Simone (a bravura performance by 17-year-old Désirée Nosbusch) is a teenage fan obsessed with a pop singer known only as “R.” That obsession takes over her life – she drops out of school, waits outside the post office for a week for a reply to her letter, which will never come because his fan mail goes straight to the tip. She climbs to the top of the church steeple in her town of Ulm (it’s actually the tallest steeple in the world) and thinks about jumping off, splattering herself all over the town square, but with a letter to R in her pocket, so he will hear of her at last.
Nosbusch as Simone offers a fascinating glimpse of the modern cannibal – she looks and acts normal (for an angst-ridden teen) but underneath are irresistible currents of passion and voracious appetite for her idol. She attacks the postal worker who disappoints her by not having a letter for her, she attacks her father for turning off the TV show on which R is performing. The walls of her room are covered in pictures of R. The film shows parallel imagery to her obsessive love; images of Nazi salutes – the same obsessive love that led Germany and the world into catastrophe a few decades previously.
The word “fan” comes from “fanatic”. The fanatic believes he or she has found the answer, the one who knows us, cares for us. She feels that R, who has never heard of her, knows her inside out. And she will know him, inside out.
She drops out of school and hitchhikes to Munich, where R’s shows are recorded, being accosted on her way by a range of toxic men, but of course the worst of them is the one she is so desperate to meet. She sleeps in unlocked cars while she waits outside the studio, so frantic that, when she finally meets him, she faints.
R seems concerned and kind, invites her to his show, where he appears as a mannequin surrounded by store mannequins – a bald wig symbolically obscuring the divide between human and inhuman, life and death.
He takes Simone back to the apartment of a friend who has gone to the US for a year, where she finally achieves the intimacy she has craved. Nobody knows they are there, so anything can (and does) happen.
But R is a superstar – he is not interested in the meeting of the souls that she imagines will happen, and afterwards tells her he has to go back to his work, tries to fob her off with vague promises of future meetings. He tells her to leave the keys on her way out.
Simone wants to own him and his love, but he just wanted her young body. As he leaves, she picks up a figurine of the goddess Diana, the Huntress, and she then hunts him, killing him with a blow to the head.
Once he is dead, he is hers at last, to do with as she wishes. The imagery switches to that of a Christ, broken and crucified, and she cradles him in her lap like an erotic Pietà.
She sees a freezer, and she sees an electric knife.
R’s blood is, as the Bible says, his life, and she laps it up from the floor and from her knife.
When R is neatly packed in the freezer, Simone faints, but next day we see pots boiling on the stove, his foot being basted with his juices.
She eats him over a few weeks, then grinds his bones to dust and takes the dust back to the TV studio; pouring it out at the place she met him.
Her revenge involves ceremonial murder and cannibalism, to ensure he will always stay with her, and inside her. Leaving for home, her head shaved so she looks like one of the mannequins from his performance, she promises her parents to return to school.
She sits with them and watches the news – R’s disappearance weeks ago remains a mystery. But she knows where he is.
“I missed my period. I’m four weeks late. I will bring you into the world. We will be happy. I know you love me. And me too: I love you.”
He is inside her, and so is his seed. Like Christian mythology, R will be reborn, but this time totally dependent on her, loving only her.
The film did not garner a lot of interest or decent reviews, but has picked up a bit of a cult following in the years since. It is an excellent study of the monstrous-feminine, a figure often found in cannibal narratives, particularly around revenge and love. Mariana Enriquez’s recent collection of stories called The Dangers of Smoking in Bed has a similar story called “Meat”, in which two similarly obsessed fans dig up a dead pop idol and eat his rotting corpse. Well worth a read if, perhaps, not during mealtime.
Fuelled by a minimalist synth soundtrack from Rheingold and stunning photography, Der Fan is an engrossing and fascinating study of love, not in its sentimental, romantic form, but as possession, greed, rage and cannibalism. Much of lovemaking is expressed orally, through kissing, fellatio, cunnilingus, and licking or sucking and sometimes chewing of various body parts. Simone has taken this to its logical extreme. R is inside her, and so is an embryonic version of him, which she promises to love as she had hoped to love its father. It’s resurrection through transubstantiation.
The Cannibal Guy 