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Popular Culture Review
deaths, more clearly foreshadowed than in much of Haneke’s other work, still
retain a sense of mystery: why do the members of this family commit a sort of
group suicide? Why does the man cut his throat in Cache? Why does Benny kill
the girl in Benny’s Video? Why are most of the children in The White Ribbon
(2009) apparently homicidal? Typically there is absolutely no explanation
attempted; but even when the characters explain their actions, or the intent of
actions may be inferred, no matter how skillfully the explanation is stitched
together by the audience, the deaths are still closed to us—perhaps because we
are still necessarily alive.
These are not horror films in the normal sense of the term. These are not
horror films unless we see all of life as already horrific. If we try to ask why the
violent people are acting the way they are acting, we will never get an answer
out of Haneke. And this is, perhaps, because to ask such a question is to imply
that we don’t already have the answer. That is, if we ask “How could those boys
in Funny Games (1997) sadistically torture that family and kill the family
members off one by one?” we are saying that we are not like that, that we cannot
imagine how someone could do that because that sort of action is so completely
alien to who we are. But this, argues Haneke, is a bit of bad faith. The truth to
which he is pointing is that we are all capable of such things. We each think that
we follow truth and beauty in service of peace, but this blinds us to the violence
we enact in the course of such pursuits. Haneke explains:
In the name of a beautiful idea you can become a murderer....There is no
crime I couldn’t have committed....It’s so easy to say “Oh no I would never do
that,” but that’s dishonest. We are capable of everything....It’s so easy to be
‘human’ when you come from a privileged background....The only reason that I
couldn’t have been a Nazi is that I can’t stand crowds.
Perhaps. But like the characters in Haneke’s films who survive, we are left
with the consequences and attempts at explanations of violence which, coming
before and after the acts themselves, still do not reveal what goes on in that
space in between. The camera is there, unmoving, giving us the details. We hear
and see death, we watch it happen, but still in the most vital sense we are not
there. We are, and can only be, viewers. Even Benny cannot know what it is like
to die, no matter how many times he watches his video of a pig dying, no matter
if he kills his girlfriend, experiences that dying firsthand, and repeatedly watches
her death on video as well. He will, indeed, get to “see what it is like,” but he
will never know what it is like until he himself dies. And, to be sure, he (and we)
will not know what death is like even at that point, for death is never an
experience, never something that takes place for the subject, never something
that we can pass through, reflect on, and then can say “So, that was death.” Our
own death is an impossible possibility. It is nothing and yet the ground of
everything. Death is only experienced as the death of the Other.
We observe Benny as he does many things—goes to school, watches
videos, opens and eats a container of yogurt, makes pizza with his friend, shoots
a girl and watches her die—but we don’t come any closer to the actual