February 12, 2006
hidden in plain sight
Our collective sorrow at the decommisoning of Franklin Bruno's blog konvolut m is matched only our delight at such periodic revenances as this. I'm happy to post Franklin's notes on the Michael Haneke film Caché, discussed recently on this site. His entire note below.
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Ex-blogger Franklin Bruno here. Jane graciously agreed to host a few additional comments on Cache; these don’t add up to a complete reading, much less an argument, and are not especially meant as responses to Jane's own discussion.
1) One criticism I’ve encountered runs: What, we’re supposed to hold Georges (Auteuil’s character) culpable for his actions as a selfish six-year-old? I think this question is misplaced, at least as a way of dismissing the drama, and especially the political allegory. What the film (and, if Haneke is successful, the viewer) passes judgment on is the “mature” Georges’s incapacity to respond in the present to past events set in motion by his agency – in his name – except with defensiveness, belligerence, and dishonesty. This much is obvious, as is the extension of the charge to Western democracies. A thornier point, perhaps, is that it’s left massively unclear how a more appropriate response would look. But that, as I understand it, is the logic of Haneke’s work. He’s not terribly interested in how his bourgeois characters (or audience) might “put things right”; his brief is to mete out a fated and merited punishment – in this case, a largely psychic one. Asking anything else would be like expecting Sally to reject Harry.
2) Haneke’s not thought of as a witty director, but there’s one bone-dry joke here I haven’t seen mentioned. We think we’re watching a broadcast of Georges’s book-chat show, but when the image breaks up, we see that we’re watching the footage being edited, as Georges fast-forwards over a guest’s discussion of Rimbaud – just as he does with the uneventful surveillance tapes he’s been receiving – while commenting, off-screen, “Too theoretical.” In part, this exemplifies one of Georges's subsidiary crimes – the trivialization of the literary. (Speaking of “howling white space,” think also of the blank-spined mock-books of the show’s set, mirroring the unread – unreadable? – wall of volumes that dominates the central couple’s apartment.) But it’s also a moment of auto-critique: an anticipation of viewers’ potential rejection of the film’s technical-cum-diegetic play. If what one values in an artist is an unwillingness to be outflanked, Haneke is your man.
3) Didactic film-making doesn’t bother me in principle – if it did, how could I have sat through Letter to Jane? – but that’s not to say I accept all of Haneke’s demonstrations. Take the scene above, in which a panicky George and Anne (Binoche) attempting to locate their missing son by phone, while the television, set directly between them, displays violent footage from Iraq and, if I’m remembering correctly, Palestine. I presume this arrangement is meant to exemplify the bourgeoisie’s ability to use their blinkered focus on their private concerns as a means of “tuning out” history. For me, this was one spot where Haneke’s critique felt cheap, in that a concern with one’s immediate family, though not universal, is not at present a characteristic that marks the class in question off from others. This is so even within the film’s own terms -- the combination of filial and social solidarity displayed by its Algerian characters is too tricky to unpack here. More generally, all I mean to suggest is that the problem of partiality – whether directed toward one’s “blood,” or some otherwise constituted set of persons – is more complicated than Haneke allows.
4) In the end, I wish I were more convinced that Haneke’s use of the 1961 FLN protest and subsequent massacre to set his plot in motion deserved to be called “historically situated,” rather than “ripped from the headlines” (in the manner of many Law & Order episodes). Though he means to allegorize collective denial, one can still come away with the sense that everything would have been just dandy for this family had Daddy not done something particularly nasty to a particular Algerian forty-odd years ago. The contrast with Haneke’s 1997 Funny Games , in which another similarly-named bourgeois family are tortured and killed for sport by two amoral youths, is instructive. Notions of motivation and explanation, imperatives of the psychological thriller, are roundly mocked as the tormentors present a variety of incompatible and ultimately irrelevant of both “how they got this way” and why they’ve singled out this couple. The political specificity of Cache is absent in the earlier film, but so is the individualized quality that blunts Haneke’s point: This Georges and Anne have “done nothing,” and that’s enough.
Posted by jane at February 12, 2006 04:37 PM | TrackBack