Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
SELF/AGGRESSION:
VIOLENCE IN FILMS BY MICHAEL HANEKE
160
Speck, Oliver C.. Funny Frames, edited by Oliver C. Speck, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2010.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kbdk/detail.action?docID=592466.
Created from kbdk on 2017-05-01 16:03:32.
Self/Aggression 161
Speck, Oliver C.. Funny Frames, edited by Oliver C. Speck, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2010.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kbdk/detail.action?docID=592466.
Created from kbdk on 2017-05-01 16:03:32.
162 Funny Frames
Cousins 2007: 224225). The violence, Sorfa states, renders the domes-
tic space truly unheimlich. Violence, something that is not supposed to
happen in the bourgeois household other than as a spectacle on the
television screen, is shown as being merely suppressed. Indeed, the
claim could be made that violence in Haneke is bound to the class of
his prime audience, something to which European reviewers seem to
be more attuned than their American counterparts.
Fatima Naqvi convincingly argues that Haneke targets the bourgeois
self-image as a victim of circumstance. In his first films, he targets the
Austrian bourgeoisie in particular, with its often-repeated claim that
Austria was Nazi-Germanys first victim. Then, in his later films, it is the
middle class in general that is subjected to his critique.1 In considering
this, we should not forget that Hanekes films are also extremely self-
reflexive, dealing with the hidden rules of representation. In other
words, the question is not in which form violence appears, but rather,
how can violence mean something at all when it is represented? In this
context, Brigitte Peuckers sophisticated arguments that consider vio-
lence in films by Haneke in the light of genre are worth reviewing. As
she shows in a close reading of Hanekes feature films and his adapta-
tion of Kafkas Das Schlo, these films are composed against the generic
backdrop of the bourgeois melodrama (Peucker 2007: 155). Follow-
ing Peter Szondis influential discussion of the bourgeois melodrama,
Peucker argues that whereas in the bourgeois melodrama climactic
scenes condense emotions in a static tableau in order to elicit empathy
Copyright 2010. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. All rights reserved.
from the spectator and sublimate the lack of political action, Haneke
breaks with this tradition and shows violence in a cold and fragmented,
as Peucker calls it on several occasions, modernist style. However, as
Peucker concludes towards the end of the chapter, this violence does
not introduce the political into the genre: Acts of violence in Hanekes
films are often directed against the self or otherwise remain in some
sense familial. Insofar as a political agenda is expressed in Hanekes
films, it may very well lie in demonstrating the inefficacy of such acts.
The spectator is thus refused an outlet for the affective tension thus
created and, constantly reminded of the filmic apparatus, instead
becomes personally engaged (Peucker 2007: 156). There is, however,
more to be said about the political, as I will show later.
While the absence of a critical interest in the topic of suicide in
Hanekes oeuvre is in itself interesting, it is maybe more fruitful to trace
another remarkablebut unremarkedabsence: none of these ges-
tures of aggression and auto-aggression carry an ascribable meaning,
that is, none of the other characters learns a lesson, nor does the
Speck, Oliver C.. Funny Frames, edited by Oliver C. Speck, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2010.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kbdk/detail.action?docID=592466.
Created from kbdk on 2017-05-01 16:03:32.
Self/Aggression 163
spectator feel especially elevated by, for example, witnessing the tragic
end to a long suffering. If we take a look at films about suicideand
there are not that manywe can quickly see that Hanekes lack of
ascribable meaning is unusual. Let us consider a famous example:
Leaving Las Vegas (Mike Figgis 1995), a film that Roger Ebert assures
us is operatic in its passion and tragedy (1995). What Ebert refers
to is of course the prototypical melodramatic dynamic that brings
about the spectators catharsis via the leading character, who, in the
dnouement, sees the error of his ways and breaks down over the dead
body of the woman. In opera circles this is known as the Madame
Butterfly effect. And indeed, by the end of Leaving Las Vegas, in a
reversal of genre-typical gender roles, Ben Sanderson, the character
played by Nicholas Cage in his Oscar-winning performance, has taught
the hooker with the heart of gold what love is and dies with her in
his arms.
However, as Terry Eagleton is quick to point out, a wronged lover
does not throw away a worthless life when he or she commits suicide.
On the contrary: Sacrifice is not a matter of relinquishing what you
find worthless, but of freely surrendering what you esteem for the ben-
efit of others. It is this which marks the difference between the suicide
and the martyr (2003: 35). Even though the unfortunate woman of a
typical melodrama piece might have suffered a fate worse than death,
or decided that this life is not worth living without the one she loves,
her life paradoxically obtains value after she has surrendered it. It is
Copyright 2010. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. All rights reserved.
not surprising, then, that the self-sacrifice for the so-called greater
good is standard fare in propaganda films. What this type of sacrifice
and the woman of melodrama share is the earned status of martyr-
dom in which there occurs an exchange of life for meaning. What the
martyr gains in the exchange of life for meaning has two dimensions.
Not only does his or her life regain value after the suicide, but this
exchange also proves to the othersin a completely tautological ges-
turethat the Big Other, the cause or movement without whom the
martyr cannot live, actually exists: I give my life for the cause, there-
fore the cause is worthy and does exist!
What stays unsaid in this morbid deal is important for the under-
standing of the functioning of violence and suicide in Hanekes films:
for the meaning of the tragic self-sacrifice to emerge, this spectacle has
to appear under the implied gaze of others, often later generations, a
mechanism that present-day producers of the so-called martyr-videos
understand all too well. The well-known obsession with ocular meta-
phors in fascist propaganda makes sense once we realize that it is
Speck, Oliver C.. Funny Frames, edited by Oliver C. Speck, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2010.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kbdk/detail.action?docID=592466.
Created from kbdk on 2017-05-01 16:03:32.
164 Funny Frames
A State of Exception
All that this reductive gaze sees is what the Italian philosopher Giorgio
Agamben, following Walter Benjamin, calls, in his book Homo Sacer,
bare life. Bare life designates the incremental remainder that is
left over when somebodys political rights, what we might call their
Copyright 2010. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. All rights reserved.
Speck, Oliver C.. Funny Frames, edited by Oliver C. Speck, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2010.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kbdk/detail.action?docID=592466.
Created from kbdk on 2017-05-01 16:03:32.
Self/Aggression 165
penal code, but rather inmates who have nothing but their bare
life (20).
The explanatory power of Agambens model stems from his insight
that states, totalitarian and democratic alike, do not proclaim enemies
of the state in the mode of a simple us/them distinction. Them
would imply a true outside to the state. As Deleuze and Guattari point
out4and Agamben would seem to be in general agreement about
thisthe modern state is like a machine that works to abolish the
outside just as it produces the conditions under which people can be
reduced to a bare life. In his seminal article The Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism, Frederic Jameson arrives at a similar conclusion. In
postmodernity, as he explains, the past is no longer bound to a histori-
cal subject or a time and cannot be lived anymore as a collective
experience, and instead a nostalgic momentum of space is evoked.
Consequently, the decisive distinction of public and private space is
eroded. In other words, private space is now fully encoded by capital-
ism in terms of value, while public space becomes a succession of pri-
vately owned anonymous malls and transitory spaces. In 71 Fragmente,
for example, Haneke focuses on typical non-places,5 often showing
the Romanian boy in long shots in shopping malls and subway stations
where he can easily hide in plain sight as he is not even worth a look.
In this regard, the so-called glaciation of feelings-trilogyDer siebente
Kontinent, Bennys Video and 71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls
describes the same phenomenon. The nuclear family in the earliest
Copyright 2010. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. All rights reserved.
film, Der siebente Kontinent, is from the beginning reduced to its eco-
nomic (inter-)actions by a focus on acts of consumption and exchange
here, objects are handled by hands in close up and bodily needs are
taken care of in a timely fashion.6 The familys space might still be con-
sidered private, but the members of the family are entirely identified
in terms of value, as they and their possessions can easily be taken out
of the calculation in a zero-sum equation: an implosion of value. From
this perspective, the young man who runs amok at the end of 71 Frag-
mente is, indeed, a double of the families from Der siebente Kontinent and
Bennys Video and not their opposite. The public murder-suicide at the
end of 71 Fragmente is simply an inversion of the suicide-murder that
happens in the seclusion of the family home in Der siebente Kontinent, as
both are threshold spaces where humanity is already completely
stripped away.
The implosion of value central to Hanekes films should not be con-
fused with an abdication of typical civic values, as many critics have done.
Indeed, Michael Hanekes diagnosis of the crisis of Western civilization
Speck, Oliver C.. Funny Frames, edited by Oliver C. Speck, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2010.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kbdk/detail.action?docID=592466.
Created from kbdk on 2017-05-01 16:03:32.
166 Funny Frames
day life, but the biological life of its citizens, and also to exclude certain
people from the body of its citizenry, and in turn to regulate their bio-
logical life. That does not mean that the guards in Abu Ghraib, a con-
centration camp, or Peter and Paul in Funny Games do not enjoy their
games of torture; on the contrary, they visibly enjoy themselves. What
happens is that the conflation of law and politics creates a situation
where somebodys sadistic impulse becomes the law of the moment.
The very existence of pictures from Abu Ghraib clearly shows that the
guards had no sense of wrongdoing or of committing an offense.
Before returning to the main topic of this essay, it is crucial to point
out how important this political concept of bare life is for Haneke.
His films abound with threshold situations that lead to sudden acts
of aggression. In Le temps du loup, an unknown apocalyptic event has
reduced the entire country to a state of exception and at the begin-
ning of the film, the father of the family is shot point-blank in the face
by a squatter in his own house while he is attempting to negotiate a
solution in the classical liberal mode of discussion and negotiation.
Speck, Oliver C.. Funny Frames, edited by Oliver C. Speck, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2010.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kbdk/detail.action?docID=592466.
Created from kbdk on 2017-05-01 16:03:32.
Self/Aggression 167
Speck, Oliver C.. Funny Frames, edited by Oliver C. Speck, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2010.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kbdk/detail.action?docID=592466.
Created from kbdk on 2017-05-01 16:03:32.
168 Funny Frames
Speck, Oliver C.. Funny Frames, edited by Oliver C. Speck, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2010.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kbdk/detail.action?docID=592466.
Created from kbdk on 2017-05-01 16:03:32.
Self/Aggression 169
Auto-Aggression
Speck, Oliver C.. Funny Frames, edited by Oliver C. Speck, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2010.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kbdk/detail.action?docID=592466.
Created from kbdk on 2017-05-01 16:03:32.
170 Funny Frames
the family was clearly separated from the public space of politics. With
the gradual waning of this distinction, the difference between us and
them, nature and culture, public and private collapses into a system
where the outside is basically abolished, where everything is interior-
ized: the others now have only a different culture, nature needs our
protection, and what used to be public space is privately owned and
operated (see Hardt 1998: 141). The way shopping-malls, fast-food
chains and video-stores appear in Hanekes films as cultural wasteland
provides a perfect illustration indeed for Deleuzes concept of the
society of control.
Deleuzes concept also provides a fascinating insight into postmod-
ern racism. And here, we find of course several examples in Hanekes
films. As Hardt explains, elaborating partially on Etienne Balibars
theories of differentialist racism, in postmodern racism the ontologi-
cal difference of race is now also interiorized, that is historicized, inso-
far as only cultural differences exist. While this sounds like a version of
the now-familiar and classic liberal stancethere are no biological
Speck, Oliver C.. Funny Frames, edited by Oliver C. Speck, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2010.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kbdk/detail.action?docID=592466.
Created from kbdk on 2017-05-01 16:03:32.
Self/Aggression 171
when Travis prepares for his attack he practices in front of the mirror the draw-
ing of the gun; in what is the best-known scene of the film, he addresses his own
image in the mirror with the aggressive-condescending You talkin to me? In a
textbook illustration of Lacans notion of the mirror stage, aggressivity is here
clearly aimed at oneself, at ones own mirror-image. This suicidal dimension
reemerges at the end of the slaughter scene when Travis, heavily wounded and
leaning at the wall, mimics with the fore-finger of his right hand a gun aimed at
his blood-stained forehead and mockingly triggers it, as if saying The true aim
of my outburst was myself. (2005)
Speck, Oliver C.. Funny Frames, edited by Oliver C. Speck, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2010.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kbdk/detail.action?docID=592466.
Created from kbdk on 2017-05-01 16:03:32.
172 Funny Frames
As was pointed out above, for the meaning of the tragic self-sacrifice to
emerge in propagandistic texts, the suicide has to appear under the
implied gaze of others. Regardless of the above-cited reputation of
Hanekes oeuvre as violent, acts of aggression towards another per-
son always happen off-screen and are only present to the viewer by
the sounds and/or their aftermath: the camera stays outside the bank
during the shooting spree in 71 Fragmente, only to join the victims in
a close-up as their blood seeps on the floor. Bennys slaughter of
the girl can be seen neither in nor recorded on Bennys Video. And the
cold-blooded killing of the father in Le temps du loup is mirrored by the
mothers shocked face. Last, but not least, the infamous slaughter of
Speck, Oliver C.. Funny Frames, edited by Oliver C. Speck, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2010.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kbdk/detail.action?docID=592466.
Created from kbdk on 2017-05-01 16:03:32.
Self/Aggression 173
the little boy in Funny Games happens while the spectator watches Paul
preparing a sandwich, and the Hollywood-style revenge of the mother
is undone by the rewinding of the film. In contrast to this off-screen
violence, suicide in Haneke almost always happens in front of a witness
who seems to be strangely unaffected by the horrible spectacle and not
traumatized in any way. In Lemminge, Teil 1, the brother jumps to his
death in front of his sister, who appears calm afterwards. On the other
hand, the parents who do not witness this event but, as we are told,
were injured at the end of the war protecting their children are instead
devastated. In Lemminge, Teil 2, the major who killed his wife in a
murder-suicide but who survived with injuries seems to be unchanged.8
The mother in Fraulein appears just the same after she sees her hus-
band wasting away by his own will, and even after her son, cornered by
the police, blows himself up while she watches his hide-out. The piano-
teacher in La Pianiste, of course, draws up a meticulous plan to make
her lover a witness to and an accomplice in her torture, only to find
out that he is not the least troubled or affected. Here, again, the spec-
tator is witness to her self-mutilations, cutting her genitals in the bath-
room and stabbing herself in the shoulder in the last scene. In Cach,
it seems strange that Georges barely reacts to the traumatic event of
the film, the sudden suicide of Majid. Instead of recognizing that he
failed to help the grown-up Majid, Georges afterwards still acts on his
main fear, namely that of tarnishing his public image.9 Even though
shaken by the event he witnessed, Georges primary concern seems to
Copyright 2010. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. All rights reserved.
be whether his wife kept up appearances when she sent their friends
away on a pretext. And the next day, before falling into bed, he con-
vincingly assures Majids son that he does not feel guilty at all.
Although Hanekes exclusions (the spectator only sees the aftermath
of violence) and inclusions (a witness to a suicide appears unfazed)
seem unwarranted at first, we find underlying them, not coinciden-
tally, a commentary on the standard demand of neo-fascist reactionar-
ies regarding witnessing. At the beginning of his book, The Differend,
Lyotard refers to just this neo-fascist demand and the paradox it
implies: Bring me a single witness who can testify . . . As Lyotard
explains, since by definition the only true witnessthe one who expe-
rienced everythingis paradoxically the one who was killed, there is no
witness at all. All real witnesses to an act of violence are either dead, or
they are perpetrators and would therefore perjure themselves if they
spoke. And, as we can deduct from this perversion of legal argumenta-
tion, this reasoning serves as a silencing device that insinuates that
the person bringing forth the accusation is nothing but an impostor.
In all brutality and simplicity the survivor is told: Since you are not dead,
Speck, Oliver C.. Funny Frames, edited by Oliver C. Speck, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2010.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kbdk/detail.action?docID=592466.
Created from kbdk on 2017-05-01 16:03:32.
174 Funny Frames
you must be a liar; how else could you stand here and testify?! The inherent
judgment denies the victim his or her existence as a victim by includ-
ing the frame of reference of a statement (the reality so to say) into the
argument itself. As Lyotard explains, this argument is not only circular,
it is truly totalitarian: If the requirement of establishing the reality of
a phrases referent according to the protocol of cognition is extended
to any given phrase, especially to those phrases that refer to a whole,
then this requirement is totalitarian in its principle (Lyotard 1988: 5).
Keeping in mind the rewinding of the film by the killer in Funny Games,
we can imagine this argument being like a film that is spliced back into
itself: the representation of reality is printed back onto itself like a
Moebius-stripe and we make what should be the absolute and irreduc-
ible plane of our argumentation an object for our cognition.10 This is
Hanekes way of showing totalitarian gesture at work.
Here, we find the double-bind situation that vexes most of Hanekes
critics. It would seem that Haneke is playing into this principle of exclu-
sion, removing all witnesses because they are inauthentic. When Haneke
violates his audience and forces it to agree to the draconic rules the
filmmaker imposes, does he not claim an exception, however slim,
for himself? There is, however, an often overlooked exception to the
exception in Hanekes oeuvre: a child is a perfect witness for Haneke.
Hanekes unsentimental portrayal of children is noteworthy here. He
takes pains to avoid the impression that we could reclaim their world-
view in any way or that children could be seen as essentially innocent
Copyright 2010. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. All rights reserved.
in any waythey are driven by their desires like everyone else. How-
ever, children are innocent of the violence that they witness. Here,
I would not contradict Christine Wheatley who claims, following Kant,
that children in Haneke are in an ethical state of nature (2009: 164).
However, although Haneke appears to be an extremely precise and
analytical filmmaker, he always stresses movements and developments
over structure. Significantly, children cannot just stay in a state of
nature, but have to grow up. Benny in Bennys Video, overcomes his par-
ents obsession with their image in society and turns himself and them
in to the police; and Ben in Le temps du loup, is able to give meaning to
the community by his readiness to sacrifice himself for it, to bring up
just a few examples. The real tragedy for Haneke, then, lies in a child to
whom such a development is deniedthe girl that is beaten to death at
the house next door in Code inconnu, for example, or Eva in Der siebente
Kontinent who is granted one of the few instances of nondiegetic music
in Haneke, tellingly in the form of the haunting violin concerto, To the
Memory of an Angel by Alban Berg, as was mentioned before.
Speck, Oliver C.. Funny Frames, edited by Oliver C. Speck, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2010.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kbdk/detail.action?docID=592466.
Created from kbdk on 2017-05-01 16:03:32.
Self/Aggression 175
same way that Franceindeed the First World in generalis guilty of,
and has not accepted responsibilities for, and the effects of its past
colonialist actions, as many critics remark (see Ezra and Sillars 2007:
219; Mecchia 2007: 134; Wheatley 2009: 164). After being forcefully
removed from the farm, it is entirely left to the audience to imagine to
what kind of abuse Majid was subjected in a French orphanage in the
nineteen-sixties and seventies. There is no direct witness to the abuse
that leads to the state of an arrested development clearly indicated by
the childish drawings and Majids behavior, just as there is no explana-
tion for the arrested development of the title character of La Pianiste.
All we have as a proof for the violence is Majids body, the body of the
immigrant who thus stands for the vanished bodies of the murdered
that cannot be retrieved and whose disappearance ultimately cannot
be witnessed.
On the other end of the spectrum, so to say, in strong opposition to
the silenced witnesses of totalitarian politics, we find the perspective of
Georges-as-child. It is crucial to note that the traumatic event of Majids
Speck, Oliver C.. Funny Frames, edited by Oliver C. Speck, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2010.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kbdk/detail.action?docID=592466.
Created from kbdk on 2017-05-01 16:03:32.
176 Funny Frames
Speck, Oliver C.. Funny Frames, edited by Oliver C. Speck, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2010.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kbdk/detail.action?docID=592466.
Created from kbdk on 2017-05-01 16:03:32.
Self/Aggression 177
filmic montage, and because there is, in the end, no real distinction
between our extradiegetic space and the virtual space of film, Haneke
is able to lay at the door step of the attentive viewer the gift of violence
done by representation. Violence is moved back to the present, is
literally re-presented.
Copyright 2010. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. All rights reserved.
Speck, Oliver C.. Funny Frames, edited by Oliver C. Speck, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2010.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kbdk/detail.action?docID=592466.
Created from kbdk on 2017-05-01 16:03:32.