ABSTRACT
Both the absolute refusal of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's cinema to provide affirmation, and the access which it periodically yields to a masochistic ecstasy or psychic sublation, locate it in some curious way within a utopian trajectory. This chapter attempts to chart that trajectory after some preliminary discussion of masculinity and its ruination in Berlin Alexanderplatz and In a Year of Thirteen Moons. The pages that follow will distinguish between two very different kinds of identification, one of which sustains conventional masculinity, and the other of which is at the heart both of classic female subjectivity, and of feminine masochism. The chapter suggests that the opening scene of In a Year of Thirteen Moons introduces a thematics of "something's missing," a thematics which obviously comes into play in Berlin Alexanderplatz as well at the moment that Franz loses his arm.
