Leonard Cohen in Spain and/or Germany

In the first hour or so of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1970 Beware of a Holy Whore (ori­gin­al German title: see poster) the char­ac­ters, young­ish (mostly) film crew mem­bers, loll about in the lobby of a Spanish resort hotel, drink­ing heav­ily and play­ing the juke­box, and most of what they play is Leonard Cohen. As I write in a new post at the Criterion Collection’s Current blog,  these “drunk­en, des­pair­ing, love-starved chil­dren of the coun­ter­cul­ture aren’t just con­sumers of Cohen’s music; they could be char­ac­ters in his songs.” The time­less­ness of Whore (at least as I intu­it it) can slightly obscure the fact that the Cohen tunes, all from his first album, late 1967’s Songs of Leonard Cohen, were con­tem­por­ary at the time. (It would be a year after Fassbinder’s film that Robert Altman would apply them, ana­chron­ist­ic­ally, to McCabe and Mrs. Miller.) What Cohen and his cult fol­low­ing have become, and come to mean, in the inter­ven­ing years, puts a dif­fer­ent light on the songs. But one does­n’t need to have been around at the time Fassbinder’s film was made to see his char­ac­ters in a par­tic­u­lar rela­tion to Cohen’s music. While Canadian, Cohen was per­ceived as an American artist, one of Dylanesque ped­i­gree; his embrace by this group of Europeans is not just a plaus­ible sig­ni­fi­er of a pop-culture mode of exchange at that time, but a sig­nal of the ali­en­a­tion that the char­ac­ters both genu­inely feel but also like to wear as a kind of armor. Not an iron­ic one, either; these aren’t hip­sters, if you will. 

The use of music in Fassbinder is always stag­ger­ingly spot-on and some­times prac­tic­ally pres­ci­ent. It sat­is­fies die­get­ic plaus­ib­il­ity and increases per­spect­ive. It’s dif­fer­ent from the towers of song that Wes Anderson builds for his char­ac­ters in pic­tures such as The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. It’s more imme­di­ate, as befits Whore’s idea of tak­ing what had been the stuff of Fassbinder’s life over the past nine films and throw­ing it on screen. Looking at Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas recently, and doing a bit of research on it, I thought a little bit about the like­li­hood of urb­an gang­sters shar­ing Martin Scorsese’s taste in ’60s and ’70s rock, and agreed with what Scorsese had poin­ted out in, I think, more than one inter­view, that stuff like Donovan’s “Atlantis” and Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love” was com­ing out of juke­boxes and radi­os in the peri­od depic­ted in the film. Still, there’s some­thing about the free­dom of Fassbinder’s use of music, free­dom taken advant­age of before the pop-song soundtrack became anoth­er com­mod­ity in a movie’s mar­ket­ing plan, that’s exhil­ar­at­ing. In the Criterion blog post, I exam­ine one par­tic­u­lar song and its use in an extraordin­ary Fassbinder work in some detail. Check it out here.