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Popular Culture Review
function of whether or not we wonder if what we are watching is real or
somehow staged. But there is a deeper sense in which the animal’s non-being is
at stake. When an animal is slaughtered on-screen, it is, in some sense, merely
the character that is killed, for animals are thought not to possess a real identity
in the world.
Think, for instance, of Lassie, a dog that exists as a character but also in life
as a real dog—or a set of real dogs—who “play” Lassie on-screen. We might
identify far more with the death of such a beloved animal if Haneke were to
have her shot in one of his films, but we might not really think of the actual dog
who would die if Lassie were actually to die on-screen. Lassie per se would still
be a dog available to us in the movies (as an aesthetic creation), and it would be
a character we would mourn. We might be outraged that an actual animal, as
with Haneke’s animals in general, was killed for the sake of a film, but consider
how different our reaction would be to this death compared to the death of
Juliette Binoche on- and off-screen. Lassie does not exist off-screen—“Lassie”
is many dogs over many years, each nameless and replaceable—but Binoche
supposedly does exist off-screen. Binoche, while being many women in many
films, is, we think, one woman in reality (whatever that means), and it is that
identity that would spark a different kind of outrage than that which is aroused
by an anonymous animal’s death.
Those of us who take issue with the realness of animal deaths question their
necessity on- and off-screen, but we do not necessarily question the necessity of
cinematic human deaths, at least not in the same way. Whether or not we think
the human characters had to die, we all understand on some level the fact that
they need to die for the film to be as it is—the film that Haneke intended to
make. We may not like it, we may think it is stupid, we may be upset that the
films are so violent and our kids may be watching them and getting frightening
ideas, but we do not question the fundamental necessity of the characters’ deaths
to achieve the filmmaker’s goal—in other words, we allow him the authority to
do as he wishes with the characters, whether we like or enjoy the narrative or
not, because it seems merely a question of aesthetics and not morality. The
director has creative freedom. But we do question the animal deaths and we do
debate their necessity in the creation of Haneke’s “art”: why can’t he just use
special effects, as most films do, to simulate the violence? What is to be gained
with this murderous waste?
Heidegger, of course, maintains that nonhuman animals cannot die.
Animals, he explains, merely perish. As poor-in-world, animals and animal
being are distanced from Dasein, that particular manner of human being that
supposedly marks us, individualizes us, and situates us in the world as
something unique. For Heidegger, the mineness of my own being is inescapable.
No one can die for me—my death is radically mine—and thus no one can live
for me either. But animals, creatures who supposedly are not world-forming and
are separated from logos by a chasm that cannot be crossed, have no individual