was relatively boring, unexciting protest and conflict into sexy, exciting, action-film-like sequences. Already in the opening three minutes then, Roth introduces the idea of a multiplicity of texts, of the media ’ s role in shaping events and figures, and of the complicity of those recording and consuming the images in the production of a satisfyingly interesting text and set of identities for the main players. Baader and his cohort may have been a problem, Roth suggests, but so too was the media that embraced the potential for exciting news stories about vigilantes whom they simultaneously condemned. If, as Seymour Chatman posits in his article «Parody and Style,» parody is defined as a text that copies and makes fun of another text, then Roth ’ s film certainly conforms to the definition (28). It includes visual quotes 21 Genre, Gender, and Gaze from the texts he copies and makes fun of as montage. Pointing beyond the film itself to other texts in which Baader is a character, he refuses to elevate the other texts (the historically accepted and established narratives and the newsreel representations) to the level of truth and thus underscores the viewer ’ s lack of access to anything beyond representations that reflect certain attitudes, ideologies, and assumptions on the part of those who represent, including himself. Roth advances the argument that Baader is always already a character in a text, first in his own, and then in that of others. He is a mediated construction. One might expect that such a diversion of viewers away from the notion of an original Baader would avert readings that engage in endless discussion of whether the Baader represented is authentic or historically accurate, but that has not been the case. In an interview with Ulrich Kriest, Roth speaks very clearly about the limits of his own filmic mediation of Baader, «Grundsätzlich sage ich dazu, dass das Ende alles offen lassen soll und dass das Ende die ganze erzählte Geschichte in Frage stellt. Ich sage ja nie: So war das. Sondern die Baader-Figur, die ich zeige, ist eine Kinofigur, die ist vereinfacht und trivialisiert.» He concedes his own simplification and trivialization of the RAF and the characters who populated it but also goes on to argue that all representation is, in any case, a simplification and trivialization of immensely complex lives and individuals. While other films might attempt to seriously and accurately depict Baader, offer insight, tell us something meaningful, Roth submits to the limits of a 90-minute feature film from the beginning and creates something that does, to be sure, reflect on and offer insight into Baader and the RAF but that also reflects on the limits of sound-bite media representations that promise to offer us the truth about historically complex, real people and events. Such moments of self-reflexivity, probing, and criticism make this film not just a representation (admittedly fictionalized) of the past but a reflection too on the mechanisms of that representation and on the audiences that partake of the representations. Given the number of distancing effects being employed in the opening sequence of the film and the film ’ s focus on an antiauthoritarian, rebel collective, it is unsurprising that the first lines spoken by Gudrun Ensslin are from a poem by Bertolt Brecht, the father of the Verfremdungseffekt: «Wenn das so bleibt was ist, seid ihr verloren. Euer Freund ist der Wandel, euer Kampfgefährte ist der Zwiespalt. Aus dem Nichts müsst ihr etwas machen, aber das Großmächtige soll zu nichts werden. Was ihr habt, das gebt auf und nehmt euch, was euch verweigert wird.» The heady, intellectual overtones of these lines delivered fairly dryly to the hand-held camera of a fellow rebel provide a radical contrast in tone to the similar sentiment expressed almost immediately in MC5 ’ s lyrics: «Kick out the jams, motherfucker.» Both Brecht 22 Muriel Cormican and MC5 argue for resistance and revolt, Brecht in a reasoned and tamed fashion, MC5 in an emotional, crude, and gritty fashion. Roth constructs a soundtrack that echoes what the juxtaposition of images implies. He recognizes and points out the different modes used to represent the members of the RAF and their theories and ideologies and promises that the film to come will offer a similar variety. This dichotomy is repeated in the contrast between Baader ’ s voice-overs in the film (generally calm, considered, and theoretical in thrust) and his diegetic contributions (generally angered, emotional, and prejudicial). If the extra-diegetic Baader of the voice-overs can be equated with Brecht, then the diegetic Baader is essentially MC5. The black and white images of people milling about somewhat ghostlike in a rural area make for an unexpected beginning to a film about Andreas Baader and introduce spaces and activities that we do not often associate with the RAF. Here, in the middle of the countryside, a group of young reactionaries are pitted against a group of old, traditional farmers in a standoff in which the weapons of choice are a film camera and an empty bucket. The young rebels stand and sit around reading and wielding cameras and flags, and the farmers hide behind old farm equipment and look at them skeptically. In humorous style, Roth invokes the American Western: this is an oddly domesticated standoff on the wild frontier with the patriarchs (the cowboys) attempting to protect their authority and position against the untamed other (the Indians). Roth then carries traits of the western through the film. After the series of introductory cross-cuts discussed above in which predominantly peaceful rural scenes are already juxtaposed to noisy and chaotic city protests and activities, Roth translates the rebellious standoff (camera versus bucket) to an urban space in which Baader shoots a policeman and zooms off to search for another BMW to replace the one he is currently driving. Baader is essentially a lawless cowboy in a BMW, and his badguy, tough image is enhanced by his insistence in a voice-over that he will not surrender: «Ich denke nicht daran mich zu stellen . . .Erfolgsmeldungen über uns können nur heißen verhaftet oder tot. Der Kampf hat erst begonnen.» The film closes with a similar quote from Baader, again emphasizing his bravado: «Wenn jemand behauptet, ich sei auf der Flucht erschossen worden, oder irgendeiner von uns, sei auf der Flucht erschossen worden, dann glaubt ihm nicht.» Baader represents himself as too cool and tough to surrender, as someone who will go down fighting and remain true to his refusal to participate in the structures that exist. The fictionalized closing draws particular attention to Roth ’ s deliberate rewriting of the main character. In this filmic incarnation, Baader not only talks the talk but walks the walk. In the closing moments of the film, which similarly invoke the Western, he strides out of the garage where he ’ s been hiding, throws down 23 Genre, Gender, and Gaze one gun in mock surrender after being hit in the leg, and, after a pause of several seconds, pulls out two more from behind his back and fires repeatedly. He chooses to go out in a high noon shoot-out reminiscent of the shoot-out that closes Arthur Penn ’ s Bonnie and Clyde. The authorities shoot without restraint and well beyond the moment when Baader is dead, riddling him and everything around him with bullets, while the one good cop tries to prevent his death, acknowledging that despite his violent tendencies and misguided actions, there is a kernel of truth to Baader ’ s social critique. The «Zwiespalt» of the Brecht poem quoted by Ensslin at the beginning of the film and referred to from start to finish in a variety of ways rears its head again in this scene. As Baader goes down in a violent shoot-out, an unperturbed housewife in her bathrobe and curlers and a man chewing on a piece of bread take in the spectacle from their apartment windows. The comic contrast between a shoot out and curlers and bread recalls the frontier/ domesticity dichotomy of the opening and reminds the cinemagoer of her own safe and comfortable consumption of the spectacle that is violent cinema. In the beginning, the countryside, the frontier that once needed to be tamed and domesticated, remains a place of wide open spaces, open skies, and unconstrained movement but is dominated by a conservative and patriarchal culture - all of those with whom the RAF does battle are older, entrenched male farmers who fight back with the technologies of their time and profession. The city, on the other hand, the already conquered wilderness, is narrow, mapped, policed, and enclosed but equally dominated by a conservative and patriarchal culture - the SPD meeting is a men ’ s meeting, and there is one woman at the table when Kurt Krone addresses his forces about containing the RAF. What was wild and untamed land has been domesticated and civilized, and this domesticated and civilized space now represents the new frontier, one that is no longer geographical but cultural and intellectual, involving questions of political clout, ideology, gender, engagement, and ownership of the media and technologies of observation and control. Roth ’ s manipulation of the genre of the Western introduces a context in which the actions of the RAF and those who sought them out to bring them to justice can be seen with new eyes. Whereas the framework or constraints of genre often limit the possibilities of interpretation in advance, by populating that framework with new elements that «don ’ t belong» Roth can open up new avenues of understanding and seeing. His play with the genre of the Western, with its tradition of good guys and bad guys, domestication and wilderness, sheriffs and outlaws introduces questions and doubts about the media ’ s limited and limiting representation of the players in the RAF, the time, and the issues. 24 Muriel Cormican Shortly after the biographical narrative of Andreas Baader begins with his shooting of the policeman in 1972, the film flashes back to 1967. Roth employs a standard filmic device to offer us information from the past that grants insight into the character ’ s current motivations. What we find in the 1967 Baader is an immature joy rider who steals a car just for the thrill and drives it in circles in the middle of a field. After his arrest, and in a discussion with his girlfriend and mother of his daughter, we discover that although we might expect him to be knowledgeable about politics and world affairs, he in fact has no idea who Humphrey, the vice president of the United States, is. His narcissism is evident in his frustration with his baby daughter when she won ’ t say «Papa,» and he speaks in slogans, trying to teach a child who clearly doesn ’ t yet speak to say «Haut die Bullen platt wie Stullen.» This scene is followed immediately by one of an SPD meeting in which Kurt Krone gives a short, articulate speech explaining the position of the Außerparlementische Opposition. Krone rationalizes their antiauthoritarian position, defends it in part, and argues that people in authority ought to listen to the critique of these young people so that the country doesn ’ t continue to embrace problematically authoritarian structures. Krone ’ s sympathy for the RAF throughout the film reminds the viewer that it was not the left-leaning ideas of the student movement and eventual RAF in and of themselves that are objectionable but their violent expression in forms that were not acceptable within the system and that could not be controlled and limited. His perspective also raises the question of whether that violent expression might have been forestalled. Krone ’ s description of the APO fits our historical assumptions about the early days of the APO but seems to bear no relationship to the Andreas Baader to whom we have just been introduced, a boor who in the diegetic representation is largely inarticulate and who, when he does make some sense, speaks in slogans. A subsequent cut to Bernward Vesper carefully changing his son ’ s diaper - a fairly obvious contrast to Baader ’ s interaction with his child - further widens the gap between Baader and those construed as some of his more reasonable contemporaries. Roth ’ s editing here calls for us to distinguish politically informed and reasonable protest from cavalier antiauthoritarianism that borders on the sociopathic and to distinguish the APO from an Andreas Baader who can be interpreted as a ridiculous and comic exaggeration of masculinity. Juxtaposed to Krone ’ s reasonable description of the APO ’ s position and to Vesper ’ s gentle fatherhood, the filmic characterization of Baader renders him a narcissist and socially and interpersonally inept. Just as Roth employs generic and formal tools to call our attention to the multiplicity of texts on Baader and to jolt viewers out of their comfort zone, he 25 Genre, Gender, and Gaze invokes the gaze to underscore identity too as text, to suggest the inexorability of narrative, and to further unsettle the viewer. Like his use of disjunctive editing and his offbeat genre choice, his treatment of the gaze works to undermine the viewer ’ s privilege of sitting in the dark, consuming easily digestible images, and receiving a clear message without doing too much labor or reflecting too much on the process of one ’ s own consumption. His examination of the gaze, particularly of how Baader «gazes» at himself, also serves to strengthen the parodic elements in the depiction of Baader, his groupies, and an alienated viewing public. One way in which Roth introduces the concept of the gaze is in his explicit referencing of other cinematic representations of bad guys. He cites Klaus Lemke ’ s 1968 bad-guy film 48 Stunden nach Acapulco - it is the film Baader and Ensslin see when they go to the theater together - and, in terms of style and theme, he invites comparisons to bad-guy films from the sixties such as Jean- Luc Godard ’ s 1963 À Bout de Souffle and Pierrot le fou and Arthur Penn ’ s Bonnie and Clyde mentioned already above. In Á Bout de Souffle, Michel shoots a policeman and, on the run from the law, captivates a young American woman with his nonchalant approach to life and his performance of masculinity. Scenes of Baader in Paris and driving down tree-lined avenues in France evoke similar scenes in À Bout de Souffle, and Roth ’ s editing choices give Baader a jagged rhythm reminiscent of Godard ’ s style. À Bout de Souffle sought to, among other things, underscore the construction of the masculine in the bad-guy hero, Michel, who appears to be bad just for the sake of it and for the erotic charge the danger provides him. Posters of Bogart and a match on the Bogart twitch draw the viewer ’ s attention to Michel ’ s masculinity as a self-conscious construction, and to Michel ’ s conscious modeling of himself on his noir heroes from the big screen. Indeed, Baader ’ s stride after he exits the Lemke film mimics that of Dieter Geissler in the scene we saw from 48 Stunden bis Acapulco and points to Baader ’ s similar self-production and self-stylization. In an interview provided as an extra feature on the DVD, Roth discusses his understanding of Baader as someone who liked film and saw himself in some of the bad guys he watched on screen. In reaction to Godard ’ s Pierrot le fou, Roth tells us, Baader is purported to have said «Das ist ja nur ein Film. Das machen wir selbst» (minute 9: 30 - 9: 39 of interview). Roth goes on to refer to Baader as a man who behaved almost like a film director for his own life, always staging action, drama, excitement (minute 24: 38 - 24: 42 of interview). Both in his own explicit discussion of the film and in his editing and formal choices, Roth investigates identity and identity construction as functions of narrative and representation, emphasizing that the Baader «brand» began with Baader who wrote himself and stylized himself first 26 Muriel Cormican and who was then rewritten and restylized by the media, among others. The stylistic and thematic parallels to À Bout de Souffle and Pierrot le fou together with the incarnation of Baader as someone interested primarily in his own coolness contribute to the repositioning of Andreas Baader as a man who never got over his adolescent need to be cool and thus as an object of ridicule rather than as a serious political and social activist. In Paris in 1969, Baader is shown admiring himself in the mirror, carefully touching and caressing some nice clothes he finds in the apartment they borrow, and playing to the super 8 camera and the women. This does not constitute a depiction of a Bader who is «cool» or a hero. It presents instead a Baader who finds himself cool, and a depiction of someone perceiving himself as cool is, after all, significantly different from a straightforward depiction of someone as cool. Roth ’ s emphasis on Baader ’ s gaze at himself changes the viewer ’ s gaze and pushes for a reinterpretation that questions the kinds of characteristics that sometimes are equated with heroism and «coolness.» In short, Roth ’ s Baader is shown to be someone more interested in his clothes, his appearance, how pretty women perceive him, and in cars than he is in any political principle or humanistic cause. The depiction of Andreas Baader in this eponymous film skirts around whatever psychological complexity might have existed in him, nods to it in the occasional reasonable voice-overs it allows him, but the film avoids delving into those same complexities in the way that, I would argue, Uli Edel ’ s Der Baader Meinhof Komplex does - Edel ’ s film shows a development in Baader from an aggressive young uneducated rebel to a more reasonable, theoretically informed adult. In Roth ’ s film, however, Baader emerges as self-assured, pig-headed, abrasive, abusive, and unshakeable in his faith in violence. He becomes the face of the RAF and its goals while the women operate behind the scenes to enhance his image, to articulate his position, to interpret and present in clear political language what he means when he resorts to angry roars of «Spaghettifresser! » «Fotzen! » «Kameltreiber! » and «Schwanzlutscher! » In the final scene of the film, Baader succumbs to a violent death while two apartment dwellers gaze down on him and the action passively. The inhabitants ’ gaze parallels ours as viewers, adds irony to the scene, and draws attention to its staging, to Baader ’ s performance, and to our own reactions to this high noon shoot out. Within the diegesis of the film, we have two viewers who are lounging about at home, seem unmoved by the violence in front of them, and only sort of vaguely curious. On the one hand, we have the sexy, brash, well-dressed young man providing the action and entertainment. On the other, we have the middle-aged apartment dwellers. Cool, active, and undomesticated meets what is without a doubt uncool, passive, and 27 Genre, Gender, and Gaze domesticated - see the curlers and bathrobe. But rather than make Baader a hero, Roth ’ s comedic twisting of the gaze and the western here implies a criticism of Baader ’ s self-stylization as well as of the viewer who embraces the murder and mayhem perpetrated by the rebel on the wild frontier while rejecting urban guerilla forms of resistance as murderous and sociopathic. Behind Baader in the garage, we are privy to his colleague ’ s prediction of what Baader will do now that he has been shot in the leg and cannot escape. He mimics in advance, and to the sounds of Can ’ s «Sing Swansong,» Baader ’ s final stand, intimating that Baader ’ s grandstanding is predictable. But in our parallel to the onlookers, we do not escape criticism either. We are these viewers sitting in our darkened cinemas, safe, unseen, and entertained by a kind of violence that it is publicly suspect to condone. In this closing sequence, femininity and masculinity, domesticity and untamedness, are humorously contrasted in such a way that they become parodies. Domestication in general serves as a comical device in this film and allows Roth to underscore the gaping chasm between daily life and our expectations of it and media representations of daily life and our expectations of them. Indeed, a major element of the film that has been omitted in its critical reception is its reliance on parody and subtle comedy, both of which depend, in large part, on an explicit treatment of the gaze and on the manipulation and exaggerated representation of gendered behaviors. Baader suggests that many of the women in the RAF were drawn to Baader and the RAF by an erotic charge. Roth depicts the women as groupies and emphasizes Baader ’ s recreation of problematic authoritarian, patriarchal structures within the Baader-Meinhof group, begging the question of why intelligent, educated, articulate and politically engaged women accepted Baader ’ s oppression and abuse. Roth chooses to depict the Baader-Ensslin relationship, for example, as based more on sexual chemistry than on shared political goals by focusing on the role of attraction in the kindling of their relationship. Baader is shown first catching sight of Gudrun Ensslin on television while sitting in a darkened room with a group of friends, watching newsreel and smoking. He perks up when Ensslin is shown being playful in a line of students whose t-shirts spell «Albertz abtreten» in protest of the Shah ’ s visit to Berlin and the shooting of Benno Ohnesorg. In a traditional shot reverse-shot, Baader ’ s gaze becomes ours as it zooms in on Ensslin ’ s smiling face. Roth cuts from Baader ’ s first glimpse of Ensslin on television to an actual personal encounter during a discussion among the political activists about how to move forward. While the others discuss how to proceed peacefully, Baader repeats aggressively «es muss auf die Fresse geben,» but seems more interested in making eye contact 28 Muriel Cormican and flirting with Gudrun Ensslin, in performing masculinity for her, than in discussing anything or listening to anyone. At this point the film takes a detour into the development of their sexual relationship that shows neither of them in a particularly positive light; he performs for her, and she abandons her lover and child for cheap thrills with him. To his violent bravado in fleeing from and shooting a cop in the first part of the film proper then, we have moved on to his inability to listen to his colleagues and his perception of women as sex objects first and foremost. The scene in which Baader sets a toaster on fire is not only a further amusing commentary on his destructive tendencies but also on his groupies ’ passivity in the face of them. In a scene in which the character blocking is significant - the three women sit on one side of the table staring in Baader ’ s direction; he occupies the other side of the table alone - Baader sticks a fork into a toaster, and all are mesmerized by the flames, by how he destroys and blows things up, as it were, and they all stare at his work in a dazed and drugged stupor. Just as in his courtship of Ensslin, Baader does not emerge here as someone who is particularly committed to a political ideal, rather as someone who is disturbed, without orientation, destructive, deceptive and authoritative in a manner that is worse than that of the state he despises. 3 A comparison of the representation of this same historical moment - their arrival at Meinhof ’ s apartment in search of refuge - in Baader and in Edel ’ s Der Baader Meinhof Komplex can serve to highlight what I argue for as Roth ’ s characterization of the women in the RAF as groupies. In Baader, as described above, three women and Baader sit around the table, getting high and drunk, and setting a toaster on fire. The scene ends with Baader ’ s only addition to the women ’ s list of commandments that must be broken in the name of the revolution: «Du musst töten.» All three women repeat Baader ’ s declaration, the camera pans to a close-up of Baader ’ s face, establishing him as the central figure in the scene, and we cut suddenly to a photo session with Baader that initially looks like a photo-op for the star, our main man, Andreas Baader. (As it turns out, he is just having his photo taken for a falsified passport.) In contrast, the scene in Der Baader Meinhof Komplex is sober and focused primarily on the relationship between Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof. Gudrun ’ s gentle awakening of Ulrike is almost erotic, and their tender hug and brief discussion in Ulrike ’ s bedroom suggest a warmth and respect between them that trumps any relationship existing between Meinhof and Baader or Ensslin and Baader at this point. In Edel ’ s rendition of this scene, Baader makes one of his usual brief, aggressive and critical statements before declaring his desire to go to bed and following Ulrike ’ s boyfriend, Peter, out of the kitchen to his bedroom. The three women - Gudrun, Ulrike, and Peggy - are left behind alone and move into positions 29 Genre, Gender, and Gaze around the table to continue the discussion of the struggle. Although Gudrun all but deifies Baader here, arguing that he embodies more revolutionary power than all of the rest of the movement together, the viewer is forced to question her deification of him and to see her valorization of his behaviors as questionable, even incomprehensible. Baader emerges as an oppressive and offensive thug who has somehow found himself propelled into a leadership position despite an enormous lack of leadership qualities. He functions in Edel ’ s film as a figurehead behind whom the women orchestrate activities and articulate positions. Whereas Roth ’ s Baader suggests that many of the women were drawn to Baader and the RAF by an erotic charge and depicts them as groupies, Edel ’ s Der Baader Meinhof Komplex marginalizes Baader, especially intellectually, and depicts the women as operating relatively effectively despite, rather than because of, him. Baader ’ s abrasiveness and aggressive autocracy is further emphasized in Roth ’ s depiction of him as repeatedly relying on the word «Fotze» to refer to the women around him and of his naming of any attempt of theirs to argue with him a «Fotzenaufstand.» The women are depicted as erotically drawn to this hypermasculinity that becomes for us viewers, however, a parody of masculinity. They seem content to accept in their relationship to him the sort of patriarchal authority and abuse they condemn in the state. Whereas they are all content to impose their cultural norms on the Palestinians who take them in as guests for guerilla training in the name of women ’ s rights and gender equity, the group as a whole tolerates Andreas Baader ’ s chauvinism and tyranny. Roth ’ s Andreas Baader can be considered «cool» and a «hero» then only from a very strange and questionable perspective, given that the director is not particularly sympathetic to any of the characters he depicts. None of them are depicted as complex human beings who struggle with the boundaries between resistance and cooption. The film seems to me then to work at demythologizing the RAF and the Baader-Meinhof group. It reduces the renowned figures involved to indiscriminate, unthinking, and sexually driven caricatures who coalesce around a problematically patriarchal masculinity that reminds us of the marginalization of women in previous generations in Germany. In the same way that the early cross-cutting between Baader in prison, Kurt Krone, and Bernward Vesper provides for a background against which it is difficult not to see Andreas Baader in a negative light, a later juxtaposition of a news report about the Frankfurter Brandstifter that interpolates them as serious actors on a political stage and a music-video style scene of these same people around a car by a body of water, getting high and drinking to the sounds of Can ’ s «Sing Swan Song,» points to a disconnect between a perception of the Baader-Meinhof gang as a politically engaged group of 30 Muriel Cormican activists and a diegetic reality of them as a group of disoriented thrill seekers more tied to a pop culture than a political scene. Baader is cavalier, obsessed with superficialities, self-absorbed, and domineering and lacks any sense of self-doubt, and Roth ’ s portrayal of him and his followers elicits unusual but useful comparisons of the radicals of the RAF years to the much criticized, politically disengaged Generation-Golf. Florian Illies has characterized Generation-Golf as a generation of consumers to whom everything is given and for whom entertainment, fun and amusement are the signposts by which they navigate through life. The Generation Golfers are unquestionably cool, progress from purchase to purchase, party to party, event to event but do so, not infrequently, with a distinct sense of disenfranchisement or alienation that they are at pains to suppress - consider, for example, the narrator in Christian Kracht ’ s Faserland. With his particular rendition of Baader, Roth implies that the gulf separating the politically engaged 68ers and Generation Golf may be less gaping than we sometimes imagine, that what is commonly called Generation-Golf and criticized as a generation of disengaged, fashionmad, money-grabbing prima donnas are not as different from 68ers as often assumed. Just by even implying this comparison, Roth levels a criticism at the mythologizing of the 68ers of which he has been accused. At the same time, however, in his introduction of reasoned leftist positions as alternatives to Baader ’ s shouting and slogans, Roth ’ s film does offer an international riposte to a discourse on leftist radical politics that would brand it all as dangerous and given to terrorism, and it offers a riposte to international discourses on terrorism that, especially in the years of the Bush administration in the United States, became monologic, insensitive to grey areas, and blind to many of the complexities (perspective / ideological conviction as different from truth) that make terrorism so controversial, conceptually slippery, and difficult to combat. Simplifying and trivializing in part, and clearly (as responses by surviving relatives showed) offensive to many who have suffered directly as a result of terrorist acts, Baader nonetheless - or perhaps precisely because of this - invites us to reflect on important questions such as the following: Who defines terrorism? What is the difference between vigilantism (often valorized in pop-culture depictions) and terrorism (vilified in the majority of pop-cultural products)? And to what degree do sociopolitical situations and contexts contribute to and fuel terrorism? Roth ’ s Baader is a fascinating and complex film, both formally and in its use of gender and gaze, and it extends to viewers a productive and challenging invitation to revisit the established narratives of German history and their media representations. Brigitte Mohnhaupt ’ s admonition to the post-Baader- Meinhof generation of domestic terrorists in the final scenes of Uli Edel ’ s Der 31 Genre, Gender, and Gaze Baader Meinhof Komplex can serve as a warning to all of us perhaps: «Ihr sollt sie nicht so sehen, wie sie nicht waren.» Mohnhaupt ’ s interest in uttering this statement is to reject any understanding of Baader, Meinhof, Ensslin and so on as victims. But Edel ’ s film might be seen to articulate this sentence in closing as a corrective to a variety of representations of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof and as a call to self-reflection for both those of us who might lean toward mythologizing the RAF and look back nostalgically on a politically engaged youth movement and to those of us who would choose to reject the student movement outright as violent and dominated by terrorist radicals with no legitimate arguments against the kinds of injustices that continue to be enacted today by democratic governments and their repressive state apparati and to be condoned by international organizations and global citizens. Notes 1 In Jump cut, Knörer writes, among other critical things, «die Inszenierung bleibt dabei so bieder und einfallslos wie das Spiel der Darsteller.» Stefan Aust declares in an interview with Ursula Leitner, «Ich finde den Film Baader extrem schlecht, ehrlich gesagt. Ich habe mich auch in mancherlei Hinsicht wirklich geärgert über den Film» (118). And Isabelle Reicher summarizes condescendingly, «Gelangweilte Poseure in einer Medienlandschaft: Der deutsche Regisseur Christopher Roth übersetzt mit seinem Spielfilm «Baader» ein Stück deutscher Nachkriegsgeschichte in Oberflächenreize.» 2 Compare this to the opening of Schlöndorff ’ s Die Stille nach dem Schuss, made in 2000. It catalogs faces and events of the time in a very similar way but without the contrasting pastoral scenes. Schlöndorff opens with scenes of a bank robbery shot with a hand-held camera in which the robbers offer the customers Schokoküsse and jewels of advice such as «Eigentum ist Diebstahl.» A drunken beggar under a bridge who asks for a Mark has hundreds of the just stolen coins poured into his hat, and Rita ’ s narrative of justification begins: «Das waren die heiteren Jahre. Wir dachten, dass wir die Grössten sind, Tatjana. Irgendwie wollten wir das Unrecht abschaffen und den Staat gleich mit. Oder umgekehrt. Beides hing ja zusammen. Politik war Krieg. Überall auf der Welt! » The opening titles are accompanied by the sound of the Rolling Stones ’ «Street Fighting man» and a montage of images associated with anticapitalist and international revolutionary efforts: a sheet of paper with Brecht ’ s «Wenn das so bleibt was ist, seid ihr verloren. . .,» an image of Benno Ohnesorg ’ s death in June 1967, a poster of Jimmy Hendrix and of Louis Malle ’ s 1965 Viva Maria, a bust of Marx, an LP by Ton Steine Scherben, a book on Ché Guevara, a biography of Ho Chi Minh and so on. Thus, in a few minutes German domestic terrorism is tied to a revolutionary pop culture and international revolutionaries just as it is here. The montage has become a trope in German films about domestic terrorism. 3 We might compare his authoritative, controlling demeanor to the pleasure that the government officials take in ordering the police force around through the microphone- 32 Muriel Cormican outfitted helmets that Krone demonstrates to them. The film suggests that there is a kind of fetish about authority that pervades every level of masculine behavior and society. Works Cited Aust, Stefan. Der Baader-Meinhof-Komplex. 3rd expanded ed. Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 2008. Baader. Dir. Christopher Roth. Perfs. Frank Giering, Laura Tonke. 2002. Universum Film GmbH, 2002. Chatman, Seymour. «Parody and Style.» Poetics Today 22: 1 (Spring 2001), 25 - 39. Der Baader Meinhof Komplex. Dir. Uli Edel. Perfs. Moritz Bleibtreu, Martina Gedeck. 2008. DVD, Constantin Film Verleih GmbH, 2008. Dittgen, Andrea. «Radical Chic.» Sight and Sound 18.12 (2008): 24 - 26. Hofer, Stefanie. «Das Ende der Generationseinheit von ‘ 68: Völker Schlöndorffs Die Stille nach dem Schuss.» Seminar 61.2 (2005): 125 - 48. Illies, Florian. Generation Golf. Eine Inspektion. Frankfurt: Fischer, 2001. Knörer, Ekkehard. «Christopher Roth: Baader.» Jump Cut Filmkritik. <http: / / www. jump-cut.de/ filmkritik-baader.html> (1 Dec. 2012) Kracht, Christian. Faserland. München: dtv, 1995. Kriest, Ulrich. «Baader. Das kannst du nicht so sagen, baby! » <http: / / www.intro.de/ kuenstler/ interviews/ 23013366/ christopher-roth-baader-das-kannst-du-so-nichtsagen-baby#> (25 Nov. 2012). Leitner, Ursula. « ‹ Gesichter des Terrors › : Andreas Baader - Ulrike Meinhof - Gudrun Ensslin. Analyse zur Figurengestaltung historischer Vorbilder,» Diplomarbeit, Universität Wien 2010. <http: / / othes.univie.ac.at/ 8582/ 1/ 2010-02-18_0501902. pdf> (27 Nov. 2012) Reicher, Isabelle. «Ein Stück deutsche Nachkriegsgeschichte, in Oberflächenzreize übersetzt: Christopher Roths RAF-Bebilderung Baader.» <http: / / derstandard.at/ 1149474/ Es-muss-auf-die-Fresse-geben> (1 Dec. 2012). Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009. 33 Genre, Gender, and Gaze