1970s: Fox & His Friends

Screening + Discussion
Our pick for the 1970s

For our stop in 1970s film history, we screened Fox and His Friends (1975), Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film about class, money, and power inside relationships. The story follows Fox, a working-class gay man who wins the lottery and is gradually taken advantage of by the people around him. Rather than framing this as a simple tragedy, the film shows how exploitation is built into social systems and reproduced through intimacy.

After the film, we talked about:

• Fox as both exploited and complicit

• How money reshapes relationships

• The overlap between love and transaction

• Class as something enforced through taste, manners, and language

• Fassbinder’s refusal to make Fox purely sympathetic

• Whether Fox’s outcome feels inevitable

• What changes when one person has economic and social power

• Fassbinder casting himself as Fox and why that matters