The Doubling of Death
23
knowledge of why he does any of these things. The same holds true for the
family members in The Seventh Continent—we see, in exquisitely minute detail,
how they manipulate and manage the objects around them. We know what they
eat, where they work, what they wear, how they draw, how they speak to one
another—but we still do not know why they die, even as we watch how they do
it, even as we hear the husband’s voice explain, calmly and rationally, the
“reasons” behind their deaths. All we know is that one moment there is a whole
family there. Then they poison their daughter. And she is dead. Soon, the
parents kill themselves as well. And they are dead. And for us, life goes on.
The audience can see and respond, can feel and think, but cannot die with
the characters on-screen. And that blank space between the actor and the
observer is where the experience of death happens. It is a space we cannot
access, and it is the place wherein our responses to Haneke’s deaths are
manufactured—our fear, or disgust, or confusion, or apathy, or rage, or anger, or
sadness, all of our responses to death off-screen as well.
The suicide in Cache is one of Haneke’s most elliptical deaths. We simply
don’t have enough information about the character even to begin to grasp why
he does what he does. Is his life, as his son asserts, miserable because of what
Daniel Auteuil’s character did to him so many years ago? Since it is the case
that we cannot understand, we are thus asked to stand with the indirect murderer
who cannot take responsibility for his actions, who can only see from inside a
position of privilege. Watching this man cut his throat—watching him live one
moment and in the next, suddenly and without warning, not live—is most like
watching the pig or the chicken or the fish; there is a heavy sense of distance, an
unknowableness that accompanies all death, but these in particular. We do not
know what pigs, chicken, and fish think when they die. Because we do not have
enough knowledge, our feelings remain abstract to varying degrees. It is terrible
to watch a girl suffer as she is shot repeatedly, as it is te rrible to watch a family’s
despair as they take their lives one by one, but is it terrible because we know
death itself is terrible or because we can’t imagine if it truly is or isn’t?
Haneke’s films revolve visually around objects—we get varied close-ups of
ordinary items (cereal bowls, yogurt cups, coffee pots, and so on) where the
object is the focus, and the manipulator (the hand pouring the coffee, the arm
delivering the cereal to the off-screen mouth) is on the periphery, visual only in
part while the inanimate object enjoys center stage. The camera, as always, does
not move, does not get distracted by voices off-screen, does not turn to give us
visual cues from the actors: we stay, as we do in any Haneke shot, squarely
focused in front of us. Haneke’s camera is not an animate camera, it is not a
camera that moves to help us or distract us. If a woman is ironing on-screen then
we will watch her iron, and that action is made just as important as the more
subtle, emotional action taking place within the person performing the action.
This kind of emphasis on the object seems to point to the idea that what we
know comes first from what we do—we become interested, as Haneke himself
says, in people and in actions through the objects that invite or submit to