You
might initially consider Mother Kusters goes to Heaven to be one of
Fassbinder’s flatter, less stylistically interesting films, until it occurs to
you that’s probably the point, to record a cross-section of a society that
hardly has the emotional and intellectual energy to lift its drab ugly ass of
the ground. Mrs. Kusters works at home assembling electrical components (some
1,500 a week of them, we’re told) while her husband toils in a chemical plant,
where one day he kills a boss’s son and then himself. The media pounces on the
story as a lurid tabloid sensation, trashing the family accordingly; her
daughter grabs the chance to wrap herself in scandal and advance her singing
career, while Mrs. Kusters’s bewildered loyalty to her husband makes her an
easy toy for the left, seeking to brandish her as the surviving spouse of an
unrecognized revolutionary. Virtually every face is familiar from
other Fassbinder works, feeding its sense of claustrophobic insularity, of
self-devouring ugliness (nobody ever captured eye-hurting 70’s clothes and
décor better than Fassbinder did, no matter that he did it in film after film). The
restored version of Mother Kusters initially seems to end in terrorism and death, but
then a caption introduces an alternative ending, originally used only on the
American release it says, which leads to further dissipation of energy, before
an act of kindness and a hint of a possible return to happy domesticity.
There’s no suggestion Fassbinder ever envisaged showing the film with both
endings, and yet it’s just about perfect, underlining how the tangle of
personal and political will only ever resolve itself arbitrarily, either due to
the unkind whims of society, or to the (perhaps) more sympathetic ones of the
artist. Viewed now, at a time of particular shakiness for progressivity, the
film speaks louder than ever of a collective inability to diagnose and shape
the present, let alone look to the future.
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