Episode 10, Loneliness Tears Cracks of Madness Even in Walls:
The episode starts off with Eva showing Mieze around her new apartment. Some rich guy is keeping her there, as though she were a one-woman harem. Dead center of the apartment is a cage of monkeys. The cage is indicative of Eva's situation and is also a repeated image, mirroring Franz's situation in a larger sense (birdcages usually.) Eva makes an off-hand comment that she'd like to have a baby with Franz and this causes Mieze to guilelessly scream for joy. She clings so tenaciously to Eva that Eva accuses her of lesbianism. But no, it turns out Mieze can't have children and sort of feels like Eva has volunteered as a surrogate mother.
Meanwhile, back at the bar, medicine is the talk of the town. One drunk remarks that doctors are useless and mired in bureaucracy. His wife is dying but is accused by the doctors of suffering only from hypochondria. The sharp-dressed man shouts that Nietzsche is the only philosopher worth listening to and the drunk rejoins that it seems to him that the rich never get accused of hypochondria. There will always be rich and poor people, the bartender says, but, the drunk replies, generation after generation, they always seem to be the same people. Franz is drunk out of his mind at this point and dithers outdoors.
He wanders around, mechanically parroting snatches of the conversation from the bar and leering at a young man who is hawking newspapers, as he once had (the headline: "Czech Jew is child molester!") Eventually, he hails a taxi and goes back, at last, to the prison from episode one. He is woken up by a cop from where he is sleeping, in front of the prison. He hustles back home where Mieze helps him inside. Passing out, he raves about men with golden flowers coming out of their mouths, of green flowers which do not bloom, and of a coming "black order," which is black like newspaper-ink. I believe this man with the golden flowers to be a reference to Hitler, the man with the golden oration, and that the coming order is of course national socialism. I've no idea what the green flowers are though. Money? My guess-work-engine needs more time for that one.
Anyway, we get two jealous-murder scares as Mieze tells Franz that 1) she is becoming a kept woman of some married rich dude and 2) she wants him to have a baby with Eva. Both times Franz is distraught at the news because he feels jealous and (weirdly) inadequate, respectively. When Mieze tells him about the Eva-baby thing, Franz declares he is an animal being lead to slaughter (another recurrent image, with obvious implications with regards to the future of Germany.)
They decide to get drunk and Franz has a momentary vision of murdering Mieze (we are told via narration. While this narration is going, we see a cartoon spider crawl over a photograph of a nude woman.) The rich patron of Mieze shows up and they leave together, leaving Franz drunk and distraught. Sad, at least, but hopefully not murderous. Then agian, Mieze is the best thing to happen to him and I get a sense of doom from this show. I anticipate the worst!
Episode 11, Knowledge is Power and the Early Bird Catches the Worm:
Well, this episode was madness. It opens with Franz meeting up with that horrible Reinhold again, this time asking to join the fruit-gang. He claims he has a cuckoo in his head which forces him to work. This image evokes the bird/bird-cage image and also the specter of the cuckold, which has caused Franz so much angst. The fruit-gangsters believe he's trying to get close to hurt one of them (ie Reinhold, the man responsible for his lost arm) but let him join anyway. The gang is stealing a "gas cylinder" this time. I wonder if they are supposed to be the Nazi's? Anyway, he helps them and brings his share of the take back to Meize.
Meize is distraught at her failure to provide for her man. Franz insists that it's only because he's bored out of his mind that he's working now, but Meize is having none of it. She calls Eva who repeats the guess that he's doing it for revenge. We are told via title-card narration, however, that Franz loves Reinhold in some way. The director of this series is gay, actually, and many of his films contain gay subtexts if not characters and themes, so I don't know how I should take this "love." Anyway, Reinhold, to preempt Franz's supposed revenge, corners Meize and tells her about his and Franz's girlfriend-swapping days. Meize becomes convinced that Franz is going to sell her to Reinhold.
So, Franz is drinking with Reinhold and concocts a plan to show Reinhold how full of love his relationship with Meize is. He brings Reinhold back to his apartment and hides him in his bed. Meize comes home, dejected. She confesses that she's developed feelings for her client and that, as a consequence, she's cut him off. Franz loses his shit. He flies into a jealous rage and beats her for minutes on end, until Reinhold jumps out of the bed and pulls him off of her. She screams and screams, exactly like the previous, murdered girlfriend, so Franz throws her down and smothers her face with his gut for a while until again Reinhold gets a hold of him. She stumbles about, one shoe off, burping and vomiting blood, as Reinhold hustles Franz out of the room. The scene is horrible, ugly madness. It's amazing.
After that fucking scene, we flash forward to the next day. Eva tells Meize that she must forgive Franz (why?) and tells Meize that "dark things" are behind Reinhold's being in their bed. It is indeed a troubling image: a strange man hiding in your bed. She meets up with Franz who is flush with embarrassment and regret. They go off into the countryside where they go to a beer garden. One of the waitresses stares at them, making Meize believe Franz knows her (what is more likely: she is staring at Meize's fresh cuts and bruises.) The episode ends with Franz and Meize in the woods, where, in happier times, they had frolicked.
So, this episode built to an insane climax. I really thought we'd see him kill her at last. Also, I'm really retiring the Franz=Germany equation. There are some echoes and some parallels, but nothing concrete and nothing overt. If I'm not purely imagining it, it's really, deeply subtextual. Okay, I'll stick to established themes from now on. Also, I'm really getting sick of this show. It's difficult to review shows without repeating the same points over and over (cages, jealousy, slaughtered animals, booze) Hopefully a closing review will be more cohesive.
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