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Popular Culture Review
Haneke to watch the scene being filmed. “It was very hard to slap the little boy,”
explains Binoche. “Michael didn’t want to involve himself too closely. He told
me, ‘It’s O.K.’ But, I could see in the little boy’s eyes that it was a kind of
humiliation. I asked [the boy] to slap me first, but he wouldn’t.”
We might be tempted to say that this is a special case because it involves
violence being enacted on an innocent child. There is something in most of us
that recoils when a child is the subject of violence. And yet, this is very telling.
If we avert our eyes and condemn acts of violence against innocent chil dren, are
we secretly admitting that acts of violence against adults are in general more
acceptable because adults are inherently less innocent? This would seem to
commit us to the belief that some acts of violence are not as bad as others
because the person to whom the violence is directed is guilty of at least
something.
If it is not a question of innocence, then perhaps it is a question of power.
Perhaps, that is, we think of the child as powerless and vulnerable. And thus
violence directed at children—and, for that matter, animals—would be doubly
bad because they cannot fight back. Haneke seems to be arguing for this when
he tells us:
You can show all the shortcomings of a society through its children,
because they are always on the bottom rung. So are animals. They are those who
can’t defend themselves. They are predestined victims....Once I bawled out a
lady in a train. She was with her child, who was a bit stressed, and she took him
out of the compartment and hit him, because she didn’t dare to do it inside. And
even though I had no right to do so, I went and bawled her out, because that is
something I just cannot stand.
There are four things to note in passing here. First is the identification of
children and animals. If the boundary between humans and other animals is to
be questioned, perhaps this is the spot to begin picking at Haneke: children and
animals, he wants to argue, have much in common. Second, there is the notion
that the whole of society can be judged by the way in which it treats its lowest
members. Such an ethic—or at least a descriptive claim that is on the way
toward an ethic—is not new. We find it in Buddhism, Christianity, and dozens
of other cultural moral schemas. But perhaps there is something telling about the
assumption of a hierarchy at the very start. Third, we would be wise to note that
Haneke is most upset by violence against children and animals because these
individuals cannot fight back. That is, they cannot meet violence with more
violence, as if somehow violence is not quite as bad if the victim is capable of
being violent in return. Here we are tempted to think that what might be
offending Haneke is not the immorality of violence, but a disrespect of violence
itself. In other words, if the child or the pig or the fish could fight back—could
bring more violence to the table—then it would not be so bad. But they are too
weak. The morally bad part becomes, in effect, the stopping of the cycle of
violence. This should trouble us. An eye for an eye for an eye for an eye etcetera
thus becomes less bad than simply poking out a child’s eye and having it stop