Isolation and Reification in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

 There's no doubt that this film is about loneliness, but Fassbinder presents multiple theories about the origins of the problem for his characters in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Both characters are attracted to the other for the comfort and company each can provide, unaware or unwilling to acknowledge the societal frisson this will create. 

Emmi is an isolated widow, and Ali a lonely Moroccan man. Ali is interested in the motherly care Emmi is eager to give, since her work as a cleaner is unsatisfying. Both bond over the overwhelming labor they spend their days completing. When contemplating their loneliness and exhaustion, Ali proclaims, "Better not to think..." 

Their relationship leads to just that. The extended stares between every character illuminate how out of place they are. The only way the love story is successful is because they both aren't functional with or without each other. Emmi holds on to her white savior complex to believe she can make him happy or successful to forget about her own state of despair. 

This film functioned as an anti-capitalist critique by examining the lack of barrier between public and private self in a commodified world. Mayne states that, "the apparent split between production and consumption, work and leisure, public and private, masks the ways in which the development of capitalist society is marked by relentless and increased domination of the commodity form over all aspects of life" (Mayne 63). Emmi's kitchen functions as a place where their relationship blossoms and marriage is proposed, but also where she waxes poetic about Hitler and invites her work friends who objectify and fetishize Ali. 

For Ali, the barrier between his work self and home self is nearly unidentifiable, since even by his own wife he is valued for his labor and body. 

Fassbinder shows how methods of escape, even cinema, are nearly always lacking, because dialectical frameworks of power exist even outside of those areas.