Rainer Werner Fassbinder didn't use a camera, he used a scalpel. His films are not narratives but open-heart autopsies of a society—the West Germany of the Economic Miracle—convinced it had healed its mortal wounds, yet being devoured by an invisible cancer: capital. And if ever there was an incision more precise, ruthless, and painfully accurate in his cinema, it is "Fox and His Friends." It presents a world governed by the right of the strongest, a concept that sounds like a mockery, a sentence pronounced with a smirk, because in the Fassbinderian world strength resides not in muscle or courage, but in one’s bank balance and mastery of bourgeois codes.

The story, in its bare bones, is of an almost fairytale-like simplicity, but a pitch-black fairytale by the Brothers Grimm, stripped of all magic and left to rot under the acid rain of modernity. Franz Biberkopf, known as Fox (played by Fassbinder himself, in one of the most radical and masochistic autobiographical performances in cinema history), is a working-class boy, a crude, naive, and vulgar former circus performer who speaks in a plebeian dialect and dresses with a taste that is an assault on the eyes. His life changes when a 500,000-mark lottery win catapults him, like a stone hurled into a crystal drawing-room, into the orbit of a group of upper-bourgeois homosexuals. Among them is Eugen (Peter Chatel), an industrialist's son—elegant, cultured, with polished speech and impeccable manners. Thus begins a “love story” that is in reality the most lucid and terrifying parable on class struggle ever conceived by post-war German cinema.

Fassbinder completely dismantles the narrative of the “gay-themed film.” The homosexuality of the protagonists is not the theme, but the battlefield; an aseptic laboratory in which to observe the universal dynamics of power, submission, and exploitation under a microscope. Fox is not destroyed because he is gay in a homophobic society; Fox is devoured because he is a proletarian in a bourgeois world. His money is the passport to enter this world, but his class identity is an original sin that cannot be washed away. Eugen and his circle do not fall in love with Fox, but with his capital. They become his parasites, convincing him to invest in failing businesses, to buy an apartment he cannot maintain, to pay their bills, to finance their lifestyle.

The process we witness is a sort of Pygmalion in reverse, a ruthless cultural colonization. Eugen doesn't want to elevate Fox; he wants to neutralize him. He forces him to change his clothes, to correct the way he speaks, to choose the right cutlery, to read the “correct” books, to appreciate the “right” art. Every lesson in etiquette is an expropriation, every expensive gift a tightening noose. Fox, in love and desperate to be accepted, allows himself to be molded, losing, piece by piece, his very essence, his only, rugged authenticity. In one of the most chilling scenes, Eugen forces him to call his mother to ask for money, humiliating him and exposing his inadequacy with the coldness of an entomologist. Love, here, is not a feeling, but the most sophisticated of Marxian superstructures, a tool of control and value extraction.

Fassbinder's direction, aided by the glacial cinematography of Michael Ballhaus, is of surgical precision. The bourgeois apartments, immaculate and suffocating, are traps of good taste. The characters are constantly framed by doorposts, reflected in mirrors, observed through glass. It is a visual language that evokes imprisonment and narcissism, where every interaction is a performance and every glance a judgment. Fassbinder plunders the aesthetics of the Douglas Sirk melodramas he so admired, but he empties them of all romantic warmth, leaving only the formal skeleton, a gilded cage of saturated colors and impeccable compositions in which his characters tear each other apart. The result is a work that has the geometric beauty and cruelty of a mathematical theorem proving the impossibility of happiness.

And then there is the meta-textual dimension, which makes the film an almost radioactive object. Fassbinder playing Fox is no mere actor's vanity. It is an act of self-flagellation, a public exploration of his own contradictions. Fassbinder, the tyrannical director, the manipulator who dominated his commune of actors and lovers, here puts himself in the shoes of the ultimate victim. The film is dedicated to Armin Meier, his partner at the time, who came from a proletarian background and whose relationship with the director was stormy and tragically mirrored that of the film. Meier would commit suicide shortly after, in the very apartment that had belonged to Fassbinder. This knowledge is not a simple piece of trivia, but a shadow that stretches over every frame, transforming the viewing into an almost unbearable experience, a document that blurs the lines between fiction, confession, and prophecy.

The film can be read as a modern and nihilistic version of a novel by Balzac or Zola, where social ascent and downfall are dictated by economic laws as ferocious as the laws of nature. Fox's naivety is not unlike that of a Dostoevsky character thrown to the demons of modernity. But unlike the great novelists of the nineteenth century, Fassbinder grants no hope, no possibility of redemption or catharsis. The epilogue is one of the most ruthless and politically potent conclusions in the history of cinema. Abandoned and penniless, Fox dies of a Valium overdose in a subway station, as cold and impersonal as a morgue. Two young boys find him and steal his watch and remaining money. Shortly after, two of his former bourgeois “friends” walk by. They recognize him, glance at each other, and walk straight on, disgusted. “Let’s go, he’s already starting to stink,” one says.

In this final scene, of an almost Brechtian desolation, the film's theorem is proven. Fox, once drained of his economic value, literally ceases to exist. He is no longer a human being, but organic waste, a public nuisance. The “right of the strongest” is not the right to win a fight, but the right to be able to ignore the corpse of the weaker. It is the right to walk on by. In this, Fassbinder achieves his most radical critique not only of capitalism, but of an entire civilization that has replaced ethics with aesthetics, compassion with convenience. "Fox and His Friends" is a film that does not simply age well; its analysis is so lucid and fundamental that with every new economic crisis, every new wave of consumerism, it becomes more current, more necessary, more painful. It is a frigid masterpiece, a diamond cut with glass, that continues to wound the eye and illuminate the darkness of our present. An exquisite corpse lying in the pantheon of cinema, forever reminding us of the price of admission to the world of the “winners.”