Pain and the Limits of Representation

In an interview in Story Quarterly in 1995, the contemporary American writer Brian Evenson was asked to address the violent character of his writing. This violence had already led to the writer's excommunication from both the Mormon Church and Brigham Young University (which asked him to stop writing novels altogether orelse). Evenson responded:

To render a violent act in language is not at all the same as committing a violent act. The writing itself is not violent, but rather precise, measured, controlled, in the grip of certain arbitrary but self-consistent rules. Only rarely does real violence become endowed with aesthetic qualities. Like religion, language does violence to the immanent world by forcing the objects of that world to be understood in terms of generalities, by stripping them of their specificities and categorizing them. And this sort of violence is in everything . . . If you've ever been involved in real acts of violence, you can see how profound the difference is.¹

Here, Evenson conceives of violence as a process of categorization, as the gathering of the irreducibly particular into a homogenizing whole that founds, and is founded by, a larger generalization. And in so doing, I would like to propose that he offers us a crucial distinction for the consideration of violence in the work of Michael Haneke.

Above all else, Haneke's work is violent. It would be quite simple to describe Haneke as an immoral sadist who relishes in the desecration of the body as a form of entertainment. Of course, Haneke does not make a spectacle of violence; its appearance occurs in a phenomenological frame. It tends toward the blunt muteness of its actual occurrence in the world. And as Evenson implies, the occurrence of violence in the world is not banal; it is just not aestheticized. While an investigation of the phenomenologically-motivated realism of Haneke's practice would not be without merit, it might direct us too simply toward the delineation of degrees of resemblance and how those levels relate to moral categories of consumer choice. In other words, it would suggest that the closer the representation of violence moves toward its occurrence in the world, the more we can learn from it; the farther the violence gets from the world, the more it contributes to our moral degeneration in a willfully self-commodifying culture. I would like to think of violence instead as a question concerning structuring. That is, it is a philosophical question concerning structure, and the ways in which structures produce different kinds of violence.

My question concerning structuring is especially germane to Funny Games (Michael Haneke, AT, 1997); the act and subject of torture, so thoroughly manifest there, is especially self-reflexive, pitched at questions of representation and containment, displeasure and relief. Despite the fact that my remarks here will be limited to Funny Games, the question is nevertheless relevant to Haneke's oeuvre more generally, especially the recent and justly celebrated Caché (Michael Haneke, FR/AT/DE/IT, 2005). Still, the question raised particularly well by Funny Games is, it seems to me: what exactly do we long for as spectators of this film? And what are the implications of this longing?

Funny Games is an experience of torture. It concerns two homicidal men, dressed in their Sunday whites, who move machine-like through a series of lakefront weekend homes of the German leisure-class. The duration of the film is spent on the torture and eventual murder of one particular family. The act of torture begins almost immediately and will carry through until, as one of the murderers himself suggests, the film has reached the standard length of the feature-film. As spectators, our experience is like the experience of this onscreen family, and yet not at all. Many of us would be inclined to describe our own viewing experience as torturous; once Haneke's camera is trained on this game of extreme violence, we are never provided with means of consolation. There is only a brief fantasy of it, when the wife manages to kill Peter, one of the murderers. However, Paul, the other...