Keywords

In an interview about her 2016 feature Toni Erdmann, director Maren Ade expressed surprise at its broad reception as comedy: ‘I don’t think the film is a comedy. It’s a drama where you laugh sometimes. It’s so funny that people are calling it a comedy’ (Peranson 2016: n.p.). That many critics classified the film as such is partly explained by the fact that, as Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai note, comedy is ‘both an aesthetic mode and a form of life’ (2017: 233), and Toni Erdmann is about a man, Winfried (Peter Simonischek), for whom the comic is a form of life he holds personally and politically dear. Dismayed by what he sees as the humourless corporate conformism of his daughter Ines (Sandra Hüller), semi-retired music teacher Winfried travels from Germany to Romania, where she works as a management consultant, and stages a series of bizarre interventions by showing up at Ines’s workplace and crashing social events in the guise of life coach Toni Erdmann. In a cheap suit, dishevelled wig and false teeth, Winfried makes little attempt to play Toni with credibility and courts ridicule. During these sequences, the film integrates the aesthetics of comedy into its realism, but if Winfried is trying to make his daughter laugh—or, perhaps, ‘crack up’—it’s rare that the film is inviting the audience to do the same. Although Toni’s appearance and patter, and the baffled reactions of Ines’s business associates, may sometimes be amusing, Ines’s decidedly unamused responses—panicked horror, cold irritation, aggressive or just exhausted compliance—mean that occasions for laughter here are frequently edged out by our sympathy for her less than joyful feelings. In this sense, the film is not a comedy so much as it is about comedy, and about the social relations which shape and are shaped by humour, or its absence. Though much of the film’s reception emphasises the redemptive power of the comic—and it is true, as Ade says, that in Toni Erdmann, you do laugh sometimes—it is in the failure of Winfried’s attempts at comedy that the film does its most interesting work, tracing the psychic dynamics of the estrangement between father and daughter and its intersection with fraying communal bonds and new affective experiences of alienation under post-industrial capitalism.

The most illuminating of Winfried’s stunts takes the form of a musical performance, a standout scene in which, as Toni, he quietly coerces Ines into singing to a room full of strangers at a party while he accompanies her on keyboard. Hüller’s rendition of ‘The Greatest Love of All’, made famous by Whitney Houston’s 1980s cover, gives rise to some of the singular effects that, for Amy Herzog, distinguish the musical moment from other instances of music in film, disrupting the dominant image-sound hierarchy, introducing aesthetic and thematic excess, and interrupting linear narrative flow (Herzog 2010: 7–8). During the film’s Cannes press screening, the Houston number reportedly drew spontaneous applause, though perhaps less as an expression of the pleasure with which Herzog associates the musical moment than an eruptive release of more ambiguous affect that mirrors that of the scene itself. Hüller’s vocal performance, for instance, is neither triumphantly good nor hilariously bad, but it is spirited and unexpectedly exhilarating in a film largely built on terse exchanges of words and looks. At the same time, although the situation is farcical, the song choice ludicrous, there is a sense that something serious is taking place between father and daughter. Though moving, the scene falls short of catharsis, and nor can it be read as the achievement of the kind of authentic selfhood, wrested from professional conformity, that Winfried’s pranks seem intended to produce. Instead, in the same way that ageing ‘68er’ Winfried fails to understand the dwindling counter-cultural force of his investments in performance and play, humour and creativity, Ade’s deployment of the musical number reflects disquietingly on the capacities of particular aesthetic and dramatic forms to escape recuperation by their late capitalist context.

Although Phil Powrie acknowledges that the musical moment does not necessarily yield ‘radical destabilisation of cultural forms’ (Powrie 2017: 11) and Herzog notes that it indeed may ‘work towards more conservative ends’ (Herzog 2010: 8), both are understandably drawn to instances that open, if vanishingly, towards difference and change. In this, they inherit Richard Dyer’s interest in the future-oriented, utopic possibilities of the musical as genre (Dyer 1992). This chapter considers the more ambivalent affects and function of Toni Erdmann’s musical moment, which speaks not so much to visions of the good life—intimate, political and economic—as to their frustration. The first section sets out how comedy, performance and two instances of diegetic music reveal fractures in the father-daughter relationship that coincide with the disintegration of attachments to particular ways of living and working in the contemporary world. Engaging Ngai’s account of ‘zany’ comedy as a strenuously light-hearted aesthetic that exhibits the cross-coupling of play and work increasingly characteristic of performance-driven capitalism and affective labour, it argues that comedy and performance in Toni Erdmann are not emancipatory, but dishearteningly central to the experience of alienation. The second section turns to the Houston number to examine how, in this context, the musical moment takes up the more modest work of capturing not utopia, but what the present feels like, sounding the depths of the disappointments with which any imagining of the future would have to contend.

I

The intertwinement of comedy, performance and music with broader social and political issues is established early in Toni Erdmann, in the first of its three distinct sections. The film opens with Winfried, in Germany, and swiftly characterises him, on the one hand, in terms of a self-conscious commitment to an eccentric sense of humour and, on the other, as a sad figure, mutely aware of his advancing age and uncertain position in the world. In the first scene, he pranks a harried courier on his doorstep, declining to accept a parcel before retreating into the house and eventually re-emerging, in a deliberately unconvincing disguise, declaring that he’s ‘looking forward to defusing’ the package. Typifying the responses of the film’s characters to Winfried’s practical jokes, the courier looks uncertain but remains politely tolerant, clearly itching to escape and continue his deliveries. In his designation of Toni Erdmann as a contemporary update on the classic Hollywood screwball comedy, ‘in which a mischievous madcap disrupts the staid life of an uptight character s/he loves’, David Bordwell notes the socio-economic inequality upon which the genre’s comedy often depends, as spectators are invited ‘to sympathize with people who have enough money and leisure to punk everyone around them’ (Bordwell 2016: n.p.). The opening scene touches on this differential knowingly, hinting at the manner in which Winfried’s unexamined, luxurious faith in humour and play as emancipatory forces will be unpicked over the course of the film.

The importance of creativity, specifically concerning music and performance, to Winfried’s sense of identity is elaborated further in another early scene, as we see him directing a musical number at a high school assembly to mark a colleague’s retirement. Winfried and his students take to the stage in black-and-white face paint, resembling the skull-like masks associated with the Mexican Day of the Dead holiday, for an egregiously tasteless death-themed tribute. Although Ade’s commitment to realism precludes the use of extradiegetic music in her films, instances of diegetic music that punctuate them are often significant, even where they might not be characterised as musical moments. We hear only a few lines of the 1972 song, ‘Heute hier, morgen dort’ (‘Here Today, Tomorrow There’) by Hannes Wader, but the performance connects Winfried’s investment in humour with his cultural and political formation. While the number, conceived—we assume—by Winfried and not by the minimally enthused student performers, bespeaks a delight in wilfully transgressing the bounds of taste and social acceptability, the song also historicises his association of humour and play with the political potential of art and creative expression more generally. We might already assume the sixty-something Winfried to be, as Anne Fuchs describes him, a ‘member of the left-leaning German post-war generation’ (Fuchs 2019: 169), but the choice of song confirms this, a metonym for the German folk music that functioned as ‘an artistic medium for the political protest of the 1968 students movement […] as well as being a popular commercial commodity for a left-wing intellectual public’ (Robb 2007:1).

Ade cuts abruptly to the following scene at Winfried’s ex-wife’s house, where a party is taking place to celebrate a flying visit by Ines, but the irreverent performance built around Wader’s song by Winfried continues to subtly inform this sequence, and the film as a whole, in its articulation of a set of ideals which simultaneously unite and divide father and daughter. The lyrics of ‘Heute hier, morgen dort’ describe the itinerant life of a musician, celebrating movement, change and freedom—values that plainly speak to the cosmopolitanism, anti-authoritarianism and liberalism of Winfried’s generation. But what Winfried fails to recognise, and what Toni Erdmann will gradually make clear, is that his progressive ‘68er’ values are the very stuff that, in the late twentieth century, came to shore up the neoliberal project of financialisation and corporate globalisation of which Ines is—to his apparent disappointment—an avatar. Capital’s ‘new spirit’, in Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s account, arises from its absorption of artistic critiques of rigid bureaucracy that culminated around 1968 (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005). With the shift from the ‘solid’ modernity of Fordist capitalism to the ‘liquid’ of the post-industrial, Zygmunt Bauman writes that ‘[n]owadays capital travels light—with cabin luggage only’ (Bauman 2000: 58), conjuring the figure—not unlike Wader’s musician—of the globe-trotting managerial class to which Ines visibly corresponds. In a smart black suit and blouse, her blandly immaculate, boardroom-to-bar attire strikes a contrast with Winfried’s casual clothes and smudged face paint, and their etiolated intimacy is disclosed in an awkward embrace. He greets her fondly with a childhood pet name but stains her jacket with make-up as they hug, and retreats glumly to the bathroom to wash his face. She is visibly concerned by the blood pressure monitor beneath his shirt, but her surprise registers that they are not in close contact. When Ines disappears to take another work call on her mobile, Winfried remarks drily to his ex-wife, ‘We did something wrong’.

As he leaves the gathering after a conspicuously brief stay, Winfried’s parting conversation with Ines reveals a sharper note in his humour that recalls philosopher Henri Bergson’s reflections on laughter’s disciplinary social function—‘above all, a corrective’ that is by no means ‘invariably inspired by sentiments of kindness or even of justice’ (1911: 197). When Ines explains that she will not have time to visit Winfried’s mother before her return to Romania the next day, he makes a deadpan quip that he can ask the ‘substitute daughter’ he has hired instead. Without missing a beat, Ines shoots back: ‘Great. She can call you on your birthday so I don’t have to’. Though it is not heated, their dialogue is mirthless, betraying entrenched mutual resentments and alluding to the encroachment of work into the private sphere and personal relationships. Winfried’s joke about outsourcing Ines’s daughterly duties is a dig not only at her absence from family life and its gendered responsibilities (in an earlier scene, we see Winfried himself deliver ready meals to his elderly mother and greet her cleaning lady), but also at the nature of the consultancy work that has occasioned that absence. It is possible to read Winfried’s engagement of humour here as an attempt to diffuse the tension around the encounter or to inject into the conversation some levity, with a view to ‘loosening up’ his daughter, along the lines of the screwball dynamic. But if Bergson famously claims that the cause of laughter is a ‘rigidity’ or ‘inelasticity’ in its object—‘something mechanical encrusted on the living’ (1911: 37)—this is not to be conflated with the uptight or a stiff adherence to norms, but refers to non-adapted behaviour that society corrects and fends off through ridicule or its threat. As Michael Billig writes, for Bergson (unlike Freud), in the comic ‘[a]ny rebellious function is secondary’ and ‘the primary link is between conservatism and laughter’ (Billig 2005: 132). Though we may have sympathy for Winfried’s hurt (he cuts a lonely figure at the party compared to his remarried ex-wife), submerged in Winfried’s joke is a reprimand of Ines for abandoning her domestic duties and the reproductive labour of care that might be expected from a daughter in particular. Here a legitimate personal wound shades into something censorious and patriarchal, suggesting that forms of exploitation are not as foreign to Winfried’s ideas of the good life as he believes. If the joke is intended to produce shame, however, Ines refuses it, assuming with defiant enthusiasm the brisk professional identity that distinguishes her from her father and complicating the madcap/staid relation of the screwball comedy that Bordwell identifies in the film. Ines may be staid, but she recognises her position and the generic dynamic as such, and reveals her own capacity for performance as she mimics and redirects her father’s humour back at him.

Winfried’s horror at his daughter’s lifestyle is manifest in the film’s second section, in Bucharest. Arriving unannounced for a visit, Winfried waits in the lobby of her office until Ines arrives with some colleagues. Quickly donning sunglasses and slipping in a set of false front teeth, he sidles up to the group and walks in step beside his daughter. Though she registers him with a startled glance, Ines does not stop, seamlessly continuing her conversation and disappearing into an elevator. It is a quiet but decisive moment in the narrative, an unmistakable moment of the rejection of a parent by a child that also seems to convey the contempt of one generation, and one worldview, for another. As Winfried, Simonischek’s expression here is hard to read, as though something passes through him with which he cannot consciously reckon, but which will inflect the conflict between father and daughter over the rest of the film. In a review, Peter Bradshaw articulates something of this dynamic and its almost unspeakably negative affect, when he writes that Ines is ‘embarrassed by her silly, sad, borderline sociopathic old dad’, and also ashamed of her embarrassment, while Winfried is not only ‘ashamed on her behalf’, but ‘convulsed with an emotion very like hate at the realisation of how little she thinks of him’ (2016: n.p.). Winfried leaves, perhaps intending to come back later or simply return to Germany, but he is chased down by a young Romanian woman who introduces herself as Ines’s assistant. Acting as a cross between substitute daughter and travel guide, she talks Winfried through hotel recommendations and relays Ines’s instructions to meet her that evening after work.

Over the next two days—fraught even by the standards of most parental visits—Winfried bears witness to his daughter’s tireless occupational performance and its colonisation of her life, trailing Ines in activities that resemble the post-industrial work paradigm described by Boltanski and Chiapello, which emphasises networking, short-term business projects and a flexibility that erodes distinctions between work and leisure. Though he tries to fit in and to be kind to his daughter, every attempt misfires. A shared joke with a business contact, whom Ines is trying to cultivate, for example, succeeds only in humiliating her and forging a paternalistic alignment between Winfried and the middle-aged man, an ill-judged move that reveals not only his limited understanding of the conditions of his daughter’s life, but a disavowed complicity with some of the most demeaning of them. He initiates a conversation with Ines about happiness, to which she responds with hostility, although he is hardly wrong to intuit that his daughter is ‘miserable in ways that she can’t entirely recognize or acknowledge’ (Scott 2016: n.p.). But just as he fails to see that humour and performance are not inherent social goods, he is oblivious to the way in which the idea of happiness, as Sara Ahmed argues (2010), may function as a technique to orient individuals towards certain objects and life choices—family, marriage and heterosexual intimacy—that may be oppressive. A little later, Winfried asks Ines, less kindly, ‘Are you really human?’, and though he later apologises, the visit ends on a downbeat note.

For most of what remains of the film, Winfried appears only as alter ego Toni. His second visit comes as a surprise for both Ines and the spectator, when a man in a bar at which she and some friends are standing suddenly turns to offer them champagne and she is aghast to see it is her father, this time in full costume of wig, false teeth and sharkskin suit. Rattled, she runs with his act and shakes his hand as he introduces himself as ‘Toni Erdmann’. Winfried’s persona as Toni is deliberately overdetermined. Claiming to be a ‘life coach’, Winfried apes the behaviours of Ines’s corporate world with a nonsensical twist, name-dropping that he is a friend of Romanian billionaire Ion Tiriac, for example, then adding that Tiriac is not returning his calls because he is upset over the death of his pet turtle. The intentions behind Winfried’s performance are opaque—‘[a] bizarre attempt to … what? Bully her? Make her laugh? Make her cry?’ (Bradshaw 2016: n.p.) Writing of the absurd comic character, Bergson notes that laughter may, briefly at least, be sympathetic—‘we treat him first as a playmate […] he abandons social convention […] our first impulse is to accept the invitation to take it easy’ (195, 196). But, according to Bergson, ‘we rest only for a short time’ and, inimical to feeling, laughter remains a corrective social gesture that restrains eccentricity through fear of the embarrassment of becoming an object of ridicule. Notably, Bergson uses the example—whose terms the film appears to reverse—of ‘a stern father’ who ‘may at times forget himself and join in some prank his child is playing, only to check himself at once in order to correct it’ (197). As Toni, Winfried appears to be soliciting ridicule, as if to present Ines with the choice of aligning with her workmates in laughing at him—daring her to publicly reject him—or of playing along with his anarchic script in loyal and sympathetic amusement, ‘taking it easy’, as Bergson puts it, abandoning her work and risking ridicule herself.

In the event, however, Ines’s colleagues do not ridicule Winfried/Toni, but in fact take little notice of this strange interloper, accepting his presence with only mild confusion and the odd nervous giggle. Fuchs reads this in terms of an ‘unsettling slippage’, as Ines’s corporate friends fail to unmask Winfried because ‘their own entanglement in constant professional role play and a world of simulation has crippled their sense of judgment about the underlying reality’ (2019: 174). However, their nonplussed responses might also register a more profound ambiguity around role-play and performance and a convergence between work and leisure, acting and being, in which the notion of a distinctly authentic, unalienated ‘underlying reality’ disappears. The question, then, is not why nobody calls Winfried out for his fakery—which, after all, is no more artificial than Ines’s business presentations or feigned enthusiasm at shopping with a colleague’s wife—but why nobody really laughs at him, and why Ines, though playing along with her father, does not at any point seem to be having fun. Fuchs finds the disruptive force of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque in Winfried’s performance, but I am inclined to see it—and, I would suggest, its failure to be either unambiguously funny or genuinely disruptive—in terms of its ‘zaniness’, as a number of reviews label it (Jones 2017: n.p.; O’Hehir 2017: n.p.). In her analysis of the ‘zany’ as an aesthetic category, Ngai argues that although insistently playful and entertaining, zany comedy has ‘a stressed-out, even desperate quality that immediately sets it apart from its more light-hearted comedic cousins, the goofy or silly’ (2012: 185). Describing it as ‘a style of incessant doing’, she suggests that, in its contemporary form, the zany and its contradictory affects bespeak the ‘politically ambiguous intersection between cultural and occupational performance, acting and service, playing and labouring’ increasingly characteristic of post-industrial capitalism (2012: 181).

Accordingly, although Winfried might consider his improvisational turns as Toni to be a subversive intervention in his daughter’s corporate milieu, they are, for all their silliness, in fact more or less consonant with its norms and bear no qualitative difference from the autonomous performance required of the post-industrial service worker—hence his failure to elicit ridicule. By drawing Ines into his act, Winfried is not liberating his daughter from work, but multiplying her labour. In another striking instance of diegetic music, Ines seems to register, with despair, the hopelessness of Winfried’s efforts and the further burden they place upon her. Letting him tag along with her and her friends to a nightclub, Ines appears unable to find enjoyment in either the supposedly desirable trappings of her lifestyle or in her father’s game. An electro house remix of ‘Safe and Sound’ by LA duo Capital Cities drowns out conversation while Ines’s friends dance exuberantly and spill champagne as she sits at a distance from Winfried/Toni. Like ‘The Greatest Love of All’, ‘Safe and Sound’ is unusual in its lyrics’ reference to love beyond the romantic; its refrain, ‘I could lift you up/I could show you what you wanna see/And take you where you wanna be’, speaks equally to friendship or indeed a parental relationship. The track—which topped the German charts in 2013 after appearing in a Vodafone advert—is ultra-commercial fare, its lyrics literal and corny, but perhaps precisely for that reason it makes for a poignant, anempathetic soundtrack as Ines shares a long and wordless exchange of looks with her father, tears running down her face, before she gets up and leaves alone. If the Wader song is Winfried’s ‘theme’, this might be Ines’s—pre-packaged, insistently uplifting electropop redolent of the ‘euphoria in unhappiness’ that Herbert Marcuse associates with the compensatory commercial pleasures of life under advanced capitalism (1991: 5).

II

Given the film’s cumulative elaboration of the ‘becoming-labour of performance’ that Ngai identifies in zany comedy (2012: 233), it is unsurprising that there should be significant implications for the Houston number as an instance of the musical moment involving diegetic performance under late capitalism. Fuchs reads the scene as part of a narrative of transformation, whereby Winfried’s role-playing ‘cracks [Ines’s] social veneer’, eliciting ‘a form of self-expression that literally gives voice to her longing for personal empowerment’ (2019: 175) and constituting one among the film’s several ‘disruptive performances of father and daughter [that] will have a lasting effect’ (180). In this regard, Fuchs finds in it some of the functions and characteristics of the musical moment as theorised by Herzog (rupture and difference) and of the crystal-song set out by Powrie (change and authenticity), both drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Although it is true that there are suggestions of all these things in what is a highly affective scene (hence the applause at Cannes), there is also an important way in which they are undercut by other, less joyful, aspects, which are made legible by situating the performance within the context of comedy, and the zany in particular. Perhaps more than any other of Winfried’s stunts, the Houston song seems engineered to unseat Ines from her social and professional conformity—in these terms, surely nothing could be more embarrassing, and therefore freeing, than spontaneously singing a cheesy ballad to a group of strangers? However, it is also the scene in which the failure of his interventions and their complicity with the norms he assumes that they subvert is made most clear. And if Ines ‘plays along’, entering fully into the zany, it is with a mixture of ‘rage and elation’ that Ngai sees at the heart of the aesthetic (2012: 218), more a reproach to her father than reconciliation. In the same way that Winfried’s role-play as Toni is too congruous with its context to elicit laughter or ridicule, this musical moment asks what remains of its own transformative, utopic potential within a capitalist work paradigm now barely dissociable from artistic performance.

In several ways, the film builds expectations that the Houston performance will deliver what Powrie describes, with reference to the crystal-song, as a ‘moment of revelation and intense, often epiphanic feeling’ that may ‘mark turning points in the narrative or the character trajectory, usually transitions from dystopia to utopia’ (2017: 198, 222). After an especially tense day together visiting an oil refinery whose workers will be made redundant by Ines’s restructuring project, the personal and political impasse between father and daughter receives its most direct articulation in a bitter exchange on the drive home. When Ines falls asleep in the car, Winfried asks her driver to make a detour to the home of a Romanian woman he has met earlier in the film. A small Easter party is taking place and the pair—this time posing as the German ambassador and his ‘secretary, Miss Schnuck’—are welcomed inside. Coming almost two hours into the film, we might assume that this will be the final scene and, though incorrect, this sense of an ending and possible resolution is also invited by the film’s organising structure, which resembles what Rick Altman describes as the ‘dual-focus narrative’ of the Hollywood musical (1987: 20). The latter, like the screwball comedy, is driven less by the chronology and progression of plot than by parallels and oppositions between two characters, usually of ‘opposite sex and radically divergent values’, and difference is ultimately, if problematically, conquered through romantic love and music (20). Accordingly, when Winfried announces that they will perform a song and Ines, trying to leave, reluctantly begins to comply, it does seem that something extraordinary and possibly climactic is about to occur.

In his elaboration of the ‘crystal-song’, Powrie uses Deleuze’s notion of the ‘crystal-image’ to model a category of musical moment that places a particular emphasis on time, gathering and refracting past, present and future. The ‘Greatest Love of All’ performance offers something close to this in its evocation of the song’s place in a personal history of father and daughter, the evolving associations of the song as cultural object, and through its lyrics. When Winfried/Toni picks out the opening bars on a keyboard, he glances across at Ines as if to cue her in and there is a strong sense that this is a reprisal of past scenes of performance of this song. That both know their parts by heart seems the legacy of time once spent pleasurably together as father and child. As Claudia Gorbman notes of amateur or ‘artless’ singing in film, beyond the musical genre, scenes of song often work to bond characters, and a common trope of the two-person song or ‘duologue’ involves ‘parent and child sharing a song as an externalisation of their close bond’ or else re-establishing that bond via the ‘direct and credible route to intimacy’ of a song from their past (Gorbman 2011: 163).

Though there is a palpable trace of earlier closeness in Winfried and Ines’s performance, the choice of this particular song is ironic in its inadvertent embodiment of precisely those features of late capitalism that have contributed to their estrangement. Though, as Herzog and Powrie make clear, the formulaic structures and commodity form of popular music can and do engender meaningful aesthetic experiences, the decision to use ‘Greatest of Love of All’ seems to emphasise the progressive hollowing out of this potential. Inspired by the life of boxer Muhammad Ali and originally recorded by George Benson for the 1977 biopic The Greatest, the song’s lyrics may be trite, but the narrative of self-empowerment they relate—‘I decided long ago/Never to walk in anyone’s shadows/If I fail, if I succeed/At least I'll live as I believe’—resonates more convincingly if heard in the context of Ali’s Civil Rights activism and conscientious objection to the Vietnam War. The song makes direct references to childhood and futurity (‘I believe the children are our are future’), questions of intergenerational responsibility (‘Teach them well and let them lead the way’) and an idealised, joyful past (‘Let the children's laughter remind us how we used to be’), all of which speak very obviously to Winfried and Ines’s situation and in some ways echo the crystallisation of different moments that Powrie describes. The lyrics might be merely too platitudinous for the song to offer Gorbman’s ‘direct and credible route to intimacy’, but there is something more specific in the song’s recording history and circulation as cultural artefact that forecloses this possibility and works instead to diagnose the breakdown of the father-daughter relationship as it coincides with the broader disintegration of modes of solidarity and resistance under late capitalism.

A much bigger hit for Houston in 1986, the song’s music video also involves a parent–child relationship, with an appearance from Houston’s real-life mother Cissy, as the lyrics are dramatised and reconfigured as the narrative of Whitney’s transformation from gifted child (played by a young actress) to superstar (Whitney playing herself). In the same way that Houston’s broader image and sound was deliberately ‘white-washed’ by record executives to ensure mainstream commercial appeal, the video in particular works to drain the song of its association with the sacrifices of political struggle and replace it with a narrative of personal success and celebrity, earned and deserved through a mixture of innate talent and self-belief. It is a perfect neoliberal script, in which self-respect (the ‘greatest love of all’) becomes indistinguishable from individualism and narcissism (in the video Houston is literally singing to herself), hence the song’s notable appearances in Brett Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho (1991) and Mary Harron’s film adaptation (2000). In Ellis’s satire of the violence of advanced capitalism and consumer culture, New York banker and sociopath Patrick Bateman professes his admiration for Houston’s music and for ‘Greatest Love of All’ in particular: ‘One of the best, most powerful songs ever written about self-preservation and dignity […] a state-of-the-art ballad about believing in yourself’; ‘[s]ince it’s impossible in the world we live in to empathize with others, we can always empathize with ourselves’ (Ellis 2015: 254). That Houston herself met an early death after struggling with problems, including addiction and a troubled marriage, that seemed to stem partly from the difficulty of inhabiting a persona cultivated for her by record labels and, notably, her parents, invests the song with further sad irony.

It is striking that, of all songs, it is this one that Winfried practised with his daughter as a little girl and that he is now apparently employing as a means of liberating her from the conditions of a culture which the song has served to celebrate. In contrast to the ‘open circuit’ of Powrie’s crystal-song, Ade’s choice of ‘Greatest Love of All’ seems saturated with the thwarted possibility of authentic change or of an unalienated position beyond capital, specifically by way of artistic expression and cultural performance. In this it corresponds to another, minor function of the crystal-song, not an instance of ‘pivotal and inevitable change’, but ‘an intense moment of recognition of the state of things’ (2017: 229), since the song is a distillation of the film’s demonstration that Ines, in her work and lifestyle, has all along been singing a tune her father taught her, albeit in a distorted form that he has been unable or unwilling to recognise. As Nancy Fraser writes, the success of the neoliberal project depended on the alliance, in the 1980s, of a ‘deeply regressive political economy’ with ‘progressive forces from civil society’ (2019: 13). By combining an ‘expropriative, plutocratic economic program’ (11) with ‘a recognition ethos that was superficially egalitarian and emancipatory’, taking in ‘ideals of “diversity”, women’s “empowerment”, LBGTQ+ rights, post-racialism, multiculturalism, and environmentalism’ (which would be interpreted only in the narrowest of ways), a progressive-neoliberal bloc achieved a hegemony that is now itself in crisis (13). In its declension from homage to the counter-cultural figure of Ali to neoliberal anthem, beloved by reality TV singing contests, the song reflects the way in which the politics of Winfried’s generation have been enlisted in the service of late capital and reveals that what Winfried sees as his daughter’s abandonment of his values is in fact the expression of what she has inherited only too directly.

Fraser identifies a number of symptoms of this global crisis in hegemony, including the election of Donald Trump, Brexit and the increasingly precarious legitimacy of the European Union, finding in these events the political expression of a rejection of neoliberalism and of its deleterious effects on the social order that has not yet been met by a progressive counterhegemonic alternative. Toni Erdmann dramatises this crisis at a number of levels, through its broad depiction of exploitative economic relations between unevenly developed EU states Germany and Romania, and through its tracing of the political dimensions of the fractured relationship between father and daughter. It is the Houston number, however, that affectively condenses ‘the state of things’ and something of how it feels to live this crisis, at least from the perspective of Ines. By singing the song, Ines submits to her father’s demand to ‘take a break’, in Bergson’s terms, and though clearly reluctant at first, her vocal and bodily performance gains momentum. As Ines, Hüller uses her hands and face expressively, closing her eyes and clenching her fist at appropriate moments of emotion and by the chorus she is singing at full volume, her face flushed, with something nearing abandon (see Fig. 12.1). The sheer energy that she brings to the performance tips it into the realm of the zany, as the strenuous effort normally dissimulated by the virtuosic performer is made palpable and what ought to be joyful sounds suspiciously laborious. Winfried’s invitation to play thus takes Ines straight back to work; neither her father nor the politics of his generation and its investments in cultural performance can liberate her since both have been directly involved in her formation as the flexible subject of global capital.

Fig. 12.1
A photograph of a Ines singing a song with closed eyes. In the background there are candles, photo frame, and a plant.

(Courtesy SODA Pictures)

Ines at full volume

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Caught in this closed loop, Ines and Toni Erdmann’s musical moment seem to find themselves in what Berlant calls the ‘situation’ or ‘impasse’, an affective structure of the present wherein the disappointment of normative ideas of the good life in the face of economic, political and intimate upheaval is accompanied by the breakdown of representational genres which might once have reproduced the same good life fantasies. For Berlant, the impasse denotes a scenario of ‘living on in the ordinary, where subjectivity is depicted as overwhelmed, forced to change, and yet also stuck’ (2011: 21) that finds aesthetic corollary in the waning of generic conventions and dramatic events which no longer seem to make sense of a world increasingly disorganised, rather than organised, by capitalism. Although Berlant tracks situations and impasses in more muted forms of realism in cinema, a similar waning of genre might be seen in a number of ways in Toni Erdmann: first, in its zaniness as a form of comedy that has, in its late capitalist context, become increasingly unfunny; second, in the musical moment as another instance of the zany, not only in terms of Ines’s character’s multiplying performances, but structurally, as one genre (realism) makes a precarious attempt to incorporate another (the musical) in a similar manner to the ever-expanding repertoire of roles of the post-industrial worker. If the musical moment elsewhere erupts into other filmic genres to bring with it aspects of the musical as genre, here neither the latter’s more conservative conventions (the superficial bridging of difference, for example) nor its more subversive potential survive fully intact.

Nevertheless, if the utopian dimensions of the musical moment and crystal-song seem largely barred here, the very frustration of possibility produces another kind of authenticity and minor change—although not in the ways suggested by reviews and readings of the film that foreground the pleasurable affects of the scene or claim its transformative effect on Ines. As Ngai’s account emphasises, if one end of the zany’s polarity lies in play and elation, at the other sit desperation and anger. In interview, Ade says that what she wanted from the Houston number was ‘for Ines to sing that song as though she doesn’t want to sing it…there has to be an option where the way of singing is to say “fuck you”’ (MacFarlane 2016: n.p.). Elsewhere, the director describes repeatedly rehearsing and recording the scene to the point where Hüller herself became tired and irritable, incorporating her displeasure into what became the final take. Regardless of its extra-filmic motivation, the energy that Hüller brings, unsmilingly, to the song has a quality that is difficult to read as anything but anger. Ngai notes that ‘zaniness often seems to involve the destruction of not just any object but of ones specifically designed for fun, as if in revolt against the compulsory pleasure that defines it’ (2012: 185). Here, Ines’s consent to perform the song, but refusal to enjoy or to perform authentic enjoyment of it, can be read if not as a rebellion against the imperatives of her father and advanced capitalism, then at least a furious demonstration of the way in which both converge in a demand for her affective labour. Her discharge of her daughterly duty is revealed as the immaterial reproductive labour it always was, and in its indiscernibility from the gendered performances now required by her work. Between the two, a credible fantasy of the good life towards which the musical moment might reach seems lacking, and there is a sense in which the performance seems finally to give shape to an impasse Ines has experienced all along.

However, although the performance reveals Ines’s entrapment, it does produce, if not change, then adjustment—for Winfried as much if not more than for Ines. Throughout the number, the camera cuts to him as he plays and watches his daughter sing with close attention (see Fig. 12.2). When the song finishes, Ines gives the small audience and their appreciative applause a perfunctory nod, then leaves the party and her father without a backwards glance. He follows her, but changes his mind and takes up a seat on the apartment stairs; he shakes his head as he removes and contemplates the false teeth, as if in recognition that his interventions as Toni have come to an end. Explaining himself to the party hostess, he admits that Ines is his daughter and says he came to Romania ‘to see how it is here and how she lives and…it’s very complicated’. Though he struggles to give words to the experience, the musical moment has been a scene, if not of transformation, then of learning and unlearning for Winfried, as he begins to better understand the conditions of his daughter’s life and to reassess the norms by which he had judged its separation from his own. In Toni Erdmann’s final scenes, Toni does not reappear and the film weaves back and forth between the promise of change and its frustration, in a dynamic similar to that of the musical number. A surreal lengthy sequence, the last in Bucharest, involves a work party that Ines spontaneously hosts naked (although she quickly and easily reinscribes this into the service of ‘team building’) and at which Winfried appears in completely unrecognisable form in a shaggy Bulgarian folk costume and mask. The pair share what seems to be a wordless rapprochement in what once again looks like a climactic scene, but—much like the present crises of late capitalism—the film keeps going. We find ourselves back in Germany, where little has changed besides a slight thawing in the personal relationship between father and daughter. Attending the funeral of Winfried’s mother, Ines is about to relocate to the Far East for a new job. She and Winfried share a brief exchange in the garden at the wake, in a more amicable replay of their encounter at the start of the film. At one point, Ines even reaches into Winfried’s pocket to pull out Toni’s false teeth and place them in her own mouth. But when Winfried goes to get his camera, Ines is left alone; after a few moments, she removes the teeth and, in the film’s final, ambivalent shot, she stares despondently into the distance.

Fig. 12.2
A photograph of Winfried.

(Courtesy SODA Pictures)

Winfried watches Ines

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Conclusion

Commenting on Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (1994), a text that—like Toni Erdmann—explores questions of duty, capital, patriarchy and Europe, Nancy J. Holland wonders ‘what becomes of the daughter’ in Derrida’s attention to spectral encounters between fathers and sons that, for Derrida, open towards ethics and politics (Holland 2001: 65). Spectres opens with the figure of Hamlet’s ghost, invoking a law of filiation and inheritance which, despite Derrida’s critique, makes little room for the feminine. In response to the assertion which begins Derrida’s text—‘I would like to learn to live finally’—Holland makes her own: ‘A father cannot teach a daughter how to live; he can only teach her the limits within which she must live’ (2001: 65). Winfried’s interventions as Toni have more than a hint of the ghostly visitation about them, as well as educational intent. But, as my reading of the film and its musical moment have made clear, Winfried’s life coaching and ‘magisterial zaniness’ (Morgernstern 2016: n.p.) reveal time between father and daughter to be ‘out of joint’ in a manner that obstructs ways of living before opening new ones. The politics of his generation, and his related attachments to humour, art and creativity, are not ineffectual because outdated in the face of late capitalism, but all too contemporary in their coincidence with post-industrial labour and its hegemony. Winfried’s attempts at emancipation—teaching his daughter how to live—therefore collapse into the further entrainment of her as post-Fordist worker. In this context, the utopian aspects of the musical moment—joy, authenticity and change—face a particular, historically specific struggle to take flight, as heaving one’s heart into one’s mouth, as King Lear’s Cordelia has it, is disclosed as a relentless, often gendered, demand of both professional and personal life. Nevertheless, as Berlant notes of living through the impasse of crisis, ‘being treads water; mainly, it does not drown’ (2011: 10). Despite floundering in its delivery of the more affirmative functions of the musical moment, the Houston number participates in a tracing of the experience of the present that has something to teach Winfried—and us. Though we might, as spectators of film and as subjects of late capital, hope for forms of art and life that escape alienation more decisively, Berlant reminds us that the impasse, though lacking the event-like qualities more typical of the musical moment, is nevertheless a time of happening during which we might fully encounter and reckon with our present condition in order to move beyond it.