On Michael Haneke

Codes Unknown: Haneke’s Serial Realism

245 Scott Durham Codes Unknown Haneke’s Serial Realism From the Glaciation Trilogy to Funny Games: The Impasses of Realism No filmmaker has more self-consciously confronted the limits of realism in postmodernity than has Michael Haneke. In the films of his “glaciation trilogy”—The Seventh Continent, Benny’s Video, and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance—these limits impose themselves as the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of confronting the social reality of his material directly. This confrontation is necessary because the emblematic events of Haneke’s films—serial killings and collective suicides, inexplicable irruptions of violence, seemingly torn from today’s headlines—are just the sort of reality a postmodern public imagines will awaken it from its dreams of undisturbed consumption. But it is precisely because these same personages and events also “come out of the media” that they are not directly representable by realism as classically conceived.1 Nor can they, given their social reality as media images, be adequately addressed solely in terms of Bressonian or Brechtian formal strategies of fragmentation and distanciation , inherited from the modernist canon. We will explore the extent to which Haneke’s films move beyond a dialectic of form and content in exploring the possibilities of a serial realism for reimagining postmodern sociality. But first we shall examine what leads Haneke to hesitate between two equally unsatisfactory alternatives, each of which initially appears as a negation of the representation of such events by mass culture. 246 S C O T T D U R H A M The first involves elaborating an alternative form for representing the act of violence, without either offering it as a readily consumable image, or explaining it by the hidden pathologies of its perpetrator and thereby framing its otherwise inexplicable rupture of the established order as a reassuringly isolated exception.2 Among the narrative techniques through which this aesthetic is elaborated is the use of sound to represent offscreen acts of violence to which the spectator is denied “visual access” (as with the killing of the son in Funny Games).3 This technique, as in the work of Robert Bresson, underscores the importance of what withholds itself from visibility.4 Haneke’s disjointed presentation of the space of violence also sometimes serves (as in the devastating close-ups of flopping fish that slowly die amid the other remnants of the shattered familial interior in The Seventh Continent) to make visible the incommensurability of the causes of the act with its effects, both upon its victims and on the milieu whose identities and relations its violence disintegrates. But at other moments, a series of close-ups, even as it enumerates the fragments of the world to be disassembled, can also make visible their nonlocalized relations to one another over time. Thus, in The Seventh Continent, a series of close-ups of the ordinary gestures of hands counting money early in the film anticipates a later series of close-ups of the extraordinary (if equally methodical) gestures of the father’s hands flushing money, a few bills at a time, down the toilet. The constitution and combination of such series in Haneke’s films decenters the origins of the violent event, making it appear less as a unique catastrophe than as the most extreme variant of an ordinary regime of repeated routines. Thus the questions raised by the destruction of the family’s lives and property in The Seventh Continent are not those posed by the news coverage generated by such events (“What was unique about this father and this family?” “What could have motivated them to commit this extraordinary act?”). Haneke’s treatment poses different questions: To what extent do the gestures that annihilate a family and its property (which are every bit as deliberate and routine as were the habitual actions that might otherwise appear as their antithesis) repeat the gestures that reproduce the family and maintain its property?5 To what extent does the form of this apparently extraordinary death express the truth of the ordinary form of life from which it emerges? Such formal devices can be understood as expressions of a fragmentary and decentered realist aesthetic, reshaping the formal components of realism in accordance with the fragmented content of postmodern life itself. 247 Codes Unknown: Haneke’s Serial Realism The elaboration of this aesthetic does not, however, take place in a vacuum. Because its content has already passed through the “mainstream...