Benny’s Video, Caché, and the Desubstantiated Image Mattias Frey (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Caché. Courtesy of Les Films du Losange and Sony Pictures Classics [End Page 30] A stable of theorists greets the reader of scholarly literature on Michael Haneke. In my own essay on Benny's Video and again in an overview of Haneke's oeuvre for Senses of Cinema, I attempted to see his Austrian features through a prism of Baudrillard, Virilio, and Augé.1 Jörg Metelmann's monograph, Zur Kritik der Kino-Gewalt: Die Filme von Michael Haneke, similarly engages the filmmaker's work with theoretical approaches from the usual suspects of European media critics.2 Even Berlin's bi-weekly listings magazine Tip had critic Wolf Donner devote four pages to juxtaposing a plot summary of Benny's Video (Michael Haneke, AT/CH, 1992) with excerpts from Paul Virilio's latest book.3 Although in some ways I still stand behind my earlier comments on Haneke and maintain that Metelmann's monograph is the most comprehensive work that exists on the filmmaker hitherto, to my mind Caché (Michael Haneke, FR/AT/DE/IT, 2005) signals a shift in theoretical paradigm. At least since this film, the description of Haneke's project as an indictment of the Western European bourgeoisie and medial representations of violence in the vein of Baudrillard and Virilio seems insufficient. Haneke's most recent film re-visits Benny's Video and revises its acerbic media critique with a nod to David Rodowick's notion of desubstantiation. Benny's Video: The Conventional Wisdom The two films' respective first sequences index this theoretical shift. Benny's Video begins with a buzz and a bang. The television screen snow-shower opening credit yields to an amateur video of a pig being slaughtered on a [End Page 31] farm. The title character, the loner son of wealthy Viennese parents, repeatedly rewinds and reviews the sequence, and then recreates the scenario upon a female classmate, whose murder he commits and records. Later, he channel surfs through RTL news reports of the August 1992 Neo-Nazi murders of asylum-seekers in Rostock-Lichtenhagen, war movies, toy commercials, and footage from the military conflict in the Balkans. The effect of course is to create a flat line of reality or unreality, a total conflation of the actual and the virtual. Benny experiences news, commercials, feature films, the pig video, and finally his own slaying of his classmate as all equally unreal. Benny inhabits a society of pure transit points and temporary abodes, not unlike Augé's surmodernité, a world completely mediated through video and saturated by spectacle. Elsewhere, I sought to understand Benny's encounter with the girl as an example of Baudrillard's dictum that the digital Narcissus has replaced the triangular Oedipus.4 What should have been Benny's first sexual encounter becomes an act of violence culminating in an autoerotic spectacle meant to be ritualistically reviewed and rewound. For his part, Metelmann envisions Benny's parents Georg and Anna as representatives of Peter Sloterdijk's "cynical reason," people who have departed from the Enlightenment drive to produce rational explanation and are instead committed only to, in Horkheimer's formulation, "reason and preservation."5 Metelmann draws on Jameson and ZHizhek, and activates Brecht, Benjamin, and Baudrillard in order to understand Haneke's work. The Cache Twist Again, let's return to the start. Caché's beginning seems less assuming. For five minutes a long shot captures a quiet street in Paris' 13th arrondissement called rue des Iris. In this timeframe the credits superimpose the space of the frame in typescript. And yet, the shock in this sequence is ontologically rather than graphically violent. As a male and female voice begin to argue from the offscreen space and fast-forward lines blur the frame, the spectator realizes that the diegetic characters are watching this image along with him or her, that his or her perspective is aligned with theirs, and that the film itself has not quite begun. Surely, the introductory sequence to Benny's Video provides a model for this VCR logic. Furthermore, Funny Games (Michael Haneke, AT, 1997...