This biting drama from 1975 has a lot to say about modern gay friendships

Welcome back to our queer film retrospective, “A Gay Old Time.” In this week’s column, we revisit ’75’s Fox And His Friends, an early gay film with a deep resonance for today’s very-online audience.

The need and longing to belong is a cornerstone for the queer community. The promise and relief of being amongst a group of likeminded people with similar interests, hopes, fears is the fuel that has kept it running pretty much since it’s been around. 

However, that promise doesn’t always deliver.

Sometimes, the meanest, most vicious, and most toxic relationships can come from within. We are not exempt from the issues of classism, racism, and discrimination that plague other communities, and these acts hurt the most when they come from your own kin; from the people that are supposed to understand you most closely.

That is why the title of this week’s film, 1975’s Fox and His Friends is so ironic. As the saying goes, with friends like these…

The Set-Up

The German film—directed by staple of mid-century Western cinema Rainer Werner Fassbinder—follows Franz “Fox” Bieberkopf (played by the director himself), a working class gay man who at the start of the story works at a carnival that his boyfriend runs. When it gets raided and with his boyfriend now imprisoned, Franz suddenly finds himself poor and jobless. His hopes hinge on a lottery ticket that he’s determined to win.

Against all literal odds, Franz wins five hundred thousand marks. But far from solving his issues and setting him up for life, his troubles are only about to begin.

Like vultures, he is suddenly surrounded by Max (Karlheinz Böhm), the fancy art dealer that gave him a ride to purchase the winning ticket, and his friends, a group of bourgeois gay men that look down upon anyone that doesn’t dress, act, speak, or even smell appropriately. They openly mock and disregard Franz, passing him around like a novelty toy they can make fun of, while at the same time milking him for every penny he is worth.

Bad Romance

Franz starts dating Eugen (Peter Chatel), perhaps the most pretentious of the group, whose father owns a bookbinding factory that is about to go under. But Eugen has a plan. With the promises of love, romance, stability, and culture, Eugen convinces Franz to loan him money to rebuild the factory and get repaid over the course of a year. Well, you can imagine how that goes.

But that’s not the way Eugen takes over Franz’s life. They purchase a new apartment (with Franz’s money, of course) that Eugen decorates according to his own, expensive, and frankly gaudy taste. He buys him an entirely new wardrobe. He forbids him to see his old friends, as he considers them and the gay bar they frequent too lowly. Everything that Franz thought he wanted at the start of the film (financial stability, a loving relationship, a community) has turned into a prison for him.

Glow-Up Or Blow-Up?

The transformation of Franz into the perfect gay specimen uses the trope of the makeover (or the upward social mobility transformation) that is so common in fiction, turns it on its head, and exposes the darkness underneath trying to fit in.

We’ve seen many rags to riches stories before. They’re the foundation of practically every romantic comedy made: Pretty Woman, My Fair Lady, She’s All That, going back to the folklore of Cinderella—a person considered to be socially inferior goes through a full transformation (including shopping montages, physical makeovers, new clothes, and a new apartment) that in turn helps them reveal the authentic self that was kept hidden all along.

Franz goes through a similar “makeover”—he allows himself to be molded on the image that Eugen wants of him, because that’s what he has been told is needed to stand out and succeed. But, instead of elevating him and getting him closer to a truer version of himself, all he becomes is a facade.

His actual friends and family slowly leave him. He finds himself tied down financially to Eugen. No matter how hard he tries, he is still left out of the intellectual and high-class world his new friends insist on keeping.

Putting The Gays On Blast

All of this leads Franz into a spiral of shame and self-deprecation that [spoiler alert] end up driving him to suicide. In the last sequence of the film, a pair of teenagers rob his dead body in a train station. Even in death, people can’t stop taking advantage of him.

Fassbinder directs huge parts of the movie through still sequences, where every person and object is carefully placed, like a diorama. He highlights how still and static the status quo is—and how hard it is to break it. People are comfortable in these immovable positions. New people can be brought in, but they will eventually be spit out of the frame.

Since its release, Fox And His Friends has been the subject of many interpretations and debates. There are the issues around how it approaches class, as well as the relationship between emotions and love—how love and companionship are sometimes just another thing that can be bought. Like many great classics, it’s a movie that can be dissected in a different way every time it is viewed.

But it’s also one of the most biting indictments of the social dynamics of the gay community; particularly gay men.

The Social Circle

Fassbinder (a gay filmmaker himself, whose filmography often explored the queer sensibilities in between the taboos of the early 20th Century and the freedom brought by the second half) comments that gay men are not only not excluded from classism, but it is often harsher and more striking among them. He understands how the burn of social rejection stings harder when it comes from one another, how easy manipulation becomes, and how transactional sex and friendship can be.

It is not the definitive outlook, but it is one that remains strangely present in an age of social media, where community can be confused with the exchange of likes and comments—where value is placed with who you are tagged with.

Fox had his “friends “in the ’70s, and he most certainly would have his followers—or subscribers—today.

Streaming now on Max and The Criterion Channel. Available for digital rental/purchase via AppleTV, Prime Video, Google Play, YouTube TV, and Vudu.