Wisdom Quote by Rainer W. Fassbinder

Reality, in Fassbinder's hands, is never safe from turning into a story we tell to survive it. "The more real things get, the more like myths they become" reads like a warning from an artist who watched postwar Germany rebuild itself with fresh drywall over old ghosts. When life sharpens into crisis, the mind reaches for shapes big enough to hold it: heroes, villains, fates, necessary sacrifices. Myth is not the opposite of truth here; it's what truth mutates into when it's too jagged to touch directly.

Fassbinder's cinema is obsessed with the everyday becoming archetypal - the battered housewife, the charming exploiter, the state that smiles while it grinds. His characters don't just suffer; they play roles society has already written, and that recognition is the point. The line suggests that "real" isn't mere authenticity. It's pressure: economic precarity, social hypocrisy, desire that can't be confessed. Under that pressure, events start to feel preordained, like you're reenacting a script older than you. That's how ideology works at street level: it turns history into inevitability, personal pain into moral lesson, inequality into "just how things are."

There's also a sly indictment of spectatorship. The more intense reality becomes, the more audiences crave mythic packaging - the clean arc, the catharsis, the distance. Fassbinder refuses that comfort. He implies that myth isn't a higher truth but a coping mechanism, and sometimes a lie with excellent lighting.