ABSTRACT
Fassbinder's films tend to provoke political debate. In the second issue of Gay Left there was a review by Bob Cant of Fox and his Friends (1975). 1 Cant admired the film for its anatomy of ‘the corruptive nature of capitalism’ (not only at the general level of the film's showing that ‘in a bourgeois society all relationships have economic overtones’, but also in the way that, through the references to Hollywood and the scene with the GIs, the film brings out ‘that West Germany – like most of Western Europe – is a neo-colony of American imperialism’) and for its unflinching depiction of ‘the jungle-like atmosphere’ of ‘the gay ghetto’. In the third issue of the journal, Andrew Britton wrote a reply to Cant's review, seeing the film as one whose ‘version of homosexuality degrades us all, and should be roundly denounced’. Britton argued that the film does not deal with the impact of capitalist economic structures on human relationships but merely with a moralising view of ‘“filthy lucre”‘ and that ‘“people with money tend to be unpleasant”‘. Moreover, the film fails, in his view, to deal with the specificities of homosexuality, both as this sexual orientation articulates with class (i.e. the different experience of middle-class and working-class gays; ‘why and how the bourgeois gays depicted have come to acquiesce in the institutions of the society which oppresses them’) and in the particular oppression that gay people suffer in society (‘There is nothing in Fox to show that gayness is subject to ideological, social or legal constraints’).
