Although his filmography is varied and prolific as much as you'd expect the output of a cocaine-addled genius who made 40+ projects in less than 15 years to be, Rainer Werner Fassbinder had a pretty consistent style throughout most of his career -- the same glidy camerawork from Michael Ballhaus, the same cast of actors from his theater troupe, the same cold, mannered acting style from all of those people, and the same ornate, carefully composed sets, always decked out with several mirrors for Ballhaus to do his thing with. Fassbinder's signature style, reliable yet never boring, is incredibly powerful when it comes to showing the intricate webs of power and control in relationships and society. Yet his best insight into the ways we warp under the pressures of a greedy world comes in the form of a true oddity in his filmography, Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?
For a film that approaches similar material to Gus van Sant and Alan Clarke's Elephant(s), the currents of tension present in Herr R's everyday life and formal choices are remarkably subtle. Fassbinder and co-director Michael Spengler offer no easy answers to why Herr R. would go on a killing spree, and certainly not in the way Gus Van Sant does in his Elephant by presenting what is essentially a list of extreme factors and graciously offering you your own closeted-homosexuality violent-video-games viewer's choice as to why two kids would shoot up their school. No, there's nothing really in particular present in Herr R's life that leads him to run amok, but we cannot escape from the fact that there IS something wrong in his life, and all the more for the fact that it cannot be easily detected and isolated. All we can really rely on is the form to tell us what might be going on in his world.
Probably the most obvious way this film is an outlier in Fassbinder's filmography is that it's solidly realist -- bizarrely pitched dialogue and acting is swapped out for casual conversations and swiveling shots and play-like staging are replaced with natural, on-the-fly handheld framing. Apparently there's a lot of doubt that Fassbinder was actually involved with the making of this film enough to have a co-directing credit because other than the familiar faces and themes, it barely looks like it's from his insane mind. But someone as attuned to the power of visuals to communicate an alienated world as Fassbinder had to have understood that maybe using his normal style wouldn't have been appropriate in showing a situation quite like Herr R's -- why have all your actors act like robots when his action has more power than 100 Fass-robots, especially at the end of a film that shows a world not terribly dissimilar to ours? Alienating the viewer through obvious formal choices doesn't make as much sense as letting the viewer recognize and (think they) understand Herr R's world, and then shattering it to pieces through an event filmed just as matter-of-factly as his boring meeting with his parents.
A bulk of the film is devoted to a simple structure -- an everyday event in the life of Herr R or his wife, people start talking, and the camera zooms in on another person's reaction to someone talking for most of the conversation. The longer the conversation goes on for, the more I got the sense that everyone is utterly, fatally uninterested in whatever the person next to them is jabbering on about, yet trying really hard to look like they are interested. I have no idea how Spengler and Fassbinder managed to get their actors to embody their characters in such a way that their alienated 1970s German citizens look deeply uninterested and not like they, the actors, secretly want to wander off-set and go take a smoke break, but they did it. I never thought watching someone be bored could be as fascinating as it is in this movie.
Speaking of acting, these reaction shots also reveal something more subtle -- when the dialogue is separated from the person speaking, it becomes obvious the people talking mindlessly about their business, other people's business, plays, and skiing are acting as much as the people that are supposedly listening to them are. These conversations are more of a person's approximation of what counts as a "close relationship" in a world obsessed with social status, upward mobility, and shiny objects, not people that care about each other engaging in a fulfilling conversation. These empty relationships are just as commodified as the furniture in Herr R's house. It's no wonder the only time anyone in this film actually seems genuinely interested in something is during a tragedy.
Herr R's only distinguishing features from the other people in this film is that he doesn't talk as much as everyone else does, and his disinterested reaction shots are more of a man daydreaming than a man looking selfishly detached and slightly disgusted. He also seems to be offputting to some people because of his awkward yet earnest nature -- a drunken toast at a work party repulses several of his coworkers just by how genuine it appears, wanting a raise be damned. There's no room for any kind of whole-hearted truth-talking or showing appreciation for others in this world, and certainly no such thing as individuality here.
So why would Herr R. run amok? The answer is: we don't know. We cannot make sense of an act that is truly senseless. Fassbinder's greatest achievement in this film is that even after Herr R "runs amok", he still comes off as a normal, quiet person who committed an unthinkable, truly unthinkable, act. We see that he faces some pressure at work, that his mother and wife bicker, and that he smokes a lot, but we cannot fathom why he would do what he did. This way, the film speaks to the nature of the inhumane society we can't really break free from -- it depicts the shapeless tension that wordlessly builds up in such a uncaring, stressful world so well that on some level it's more surprising that more of us don't go berserk.
The title of Elephant refers to Ireland's "elephant in the room", of people refusing to acknowledge the problems in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. The elephant in the room of Herr R's surroundings is the room itself. We can't understand why Herr R would run amok, but we do come away with the clear notion that people are not meant to live in a society as detached and false as the world he floats through. And how are we to live if we accept this? Herr R's answer is simple: we don't.