Berlin Alexanderplatz, Episode 1

Saw Berlin Alexanderplatz, Episode 1, The Punishment Begins:
The episode opens with ex-convict, Franz, being released from prison. Immediately he's overwhelmed by the rush and chaos of life outside the prison. This fact, coupled with the episode title bodes ill for Franz's future. I suspect life after prison just might turn out to be worse than life in prison (but we'll see where the show goes.) He's told not to look back when he leaves the prison (shades of Orpheus?) or he'll be cursed to return. He marches off, but must look back to avoid being run down by a car.

Scared, alone, and overwhelmed, he dithers about almost incoherent. He's shown kindness by a Hasidic Jew, a man bound by his own strict system. The Jew tells him a story about a man who lived large and was loved by all. Then the Jew's brother-in-law shows up and finishes the story: the man died in poverty, imprisoned for not paying his debts and finally buried in a landfill, heaped in garbage. The story illustrates the lack of compassion in the justice system. Franz calls this injustice, but it is the lack of pity we are meant to react to.

The show has a terribly fraught relationship with sex. The opening sequence of the show has an image of two people having sex superimposed over footage of marching soldiers and images of dead people. Very bracing. Franz, we learn, was first put in jail for killing his girlfriend after he realized she was going to leave him. Later he makes violent advances on his sister-in-law. Yet later on, he bites a woman during sex and explains that "this is my way." After the vignette with the Jews, Franz seeks out some female company but when he finds a prostitute, he is unable to preform. The prostitute laughs at him, lustily and gutturally. I think that the show really wants the frustration and embarrassment of sexual impotence to be a theme. I suspect that a parallel will be drawn between Franz's post-prison life and his sex life.

Anyway, the prostitute then tries to arouse him by reading a scientific pamphlet on human reproduction. It's dry and weird and off-putting. Several times the show uses dense scientific jargon to provide a distancing effect. At one point Franz reads the entire prescription, down to the trademark number, off of a bottle of pills (for sexual impotence, naturally.) When Franz's court-case is being described, Newton's equations for force and momentum appear on the screen like title-cards. The obsessive details make the show feel very literary (I suspect reading out a 9-digit number is more bearable in print) and also very frustrating. The descent into distraction removes us from the action, but also usually halts the action. It's an interesting effect.

Thus far, the show is a bit inscrutable. I have no idea, for example, what the little scene with the Jews is meant to convey. We are only 7% of the way through the show however, so the show may become more accessible later. Anyway, to finish the plot: he shacks up with a Polish woman and moves her into his apartment (there's a close-up of a bird cage and when the Polish woman arrives, she is clutching a statue of the virgin Mary) He receives a letter expelling him from Berlin but makes a deal with a prisoners' rights group to stay in Berlin and check in with them monthly in exchange. The women at the advocacy group are smiling and pretty. We shall see how his relationship with them evolves.