This Really Wasn't Intended as Another Scott Foundas Rant...

... but it probably is going to sound like one.

In his latest cover story, Foundas puffs up Michael Haneke, the Austrain director who has made much of his work in France. Foundas considers Haneke's remake of his own Funny Games to be a "consciousness-altering" masterwork because it critiques the complicity of audiences in our cultural desensitization to violence in media and society.

That rattling sound you hear is me rolling my eyes. I've appreciated if not necessarily enjoyed the Haneke films I've seen (including the original Funny Games but they're not consciousness-altering. And Haneke is certainly not the only director to have implicated the audience in the proliferation of violence in cinema and society: Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, Remy Belvaux's Man Bites Dog, Mary Harron's American Psycho and even Sidney Lumet's Network and Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange spring to mind. One can even see Eli Roth's films as muddled analyses of our enjoyment of watching violence inflicted on others. For that matter, Pasolini's Salo does Haneke one better by indicting both the audience and the director -- as the sidebar that accompanies Foundas's piece points out, Haneke relies on his audience's taste for the ultraviolence as much as he critiques it.

In other words, Foundas seems awfully exercised about a director whose main thematic interests have been explored by other directors for many years. Haneke is a director of no mean talent but in my estimation he's not the trenchant social critic Foundas's latest mash note would indicate.

What initially spurred me to write this post, however, was the cover copy -- Michael Haneke is our mirror and if we don't like what we see, it's not his fault. This is a cliche, of course, but that's not what piqued my interest. Rather, I'd like to know why the mirror is always assumed to reveal what is ugliest about a society? Why do we never have a mirror that is held up to reveal what is good or beautiful about us? I don't write this as an irritated American who is tired of seeing our Wonderful Freedom and Way of Life denigrated. This is more a conceptual question. The mirror has obvious connections to narcissism -- it allows us to gaze upon our beauty and to double ourselves in reality. But the artistic mirror (or at least the art-critic mirror), the one that is said to show us who we really are, denies the pleasure of the gaze. By implication, the recognition of one's beauty would never be more than a narcissistic and thus false perception while the recognition of ugliness would always be the healthy and true perception. To borrow the style of Zizek's chapter titles in Enjoy Your Symptom, why does the mirror always show us as ugly?