Respect Quote by Rainer W. Fassbinder

Melodrama is usually where serious people go to sneer, and Fassbinder is calling that bluff. When he insists that “melodramatic feelings” aren’t laughable, he’s defending a mode that critics love to treat as cheap: big emotions, obvious symbolism, tears on cue. His point is that the laughter aimed at melodrama isn’t really about aesthetics. It’s a social reflex, a way of policing what kinds of feeling are allowed to show in public without embarrassment.

Fassbinder’s work (from The Marriage of Maria Braun to Ali: Fear Eats the Soul) lives in the pressure cooker of postwar German respectability, where desire, shame, and class resentment simmer under tidy surfaces. In that context, melodrama becomes less a guilty pleasure than a diagnostic tool. Exaggeration isn’t a flaw; it’s how you make invisible violence legible: the casual cruelty of institutions, the everyday humiliations of racism, the transactional bargains of love. When he says these feelings should be taken “absolutely seriously,” the absoluteness matters. He’s refusing the safe middle ground of ironic distance, the posture that lets audiences consume suffering while congratulating themselves for being too sophisticated to be moved.

The subtext is almost accusatory: if you’re laughing at “melodramatic” pain, you might be laughing at pain you’ve learned to deny in yourself. Fassbinder stakes out a radical sincerity, not as sentimentality, but as a political choice: let the feelings be huge, because the forces crushing people are huge, too.