... 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?
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4 comments:
The answer to your question, "Why does the mirror always show us as ugly?," is obvious: because we are, and Haneke and Lars von Trier and Brian de Palma and George Romero a few other indispensible contemporary directors whose movies regualrly get moviegoers (and some critics') panties in a twist are unafraid of showing us (just as Bresson, Passolini, et al. were in an earlier generation). Naturally, all those filmmakers who show beautiful things about life or allow their characters to meet with happy endings are nothing but big fat liars. Jean Renoir? Full of shit. Vittorio de Sica? Wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him. Frank Capra? Spot on so long as George Bailey is standing on the edge of that bridge ready to jump, but the second he has a change of heart? Forget about it.
Scott, thanks for your response. (And sorry to bag on you so much... really. You seem like a nice guy even if we appear to have rather different approaches to film criticism!)
My point was somewhat rhetorical, though, and perhaps under-researched. Renoir, de Sica, Capra, et al. certainly do remind us of the possibility of human good in the world. However, so far as I know, we don't describe their films as mirrors; the mirror metaphor is invoked only (or at least usually) when the representation is ugly. Obviously, humans have the potential for ugliness that Haneke et al. have portrayed. But why do they get to hog the metaphorical mirror?
I think it’s (at best) intellectually lazy and (at worst) dishonest to label the human condition as ugly. Undoubtedly ugliness is intrinsically part of being human, but so is goodness (though angels and bells may be stretching the argument). The same argument that holds altruism to be nonexistent also works against evilness (or ugliness). Bailey stepping back from the bridge may unfairly characterize the human condition (whatever that means), but so too would his jump into despair.
How does Foundas keep knowing that this blog is talking about him? Somebody posts on this blog like, what, once a month. A post goes up with his name on it and 24 hours later he has a comment up. What, does he a google-alert for his name? Really, how vain. I'm going to leave a comment on espn.com about Foundas not knowing anything about post-modern tibetan horror cinema and see how long it takes for him to reply.
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