"Fear of Fear" (1975) is one of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's movies in which the destruction of a human being by society is shown. In an interview, Fassbinder said that lack of communication leads to brutal force. Force has two faces and appears as self-destruction like the death of Herr R. in "Why does Herr R. run amok?" (1969), and of Fox in "Fox and his friends" (1974) or as destruction of others like the death of a substitute of the protagonist's father in "I only want you to love me" (1976). In Fassbinder's own words: "I really seems that we have to destroy others in order not to destroy ourselves, for the sake of protecting ourselves from self-destruction". As depicted in may Fassbinder-movies, the mechanisms of destruction by society work basically because this mechanisms paradoxically evoke guilt in the person being destroyed, but guilt is a necessarily insufficient interpretation of the reaction of others to oneself. It is thus a feedback-process based on under-determined information and has to lead in consequence to the breakdown of the information processing system, in this special case the human being, who develops that guilt.
After the birth of her second child, Margot falls into a deep depression. Her husband has no time to listen to her, her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law are openly fiendish to her, her daughter is to small to understand her, and her brother-in-law, although on her side, is unable to help her because of his own fragile position. To the depressive Mr. Bauer who offers to listen to her, she does not want to speak because she cannot accept her own depression. Her physician prescribes her Valium, but she gets quickly addicted and needs more than prescribed. The pharmacist is willing to furnish her with the pills in exchange to sexual intercourse. From him, she also learns the helpful effect of cognac, so that she ends up by taking cocktails of Valium and alcohol. These two substances have the desired effect because they isolate her from an environment that she cannot stand anymore and which she wants to flee, helping her in her refusal of being a member of a society of which she is unable to feel herself as a member anymore. But this society in the shape of her closest relatives call her back from her inner emigration and destroy her fully by sending her through the mills of psychiatry in order to turn her into a weak-willed but by it useful member of their society. At the end of the movie, we see that Mr. Bauer has chosen to go his way to the end while Margot has turned into an automata-like being unable even to recognize Mr. Bauer's suicide. One remembers the famous passage of the Revelation in which we read that the greatest fear does not consist in dying but in not being able to die.
After the birth of her second child, Margot falls into a deep depression. Her husband has no time to listen to her, her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law are openly fiendish to her, her daughter is to small to understand her, and her brother-in-law, although on her side, is unable to help her because of his own fragile position. To the depressive Mr. Bauer who offers to listen to her, she does not want to speak because she cannot accept her own depression. Her physician prescribes her Valium, but she gets quickly addicted and needs more than prescribed. The pharmacist is willing to furnish her with the pills in exchange to sexual intercourse. From him, she also learns the helpful effect of cognac, so that she ends up by taking cocktails of Valium and alcohol. These two substances have the desired effect because they isolate her from an environment that she cannot stand anymore and which she wants to flee, helping her in her refusal of being a member of a society of which she is unable to feel herself as a member anymore. But this society in the shape of her closest relatives call her back from her inner emigration and destroy her fully by sending her through the mills of psychiatry in order to turn her into a weak-willed but by it useful member of their society. At the end of the movie, we see that Mr. Bauer has chosen to go his way to the end while Margot has turned into an automata-like being unable even to recognize Mr. Bauer's suicide. One remembers the famous passage of the Revelation in which we read that the greatest fear does not consist in dying but in not being able to die.