There is a fable that is strangely popular in Swabia. In Stuttgart. In the Stuttgart “crime scene” to be more precise. The fable was originally written by Aesop and is about two frogs who, in their distress – sometimes even in ancient Greece it was so dry that amphibians died – jumped into a bucket of fat milk. They were lucky there. And again not.
They wanted to get out of the bucket again. But it didn’t work. The walls were too smooth. They kicked and kicked. One gave up and drowned. The other kept kicking through the night. In the morning he had kicked the milk into butter. And if he didn’t die…
Of course, the Stuttgart “crime scene” gets by without frogs, but recently it has been happily exposing people to awkward situations and then watching them kick around. “The Man Who Lies” was such a case. “Anne and Death” another. They’re actually quite nice, the murderers. You can understand them. But that doesn’t help them.
They become entangled in an increasingly dense web of lies that eventually strangles them. They just can’t butter the fat milk they’re dumped in. Which is also correct, because otherwise it would contradict our understanding of the law and undermine our legal system. Killers just have to go down. So say the law. Also that of Sunday evening television.
And now we come to a very special frog. His name is Ben. He has everything. Wife, Villa, two children named Fritzi and Franz, his law firm wants to make him a partner. He drives through a rather apocalyptic rain late one night. You can’t see anything anymore. Mountain races used to be held on the route around Solitude Castle. It is said that those who did not reach the bottom quickly enough starved to death.
A homeless man pushes his bike up the hill to the castle. Ben is negotiating while driving in his SUV. He reaches back. In front he takes the homeless man with him. Ben stops, Ben watches, Ben drives on. The cyclist they called Foxy lives in the ditch for another five or six hours. Then he’s dead.
Niki Stein wrote the “Tatort”. He also directs. You have to think of him as a pretty nasty anthropologist. From the moment Ben the man falls over the car, we watch him. How he struggles, how he gets entangled. How his life falls apart, getting tighter and tighter.
At some point he wears a neck brace, but that has nothing to do with strangulation. But with symbolism. And by accident. “The Murderer in Me” has more of both than would actually be good for a crime film.
Let’s just take the victim’s cap. “Foxy” is written on it. She is red. Foxy was called the dead man. Following detective fiction theory, “Foxy” is a classic MacGuffin, an object that is essentially meaningless but becomes charged with meaning as it travels from one suspect, from one place to another, running like a thread through a murder story, holding it together.
The hat gets caught in Ben’s rear wiper, thanks to Niki Stein, not probability. Then she accidentally ends up in the car wash, where Ben wants to have his damaged mobile car washed clean of all traces.
There happens to be a woman on duty who used to be a stewardess, so she happens to be needy and a single parent and happens to be the mother of Helge, who in turn is in the same class as Franzi, who is Ben’s daughter and lives around the corner from Ben’s villa. She finds Foxy’s hat.
To digress briefly into automotive history, Niki Stein’s “crime scene” is quite similar to the engine compartment of a vintage car. Nowadays engines are often packed in some kind of capsules so that they don’t roar so much.
The mechanics of Stein’s “crime scene” engine are always open to everyone. Every symbol, every sentence, every motif has its task. There are no capsules. And yet the brilliant construction – you can call it postmodern – becomes a touching story. This in turn has – apart from the really outstanding actors – to do with a ghost. With Foxy.
We hardly ever see his face. Still, he’s not just any victim in a ditch. Stein gives him a story. That he was on his way to his son’s grave. To the day of death. The son died of leukemia. His death threw him off course. He had the old cuddly rabbit with him.
Foxy goes from being someone on the street to becoming the moral fuel for the investigation of Bootz and Lannert, the sober detectives. They don’t want to let Ben get away with it, even though he may have just made one wrong turn, which can happen to anyone.
They develop a momentous rigorism. What if, they ask, what Ben did became law, if – which they sympathize with – he was allowed to get away.
What would a detective be like to let a murderer get away out of compassion, consideration of the consequences for all involved and the fact that his victim might not have lived much longer anyway? Richy Müller (Lannert) and Felix Klare (Bootz) could give up their job in Stuttgart, which would be a shame.
Because you are only too happy to follow the two honest frogs in the buttery Stuttgart biotope through all the milk buckets in Baden-Württemberg, to all their kicking and kicking. And because it always turns out a good piece of butter.