Popular Culture Review Vol. 22, No. 2, Summer 2011 | Page 26

22 Popular Culture Review deaths, more clearly foreshadowed than in much of Haneke’s other work, still retain a sense of mystery: why do the members of this family commit a sort of group suicide? Why does the man cut his throat in Cache? Why does Benny kill the girl in Benny’s Video? Why are most of the children in The White Ribbon (2009) apparently homicidal? Typically there is absolutely no explanation attempted; but even when the characters explain their actions, or the intent of actions may be inferred, no matter how skillfully the explanation is stitched together by the audience, the deaths are still closed to us—perhaps because we are still necessarily alive. These are not horror films in the normal sense of the term. These are not horror films unless we see all of life as already horrific. If we try to ask why the violent people are acting the way they are acting, we will never get an answer out of Haneke. And this is, perhaps, because to ask such a question is to imply that we don’t already have the answer. That is, if we ask “How could those boys in Funny Games (1997) sadistically torture that family and kill the family members off one by one?” we are saying that we are not like that, that we cannot imagine how someone could do that because that sort of action is so completely alien to who we are. But this, argues Haneke, is a bit of bad faith. The truth to which he is pointing is that we are all capable of such things. We each think that we follow truth and beauty in service of peace, but this blinds us to the violence we enact in the course of such pursuits. Haneke explains: In the name of a beautiful idea you can become a murderer....There is no crime I couldn’t have committed....It’s so easy to say “Oh no I would never do that,” but that’s dishonest. We are capable of everything....It’s so easy to be ‘human’ when you come from a privileged background....The only reason that I couldn’t have been a Nazi is that I can’t stand crowds. Perhaps. But like the characters in Haneke’s films who survive, we are left with the consequences and attempts at explanations of violence which, coming before and after the acts themselves, still do not reveal what goes on in that space in between. The camera is there, unmoving, giving us the details. We hear and see death, we watch it happen, but still in the most vital sense we are not there. We are, and can only be, viewers. Even Benny cannot know what it is like to die, no matter how many times he watches his video of a pig dying, no matter if he kills his girlfriend, experiences that dying firsthand, and repeatedly watches her death on video as well. He will, indeed, get to “see what it is like,” but he will never know what it is like until he himself dies. And, to be sure, he (and we) will not know what death is like even at that point, for death is never an experience, never something that takes place for the subject, never something that we can pass through, reflect on, and then can say “So, that was death.” Our own death is an impossible possibility. It is nothing and yet the ground of everything. Death is only experienced as the death of the Other. We observe Benny as he does many things—goes to school, watches videos, opens and eats a container of yogurt, makes pizza with his friend, shoots a girl and watches her die—but we don’t come any closer to the actual