Michael Fassbender and Rainier Fassbinder: The unbearable agony of gay life

 

Through an internet rabbit hole too convoluted to explain, I set about to research David Boreanaz, and ended up with nude photos of Michael Fassbender -- from 2007.

Every gay man coming out in the 1980s knew about Michael Fassbender, the German director who specialized in movies about the "unbearable agony of gay life" -- thieves, hustlers, derelicts, outcasts, wandering through industrial wastelands in search of sex or death, both unattainable, hooking up with straight men in the hope that this time, finally, they have met their murderer.

Who could forget Brad Davis, ripped, sweaty, and bulging, as the doomed sailor/murderer Querelle.  "Each man kills the things he loves".

Then there were Fox and His Friends, Despair,  In a Year of 13 Moons, Germany in Autumn, Berlin Alexanderplatz...

Whoops, sorry, that was Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died in 1982.

Although he does show his penis in Germany in Autumn(1978). 

The new guy is Michael Fassbender -- no connection -- born in Germany in 1977 and raised in Ireland, with 63 acting credits on IMDB, including two Oscar nominations. 

I think I've only seen him in the X-Men franchise, where he plays Erik Lensherr, a Holocaust survivor who has a gay-subtext romance with Charles Xavier before becoming his enemy as the supervillain Magneto.  But he has played several canonical gay-ish characters.

In Shame, 2011, Michael plays a business executive who has sex with multiple female partners several times a day, even when he should be doing other things, like helping his sister out of a jam.  One night after he is beat up by the boyfriend of the woman he just screwed, he goes to a sleazy, decadent gay bar and gets a blow job from a guy in the back room.  

Got it, gay men are still wandering through industrial wastelands, eternal outsiders, eternally depressed. But we see his dick.  And his butt, top photo.

More agony after the break

Assassin's Creed, 2016, has Michael's Cal being initiated into a top-secret, thousand-year old order of assassins. He gets a girlfriend, but they have a falling out, leaving open the possibility that he might have some gay relationships later one.  None here, although some of the video games allow same-sex romance..

In Alien: Covenant, 2017, one of the prequels to Alien,  Michael plays an android David 8, an evil sexual aggressor who intimidates and assaults his older model, Walter One.  There's also a human gay couple, but you don't find out about them until one dies, this sparing the audience from"gross" gay stuff.   Sounds like we're back in the "unbearable agony of gay life."

Plus a lot of movies about the unbearable agony of -- not necessarily gay life, but life in general. Like Hunger, 2008, a biopic of Bobby Sands, who went on a hunger strike in 1976. I can't imagine who would want to watch him being slowly tortured to death. But if you want to see the dick of a dying man, it's there.

Trespass against Us, 2016, is about the unbearable agony of life as an Irish traveler. Michael doesn't take his clothes off, but you can see Sean Harris's dick as his character is beat up.

 

Very few tv shows, not a single comedy, just a lot of superhero, crime, and "unbearable agony of life."  Not much has changed since Querelle, except they're showing more dicks and butts.