Writing Quote by Rainer W. Fassbinder

Fassbinder’s line is a provocation disguised as reassurance: if narrative can poison, it can also heal. Coming from a filmmaker who made a career out of emotional abrasions, it reads less like New Age uplift than an indictment of cultural complacency. He’s pointing at a basic, under-acknowledged technology: stories aren’t entertainment accessories, they’re delivery systems for sensation, ideology, and permission. Make the audience “sick,” and you’ve proved how permeable they are; “well” is the same mechanism aimed in a different direction.

The phrasing matters. “Evil stories” suggests not just horror plots but social scripts that normalize cruelty: misogyny packaged as romance, nationalism as destiny, consumerism as identity. “Make people sick” is bodily language, insisting that culture lands in the nervous system. Then he pivots to “good myths,” not “facts,” which is the tell. Myths are synthetic, larger than life, shared. He’s arguing that the antidote to manipulative myth isn’t dry debunking; it’s better mythmaking. That’s both generous and dangerous. It concedes that people often live by narrative before they live by reason, so the fight is over which fictions get to feel inevitable.

In Fassbinder’s postwar German context, that’s loaded. A society wrestling with propaganda’s aftertaste can’t pretend storytelling is neutral. His intent is almost tactical: artists should stop acting surprised that images move crowds, and start taking responsibility for building narratives that restore empathy, agency, and ethical imagination instead of exploiting the same old reflexes.