Strozek, Fo Stro: Shit happens

Man these Fridays really sneak up on you, huh? Anyways I finally saw Strozek in its entirety Wednesday, and I guess I came away with a new outlook on the film. At first Strozek seemed more of a portrait of intersecting lives, yet as it progressed I felt the film took on a more explicit direction. The ending in particular emphasizes the cyclical nature of life as we know it. Instead of merely following Bruno through some sort of arbitrary adventure, we see him take a path that leads directly (almost meticulously) back to his starting point (mentally unstable, and imprisoned or dead). Eva too seems to come full circle as she resorts back to prostitution. One might interpret these situations as people unable to escape their own fate or destiny, but I see it more as them being unable to escape themselves--especially when confronted with the difficulties of society. Here we see another endless cycle forming; as society slowly rejects Eva and Bruno's dream of american success, so to do Bruno and Eva stop believing in their own possibilities off success and their lives, accordingly, begin to spin out of control. But what comes first in this chicken-egg-like scenario? In the final scene of the film, Herzog, bombards the viewer with more cyclical imagery (dancing chicken, chairlift, truck), yet now it is apparent that Bruno is fully aware of these metaphors, and once again we have to ask ourselves what is driving who? One may finish the film and come away with a pointless outlook on life, but I think that viewpoint is misguided. Instead the film compounds the difficulties of life with someone who is mentally unstable from years of abuse. For this particular case, the cycle is tragically impossible to prevent, yet we see that society alone is not responsible for this but also Bruno's own outlook on humanity (distorted from his abusive upbringing). From this we can gather that Bruno's life is one of unfortunate consequence, mostly out of his control. In Herzog's film, the word is a cruel and unforgiving place, but I think it shows that this is intensified the more one believes it to be true, and therefore it might be possible for us to break the cycle.