The Doubling of Death: Human, Animal, the
Real, and the Irreal in the Films of Michael
Haneke
Michael Haneke’s film Cache (2005) plods along slowly. The mood is tense
and the tone is somber, but very little actually happens. Until, without warning,
everything changes one hour and twenty-seven minutes into the movie when
French television personality Georges Laurent, played by Daniel Auteuil, arrives
at the apartment of an Algerian man, Majid,(played by Maurice Benichou,
whose parents used to work for Georges’ parents when both men were little
boys. Majid tells Georges that he wants him to be present for something, at
which point the man pulls out a straight razor and slashes his own neck,
immediately collapsing on the floor. The blood splatters across the door and
wall. Georges stands immobilized, the camera still and unmoving for more than
a full minute. And then life goes on.
One of the hallmarks of Haneke’s films is a shocking and unexpected
violence. It is the sort of violence that hangs with us long after we watch the
film precisely because it appears so “real.” Yet, what is the difference between
artistic violence and “real” violence? Does the audience’s assumption that the
death they see in films is fake give them license to enjoy that violence? Or is
something much more complex at work, something that makes Haneke’s films
particularly interesting and particularly disturbing?
Of course, the human actors in these films are not actually killed. Haneke is
European, moody, and avant-garde, but he still hasn’t made a true snuff film—at
least not yet. The question of what constitutes real violence and real death is
something that must concern us, but there is, in fact, one obvious way in which
there are elements of so-called real death on-screen, particularly in terms of the
nonhuman actors.
We often read during the credits of movies made in the United States that
“no animals were harmed during the making of this film;” in a Haneke film,
however, we never receive this assurance because the animals who die—pigs,
fish, chickens, and so on—are real and their deaths are real. Haneke’s exotic
fish, for instance, truly suffocate—these fish whose aquarium is smashed by a
family destroying every object in their home in the film The Seventh Continent
(1989). The death of the fish, like the death of the inanimate objects destroyed in
the film, as well as the deaths of the human characters, is shot calmly and
without melodrama. Even in Benny’s Video (1992), where Benny, a young
teenage boy, watches the graphic slaughter of a pig over and over on videotape,
there is a sense that death has become removed from us though technology: the
stoic eye of Haneke’s camera—languid, calm, and unrushed to judgment or to
the next scene—appears to be without moral bias.