On Michael Haneke

The Key to Voyeurism: Haneke’s Adaptation of Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher

127 Fatima Naqvi and Christophe Koné The Key to Voyeurism Haneke’s Adaptation of jelinek’s The Piano Teacher European reviewers warmly greeted the release of Michael Haneke’s film The Piano Teacher (La Pianiste) in 2001—to be expected, perhaps, considering the number of prizes the film garnered at the Cannes Film Festival the same year.1 To many, The Piano Teacher represented a successful adaptation of Elfriede jelinek’s acclaimed 1983 novel by the same title, a fascinating translation from one medium to another. Their reactions, on the whole, lent testimony to the maturity of the discourse surrounding films based on literary predecessors, in that few were interested in the film’s supposed “fidelity” to the original novel’s contents.2 In fact, numerous critics stressed that Haneke had profoundly departed from the original to allow a shift in focus. The trajectory these commentators charted for the transfer from novel to film involved the movement from the sociogenesis of female sadomasochism in jelinek’s case to the impossibility of normal intimacy in an emotionally “glaciated” West in Haneke’s. (A few with dissonant opinions objected to Haneke’s elision of the concrete social and political setting of jelinek’s text in his parodic melodrama of “boy meets girl.”3 ) One particularly discerning Austrian reviewer, Klaus nüchtern, remarked on the specific change that had occurred in the adaptation concerning voyeurism: while jelinek’s novel allows the main character no other choice but to be an intensely controlling voyeuse, Haneke’s film emphasizes the impossibility of controlling this voyeuristic gaze.4 This aspect of the film, as it relates to the key and keyhole leitmotif and the topological construction of space, is our focus in this essay. 128 F A T I M A n A Q V I A n d C H R I S T O P H E K O n É The Keyhole and the Keyholder Haneke’s The Piano Teacher explores the key and keyhole as symbols for phallic power, repressed female sexuality, and voyeurism at the same time as the film complicates the binary oppositions that an optical metaphor of keyhole as peephole implies (actively voyeuristic subject versus passively viewed object). Ultimately, the film transcends the psychoanalytic paradigms to which it lends itself so readily—and thus fits into Haneke’s larger concern with what he perceives as omnipresent explanatory models that have somehow aged and are not quite up to par with the historical moment . Indeed, in the discussion that follows, the prevalence of 1970s film theory, relying heavily on psychoanalysis, should be unsurprising. Both Haneke (born 1942) and jelinek (born 1946) come of age when these theories had their heyday; however, they both are aware of the theories’ limitations once they have become accepted belief. As such, both artists incorporate elements from depth psychology and simultaneously seek to get beyond it. On one level, the key and keyhole function in the film as a metaphor for genitalia and intercourse, in accordance with the dream symbolism Sigmund Freud outlines in The Interpretation of Dreams and in The Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis.5 The film revolves around fantasies of violent penetration—penetration that is only accomplished via cuts in flesh (with the razor blade or the kitchen knife), however, or with rape. On another level, the key is also generally associated with the pianist Erika Kohut’s overbearing mother, mapping the power relations of patriarchal society— jelinek’s and Haneke’s bugaboo—onto the relationship between mother and daughter.6 The mother can be read, as john Champagne has written, as a “(phallic) Lacanian pre-Oedipal mother, the mother who is both adored and feared by the child because of the child’s dependence on her and its closeness to her body.”7 Mother Kohut only relinquishes her power over the key when the suitor Walter Klemmer “overthrows” her during Erika’s violation. She is, to a large degree, Lydia Perovic argues, julia Kristeva’s “mythic mother of psychoanalysis,” who must be overcome.8 The opening of the film already establishes the key as symbol for the power that Erika (Isabelle Huppert) attempts to appropriate from her mother. We are confronted with a medium shot of a closed door from the inside of an apartment. Erika, shown in a medium shot, discreetly opens the door, inches her way in, and carefully closes and locks the door with the safety chain. By doing so, she already signals that there is no way out [3...