“Always this gross sex.” On reading the reviews of Jan Bonny’s *Wintermärchen*
After going to the movies yesterday and reading the arts reviews afterward, I found myself pondering—or rather, through the shared pondering and discussion after the film with my companionsSilvia BahlandSebastian Köthe, without whom this text would never have been written.
We saw*Wintermärchen*’by Jan Bonny. The film, highly relevant and, in the best sense, hard to watch, tells the story of a racially motivated, terrorist trio—it immediately brings to mind theNSU. What makes the film unique and controversial is that it focuses primarily on two forces: hate/violence/murder and sex. I don’t want to write any further about the film itself, but ratherabout howthe film and this seemingly hard-to-bear connection have been written about.
[spoiler alert]
The arts reviews give the impression that emphasizing one’s own outrage and revulsion is a necessary conclusion that viewers must draw whenever sex and terrorist violence are presented together. And this is despite the fact that, if you look closely, the way sex is portrayed in*Wintermärchen* works differently from the callous, hardcore sex scenes in other neo-Nazi films. In contrast, the explicit scenes in Jan Bonny’s film look surprisingly “normal.” Normal = no steel-hard bodies, the fumbling seemsclumsy(“ow!”), there is insecurity, jealousy, envy; it seems bored, then, to spice things up, erotic fantasies are shared with the partner, as if the tip had come fromGlamour.
During one of these “wish rounds,” he confides to his partner that he’d love to watch her have sex with another man.Ta-da! – like a genie, the third guy suddenly appears to snatch his buddy’s girlfriend right out from under his nose. So it goes back and forth: she with him, she with the other guy, he with him, and in the end all three together—and it’s precisely this final “unifying” scene à la Tom Tykwer that needs to be discussed in more detail, because apparently none of the reviewers really watched it closely.
What we see in the explicit scenes: cunnilingus, cowgirl position, missionary position, and anal penetration of the men. What wedon’tsee, but might expect based on some reviews: BDSM aesthetics and practices or classic depictions of power imbalances (for example, the woman doesn’t performdeepthroat, there are no facialcumshots, and no Nazi slogans are shouted during sex). If the reviews describe the sex scenes as too intense, the worst part is actually when the men try to get close to the woman when she’s not in the mood and she has to shout “no, leave me alone!” several times—but the line isn’t actually crossed, even if the repetition is frequent enough. And the fact that during the sex fantasy segment, the woman uses the N-word when she says who she’d like to sleep with—but you wouldn’t expect her to use any other language either!
In any case, they mainly go out to kill senselessly and spread their hateful slogans in bars.
The final threesome is surprising—despite everything—because of how tenderly and relaxed everyone interacts with one another. Something entirely different unfolds here compared to the brutal scenes of violence. After the woman initially fled from the men’s same-sex sex—which she had previously provoked in them—it no longer poses a problem in the end. On the contrary, she watches curiously as he gives him a blowjob, then she’s invited to join them on the mattress, and she cautiously joins in. One of them fucks her and is suddenly surprised. She laughs heartily and asks if he came; he has to admit, somewhat embarrassed, that it took him by surprise. They laugh—it’s no problem. Hey, then the other guy just keeps fucking, and the premature ejaculator leans back, relaxed, and watches the couple affectionately. In the end, they all cuddle together, taking turns deciding who gets to lie in the middle.
Not to mention, in all the other scenes, they’re unbearable.
And this is what the arts section writes:
"Unnecessarily long and constantly recurring disgusting sex scenes" (NZZ). “Absolutely ugly,” “boundlessly ugly,” “Fucking and executing migrants merge here into a repulsive release of primal urges.” (Spiegel Online)
“But he [Bonny] shows the endless sex scenes so relentlessly that they become mere poses; eventually, they just grow tiresome. By the time the three of them are constantly rolling around in the sheets at the end, the supposed shock value has long since worn off. Sex and violence—yeah, we get it.” (Zeit Online) Why are the scenes reduced to nothing more than a shock effect? Has the author now seen through something here, “understood” it? Then on: “Above all, one would gladly do without the numerous scenes featuring copulating bodies in shifting pairings—Becky with Tommi, Becky with Maik, Tommi with Maik, and finally all together.” Honestly, and not with the ironic tone of a rhetorical question, I really want to know: Why would one want to spare oneself these scenes? Why is this sex something unbearable? Because Nazis aren’t allowed to have sex? Because the connection between sex and violence is unbearable (why?)? Because violent Nazis cannot have tender sex per se? Because sex shatters the narrative cinema—both as spectacle and in its redundancy? Answers to these questions could provide fascinating insights into the film’s aesthetic strategies and decisions; the prerequisite, however, is to first remain descriptive regarding what the film actually shows and not immediately accept one’s own initial automatic tendencies in interpretation and evaluation without question.
“While the explanation of NSU right-wing extremism as stemming from hatred, sex, and sadomasochism does align with certain quite convincing theories of fascism, the film isn’t even remotely a German ‘Salo’.” (SWR2) As I said, there was no sadomasochism. And why can sex and fascism only be accepted in the context of Sade’s excessive aesthetics of torture?
The oft-cited triad “sex, booze, and murder”(SZ)or “Fuck, kill, drink—one thing leads to another” (Tagesspiegel) –Zeit onlinetakes it a step further in its headline with “Fucking, killing, drinking, fighting” – claims that everything takes place on the same level, with similar qualities, when in fact the sex depicted here stands out, especially in the final scene. This is a trivialization that refuses to look closely.
You don’t have to like the sex scenes or the whole movie; the juxtaposition of tenderness and triviality on one hand and right-wing extremism on the other is unsettling, and you find yourself wondering what this production is trying to achieve, but you can only reflect on that if you don’t imagine combat boots(swr.de) that none of the protagonists are wearing. When mocking tastelessness, exciting interpretive possibilities are overlooked. Doesn’t sexuality, per se, enter into a fascinating relationship with violence? Isn’t there latent violence in the sexual, and doesn’t sex also serve as a mechanism of rejection:
“Love & Violence: Processes that reveal what people had been doing allalong: using sexuality […] toprocessthe unresolved violence trapped within their own bodies; this, too, was part of the attempt at liberation; and where ‘liberation’ increasingly failed to materialize, violence increasingly resurfaced…” (Klaus Theweleit: Salting & Desalting. Changes in the Sexual Fantasies of a Generation) Do the protagonists take refuge in their—always also comical—sexual acts in order to transform killing? It would certainly be worth thinking about.
Ultimately, what comes across most clearly in the reviews is a sense of being overwhelmed, a desire not to have to look. But why do depictions of racist violence seem more acceptable than sexuality that is hardly specifically Nazi in nature?
Ultimately, I don’t yet fully understand what it means that the neo-Nazis in this film have sex the way they do and commit murder the way they do. However, the significant forces at play here can only be uncovered by paying close attention and confronting the ambiguities.
