Bruce LaBruce's The Raspberry Reich: Revolutionary Corn, Revolutionary Flakes - Page 2

Her radical enterprise falls apart because Gudrun doesn't perceive or can't control the drives she stirs up. Some of the guys turn out to be more sexual, some more criminal, some more conventional, than is good for a group of supposedly dedicated terrorists. Gudrun isn't really paying attention--she's theorizing, with exclamatioin points. Gudrun's revolution is 1% theory and 99% exhibitionism, combined in a way meant to impress, cow, and stimulate her followers, not to persuade them, or anybody else. In the end all she's exhorting the guys to do is screw, play with guns, and shoplift. It wouldn't take even 1% theory to get some guys to do this.

But when the gang's plans go awry, Gudrun the survivor follows Holger, who always wanted only to marry her, confine their sex to the bedroom, and have kids. We last see Gudrun pushing a stroller and telling little Ulrike (as in Ulrike Meinhof) the same "glorious" stories of the RAF she had bored the boys to distraction with a few years earlier.

The movie is full of details about the notorious terrorist cells of the '70s, including the infamously ragtag and incompetent Symbionese Liberation Army, but as LaBruce's dialogue indicates, this is not a realistic recreation (unlike Paul Schrader's fine Patty Hearst (1988)). The Raspberry Reich makes no attempt to stage the action realistically, and it's like a vacation from the suspension of disbelief. LaBruce owes a debt to La Chinoise, which was "difficult" and broke through generic categories but remained culturally "respectable." But The Raspberry Reich, repetitive, disorderly, and flagrant, has more more in common with the work of underground professional amateurs, like Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, Paul Morrissey, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and John Waters, than with the work of Godard.

Godard was comfortable with actors and movie stars. LaBruce isn't interested; he wants the characters to seem fake. As he says in this interview with Filmmaker Magazine, "[S]ome people who don't understand my films, they'll go, 'Well the acting was really bad.' Well, who cares? I don't care if the acting was bad. That's not the point--or that was the point!" The movie is in English, but the actors aren't native speakers. It shifts back and forth between Gudrun's tirades and more intimate conversational scenes among the boys, and though Susanne Sachsse, who plays Gudrun, is a stage actress she doesn't have the command of English to put the rhetorical flourishes across, and the boys' scenes are never more than thinly realized. LaBruce cultivates the inevitable awkwardness in the first place because the clumsiness and obviousness function as satire of Gudrun (who can't see, as we can, that her theories aren't working out as she imagined). LaBruce's use of camp is thus fairly complex but still as entertaining as if Gudrun had been played by a nothing-to-lose drag queen.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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