16
Popular Culture Review
This is, of course, not the case. Morality is never something that is added on
to bare experience, but instead is always already there, suffusing the world and
our experience of the world at every step. Given the complexities of the way in
which Haneke manipulates this fact, it is, perhaps, best to start thinking about
the way in which we conceptualize cinematic violence and death in general with
the death of animals specifically.
Do we feel differently about nonhuman animal deaths, cinematic or
otherwise, compared to the deaths of humans? Though some viewers are
undoubtedly vegetarians, many in the films’ audience eat the sorts of animals
Haneke has killed; and, like it or not, we all participate in the institutions of
modem life that make possible the killing and torturing of animals every day.
Perhaps what bothers us is that, strictly speaking, we know that the death of
animals is unnecessary. This is true both in day-to-day life (for none of us truly
needs to eat meat to live), and it is true in cinema (for no animal truly needs to
die just to entertain us). But perhaps it is true in different ways. In Benny’s
Video, the pig dies, presumably, to become dinner. For many viewers, such a
death is likely more understandable and thus more acceptable than the deaths of
other animals on film that take place for no apparent reason other than aesthetics
(as is the case, apparently, with the fish in The Seventh Continent). Haneke once
observed in an interview that audience members objected strongly to the killing
of the fish, presumably because people could not see the reason for such
“unnecessary” suffering on-screen. These are, after all, beautiful and expensive
fish meant for decoration or pleasure; it is in living that they are useful to us—as
opposed to the pig who is more useful as a consumable object and not as a pet.
Perhaps we do not wish to think of any animal suffering; perhaps we do not
wish to think of ourselves measuring animals merely by their use-value. But
Haneke’s camera forces such thinking, lingering on the suffering of each being
to whom violence is being done. The unmoving camera, as always, does not
flinch or cut away from the desperately squealing pig, the headless rooster
flapping helplessly in his death throes (Cache), the laboring gills of the fish as
they slowly suffocate on the living room floor. The apparent reasons these
animals die are different, and their deaths mean something different for each
film, but do we not think that their suffering is the sa me? And do we not admit
that the end result is necessarily the same as well?
Does art have a license to kill—especially when the killing fulfills merely
aesthetic ends? In terms of humans, there are no truly “bad guys” in Haneke’s
films; and those who die are often main characters. It is not as if these humans
are being killed off in the name of justice. Such cinematic human deaths are
also, in the simplest sense of the word, unnecessary—the characters are not
terminally ill, nor are they guilty of any crime. Those who are killed are killed
seemingly without reason, and those who do the killing offer no answers.
Of course, Haneke cannot legally kill human actors on-screen—it is
doubtful anyone would sign up for such a role. Therefore their deaths, however
realistic, are fake. But is there actually a distinction between the real death of a