The Doubling of Death
17
character and the fake death of an actor? If Haneke could find some human
willing to die on-screen, how would our experience of seeing the film be
different? Phenomenologically, this is a complicated question. A real actor
would die, but the character would also be dead—the same kind of dead—in
either case; and assuming that the audience does not know one way or the other,
the movie-going experience would remain the same. If, however, it were
announced beforehand that the actor actually died while making the film, we
would have a completely different experience, likely being unable to separate
the death of the actor from the death of the character. Interestingly, we would be
“taken out” of the experience, moving from an act of direct perception to one of
imagination as well such that the imagination would require us to imagine
reality.
When Hamlet stabs Polonius in Act III, scene IV of Shakespeare’s Hamlet,
we do not pull out a cell phone and dial 911. Such a deranged and panicked
theatergoer would not be having an experience of the play, Hamlet. However, if
that theatergoer does not care at all—does not feel a jump, a start, a momentary
wish to do something and a lingering feeling of trepidation and doom after the
stabbing—then the play has not been doing its job as art. Having the right
balance of emotional investment and sense of the fictional means that we can
take the action to be real, where “real” indicates something other than what
could be settled by an appeal to a correspondence theory of truth.
Suppose Haneke filmed and then asked us to watch a human dying. Would
we find here the first doubling of death? In the story, on paper, and on-screen,
that character ceases once and for all to exist, and so too, does the actor. They
die together, though separately. In the case of nonhuman animals, however, it is
far more complicated. The fish, the chicken, and the pig play themselves—they
are both acting and not acting. They likely have no conscious, trained, or
intentional role in the film and so their deaths are as characters, unintentional
actors, as well as real animals simultaneously. In the context of the films
themselves, all of the deaths are final, regardless of whether an actor leaves the
soundstage that day intact or not. The actor’s life is not at stake except in the
case of animals. Which is, perhaps, why viewers object more to the deaths of the
animals. Their deaths appear to extend out from the film into real life, and for
what reason? Juxtaposed with the deaths of the fictional characters with which
they share the screen, how do such deaths talk to each other? What do they say
to the audience?
In an act of imagination, human death would be different. If we were to see,
say, Juliette Binoche actually die on-screen in Cache we would no longer think,
“Oh, that character is dead.” We would also think, “Oh, Juliette Binoche is
dead.” This realization would take the viewer away from the movie and into the
implications of the apparent real death—the death of the actress looming larger
than the death of a make-believe character. But how do we consider the death of
the rooster in that same movie? Do we mourn at all, and if we do, what are we
mourning? How far from the film this animal death takes us is typically a