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Popular Culture Review
manipulation. And if we are not doing the things we see—if we are not pouring
the coffee, eating the cereal, or shooting the gun—then how can we make a
connection? We have driven cars, we have gone shopping, we have ironed, but
not one of us has died. Haneke thus gets us into the visual habit of supplying the
emotional content of a scene by projecting ourselves doing the mundane tasks
required by life—we imagine ourselves as the double of the characters—and
then he hits us with death and asks the viewer: can you imagine this? All we can
say is: no. We cannot imagine death as anything more than a specter, the ghost
of death, the possible impossibility and yet necessity of our own eventual nonbeing. And this is, perhaps, why we turn to art.
This is what happens when we go from a family eating a lavish supper to a
family engaged in the destruction of their home and of themselves. We see them
flushing their life savings down the toilet, and we learn that Hanake actually
used real money to film this scene: real money is being used up and flushed
away, all in the name of art; all in the name of making a point? And yet isn’t this
always the nature of art? We watch the family destroy everything around them
in unimaginable acts of violence, and we say that we feel lost in this movie. But
where do we get lost and what happens when we realize we are lost—when we
realize that we have been left behind in the narrative but are still somehow
involved, participating by watching? We have passed by the safety of the last
scene we understand—opening a bottle of wine, or answering a telephone—and
are plunged into the horror and alienation of a scene we cannot understand, a
scene that is presented with an identical clarity and detachment as those
preceding it, but the content of which goes from ordinary to extraordinary. The
irony, of course, is that death is ordinary, and it is happening while we iron, or
brush our teeth, or draw a picture, or make a film. After all, if you eat a chicken
sandwich, you taste death.
But why, then, do we feel differently about a man slashing his throat than
we do about a family going through a car wash? And if death is beyond us, if we
cannot connect to it or grasp it the way we can the handle of a cup, then can we
truly grasp the image of a wife talking to her husband, or a woman making
pancakes, or a man simply sitting in a chair? What makes us think that the rest
of life, the little things, the things that precede death, are truly any more
understandable?
What Haneke ultimately does is make real life irreal. Violent deaths saturate
his films, making us question our knowledge of every scene we thought was
simple. As the films move along and we absorb their unusual rhythm—the long,
stable shots; the amplified sound; the emphasis on absolutely “authentic”
gestures, expressions, and language—we have a growing sense of unease as the
simple seems to move away from us even as we get closer to it. We are not used
to such deliberation in film or in real life. We don’t consider the breakfast bowl
all that carefully in our lives, but by having it pushed in our faces on film, it
gains new importance. And in that elevation, that refined and unmoving final
focus, it is pulled away from us and from what we know. These films are not