A Cold Cruel Teacher: Masochistic Submission to the Films of Michael Haneke

A Masters Thesis

Presented to

The Graduate Administration Committee of

McGill University

by

Matthew Mackenzie

April 2013

Thesis Advisor:

Dr. Ara Osterweil Abstract

This thesis offers analyses of two of Michael Haneke's most provocative films, Funny

Games US, and The Piano Teacher. Contrary to the popular critical conclusion that Haneke is a cinematic sadist, this thesis argues that the aesthetics and thematic concerns of his films are best understood through the dynamics of masochism, not sadism. Using a variety of theories of masochism, including the conflicting theories of Sigmund Freud and Gilles Deleuze, this project seeks to build upon the work of Gaylyn Studlar and argue for the subversive power inherent in masochistic submission in the cinema.

Cette thèse propose des analyses de deux des films les plus provocateurs de Michael

Haneke, Funny Games US, et La Pianiste. Contrairement à la conclusion critique populaire qui

Haneke est un sadique cinématographique, cette thèse soutient que l'esthétique et les préoccupations thématiques de son films sont mieux compris par la dynamique du masochisme, sadisme pas. En utilisant une variété de théories de masochisme, y compris les théories contradictoires de Sigmund Freud et Gilles Deleuze, ce projet vise à s'appuyer sur les travaux de

Gaylyn Studlar et plaider pour le pouvoir subversif inhérent à la soumission masochiste dans le cinéma. Mackenzie 2

Table of Contents

Page

Title Page...... 1

Introduction...... 4

Chapters

I. Haneke’s Kinky Invitation in Funny Games...... 14

II. Story of Erika: Masochistic Submission in The Piano Teacher...... 49

Conclusion...... 75

Bibliography...... 78 Mackenzie 3

Acknowledgements

This project would have never been accomplished without the help of my friends, family, and mentors. I want to thank my parents, Elaine and Peter, for their profound love and encouragement through the years. I especially want to thank Dr. Ara Osterweil for her tireless support, insight, and enthusiasm throughout this project and my academic career. Ara gives me the confidence to pursue my passions, and in addition to being a dear friend, she continues to be a role model for me in academia and in life. Finally, I want to sincerely thank all of my friends, especially Jessica Bahar, Diane Belzil, and Lauren Clinton, for providing me with the motivation and relief needed to complete this project. Mackenzie 4

Introduction

“She held out her trembling hand to K. and had him sit down beside her, she spoke with great difficulty, it was difficult to understand her, but what she said ---” Franz Kafka’s The

Castle thus ends in mid-sentence, on the verge of what we hope will be some final explanation for the enigmatic story of K., who spends the entire narrative trying to gain access to the illusive bureaucrats who reside in a nearby castle. Michael Haneke’s brilliantly faithful film adaptation,

The Castle (1997), also ends mid-sentence and mid-scene as K. tramps through the snow in search of a place to rest his weary head and the narrator reads this final incomplete line before the film cuts to black. Haneke never once shows the castle that K. spends the entire film trying to gain access to, even though it is supposedly immediately adjacent to the village. We get the sense that it is always just offscreen. The tracking shot of K. walking through the village is repeated multiple times throughout the film, and though he is always depicted moving in the same direction down the street, from the right of the frame to left, he never arrives at the illusive castle. This dark film is at turns erotic, politically incisive, and frustratingly surreal. Most importantly, it is emblematic of Haneke’s career-long interest in structures of power, repetition, and the perpetually incomplete.

These themes appear time after time in Michael Haneke’s provocative films. The icy stare he fixes on unpleasant subject matter routinely sparks guttural reactions amongst viewers.

His films are at once in dialogue with contemporary narrative cinema, both Hollywood and art house, and yet totally unique. His austere aesthetics and politically challenging films earn him many critical accolades. He won the Palme d’Or twice in three years with The White Ribbon

(2009) and Amour (2012), an honor held by only seven other directors in history. Haneke was Mackenzie 5 born in Munich in 1942 to parents who were both part of the world of cinema. His father was

Fritz Haneke, a German actor and director. His mother was the Austrian actress, Beatrix von

Degenschild. He studied philosophy, psychology, and drama at the University of Vienna. After graduating, he worked as a film critic, and later as an editor, dramaturg, and eventually director for the German television station, Südwestrundfunk. The influence of his time in television is evident throughout his theatrical films, which frequently cite television, specifically news outlets, as culprits in spreading desensitizing images of violence around the globe. He made several made-for-television movies from 1974 until 1989, when he left television and made his theatrical film debut with The Seventh Continent. Inspired by a true story, the film depicts a middle-class family who destroys all of their possessions and commits suicide while watching television. By the time Haneke released Benny’s Video in 1992, about a young boy who murders a girl with a butcher’s gun and films it for no apparent reason (also inspired by a true story), he had established his name as a provocative filmmaker with a preoccupation for critiquing violence in the media, alienation in contemporary society, and the consequent effects on today’s youth.

Haneke’s use of intense violent outbursts, the tendency for his narratives to focus on pathological characters, and his apparent lack of concern for the audience’s pleasure in almost every film he has made leads many critics to describe him as a killjoy whose miserable films are solely about punishing the audience. The word most often used to describe his aesthetic is

“sadistic.” New York Times critic A. O. Scott describes Haneke’s style in Funny Games U.S. as

“an especially pure and perverse kind of cinematic sadism, the kind that seeks to stop us from taking pleasure in our own masochism” (Scott). Scott’s description of the effect of watching

Haneke’s film is reminiscent of the climax of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, in Mackenzie 6 which the sadist, known as the Greek, whips the masochistic Severin so severely that Severin fools himself into believing he is cured of his masochistic desires through this cathartic experience of violence. However, the glacial pacing and productive ambiguity of many of

Haneke’s films suggest that his ideological goals may be other than simply “whipping” viewers to the point that they no longer take pleasure in images of violence. For all of his “sadistic” brutality, Haneke’s depiction of violence onscreen is remarkably restrained. Like Kafka’s castle, violence is often hidden altogether. Haneke’s measured aesthetics, such as his strategy of withholding visual and narrative pleasure from the viewer, as well as his evident desire to create active, critical cinematic spectators do not suggest the domineering style of a sadist. Rather,

Haneke’s formal techniques, his ideological concerns, and the viewing experience he enables are best characterized by the dynamics of masochism, not sadism. In psychoanalysis, masochism has long been theorized as the passive counterpart to sadism. This has in turn influenced film theory that seeks to explain the pleasures of spectatorship through the dynamics of either paraphilia. By illuminating Haneke’s masochistic aesthetic, I argue that genuine masochism is never a passive surrender. As I shall demonstrate through a reading of two of Haneke’s films, masochism, and masochistic spectatorship are active and conscious acts of submission to one’s selected torturer. In order to explore Haneke’s masochistic motifs and mode of address in Funny

Games U.S. (2007) and The Piano Teacher (2001), this thesis will rely upon theories of masochism from a variety of sources, including the conflicting accounts of Sigmund Freud and

Gilles Deleuze.

Sigmund Freud was one of the most prolific and influential theorists of sadism and masochism. While sadism and its presence in human sexuality is easily explained in his Mackenzie 7 accounts of natural human aggression, Freud consistently describes masochism as “mysterious” and “incomprehensible” because of its apparent deviation from the pleasure-principle (The

Economic Problem in Masochism 190, 192). In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905),

Freud writes: “the desire to cause pain to the sexual object and its opposite, the most frequent and most significant of all perversions, was designated in its two forms by v. Krafft-Ebing as sadism or the active form, and masochism or the passive form” (31).1 Freud’s thoughts on masochism evolved and grew more nuanced throughout his career, but he always maintained that sadism and masochism are complementary opposites. Hence, the popular conflation of the terms: sadomasochism. Freud initially posited that every masochist is originally a sadist:

“masochism is nothing but a continuation of the sadism turning against one’s own person in which the latter at first takes the place of the sexual object” (Three Essays 32). The sadistic

“death instinct” manifests itself “as an instinct of destruction directed against the external world” (The Ego and the Id 381). Sadism is thus an active, and, according to Freud, masculine impulse that seeks to shape (or destroy) the world. When this destructive instinct turns inwards, the sadist becomes a masochist. Masochism is figured as passive and feminine because it is an impulse to accept the changes inflicted by the external world. Therefore, “a sadist is simultaneously a masochist, though either the active or the passive side of the perversion may be more strongly developed” (Three Essays 33).

While this initial theory established sadism as the primary impulse, Freud began to question this assumption in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Looking for evidence of the

1 Richard von Krafft-Ebing is typically credited with coining the terms sadism and masochism in his seminal work, Psychopathia Sexualis: eine Klinisch-Forensische Studie (1886). However, it is more accurate to say that he simply popularized the terms by introducing them to widespread psychiatric consideration, since it is now known that he took the terms from underground advertisements used by practitioners (Cutler 100). Mackenzie 8 death drive, Freud conceded that “there might be such a thing as primary masochism - a possibility which I had contested” (Beyond 328). Contrary to what many of Freud’s critics claim, he does not assert that the sadist and the masochist would make a perfect couple in reality.

Based on case studies, Freud states that the fantasies of sadists are often far beyond what the masochist may desire: “masochistic tortures seldom convey an impression of such seriousness as the brutalities---phantasied or actual---of sadists” (Economic Problem 193). While Freud’s theory that sadism and masochism are complementary opposites is elegant, his gendering of both impulses, as well as his figuration of masochism as a purely passive surrender to pain or changes inflicted by external factors is deeply problematic.

Gilles Deleuze critiques many of the core assumptions of Freud’s theories in Masochism:

Coldness and Cruelty. Unlike Freud, whose primary focus was on clinical case studies,

Deleuze’s analysis is far more interested in the aesthetics of masochism. “Fundamentally, masochism is neither material nor moral, but essentially formal” (Deleuze 74). Accordingly, his analysis is largely based on close readings of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s work in contrast to that of the Marquis de Sade’s. Deleuze argues that while sadism and masochism share similar characteristics (the pain-pleasure complex), they are ultimately distinct paraphilia that cannot exist within the same person (he is vehemently against the term ‘sadomasochism’), and are not at all complementary. Arguing against the “spurious sadomasochistic unity” theory of Freud,

Deleuze asserts: “a genuine sadist could never tolerate a masochistic victim ... Neither would the masochist tolerate a truly sadistic torturer” (40). While Freud tentatively conceded the possibility of a primary masochism that did not originate from sadism, Deleuze insists upon masochism as a distinct, original impulse. He demonstrates how the masochist’s fantasy is Mackenzie 9 incompatible with the sadist’s, because the masochist is never truly passive. Their surrender is highly artificial, and their torturer is carefully selected and educated to act out very specific violent fantasies, which are often dictated in a signed contract. Deleuze argues that the masochist’s torturer, far from being a sadist, is actually the mirror-image of the masochist: the torturer disavows and escapes their own masochistic desires by taking on the active role in the partnership (42). Because both partners are potentially masochists, the roles of torturer and masochist are quite flexible within this dynamic, and there are not specific genders associated with either role. Deleuze’s emphasis on the aesthetics of masochism has proved highly influential in film theory, and has led to many excellent analyses of filmic masochism. Gaylyn

Studlar’s influential theory of masochistic spectatorship is perhaps the most significant, and it is framed as a response to Laura Mulvey’s theory of sadistic spectatorship.

Just as it is all but impossible to speak about masochism without simultaneously addressing sadism, any contemporary analysis of the pleasures of filmic spectatorship is in inevitable dialogue with Laura Mulvey’s seminal theory of the sadistic visual pleasures offered by Hollywood narrative cinema. In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Mulvey asserts that the narratives and aesthetics of Hollywood films are implicitly based on Oedipal, patriarchal desires. Women are treated as objects to be looked at and fetishized. As a result, they are forced into a passive surrender to the active sadistic male gaze. According to Mulvey, this structure of viewing pervades popular cinema, and reinforces patriarchal structures throughout society.

There have been countless responses, revisions, and critiques of Mulvey’s landmark essay since its publication in 1975 (including by Mulvey herself). Mackenzie 10

Gaylyn Studlar offers one of the most intriguing of these critiques in her book, In the

Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic (1988). While

Mulvey’s psychoanalytic basis was predominantly Freudian, Studlar uses Deleuze’s alternate theory of masochism to offer a fresh perspective on the pleasures of cinematic spectatorship.

Unconvinced by Mulvey’s cynical conclusions about the sadistic male gaze occluding any space for guilt-free female spectatorship, Studlar argues that narrative cinema actually operates on a bisexual masochistic model. Her theory rests on the affinity between cinematic spectatorship and the psychoanalytic dream-screen in which the subject’s ego boundaries are lost. Studlar writes:

the cinematic spectator passively surrenders to the filmic object of desire

in much the same way that the masochist surrenders to his/her object of

desire; but like the masochist, the spectator’s passive position masks

activity. The spectator and the masochist share the need to distance

themselves from the anxiety of total surrender. Within the regressive

structures of the cinema’s perverse pleasures, ego dependence cannot be

complete or disavowal would be broken. Multiple, mobile spectatorial

positions alternating identification and distanciation guarantee against

complete object cathexis and ego investment in the screen (192).

Studlar’s theory does an excellent job of demonstrating why gender on the screen and in the theater is not a determining factor for spectator identification, as Mulvey claimed. Rather,

Studlar argues that the masochistic aesthetic, defined by “fantasy, disavowal, fetishism, and suspense,” successfully “reintegrate[s] psychic bisexuality” for the viewer (18, 192). While Mackenzie 11

Studlar’s focus on masochism’s formal elements in film and its own unique aesthetics is fundamental to my own analysis, I will critique her characterization of masochism as a “passive surrender.” Studlar notes that there is hidden activity behind this surrender in the form of mobile spectator identification, but she places this activity firmly in the subconscious mind of the viewer. As a result, there is no true choice made before the viewer is dominated by the film.

Rather, Studlar figures this as an almost automatic surrender.

Within the Bondage and Discipline, Dominance and Submission, Sadism and Masochism

(BDSM) community, a masochistic relationship is a consensual and conscious act of submission.

Through my analysis of Haneke’s films, I will establish that despite the many claims about

Haneke’s sadism, masochism is the primary narrative and aesthetic concern in his films. Most importantly, this analysis will demonstrate that genuine masochistic spectatorship is always such an active decision to submit to a chosen torturer. Haneke’s mode of masochism constructs and depends upon self-aware viewers who do not passively surrender, but who consciously choose to submit (or not), and this submission carries its own subversive form of power over the ostensibly dominant partner.

The first chapter of this thesis will be oriented around an analysis of the masochistic aesthetics in Haneke’s Funny Games (1997), with a particular emphasis on Haneke’s own

American remake of the film, Funny Games U.S. (2007). In these twin films, two undeniably sadistic libertines torture an innocent bourgeois family to death. Not surprisingly, the film is often viewed by critics as a pointless exercise in torture porn, and the epitome of Haneke’s cinematic sadism. The film certainly foregrounds sadistic content, but this chapter will argue that Haneke deploys distinctly masochistic filmic techniques in order to undermine this sadism. Mackenzie 12

Haneke’s masochistic aesthetics include a heavy use of repetition in order to delay or deny climax, fetishistic framing, and complex games of character and viewer identification, all of which serve to curtail the sadistic desires that the film ostensibly offers. Far from feeding the audience’s sadistic thirst for blood in yet another slasher film, Haneke offers the Funny Games films to the audience as a means of masochistic self-torture in the hopes that the viewer may use it as a mode of escaping the sadistic control of Hollywood’s proliferation of easily consumable filmic violence. Even critics who applauded the original film find the American remake rather pointless. However, the masochistic themes of repetition and mirroring found in the original film, as well as the critique of Hollywood horror film conventions, are magnified even further in

Haneke’s (almost) shot-for-shot remake. Therefore, this chapter will predominantly focus on

Funny Games U.S. in order to rescue it from its current critical disregard.

The second chapter will examine Haneke’s most overtly masochistic film, The Piano

Teacher (2001). The film revolves around Erika Kohut, an accomplished pianist who teaches in

Vienna, and her tumultuous relationship with her charming young student, Walter Klemmer. It is gradually revealed that Erika’s sexual kinks include voyeurism, exhibitionism, and extreme masochism. When she tries to enlist Walter to act out her masochistic fantasies, he rejects her violently and assaults her in her apartment. The film ends ambiguously when Erika waits to see

Walter arrive at her concert before stabbing herself in the shoulder and walking out. Many of the film’s critics mimic Walter’s disgust with Erika’s sexual masochism and assert that the film is meant to highlight the problems with contemporary sexuality. These critics interpret Walter raping Erika at the end as an allegory for the impossibility of female sexual desire in a patriarchal society. However, the film’s deliberate ambiguity eschews easy conclusions about Mackenzie 13 even the most basic encounters in Erika’s life. This chapter will demonstrate how Haneke uses a formal withholding strategy throughout the film by denying visual and aural pleasure, all the while encouraging mobile, critical forms of spectatorship. The film’s masochistic aesthetic subtly legitimizes Erika’s sexual desires, and allows for a radical alternate reading of the climactic assault as a masochistic success, rather than yet another story of passive surrender to misogyny and sadism.

While Freud, Deleuze, and others will all be central to my analyses of these films, it is important to remember that Michael Haneke is a filmmaker, not a clinician. As such, he shows little interest in arguing for the primacy of one theory of masochism over another. Rather than pathologizing his characters through a Freudian or a Deleuzian lens, Haneke presents the viewer with the contradictions found throughout both of these broad approaches. The result is a more nuanced understanding of masochism and its dynamics. Through the analyses of these films and

Haneke’s active masochism, this thesis aims to problematize and revise the notion of masochistic passivity found in Studlar’s theory of the painful pleasures of spectatorship. I will demonstrate that cinematic submission is a cognizant decision, and that it enables an active, empowering position for the viewer. Mackenzie 14

Chapter I

Haneke’s Kinky Invitation in Funny Games

“I am the wound and the blade,

both the torturer and he who is flayed” -- Charles Baudelaire, Fleurs du mal2

The original Funny Games (1997) and the (almost) shot-for-shot American remake,

Funny Games U.S. (2007), are perhaps the most critically hated films in Michael Haneke’s filmography. Both versions depict two polite, well-dressed young men torturing and murdering a family for no apparent reason. The film opens with Ann, George, and their young son, Georgie, driving to their the picturesque country home on Long Island (in the U.S. version). They are quickly taken hostage in their own home by a mysterious duo, Paul and Peter, who proceed to mock, humiliate, and kill each family member. Though the film introduces several opportunities for the family to strike back at their captors, they always fail. This sense of inevitable failure gestures towards the film’s engagement with the tropes and cliches of the Hollywood horror genre, all of which are ultimately subverted. The ostensible innocence of the family has served as provocative fodder for critics, who have most often dismissed both versions as pointless exercises in sadistic torture porn. German film director Wim Wenders famously walked out of the world premiere screening at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997, and though there have been several academic advocates for its value in recent years, most critics have had negative reactions to the film. This is particularly pronounced in the reviews of Funny Games U.S., which often read like testimonies from a traumatized survivor’s support group meeting as each critic recalls their experience of watching the original film before confirming that the remake is just as

2 Quoted in Matsumoto. Mackenzie 15 aimless and sadistic.3 David Edelstein begins his review of Funny Games U.S. by proudly reporting that immediately after watching the original film he popped the DVD out and snapped it in half (Edelstein). While Edelstein acknowledges that Haneke is obviously trying to make a statement, he concludes: “it's difficult to grapple with serious themes when what comes through most vividly is the director's sadism” (Edelstein).

What is rarely acknowledged by such critics is that, compared to most contemporary horror films, Funny Games is quite tacit in terms of the violence and nudity that actually appears onscreen, calling to mind Gilles Deleuze’s praise for Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s work being

“commendable for its unusual decency,” compared to the Marquis de Sade’s explicit descriptions

(Deleuze 25). Funny Games undoubtedly foregrounds sadistic content, but that is only one aspect of this surprisingly nuanced film. What is truly intriguing is that Haneke’s use of masochistic aesthetics serve as a competing (not complementary) force to the sadism. In a film that focuses on two undeniably sadistic libertines and invokes a plethora of generic Hollywood horror movie clichés, Haneke deploys specifically masochistic aesthetics as a challenge to conventional depictions of violence. For example, the film revels in repetition and mirroring, both in terms of the narrative and the characters, all of which serves to delay or outright prevent visual pleasure and narrative climaxes. Haneke’s use of fetishistic framing further serves to occlude the sadistic voyeuristic desire to see nude bodies or bodies in pain. All of these techniques contribute to the complex games of character and viewer identification that the film plays in order to offer the audience an escape from the sadistic control of Hollywood conventions and the proliferation of easily consumable violent entertainment.

3 See the reviews of the film by Armond White, David Edelstein, A.O. Scott, and Rex Reed for examples (cited in bibliography). Mackenzie 16

Almost every review of Funny Games U.S. begins by stating that it is a shot-for-shot remake of the original. On the one hand, this is a generally accurate statement and many of the critical observations (though not all) about one film hold true for the other. However, this description also inevitably serves as a dismissal of the remake from the outset. Consequently, very little attention is given to what is unique about Funny Games U.S. or how its status as a remake not only mocks the Hollywood tradition to pump out nearly identical sequels of horror films year after year, but actually amplifies the masochistic themes and structures of the original.

For these reasons and others, this chapter will primarily focus on Funny Games U.S., while making explicit note of where it diverges from the original film. While film theorists such as

Gaylyn Studlar and Carol Clover also argue for considering cinematic spectatorship a primarily masochistic experience, both of their arguments rely on the notion of passive surrender to the screen. This chapter will demonstrate that Haneke encourages a masochistic engagement with his twin films, and, furthermore, that his mode of viewing is not a dull, trance-like surrender to the action onscreen, but an active form of submission that creates an empowered, critical audience.

In Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze repeats the popular joke about what happens when a masochist meets a sadist: “the masochist says: ‘Hurt me.’ The sadist replies:

‘No.’” (40). Deleuze then goes on to explain why this is a stupid joke because it suggests a simplicity and level of compatibility between the two paraphilia that does not exist; his argument is that the sadist and the masochist are fundamentally incompatible partners. He writes: “a genuine sadist could never tolerate a masochistic victim ... Neither would the masochist tolerate a truly sadistic torturer” (40-41). Deleuze explains how the sadist and masochist would Mackenzie 17 undermine each other’s pleasure, because the sadist wants an unwilling victim, and the masochist wants a torturer who is guided by strict rules set out by the masochist. The sadist is an

“instructor”; he directs and commands his victim, using them like a puppet (19). The masochist is an “educator”; he teaches and molds a selected individual into his ideal torturer before choosing to submit to them (19). Deleuze’s hardline separation of masochism from sadism may be too strict, since it cannot adequately explain why it is seemingly impossible to talk about one without talking about the other. Nonetheless, his easily delineated premise is productive for beginning to think about the sadistic and masochistic elements of the Funny Games films. In his analysis, Deleuze never returns to his opening joke to consider what would happen if a masochist meets a sadist. Even if there is no pleasure to be found in such an encounter, it is a meeting worth contemplating.

Sadistic fantasies rely on the presence of victims. Sade’s libertine cannot simply entertain himself in solitude. He needs bodies to torture, and typically, quite a lot of them. The masochist, on the other hand, may prefer to have someone else torture him, but he nonetheless has the ability to satisfy his desires without a torturer present through self-inflicted pain. If a masochist were to meet a sadist, the masochist would be at a disadvantage, because it is the masochist who relies on clearly demarcated rules and limits with his appointed torturer, whereas the sadist has no limits. So the question of how to escape from a sadistic master becomes important. In “An Ethical Plea for Lies and Masochism,” Slavoj Žižek considers the possibility of self-inflicted torture in front of one’s sadistic master, and, calling on Deleuze, he argues that

“far from bringing any satisfaction to the sadist witness, the masochist’s self-torture frustrates the sadist, depriving him of his power over the masochist” (Žižek 183). If the victim of a sadist Mackenzie 18 decides to engage in masochism, and furthermore, to play both roles, torturer and victim, their masochistic self-torture reveals that the sadistic “master is superfluous,” and can thus be seen as a radical path towards freedom from sadistic control (Žižek 183, original emphasis). This is the opportunity Haneke offers the audiences of the Funny Games films: an escape from the sadism of Hollywood via self-inflicted masochism.

Haneke has said of Funny Games: “If you don’t need this film, you leave. If someone stays until the end, he needed to be tortured during that time to understand” (cited in Brunette

59). By presenting sadistic content through a masochistic aesthetic, audience members who choose to sit in the theater and suffer will hopefully come to realize the dangers of contemporary depictions of violence onscreen, even when that violence is fictional. One of the chief ways this message is relayed is through audience identification, or the lack thereof, with the bodies onscreen. The dilemma of viewer identification is a common one in narrative cinema, but it is particularly foregrounded and problematized in the Funny Games films. Judging by the sheer number of negative reviews of Funny Games U.S., it seems safe to assume that most critics identify with the victims in the film. New York Times critic A. O. Scott tellingly entitled his review of Funny Games U.S.: “A Vicious Attack on Innocent People, on the Screen and in the

Theater.” In his article, “How Much Haneke Do We Deserve?: Against Sadistic-Philosophical

Tendencies in Filmmaking,” Charles Martig writes “In Haneke’s films, a certain strategy is predominant: he establishes an implicit spectator who sees the film from the point of view of the victims. In doing so, Haneke enforces a fundamental role change: he forces spectators to switch their position from an active (sacrificing) subject to a suffering (sacrificed) object” (Martig 34). Mackenzie 19

Martig notes both versions of Funny Games as particularly strong examples of Haneke’s ostensible strategy of trapping the viewer into the role of the victim.

Even if Martig’s claim were true, this would not be a strategy unique to Haneke. Carol

Clover writes extensively about the tendency to masochistically identify with the tortured bodies onscreen in horror films in her book, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern

Horror Film. Clover acknowledges the sadistic side of the Hollywood horror genre, but overall, she asserts that it is masochistic “reactive gazing” that defines horror spectatorship. Clover contends that the viewer is merely reacting to the violent images, rather than assaulting the onscreen bodies with a voyeuristic gaze. Clover writes “that people who make movies sense the iterative ‘my-turn-is-coming-soon’ quality of victimization fantasies; that they consciously exploit the proved willingness of the viewer (proved because he keeps paying for it) to imagine himself as a ‘next victim’; and that the screen functions as a kind of anticipatory mirror intended not so much to instruct as to heighten the effect” (Clover 221). As her survey demonstrates, most modern horror films play on the audience’s inclination for imagining themselves as part of the victim fantasy onscreen. Clichéd techniques like tense close-ups on the victims walking through dark corridors so that the frame hides the killer as he inches closer and closer compel the viewer to identify with the victim. This is not how the Funny Games films operate though.

While Haneke references such cinematic strategies in the films, he does not rely on their tricks.

So many of the critics of Funny Games U.S. speak about how cruel the film is because we are forced to identify with the family members who are then tortured to death. This conclusion belies the complexity of what Haneke is doing with identification in the film.

Contrary to how it has been theorized, Funny Games occludes the possibility of conventional Mackenzie 20 identification, with the victims or the killers, through Haneke’s use of classic Brechtian alienation effects. In Brecht’s essay, “A Short Organum for the Theatre,” he explains the importance of alienating the audience in order to break them from their passivity. Before detailing different alienation techniques (such as direct audience address), Brecht describes the kind of passive audience that he wishes to undermine:

The theatre as we know it shows the structure of society (represented on

the stage) as incapable of being influenced by society (in the auditorium).

Oedipus, who offended against certain principles underlying the society of

his time, is executed: the gods see to that; they are beyond criticism.

Shakespeare’s great solitary figures, bearing on their breast the star of

their fate, carry through with irresistible force their futile and deadly

outbursts; they prepare their own downfall; life, not death, becomes

obscene as they collapse; the catastrophe is beyond criticism (7).

This is precisely the kind of passive, uncritical audience that Clover writes about in her survey of the typical audience for horror films, and it can be said of many conventional Hollywood films whose primary purpose is entertainment. The audience, which Brecht deems a representation of

“society,” surrenders to the point of entering a “trance.” This kind of audience watches the bodies onscreen (or on the stage) get ripped apart, and they do nothing because they are under the impression that nothing can be done. The diegesis cannot be pierced. The typically passive spectatorship of sadistic violence in films encourages an attitude of disinterestedness in all spectacles of violence. Such an attitude becomes problematic when it extends beyond the movie theater, making the violence around the world relayed by news outlets less troubling and more Mackenzie 21 easily consumable. The viewer assumes that nothing can be done: “the catastrophe is beyond criticism.” Haneke challenges such problematic passive spectatorship by periodically breaking the fourth wall in Funny Games.

At five points in the film, Paul (Michael Pitt, in the remake) turns to the camera and addresses the audience, smirking at us, taunting us, or asking us questions. This is one of many ways that Haneke ruptures Hollywood conventions; these moments effectively alienate the viewer by piercing the diegesis and making the viewer aware of their role and their choices for identification. Many conventional Hollywood films work to draw the viewer into their fantasy realm and absolve them of critical thinking. All the choices of identification with the characters are already made for them. By acknowledging the presence of its audience, Funny Games alienates and empowers them to come to their own conclusions (or to leave the theater entirely).

The resultant empowered audience hopefully comes to realize that by watching films like this, they are complicit in the sadistic violence they passively consume in the theater and beyond.

Like George’s (the father’s) seemingly inexplicable decision to remain unhidden in the house after the killers murder his son and depart, the empowered viewer may choose to remain in the theater and be tortured. This conscious decision to remain is quite different from Clover’s concept of masochistic spectatorship, which, like Studlar’s, presumably occurs automatically.

However, it must be noted that because Funny Games empowers the viewer to engage with the film as they see fit, it is entirely possible to take sadistic pleasure from the same moments in the film that evoke a masochistic reaction in other viewers. In other words, the masochistic aesthetics can fail to contain the sadistic content. The empowered spectator can refuse to masochistically submit, and instead choose to derive sadistic pleasure from watching Mackenzie 22

Paul and Peter torture this family. In the case of the alienation effects and breaking the fourth wall, the sadistic viewer may take cruel delight in Paul’s self-reflexive moments, viewing them as a sort of invitation to cackle alongside the killers. Paul’s acknowledgement of the viewer’s involvement in the violence onscreen can be taken as a moment of exhibitionism for the sadistic viewer. Critics like Edelstein fault Haneke for making these two films by claiming that despite his ostensible aim of critiquing sadistic depictions of violence, Funny Games inevitably ends up feeding the very bloodthirsty desires it critiques. There is, after all, a lot of brutal violence in this film, even if it is predominantly offscreen. Taking sadistic pleasure in this film is not proof of the director’s sadism though, as Martig claims, but a consequence of Haneke’s empowered viewer making the decision to engage sadistically rather than masochistically.

This dilemma is laid bare in yet another moment of audience address. When Peter and

Paul are sitting on the couch and making the bet with the family (they will all be “kaput” in twelve hours), Paul turns to the screen and nonchalantly asks, “I mean, what do you think? You think they stand a chance? You’re on their side, aren’t you? Who are you betting on, hmm?”

Just as his comments make it unclear who to bet on, the direction Paul turns to address the screen physically positions us away from either the victims or the killers. These moments of audience address thus foreclose the possibility of identifying too closely with the killers or the victims onscreen, because we are reminded of our bodies just as they are effectively positioned apart from either the killers or the family. Haneke said in an interview on Funny Games: “My goal was a kind of counter-program to Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994) ... NBK makes the violent image alluring while allowing no space for the viewer” (cited in Brunette 58-59). By putting us in that space between the torturer and victim, Haneke empowers the viewer to make Mackenzie 23 this choice: to empathize with the killers and revel in sadism, or to empathize with the victims, choose to stay in the theater and suffer alongside them, and escape the sadistic masters through self-inflicted masochism. Either way, this strategy demonstrates that Haneke is not acting as a sadistic instructor, beating the audience toward a fixed conclusion (that is how most conventional

Hollywood movies work, though the beating is subtle and seductive). Instead, Haneke acts as an educator. He never forces one mode of engagement or another onto the viewer. Therefore, it is worth exploring the darker alternative of sadism before looking for Haneke’s masochistic escape route.

The two torturers in the film that the viewer may identify with, Paul and Peter, are pure sadists. Like the Marquis de Sade’s libertines in The 120 Days of Sodom, they are excessively polite, well-spoken, and entirely apathetic about the violence they inflict. Most importantly, their characters point toward a central concern of the film -- identity -- and how sadism and masochism treat this element differently. In sadistic fantasies, the identities of the libertines

(their personalities, characteristics, biographical details) and especially those of the victims are entirely irrelevant. In The 120 Days of Sodom, the four main characters are the Duc de Blangis, the Bishop, the Président de Curval, and Durcet. Sade’s libertines are almost always identified solely by their institutional titles (occasionally by a single name, like Durcet), and we are only given the bare minimum of information about their characters.4

Haneke offers even less information about Peter and Paul, and he emphasizes their lack of identity in a variety of ways throughout the film. Paul and Peter constantly play an unsettling name game with each other by also referring to each other as ‘Tom’ and ‘Jerry,’ and ‘Beavis’ and

4 Typically their age, body type, wealth, and the size of their genitals. Mackenzie 24

‘Butt-head,’ respectively (Peter/Jerry/Butt-head also answers to ‘Tubby’), often switching names from one sentence to the next. When Peter comes to borrow the eggs from Ann (his first close- up in the film), a screen door almost entirely obscures his features, leaving us staring at his silhouette. The first time Peter and Paul are seen onscreen is in an extreme long shot from Ann’s perspective outside the gate of her neighbors’ house. The shot-reverse-shot shows Ann in close- up, while continuing to show the villains in extreme long shot, demonstrating how unknowable and ultimately unimportant the identities of the two torturers are. Peter and Paul remain silent throughout the brief scene as Ann shouts to her neighbors, not knowing that they are already victims. The metal bars of the gate that they are seen through hint at the neighbors’ status as prisoners in their own home, and the fact that the neighbors are seen in extreme long shot demonstrates how sadism depersonalizes its victims as well. One of the metal bars largely obscures Peter in the beginning of this shot, and he cannot be seen clearly until he moves towards the couple, at which point Paul and Peter are framed on either side of a bar in the gate, appearing like mirror images of each other. Their mirror-image resemblance is particularly emphasized in Funny Games U.S., due to Haneke’s decision to cast two actors (Michael Pitt and

Brady Corbet) who almost look like twins: both are young, white, cherub-faced men with dirty blonde hair, and their matching haircuts are parted in opposite directions. Their mirrored appearances reinforce their status as more “faceless” iterations from the realm of sadism, introduced in order to serve a required narrative function, rather than as developed characters.

The potential for identifying with Peter and Paul and engaging with the film sadistically is introduced from the outset through music and dark humor. In the opening shot of the film,

Ann and George play a bourgeois guessing game that involves one of them playing a piece of Mackenzie 25 opera and having the other identify it. Suddenly, there is an explosion of extra-diegetic music that accompanies the bold red title and opening credits. The song is “Hellraiser and

Bonehead” (actually a mash-up of two different songs) by John Zorn’s experimental avant-garde band, Naked City. Peter Brunette describes this ostensibly traumatic moment in the original film:

“it is as though this innocent bourgeois family--and we innocents in the audience--have suddenly been taken over, dominated, and even raped by a violence that lurks just outside, or just below, the comfortable world we think we inhabit” (Brunette 52). Brunette’s observation fits in with his overall argument (shared by many critics) that this film is a largely pointless exercise in sadistic torture inflicted on “we innocents in the audience.” However, no one seems ready to admit the possibility of bursting out laughing at the moment when the peaceful opera is abruptly replaced by this screaming parody of death metal. And it is undoubtedly a parody of the death metal genre (it is not at all a genuine example of “punk rock,” as Brunette labels it), just as the film itself is a parody of the horror genre, and specifically the home-invasion sub-genre of horror films. Acknowledging the dark (pitch black) humor of Funny Games is something that is sorely missing in basically every analysis of the film. The tendency to laugh at this moment is even greater in Funny Games U.S., since Ann smiles and glances over at George shortly after the metal music invades, and they both start laughing at the moment when Zorn’s absurd screaming begins in the song. Whereas in Funny Games (1997), the family has no reaction to the music, the humorous reactions of Ann and George in the U.S. version neatly blur the line between diegetic and extra-diegetic by making it unclear whether they can hear the music or not.

This invitation to laugh is essential to the construction of the film and the game of identification (in many different senses) that is repeated throughout. Brunette’s analysis of Mackenzie 26

Funny Games reflects the critical consensus that we are meant to identify with this “innocent” family, while Haneke’s hired killers torture us to death. However, the film is actually filled with invitations to cheer for the killers and join in their “fun” via dark humor. When Paul breaks the fourth wall and turns to the camera to smirk at us while Ann searches for the dead dog, many viewers may find it easier to laugh sadistically than to masochistically empathize with the horror

Ann must be feeling. Brunette is certainly correct in pointing out the unsettling effect of the music and the foreboding sense it gives once silence returns at the end of the credits. As he notes, this song comes to be directly associated with Peter and Paul later in the film. The Zorn song in the introduction is multifaceted, because it simultaneously allows us the possibility to identify with the family (let us be afraid for them) as Brunette does, or to laugh with the killers

(we know this is a horror film -- we are in on the joke that everything is about to go horribly wrong). The film constantly oscillates between inviting us to identify with the tortured family

(we want Ann to triumph) and with the charming torturers, because, like them, we know this is a movie. Meanwhile, the periodic moments of audience address remind us of our own bodies and thus preclude fully identifying with either. Like almost all horror movie characters, Ann and

George behave as if they live in a world without horror movies and their utterly predictable outcomes. Like the killers, however, the audience is media savvy. We know the killers are not going to let them go. We know the killers are coming back in the end. We know there will be a body count. Indeed, we are counting on it. One way to enjoy watching Funny Games is to cheer for the killers and join them in their appreciation of this predictable farce, which the film offers as a viable option. We can choose to laugh along with the murderous boys and take their complete lack of characterization as an invitation to put ourselves into their empty white shoes. Mackenzie 27

The lack of import accorded to the identities of Peter and Paul also carries over to their many victims, further aligning the film with classic sadistic fantasies. Even more so than presenting us with faceless killers, Sade’s lack of any real characterization is especially pronounced in describing the victims of the libertines. For example, here is one excerpt from an extensive list of family activities in The 120 Days of Sodom:

33. This libertine requires a dozen women, six young, six old and, if ‘tis

possible, six of them should be mothers and the other six their daughters.

He pumps out their cunts, asses and mouths; when applying his lips to the

cunt, he wants copious urine; when at the mouth, much saliva; when at

the ass, abundant farts (120 Days 577).

All of the libertines’ victims in 120 Days are typically just such faceless numbers; often the most information that is given is their familial relations to each other, and this is generally just to demonstrate the delight the libertines take in violating the taboo against incest. The victims in the Funny Games films (Anna/Ann, Georg/George, and their son, Georgie) are rather weakly characterized as well. They appear much like the faceless mothers, fathers and children of 120

Days of Sodom, little more than the generic horror movie family, put into play only to be tortured. Finally, like almost all of Haneke’s cinematic bourgeois couples, they are named Ann and George, further removing any specificity from their identities. Naming the primary couple some variation of Ann and George is a trope throughout Haneke’s films. The original version of

Funny Games, as well as The Seventh Continent, feature Anna and George, while Code

Unknown, Caché, and Amour all feature Anne and Georges. While this demonstrates Haneke’s long held interest in repetition, it is important to note that just because these characters share Mackenzie 28 names and generally socioeconomic status (upper middle-class), they are not simply copies of one another. In most of Haneke’s films, Ann and George are richly characterized and feel quite distinct from their namesakes in other films. This only emphasizes how little we ever learn about the Anna/Ann and Georg/George of the Funny Games films. They are deliberately empty characters, in keeping with the conventions of most Hollywood horror films that Haneke is toying with. Both the killers and the family are blank slates, making both equally viable options for the viewer to identify with. If a main character had to be chosen, it would undoubtedly be the mother, Ann, and not merely because she is the last to die. Amongst hundreds of faceless victims, the mother is always a figure of particular interest in sadistic fantasies. In her overview of Sade’s main tenets, Lindsay Anne Hallam observes that more than any other family figure,

“the figure of the mother is repeatedly reviled and violated in his stories. Many of the mothers in

Sade’s works are hence represented as obstacles to pleasure, voices that preach the virtues of chastity and piety” (Hallam 14). The libertine, always a vehement atheist, thus takes particular pleasure in destroying this symbolic obstacle.

Accordingly, in Funny Games U.S., the one member of the family that Peter and Paul seem most intrigued by, and the person they torture the most, is Ann.5 However, Ann does not fit the model of a classic Sadean mother figure. To Paul’s bemusement, she is not religious. When

Paul tells Ann that she can choose who will die next and with which weapon if she can only recite a prayer, she admits that she does not know any. Paul is surprised and Peter must teach

Ann a childish prayer so that she can complete the trial. One way to read this interaction is that

5 This is a point of deviation from the original Funny Games. As Leland Monk observes, in the original film, Anna and George are more clearly presented as a couple who suffer together, whereas the remake almost entirely shifts the emphasis to Ann, and George is depicted as excessively passive to the point where he is easy to forget. I think this is yet another subtle improvement in the remake. Because the Funny Games films are parodies of conventional horror movie fare, it makes sense to put the emphasis almost entirely on the “Final Girl,” and her struggle against the killers (See Clover’s Men, Women, and Chain Saws for more on this phenomenon). Mackenzie 29

Peter and Paul, as classic libertines, want Ann to fit the model of a pious Sadean mother, so when they discover that she does not align with their fantasy, they force her to fit that role. The religious monikers of Peter and Paul further fit the Sadean fantasy, which delights in subversive characters that are atheistic members of the clergy, like the Bishop in 120 Days of Sodom. In

Davide Zordan’s analysis of this scene in both versions of Funny Games, he notes that it is, of course, impossible to tell whether or not Anna/Ann’s forced prayer becomes a genuine one for her in this moment of peril (Zordan 137). However, Zordan notes the differing tones between the scene in each film. He points out that in the original Funny Games, Anna’s prayer certainly feels more sincere and (relatively) less forced, and when it concludes, Paul seems genuinely pleased with himself for having taught this woman a prayer. Whereas in Funny Games U.S., the forced nature of the prayer is emphasized by Paul holding Ann’s hands up high by a rope to make her look as if she if praying to the heavens (the rope quickly drops out of the frame in the original) and after it concludes he mocks her performance, exclaiming “Bravo!” (132). In a film that relies so heavily on generic predictability, this is one of the rare moments when Paul seems genuinely surprised by Ann. Therefore, I think the more subversive incarnation of the scene is the one in which Ann’s prayer does not feel sincere, since a genuine prayer more easily figures

Anna (from the original) as yet another religious mother to be destroyed. Ann’s failure to fit the

Sadean mother model can be seen as one of many signals that Haneke is not simply depicting a classic sadistic fantasy as one could find in a Hollywood horror flick, but rather toying with many of its stereotypical elements.

On the subject of sadism, Krafft-Ebing wrote: “In certain cases the personal element is almost entirely absent. The subject gets sexual enjoyment from beating boys and girls, but the Mackenzie 30 purely impersonal element of his perversion is much more in evidence ... While in most individuals of this type the feelings of power are experienced in relation to specific persons, we are dealing here with a pronounced form of sadism operating to a great extent in geographical and mathematical patterns” (quoted in Deleuze 20). The impersonality of both libertine and victim in the sadistic scenario points to the terrifying lack of any logical motivation for the brutality. Violence is an autotelic act for the sadist. This simple fact is introduced in Funny

Games when Paul mockingly offers George a slew of reasons for why they are torturing them

(economics, drug addicts, abused as children, gay, etc.), all of them clearly false. One of the most truthful explanations for the prolonged torture is: “you shouldn’t forget the importance of entertainment.” This statement points to the film’s explicit engagement with the generic conventions of the Hollywood horror film. Peter and Paul’s motivations are truly irrelevant, because the kind of movie they are in dictates that the violence must continue.

Whether they loved it or loathed it, most critics of Funny Games note that the film clearly engages with the generic conventions of Hollywood horror movies, and specifically, those of the home-invasion sub-genre. Even in the original Austrian setting, the fact that Haneke takes on the guise of a Hollywood film director and challenges the notion of violence as entertainment from within clearly addresses specifically American tastes and values. This is another reason why the remake feels particularly well-suited for its mission. Funny Games U.S. was even produced by

Warner Bros. Independent, making its connection to Hollywood literal rather than merely figurative. While North American and European critics received both versions poorly, the

American remake is often seen as especially pointless. New York Times critic A. O. Scott sees

Funny Games U.S. as one among countless other films like Eli Roth’s Hostel that “revel in the Mackenzie 31 pornography of blood and pain” (Scott). David Edelstein’s critique takes a slightly different tactic, as he seems to primarily take issue with the film’s deviation from conventional torture porn: “audiences flock to nightmarish ‘home invasion’ thrillers because of an implicit pact with the filmmaker that the invaders will be vanquished and the family unit saved” (Edelstein). He despises the Funny Games films so much because they are supposedly “torture porn” without the redeeming cathartic ending assured by the genre (Edelstein).

Likewise, Charles Martig angrily concludes that Haneke’s strategy in Funny Games

“make[s] it impossible for the spectator to develop any expectations as to the ending of the film.

Funny Games is not a common thriller but an irritating and alienating spin-off” (Martig 35).

Much like Edelstein, Martig’s blunt point of contention with Funny Games is that it is not predictable enough, which again demonstrates just how entrenched some viewers are in the comforting ideology of Hollywood genre conventions. Much like the slasher film, with its ubiquitous “Final Girl” phenomenon that Carol Clover analyzes at length (35), the conventions for a typical home-invasion film dictate a fairly typical trajectory: killer invades the home, killer dispatches most of the men and women, killer tortures one woman in particular, the woman takes her justified revenge against the killer, credits roll. Thus, the domestic space is saved from the perverse killer and social order is restored through justified violence. Singling out Funny Games

U.S. as somehow particularly sadistic, above and beyond standard horror movie fare, points to Mackenzie 32 the comforts of routine, even if the routine is utterly brutal, misogynistic, or homophobic.6

Andrew Britton’s recollection of watching Hell Night (1981) with teenage horror-movie buffs demonstrates the reassurance derived from predictability:

It became obvious at a very early stage that every spectator knew exactly

what the film was going to do at every point, even down to the order in

which it would dispose of its various characters, and the screening was

accompanied by something in the nature of a running commentary in

which each dramatic move was excitedly broadcast some minutes before

it was actually made. The film’s total predictability did not create boredom

or disappointment. On the contrary, the predictability was clearly the main

source of pleasure, and the only occasion for disappointment would have

been a modulation of the formula, not a repetition of it (quoted in Maltby

79).

This predictability points toward the horror genre’s interest in sadistic control over the viewer.

Like Sade’s libertines describing the details of every planned action before performing it, the horror movie telegraphs its moves long before enacting them. The turn at the end of horror films

6 The conventions of the Hollywood horror genre carry a deeply troubling conservative ideology, and their widespread acceptance is made evident in many of the responses to Funny Games U.S. One curious claim about the Funny Games films is that the killers are “obviously” gay. An interviewer commented to Haneke that in Funny Games U.S. “the killers this time seem to be much more clearly gay than in the first one ... Have you had that reaction from other people?” Haneke replies: “We heard it before, but I’m very surprised actually. First of all, the actors aren’t gay, but that would be beside the point. I don’t know why people think that—because they are handsome, or have white clothes on, I don’t know” (Rich). The baseless assumption that Peter and Paul are gay speaks to some longstanding conventions in Hollywood horror films. The killers of slasher films are generally impotent or sexually perverse in some way. Clover writes: “slasher killers are by generic definition sexually inadequate -- men who kill precisely because they cannot fuck” (186). Furthermore, some of the most influential horror films feature queer killers of some sort (such as Norman Bates in Psycho). Apparently, being outside of heteronormativity is enough to fulfill the generic requirement for a kinky killer. It is telling of the strength of this convention that viewers of Funny Games still believe the killers are gay despite the fact that Paul mocks this very convention in the film when he sarcastically tells the family that Peter is gay (and having sex with his mother), and that is why they are torturing people. No matter how ridiculous or troubling, these genre conventions are undeniably comforting for the majority of viewers, and deviating from them is unacceptable. Mackenzie 33 that Edelstein refers to -- when the hero (typically female) vanquishes the killer and saves the family unit -- acts as a bloody climax in those films, providing relief after hours of pleasurable tension.

Though the sadistic killer dies in the end of the conventional horror film, control over the viewer’s perception is never relinquished. This is because, beyond the spectacle of violence, the film’s sadistic control over the audience is rooted in the very structure of its narrative. And, like

Brecht’s description of the standard theater audience, the average conventional horror film viewer looking for simple bloody thrills is so entranced that they assume they are powerless as soon as they enter the movie theater. There is no agency here, only passivity. While Clover characterizes this type of spectatorship as masochistic, it is worth considering the differences between a victim and a masochist to problematize this conclusion. Deleuze’s distinction between the forced surrender of the sadist’s victim and the willing submission of the masochist is key here. The sadist’s victim is convinced that he never had power to begin with. The masochist knows he has agency and control, but he elects to submit to his chosen torturer, because he is searching for the pleasurable payoff. In the case of Funny Games, the masochist’s quest is challenged by a truly sadistic master, and so the masochist engages in self-inflicted torture in order to escape sadistic (genre) control. With the Funny Games films, Haneke seems to take up

Brecht’s call to arms for a new kind of theater: “Human sacrifices all round! Barbaric delights!

We know that the barbarians have their art. Let us create another” (Brecht 7).

Haneke delights in mocking horror movie conventions and sadistic signposts of predictability. When George and Georgie are both dead and things are looking particularly dire for Ann, viewers can recall the close-up shot of a knife from earlier in the film that is still hidden Mackenzie 34 in the boat where the killers place her in the final scene. However, the hackneyed foreshadowing is only a trick, and the killers triumph anyway, easily tossing away the knife when she reaches for it. Genre conventions that allow the viewer to predict the outcome of a violent film are one way of removing any potential traumatic effects from witnessing gruesome scenes of violence, thus making the violence easily consumable and meaningless. The Funny Games films subvert generic expectations, which many critics take as proof of their cruel sadism, but in fact, this is one of the many ways that the films avoid the sadistic model that typically govern horror films.

The infamous rewind scene that occurs late in the film is perhaps the best example of avoiding the sadistic model and subverting the audience’s implicitly bloodthirsty desires. In the first “version” of the scene, Ann suddenly breaks from her passivity, grabs the shotgun on the table, and shoots Peter in the chest -- his shocking death is shown onscreen in all its gore and viscera, though only in a quick, one second flash. This represents the classic and utterly predictable turn in most horror movies, in which the protagonist violently rebels against their tormenters in a burst of cathartic violence. Accordingly, it is shot in a clichéd way; like a typical

Hollywood movie, there is only a flash of violence that is then buried by a quick cut. The audience at the Cannes premiere actually started cheering in the theater at this moment (Brunette

67). Paul even cracks a smile and laughs a bit when staring at the fresh corpse of his sadistic twin, suggesting that even though the audience in that moment (the only time in the film when the viewer actually witnesses violence and blood onscreen) probably thinks they are most identified with the triumphant Ann, in truth they are simply taking joy in a gory death, just like

Paul likes to do. Needless to say, the audience at Cannes was silenced by what happened next.

Paul frantically searches for the diegetic remote control, finds it in the couch cushions, and in a Mackenzie 35 supreme moment of self-reflexivity, rewinds the film to before Peter was killed. Paul thwarts

Ann’s attempt the second time around, ensuring that Peter lives, and George dies instead. The climactic bloody relief from tension offered by many Hollywood horror films is thus given and then yanked away, so that the audience is made fully aware of how easily most horror films manipulate their emotions.

Haneke repeatedly denies all moments of relief in these films by using distinctly masochistic aesthetics, such as repetition designed to delay or deny climax. The literal repetition of time in the rewind scene clearly denies the relief that would have been offered by a bloody death. Part of Clover’s argument that the Hollywood horror genre offers primarily masochistic thrills to the audience is her contention that the films are highly repetitive, and that psychoanalysis identifies the unpleasure of the “repetition compulsion” as masochistic (Clover

213). However, repetition and consequent narrative predictability are aspects of both sadistic and masochistic scenarios. The repetition compulsions of Hollywood horror films does not prove that they are primarily masochistic (rather than sadistic) in nature. The repetition found in sadistic fantasies generally takes the guise of mathematical permutations on a starting scenario; there is repetition of a sort, but always with slight differences that build upon one another in order to multiply the perversity as much as possible in a linear trajectory. New victims are continuously introduced, all the while providing several points of orgasmic relief for the libertines in their search for supreme pleasure. This is what conventional horror films offer: a slew of repetitive bloody climaxes and easily predictable outcomes. Masochistic scenarios fall much closer to true circular repetition, somehow outside of time, in which acts are repeated nearly verbatim for the sole purpose of delaying the relief of a climax for as long as possible, or Mackenzie 36 even denying it altogether. The world of Funny Games seems to be stuck in a perpetual loop

(this is perhaps the reason for the broken clock glimpsed in the kitchen scenes throughout the film that is always frozen on the same time). In a similar fashion to Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the narrative of Funny Games is essentially told twice. In broad strokes, Peter and Paul arrive, torture the family, shoot Georgie (the son) with the shotgun, and then immediately leave the house. A long period without Peter and Paul serves as a kind of intermission, during which Ann and George are remarkably unhurried to leave their torture chamber (masochism at its finest).

Then events begin to repeat themselves. Paul and Peter arrive a second time, torture the remaining family members, shoot George (the father) with the shotgun, calling him ‘Georgie’ as they do so, and then immediately leave the house. Beyond this repetition, the film begins and ends by showing that Peter and Paul are torturing other nearly identical nuclear families in the neighborhood in the same fashion. Because the film resolutely denies any moments of relief

(rewinding and recording over Ann’s final attempt to save the film and deliver the conventional sadistic Hollywood ending) this repetition is intensely masochistic. Relief is endlessly deferred, so that tension continues to build throughout the film and, despite all of the clichés introduced, the conventional genre ending never arrives. Clover is certainly correct in noting that conventional horror films revel in prolonged tension, but this is not enough to qualify them as aesthetically masochistic. Sadists enjoy prolonged torture as well, and any reader of 120 Days can testify to the excessive repetition in their fantasies. Haneke’s film truly uses a masochistic aesthetic because the repetition is circular, rather than linear, and there are no moments of relief or visual pleasure (from a bloody death or a nude body) offered in that never-ending cycle. Mackenzie 37

The interest in exact repetition is made that much more obvious in Haneke’s remake of the film. Unlike a Hollywood remake of a horror film that changes just enough details to keep viewers in a state of suspense (sadistic permutation), Haneke does everything exactly the same, right down to the angles for each shot. In an interview by Katey Rich about the experience of remaking Funny Games (featuring shamelessly leading questions), Rich begins by asking

Haneke, “Did you have a more sadistic experience this time around shooting the film?” Haneke replies, “If anything, masochistic ... In order to decide to do a shot-by-shot remake, you have to be masochistic to some point, because it is a much greater challenge. If you do an original film, and you don’t like a scene, you just cut it out. But if you do a shot-by-shot remake you don’t have that option; you have to be sure it succeeds” (Rich). The masochist ideally sets out clear rules for their chosen torturer to follow, so that their fantasy can come to life exactly as they envisioned it. In this instance, Haneke plays both roles (in retrospect). Like the willing masochist, Haneke created the precise rules to follow to create this violent fantasy when he made the original film. The remake allows Haneke to act as the masochist’s chosen torturer, following the dictates and recreating the fantasy as best as possible. Funny Games offers viewers an escape from typical sadistic Hollywood depictions of violence and their conventions through self- inflicted masochism. By remaking the film, this dynamic came to be reflected on the side of production as Haneke endured self-inflicted torture to recreate a scenario exactly as it was laid out before.

One of the key ways Haneke achieves a masochistic aesthetic in the Funny Games films despite the sadistic content is through his fetishistic framing. His framing is fetishistic in the sense that it most often avoids direct gazes at the traumatic site of violence, and instead chooses Mackenzie 38 something else in the vicinity on which to focus. While most Hollywood horror films are routinely accused of fetishizing violence through explicit detail, there is little consideration of the actual process that the term denotes. Deleuze contends “fetishism, as defined by the process of disavowal and suspension of belief belongs essentially to masochism” (Deleuze 32). In

“Fetishism” (1927), Freud writes that at the moment when the “fetish comes to life, so to speak, some process has been suddenly interrupted ... interest has been held up at a certain point -- what is possibly the last impression before the uncanny traumatic one is preserved as a fetish” (“Fetishism” 201). Freud defines fetishism chiefly in terms of castration anxiety (a definition with which Deleuze concurs), stating that no “male human being is spared the terrifying shock of threatened castration at the sight of the female genitals” (201). For Freud, the prime example is when the boy, confronted with woman’s lack of a penis and thus the threat of his own castration, focuses on “the last impression before the uncanny traumatic one,” thereby turning some other body part or object into a fetish, such as her feet or stockings. Haneke’s fetishistic framing means that violence in the Funny Games films exists entirely in our imagination (except for Ann shooting Peter). Our vision is diverted from the wound to focus on something else, thus creating a fetishized visual perspective in each instance of violence. When

Peter suddenly strikes George’s knee with a golf club, the camera is in close-up on George’s face; the briefest glimpse of the club swinging downwards through the frame can be glimpsed.

We hear the impact, but never see it. The next shot is of George falling to the ground.

Eventually, several scenes later, a dark stain (more black than red) will appear over his pants leg where he was struck, but truthfully, the wound is never seen. Whereas most Hollywood horror

(or action) films show a flash of violence before cutting away to something else (as in the rewind Mackenzie 39 scene), Haneke shows the build up and result of violence, rarely the act itself. He repeatedly uses the process of fetishization to look away and avoid the moment of trauma. When young

Georgie is murdered in the living room, the camera lazily follows Paul around the kitchen while he makes a sandwich; he does not react at all when the gunshot is heard from the next room. In this way, the only concession to a sadistic viewer’s desire to see the bloodletting is when Peter, one of the characters the sadist is invited to identify with, is killed. This means that the only instance when the sadist sees the bloody detail he so desires requires him to masochistically take joy in the image of his own destruction.

This strategy is especially noticeable in the forced prayer scene, wherein the camera gives shot/reverse-shot close-ups on Ann and Paul, while Peter tortures George entirely offscreen.

George actually disappears into this offscreen space several minutes before he dies at the conclusion of this scene, so it is quite unclear what specifically is happening to him while Paul forces Ann to pray. We hear his screams, and we see Ann looking in horror at him suffering, but the violence is never shown. Ann’s face acts as the fetish object here, as it does in several other scenes; most notably, the forced strip scene.

The strip scene could easily be read in terms of Laura Mulvey’s classic argument about fetishistic scopophilia in narrative cinema. Mulvey argues that in classic Hollywood films, women are placed in an exhibitionist role: “women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness” (Mulvey 40). Thus, the assaultive male gaze contains and controls the female figure, “turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous” (42). Peter and Paul are powerful males who sadistically gaze Mackenzie 40 at Ann, force her to strip in order to assuage their castration anxiety, and reassert their patriarchal dominance. The theatrical trailer for Funny Games U.S. shamelessly teases at the possibility of seeing Ann (Naomi Watts) nude when it montages a string of alliterative adjectives alongside scenes from the film (“Daring,” “Dangerous”; “Wicked,” “Wild”), eventually showing a flash of

Ann pulling her dress over her head, bookended with “Sensual” and “Savage.”7 The film is all tease though, as the actual strip scene is relatively chaste. Throughout the scene, the camera never dips below Ann’s collar bone, instead remaining fixed on a close-up of her tearful face.

These shots are matched by close-up shots of her audience’s faces: Peter, Paul, George, and

Georgie’s bagged head. Naomi Watts is evidently not opposed to appearing nude on camera, as she famously does so in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), which is only significant because it underlines Haneke’s decision to not show her body in a scene that is explicitly devoted to examining her body for flaws (Peter and Paul are having a mock argument over whether Ann has “jelly rolls”).8

Instead of being offered a view of Naomi Watts’s nude form, the camera keeps us fixated on her face alone. Deleuze writes: “the fetish is therefore not a symbol at all, but as it were a frozen, arrested, two-dimensional image, a photograph to which one returns repeatedly to exorcise the dangerous consequences of movement, the harmful discoveries that result from exploration; it represents the last point at which it was still possible to believe” (Deleuze 31).

Haneke uses close-ups on the faces of those experiencing or watching violence as fetish objects in place of showing the violence itself, thereby denying us sadistic voyeuristic pleasure and

7 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ec-70W_K77U

8 When approached about doing a remake of Funny Games, Haneke insisted he would only do so if Naomi Watts starred in it, and he cited Mulholland Drive and 21 Grams as the two films he had seen that convinced him of this (Rich). Mackenzie 41 keeping us reliant on masochistic fetishism. Accordingly, the close-ups of Ann’s face during her forced strip are like a static photograph. The shot is in shallow focus, removing any depth, and the frame does not move, except for a brief pan down and back up to keep Ann’s face in the center of the frame when she bends down to take off her panties. This strategy of presenting us with a frozen frame in shallow focus of a character’s face watching violence or nudity offscreen is used throughout the film in order to continuously disavow the site of trauma in favor of its surroundings.

One of the most discussed changes in the remake is the supposedly heightened sexualization of Ann while she is being tortured, which is frequently met with dignified cries of disgust from critics. Of course, eroticized violence against women is hardly a new feature of the horror genre. Most of the claims about the American remake’s amplified sexuality (it is always interpreted as a concession to American desires) exclusively revolve around Naomi Watts wearing only her bra and panties for a lengthy segment of the film after the strip scene. In the original film, actress Susanne Lothar wears a flimsy slip. Leland Monk devotes an entire essay to analyzing the failure of the remake, and ends with a particular focus on Ann’s character, and the way Naomi Watts’s image was marketed: “the iconic publicity image for Funny Games U.S. is a portrait of Naomi Watts looking beautiful and abused, one side of her face blotched with tears, making it crystal clear that the remake (unlike the original) is about stripping naked -- emotionally, psychologically, physically -- the female star.” Monk declares that this image of

Naomi Watts is taken from a moment in the film

not when she or her family are being physically tortured but just before

she is forced to take her clothes off for the eager young men holding them Mackenzie 42

captive ... She looks both vulnerable and rather voluptuous, with tousled

hair and teeth about to bite those full lips. Female viewers who identify

with the tears of the movie star at this moment would likely feel with her

that those male spectators (and directors) making such a spectacle of this

woman want to see her naked in her suffering and suffering in her nakedness

(Monk 431).

Monk’s assertion that the publicity still of Watts is definitely taken from the strip scene in particular is without any real basis. In a film filled with close-ups of Naomi Watts’ tearful face and disheveled hair, there is no indication at all that the publicity still comes from the strip scene.

Monk’s adventurous imagination about female viewers’ response to this scene “making such a spectacle” also does not account for the critical fact that we do not see Naomi Watts/Ann naked.

Once again, Haneke uses fetishistic framing to occlude the potentially sadistic gaze, this time (in a classic Freudian move) away from the nude female body. The film obviously acknowledges the sadistic voyeuristic desire “to see her naked in her suffering and suffering in her nakedness,” but it largely denies this desire. I will return to the issue of fetishizing Ann’s face while she is tortured, but first it is important to note that the violence in the original film was already highly eroticized; this was not a new feature for the American remake. Both films, especially the strip scenes, demonstrate the many affinities between horror films and BDSM pornography.

The strip and escape sequence in Funny Games can easily be read as a catalogue of various BDSM kinks and scenarios, which is proof that the violence in the original Funny Games was already eroticized and that this was not an addition for American audiences (this also underlines the alternative to sadistically enjoy several moments of the film). To start, the forced Mackenzie 43 strip is part of any classic sadistic sexual fantasy. After she is forced to strip for her captors,

Anna/Ann, wearing very few clothes, is gagged and placed in bondage. Georgie is submitted to breath-play when the bag is put over his head (Paul even politely confirms that he is able to breath before continuing). Urolagnia (or ‘water-sports,’ to use the less terrifying moniker) is also on show here as Georgie pees himself after his mother strips. The cuckold scenario of violating a wife in front of her husband is another popular fantasy in BDSM scenarios. Indeed, the entire home-invasion nightmare can easily be recast as a rape fantasy for those so inclined. The threat of rape haunts this scene, and seems like it could occur at any moment, but it never does, and that tension gets no release. Just like the “escape” sequence that follows it and concludes with a gun that does not fire, this “strip” scene has no nudity and no orgasmic climax.

Haneke’s repeated extreme close-ups on key narrative objects (the knife, the golf club, the shotgun, the ineffective cellphone) are clearly playing on generic conventions by establishing foreshadowing (which is often subverted, as previously discussed). Yet these shots also indicate the more general importance of props in the horror genre. After all, it is rare that the killer in any horror film uses his bare hands; he always has his signature weapon, and knives are particularly popular (Psycho, The Shining, Halloween, Friday the 13th). The heroine of such films is frequently tied up with ropes or chains at some point, just as a barely clothed Anna/Ann is tied up with tape when Georgie tries to escape following her forced strip. The horror genre’s heavy reliance on props is quite similar to BDSM pornography, which is also never complete without a range of tools, such as ropes, whips, paddles, gags, handcuffs, nipple clamps, or shock prods, to be used on the victim. Mackenzie 44

The climax (violent death or orgasm) is another common trait in horror films and pornography noted by other film critics.9 Most horror films function like typical pornos in that there are multiple climaxes (multiple deaths) throughout the film, and they are all shown in gruesome detail. Funny Games is unique in de-emphasizing the climax. With one key exception, deaths are never shown onscreen. This is akin to BDSM porn, where the orgasm matters little, and is sometimes not even shown. Writing about BDSM porn, film scholar Linda

Williams observes: “the emphasis throughout is on the suffering and emotion of the victims ... close-ups of their faces reveal mixtures of excitement and pain. There is no visible climax, in either the dramatic or the sexual sense of the word, only a suspenseful spectacle of prolonged suffering” (Hard Core 197). If orgasm can be linked to death, then it seems fair to entertain the notion of a similarity between torture and foreplay, especially since the two are really the same thing in BDSM porn. Freud writes of the fetishistic impulse “to linger at the preparatory acts and to form them into new sexual aims which may take the place of the normal” (Three Essays 30).

Without a doubt, torture is given far more importance than murder in this film. All of the family members deaths occur offscreen, and Peter and Paul do not take obvious climactic pleasure in the killings. In the conclusion, Peter is even annoyed at Paul for killing Ann when they still had an hour left to play with her. This entire film is an endless building of eroticized violent tension that is never released, and that is true of both the original and the remake. Of course, none of the potentially kinky elements in the scenes discussed above are particularly unique to Funny

Games, and can be found throughout the sadistic Hollywood horror genre. However, this film is

9 Carol Clover identified horror and pornography as “body genres,” that rely primarily on physical, emotional responses based on the behavior of the bodies onscreen. Linda Williams builds on this concept in her essay, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess,” in which she analyzes the similarities between three “body genres”: melodrama, pornography, and horror. Williams asserts that in these genres, “the body of the spectator is caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen along with the fact that the body displayed is female” (“Film Bodies” 270). Mackenzie 45 unique in its economy of withholding pleasure and withholding climaxes. The sadistic content is thus subsumed by the masochistic aesthetics.

Now that the subtext of pornography within the film has been established, it is worth returning to the frequent close-ups on Ann’s face while she is tortured and forced to strip. This chapter may give the impression that masochism merely denies pleasurable things that sadism offers freely and in abundance, which is not quite true. Rather, masochism relocates the sites of pleasure as part of its strategy of prolonging the experience and engaging the imagination. While

Haneke’s fetishistic framing may deny the sadistic voyeuristic impulse to see Ann’s nude body, the close-up on her face can still easily be read as pornographic. The visual work that shots of

Ann’s bare body would have accomplished is relocated to the non-genital site of her tearful face.

This mirrors Williams’s observation that the emphasis in BDSM porn is on close-ups of faces in the throes of pain or ecstasy, which are often indistinguishable. Film theorist Béla Balázs attributed great importance to close-ups of the face because he believed they offer access to the psychological interiority of the subject (Balázs 56). In her analysis of the use of the close-up in

Andy Warhol’s Blow Job, Ara Osterweil critiques Balázs’s claim that the close-up can offer such psychological truth. Osterweil notes that Balázs’s evident desire to discover and document the involuntary movements of the body in search of truth is quite similar to the concerns of pornographic films and their impulse to document the body in convulsions of pleasure.

Osterweil states “like pornography, the close-up is animated by a drive for knowledge about the subject” (446). The primary difference then is the camera’s focus, on the genitals or the face, when searching for that corporeal knowledge. The forced strip scene demonstrates that for all of their radical differences, sadism and masochism do share a common interest in the same location: Mackenzie 46 the body in pain and its involuntary movements or excretions. In this instance, the sadistic viewer wants to satisfy their voyeurism and see every inch of Ann’s suffering body in clinical detail. The masochist, always more interested in individual identity and emotion, focuses on the face in hopes of finding some proof of pain or pleasure or both. Instead of gazing at the tremors of her body, the camera focuses on the excretion of Ann’s tears and mucus, documenting this bodily response to fear. Masochism is definitely less explicit than sadism in its eroticism and that is reflected in the framing of this scene, but that does not mean that masochism is some demure alternative. Masochism is just as deeply interested in the pain/pleasure complex as sadism, and Ann’s suffering is still very much the spectacle here. When Paul tells her she can get dressed again, she turns away from the camera (and the only light source) so that her face falls into shadow as she puts her clothes back on, suggesting that even Ann recognizes the pornographic potential of her face. As useful as Deleuze’s separation of masochism and sadism is for analytic purposes, the absolute disconnect he argues for is never quite convincing.

Masochism and sadism do overlap because they share the body as a contested territory. That said, these instances where the two impulses meet, as in the forced strip scene and the film as a whole, demonstrate that they function in a competitive (not complementary) fashion.

The pure sadism of the scenario and the content of the Funny Games films is undeniable.

Haneke’s use of twin sadistic libertines and their faceless victims demonstrates his deliberate engagement with the conventions of the Hollywood horror genre. While I agree with Clover that even the most conventional horror film contains elements of masochistic pleasure for the spectator, those films are still primarily characterized by sadism due to their forced domination of the viewer’s experience. As I have argued, their repetitiveness is of an altogether different Mackenzie 47 nature from that found in Funny Games, because the conventional horror film’s repetition is always punctuated by moments of bloody climax and relief, which have no place in the masochistic fantasy. Most importantly, the narrative structure of those films is designed to subdue the audience, to draw them into the kind of dull, uncritical trance that Brecht decries.

In the Funny Games films, Haneke deploys these conventions that exemplify

Hollywood’s sadistic mastery so that he can offer viewers a radical form of escape via a form of self-inflicted torture that demonstrates that the sadistic master is superfluous (Žižek 183). The alienation effects deployed throughout the film that break the fourth wall make the viewer fully aware of their role, their responsibilities, and their choices of identification with the bodies onscreen. Those viewers who attempt to engage with the film sadistically may take pleasure from much of the film, but in the end, their pleasure is thwarted by the lack of any climaxes or moments of visual pleasure. The fetishistic framing teases the viewer with the sadistic thrills they expect from this sort of film, but those thrills are always denied. Thus, the masochistic aesthetics consistently undermine the sadistic content. The viewer who chooses to stay in the theater makes a conscious decision to endure the fundamental unpleasure of Funny Games as a way of refusing to surrender to the sadistic control exerted over them by most horror films. I disagree that the kind of horror spectatorship that Clover identifies is truly masochistic, because it is presented as the default; an automatic surrender to the film, which is clearly sadistic. The empowered viewer of Haneke’s twin films exercises their agency and chooses submission. This voluntary submission is far more akin to genuine masochism. The masochist is not a victim, but a kinky partner in crime, and they need only accept Haneke’s invitation. The empowerment that Mackenzie 48 comes from choosing masochism will be expanded upon in the next chapter on Haneke’s most overtly masochistic film, The Piano Teacher. Mackenzie 49

Chapter II

Story of Erika: Masochistic Submission in The Piano Teacher

“Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.” -- Oscar Wilde

Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001), an adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek’s novel,

Die Klavierspielerin (1983), offers one of the best investigations of masochistic desire in contemporary cinema; it is also one of the director’s most successful films, critically and commercially.10 The film depicts a violent love triangle between an accomplished pianist teaching at the Vienna Conservatory, Erika Kohut, her charming young pupil, Walter Klemmer, and her overbearing mother. It is gradually revealed that when she is not teaching Schubert’s scherzos to students, Erika engages in a variety of taboo forms of sexual release, including exhibitionism, voyeurism, and masochism. Erika’s attempts to draw Walter into her kinky world and mold him into her ideal torturer culminates in Walter assaulting Erika in her apartment with her mother in the adjoining room. In the ambiguous final scene of the film, Erika brings a knife to her concert performance and waits for Walter to arrive. After seeing him walk by and pretend like nothing happened, she stabs herself in the shoulder and walks out of the conservatory and offscreen.

Many critics have understood the film primarily as a portrayal of a pathological and repressed woman who eventually comes to understand the irreducible gap between her extreme fantasies and stark reality when Walter rapes her. In The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Slavoj

Žižek describes the film as an “impossible love affair between a deeply traumatized woman and her young student,” which culminates in what is “arguably the most depressive sexual act in the

10 At its premiere in the Cannes Film Festival, it won the Grand Prix, as well as the awards for Best Actress (Isabelle Huppert) and Best Actor (Benoit Magimel). Mackenzie 50 entire history of cinema” (when Walter assaults Erika). Discussing that penultimate scene, Žižek concludes, “as if to punish her for disclosing the fantasy in her letter to him, he literally enacts her fantasy in the way he makes love to her, which of course means that fantasy is lost for her.”

Overtly Lacanian readings of the film are popular, such as John Champagne’s “Undoing

Oedipus: Feminism and Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher,” that contends Erika’s story is evidence of the impossibility of female sexual desire in contemporary society (Champagne).

Following these readings, the narrative can be read as a feminist allegory about how patriarchal society fosters both sexual repression (guilt feelings) and commercialized sexual excess

(pornography), the clash of which results in Erika’s unfortunate desire for “alienated sex devoid of affection and tenderness, coupled with knowledge that all sex is wicked, disgusting and therefore must be punished” (Wheatley 125). The film is thus seen as an indictment of the audience for their role in the creation of a world where Erika’s story and desires are possible.

Such readings are remarkably conservative. They lead to considering Erika, and by extension, all women, as hopeless victims of their own impossible fantasies. Meanwhile, the audience is only empowered to pass moral judgement on Erika and themselves. These readings foster the continued stigmatization of BDSM desires and the understanding of masochism as little else but a passive and shameful surrender to misogyny. Most importantly, it ignores the inherent ambiguity of Haneke’s film that eschews easy answers. The world Haneke depicts in

The Piano Teacher is sadistic towards women at every echelon and they do not seem to fit in anywhere. The halls of the music conservatory are filled with young women crying because of the cruelty of their instructors. The seedy porn shops are filled with men gazing sadistically at row after row of magazines filled with images of anonymous women being penetrated, and they Mackenzie 51 stare suspiciously at Erika as she waits to enter a private booth. The men in the film, particularly

Walter, are evidently disgusted by Erika’s desires. This is a view shared by many of the film’s critics too. Yet the film’s withholding aesthetic that denies visual and aural pleasure, while encouraging mobile spectatorship, subtly legitimizes Erika’s sexual masochism and its power to undermine sadistic impulses. Much like Funny Games, Haneke’s framing here often hides that which we desire to see most, just as the camera perspectives occlude the possibility of identifying fully with any one character. This chapter will demonstrate that rather than making a spectacle of a pathologically repressed and sick woman in need of saving, this film portrays

Erika’s masochism as an active form of engagement with her sadistic world, which allows for a radically different reading of Walter’s assault on Erika as a masochistic success for her.

Even more so than Funny Games, The Piano Teacher foregrounds its engagement with masochism and sadism, and posits how the sadist and the masochist might interact. Iuliana

Corina Vaida’s article, “Two Meanings of Masochism in the Language of the Art Critic,” compares Haneke’s film with its source material, Jelinek’s Die Klavierspielerin, through the lens of the differing Freudian and Deleuzian concepts of sadism and masochism. Vaida argues that

Haneke’s film adopts the Freudian understanding that sadism and masochism are complementary and that the sadist and the masochist would make an ideal couple. (As noted in the introduction,

Freud’s theory was actually more nuanced than this, but Vaida presents it as such.) In his famous

Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud argues “it can often be recognized that the masochism is nothing but a continuation of the sadism turning against one’s own person,” and, therefore, “a sadist is simultaneously a masochist, though either the active or the passive side of the perversion may be more strongly developed” (Three Essays 32-33). Vaida sees the film’s Mackenzie 52

Walter and Erika as an embodiment of Freud’s theory, arguing that they are both primary sadists, and that their masochistic desires only emerge from a turning inwards of their sadistic tendencies. Vaida notes the subplot about Erika’s relationship with her other young student,

Anna Schober, as proof of her primary sadism. Erika is consistently cruel to Anna in their lessons, and at one point, Erika places broken shards of glass into Anna’s coat pocket, which mangles her hand and prevents her from playing anymore for the rest of the film. In Vaida’s reading of the film, all of Erika’s masochistic desires stem from such acts of sadism.

Vaida writes: “For Michael Haneke, who works within the bounds of modernist/classical art forms, Freud’s beautifully simple theory serves the need to condense the material of the novel, bring clarity to and unify the plot” (218). However, she concludes that this elegant simplicity undermines Jelinek’s radical feminist message about the fundamental incompatibility of men and women in patriarchal society. Vaida asserts “Jelinek’s real topic is not the sadomasochistic couple, but the relationship between man and woman in general, and that the theme of the impossibility of the sadomasochistic couple is a metaphor for the impossibility of a satisfying relationship between man and woman in a patriarchal society” (215). Vaida concludes that Deleuze’s argument against sadomasochistic unity is the more subversive and that Haneke’s

Freudian bent makes his film “a rather conservative affirmation of traditional ways of thinking, a bow in the direction of patriarchal values and old-school psychoanalysis” (218). Vaida’s argument has an elegant simplicity, but Haneke’s film is not so definitively Freudian as she contends. Also, her feminist reading of Deleuze’s theory ironically leads to a conservative reaffirmation of traditional gender roles that his argument attempts to dismantle. Erika, the metaphor for all women, is a masochist and destined to be a victim. Walter, symbol of all that is Mackenzie 53 male, is a sadist and all of his behavior is normalized. Furthermore, Vaida’s reading does not take into account the essential point Deleuze makes about masochistic role-switching.

In Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze draws a distinction between a sadist and the masochist’s selected torturer, just as he draws a distinction between the sadist’s victim and the masochist. Deleuze argues that the masochist’s torturer, far from being a sadist, is actually the mirror-image of the masochist: the torturer disavows and escapes their own masochistic desires by taking on the active role in the partnership (Deleuze 42). Because both partners are potentially masochists, the roles of torturer and masochist are quite flexible within this dynamic.

Due to this inherent flexibility, Deleuze’s theory of masochism does not attach specific genders to either role. With this in mind, the film’s depiction of Erika and Walter’s relationship, in which there are shifts in dominance, can be read as entirely masochistic. In the first half of the film,

Walter’s masochism responds to Erika’s outwardly dominant personality as a professor.

However, glimpses of her private rituals reveal that this public persona is simply a disavowal of her inner masochism. In public, Erika hides her masochism by taking on the active role of the torturer. In private, she yearns for Walter to take on the active role. This theme of masochistic role-switching is repeated in various ways throughout the film, especially in the kind of mobile spectator identification that Haneke’s cinematography encourages.

In Felix W. Tweraser’s essay, “Images of Confinement and Transcendence: Michael

Haneke’s Reception of Romanticism in The Piano Teacher,” he asserts that “the composition of several early shots establishes viewer identification with Erika’s point of view” (Tweraser 197).

While the film certainly works to generate sympathy for Erika, the viewer’s options for identification are not so simple as Tweraser claims. The film’s most iconic image is a close-up, Mackenzie 54 overhead shot of a pianist’s hands dancing across the keys. The camera is perfectly perpendicular to the ground. This is representative of the film’s entire strategy vis-à-vis viewer identification. The shot is almost a point-of-view shot, but not quite. It is too perfectly still, too perpendicular, to be the pianist’s perspective. The opening credits of the film alternate between stark black screens with white lettering and various incarnations of this overhead shot. At one point, Erika’s student, Anna, is playing, when suddenly Erika pushes her off the bench and takes her place, but the camera remains fixed in its position. We only see the change in hands. This proves from the outset that the camera is not offering the perspective of any single character.

The film also has a noticeable lack of the conventional shot/reverse-shot format in conversation scenes, and we are often left staring at the back of Erika or Walter’s head when they are speaking. This breach of convention is another way of alienating the viewer by not anchoring them to any expected perspective. The film draws us close to identifying with Erika, or Walter, but it always forces us a little to the side, maintaining the viewer’s presence in each scene and occluding the possibility of purely identifying with Erika or anyone else. The propensity for masochistic role-switching is thus mirrored in the viewer’s shifting perspective throughout the film.

The impetus to read the film as primarily engaged with a more Deleuzian understanding of masochism can be seen in its varying depictions of sex and Erika’s responses to it. The differences between the scene when Erika watches a pornographic video in a viewing booth and her subsequent bathroom encounter with Walter demonstrate this well. Both the porn booth scene and the bathroom encounter feature a woman giving a blowjob to a man, but the similarities end there. The porn video is an entirely conventional example of that genre; it Mackenzie 55 depicts a woman lying on her back on a table giving a blowjob to a man standing next to the table. It uses relatively quick takes, close-ups on genitals, and it deemphasizes the identities of the man and woman. First, we see a medium long shot of the couple from the side. Both of their faces are visible, but at the very edges of the frame and in shadow. The shot only lasts a few seconds, and then there is a cut to an overhead close-up shot that entirely hides both of their faces (all we can see of the woman is her chin). There is nothing overtly sadistic about the porn video (though the woman’s position certainly does not look comfortable). However, given the contrast that the film draws between sadism and masochism, the explicit imagery combined with the anonymity of the man and woman in the video can be seen as broadly emblematic of the eroticized lack of identity in sadistic scenarios. This can be seen in Pauline Réage’s Story of O, when O goes to be trained by the sadists at Roissy: faceless men wearing masks torture nameless women, and there is an inviolable rule at Roissy that women are not allowed to look at the men’s faces, only at their cocks. After watching several seconds of the porn video, there is a cut to a long take of Erika’s face in close-up; she watches the video with an almost neutral expression.

As we recall from the previous chapter, the forced strip scene in Funny Games gestures toward the sadistic voyeuristic impulse to see Ann’s nude body, but instead masochistically focuses on her face. In much the same way, this scene in The Piano Teacher acknowledges sadistic voyeuristic desires with these brief snippets of explicit imagery, but then it cuts away to focus on

Erika’s face and her masochistic reaction. She does not masturbate to the video, instead just sniffing a cum-stained tissue. The ostensible purpose of a porn booth is to masturbate to porn, so

Erika masochistically teasing herself is a rebellion against the norm. Erika smelling the tissue also emphasizes that her mode of spectatorship is not passive and trance-like; she is taking Mackenzie 56 action, just not the expected one. Thus, she engages in a non-visual mode with pornography, a genre that is principally defined by its visual thrills. Optical pleasure is typically colonized by sadism, so Erika’s approach to the porn video avoids this pitfall.

The porn booth scene is bookended by classical music, which is used as a metaphor in the film for the masochist’s contract. The contract, whether literal or in the mind of the masochist, is essential to any such partnership. Deleuze writes: “in the structure of masochism in general, the contract represents the ideal form of the love-relationship and its necessary precondition” (75).

Masochistic contracts consist of specific instructions and dictates for both masochist and torturer so that the selected torturer can successfully act out a very specific scenario. We only hear excerpts from Erika’s proposed contract with Walter, but it is clear that she is not simply pointing out various acts she would enjoy. Rather, she is describing an entire narrative that proceeds from bondage (“if I beg, tighten my bonds, please. Adjust the belt by at least two or three holes.”) to breathplay (“then, gag me with some stockings I will have ready”) to specific acts of beating

(“sit down on my face and punch me in the stomach to force me to thrust my tongue in your behind”). One instruction leads to the next, and it is Walter’s task to follow this path. In the context of this masochistic story, a piece of classical music can be understood as a contract between composer and performer. In the most basic formulation, the composer/masochist dictates the rules by setting down the notes and creating a musical narrative. Then the performer/ torturer accepts and follows these rules and acts out the musical fantasy. The classical music metaphor further demonstrates Erika’s role-switching disavowal of her inner masochism when she is in public. At the conservatory, Erika plays the role of the performer/torturer when she plays the music (accepts the contracts) of her favorite composers. However, it is clear that Erika Mackenzie 57 does not enjoy her job whatsoever, and when at home, she never plays (or even listens to) music because she prefers to be the composer of fantasies that she is later subjected to. Of course, the film constantly switches Erika between one role and another, just as it shifts the viewer’s identification from one character to the next, so the simplicity of this basic role-switching forumla is confused and the binary is further undermined. As a result, performing is often figured as masochistic, just as composing complex fantasies (musical or otherwise) seems like an act of torture. As Erika walks into the porn booth, diegetic classical music from her practice session in the previous scene provides a sound bridge. The sound of her dropping coins into the machine interrupts the music; this abrupt audio transition cements porn as a capitalist product.11

At the end of the scene, another diegetic classical music sound bridge transitions out of the booth and into the next rehearsal scene, thus containing the sadistic voyeuristic interlude within an aesthetically masochistic construct.

In The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Žižek claims that Erika watches the porn video like “a pupil in school.” Žižek assumes that Erika is woefully sexually inexperienced, and that she is watching the video not to get excited, but “to get the coordinates of desire, to learn how to do it, how to get excited.” Robin Wood similarly concludes that Erika derives a large part of her understanding of sexuality from such hardcore pornography (Wood 58). However, considering

Erika’s behavior in the porn booth and the way that the porn video is shot alongside her later bathroom encounter with Walter and the aesthetics of that scene, it becomes clear that Žižek and

Wood’s assumptions about the impact of porn on Erika is unfounded. Erika’s quiet confidence to

11 On the subject of pornography, Haneke said “it isn’t the sexual aspect but the commercial aspect of porno that makes it repulsive ... Pornography, it seems to me, is no different from war films or propaganda films in that it tries to make the visceral, horrific, or transgressive elements of life consumable. Propaganda is far more pornographic than a home video of two people fucking” (quoted in Brunette 90). Mackenzie 58 pursue precisely the kind of masochistic sex she desires in all encounters belies their paternalistic construction of her as sexually naive and uncertain.

Whereas the porn video used quick cuts, explicit images, and emphasized anonymity, the bathroom encounter between Erika and Walter offers an erotic demonstration of masochistic sex, with its long duration and its ultimate deferral of pleasure, both for the participants and the viewer. The scene lasts for over ten minutes with minimal editing. Erika does not allow Walter to touch her, speak, or move in any way as she masturbates him and gives him a blowjob, thus imposing a kind of verbal bondage on him. In the end, she refuses to let him orgasm, and though he complains about her cruelty, he follows all of her instructions. Walter plays the role of the masochist in this scene, but while Erika is constantly telling him not to do things (talk, move, ejaculate), he is certainly not passive. When Erika opens the bathroom door and amps up the exhibitionist thrills of their public sex, Walter chooses to remain exposed, just as he chooses to follow her instructions throughout. Masochism is about submission, but it is not a passive, default surrender to another person (or an apparatus). Agency is still very much involved. While

Erika does share the porn video’s interest in oral sex, her approach suggests that she is reveling in the unproductive nature of this sex to the point that the encounter does not even produce an orgasm. The lack of orgasmic release at the end of this scene is what makes this encounter so subversive and perversely unproductive an act, in the context of heteronormative, reproductive sex. This in sharp contrast to the porn video, because even though it also features unproductive oral sex, its capitalist focus on productivity and that genre’s ubiquitous emphasis on the male orgasm are underlined by the sound of Erika paying the machine and sniffing the used tissue. Mackenzie 59

Judging by her behavior with Walter, hardcore pornography clearly does not influence Erika’s approach to sex, or teach her how to do it, as Wood and Žižek claim.

Throughout the scene, the blocking of the actors and the framing obscure any view of nudity or penetration. Erika says to Walter: “Look at me, not your penis,” showing that their identities are the essential quality of this sex scene. This is in keeping with masochistic scenarios, in which the identities of the masochist and their chosen torturer are paramount.

Because educating one’s partner is such a central component of masochism, the choice of partner cannot be at random, as in sadistic fantasies; partners must be carefully selected. In reference to this scene, Robin Wood writes: “I assume that Haneke, in La Pianiste, would have liked to show us everything, since one of the film’s central projects is clearly the demystification of sex ... We need to see Isabelle Huppert actually sucking Benoit Magimel’s cock, not because it would give us our latest thrill but because it is an intrinsic part of the scene, and to conceal it is to continue the repression that is the mere obverse of our ‘liberation’” (Wood 56). The realism of unsimulated sex is not at all an intrinsic part of this scene, and showing us anything would destroy the erotic tension of this scene and the film as a whole. If we really saw the actors having sex, even for an instant, it would not matter if Erika still denied Walter orgasmic relief, because the visual pleasure of the scene would have already reached its climax in the explicit imagery. Fantasy is a basic characteristic of masochism because it suspends reality and its productive concerns. Part of the pleasure of this scene comes from imagining, from fantasizing corporeal encounters that remain stubbornly invisible. As Erika says to Walter when he tries to finish himself, “Don’t be stupid. You’re spoiling it.” Most importantly, Haneke’s strategy of withholding visual pleasure in this scene legitimizes Erika’s masochistic desires, which are Mackenzie 60 otherwise met with confusion or vehement disgust by Walter when they are made clear to him later in the film.

Repetition and the denial of completion or climax is a central motif in this film. The song that Erika is teaching to her student, Anna, in all of their scenes together is Schubert’s

“Winterreise,” and it is played periodically throughout the film. Importantly though, the song is never heard in full. Indeed, none of the musical pieces in the film are ever heard from beginning to end. In addition to the interruption of the music when entering the porn booth, “Winterreise” provides the sound bridge out of the booth and into yet another rehearsal scene with Anna, but this time Walter knocks and interrupts the song. At the recital early in the film, there is a cut to

Erika and another pianist in the middle of a performance, so we only hear the end of the song.

Shortly after, we hear the beginning of Walter’s performance, but there is a cut before he finishes. During Walter’s audition to study under Erika, he plays three pieces, but as the camera settles on Erika, each musical piece is interrupted by a cut as the camera moves from a long shot, to a medium shot, to a close-up. Even the ending of the film feels as though the addition of just one more scene could explain everything, but Haneke denies us any sense of closure.

In her analysis, Vaida cited the subplot about Erika’s young student, Anna Schober, as evidence of Erika’s primary sadism, and she is certainly not alone in this reading. On the surface, it does appear that Erika is acting sadistically. In addition to perpetual verbal abuse,

Erika places broken shards of glass into Anna’s jacket pocket, seriously injuring her and preventing her from playing piano for an indefinite period of recovery. Since this incident occurs immediately after Erika watches Walter soothe Anna, who is petrified in the moments before she is to perform, it would be quite easy to see Erika’s action as sabotage motivated by jealousy. Mackenzie 61

Peter Brunette describes the moment as Erika’s “overtly sadistic act” against “her perceived rival for Walter’s attention” (96-97). New York Times critic Stephen Holden writes: “In an unsettling subplot of ‘The Piano Teacher,’ Erika sadistically torments a female student” (Holden). The film enables this reading by editing together a classical Hollywood narrative logic of cause and effect:

Erika watches Walter pay attention to a much younger woman, so Erika sabotages that woman to reclaim Walter’s interest. However, it is a phallocentric assumption typical of a Hollywood melodrama to conclude that Erika’s action here is really all about Walter. Despite appearances, a deeper consideration of the ostensibly sadistic Anna subplot reveals Haneke’s use of a subtle masochistic aesthetic that demonstrates Erika is not necessarily acting sadistically or out of jealousy.

Anna, who does not appear in the novel, could easily be written off as a largely forgettable minor character. Yet it is worth noting that ‘Anna’ is Haneke’s prized moniker for the lead female characters in most of his films, which suggests that this seemingly minor character has a greater significance than meets the eye. There are multiple parallels drawn between Erika and Anna, as well as between their mothers, Mrs. Kohut and Mrs. Schober (Susanne Lothar, who played Anna in the original Funny Games). Both daughters are talented pianists who have a particular affinity for Schubert, and both suffer under the hawkish supervision of their domineering mothers. Anna and Erika both speak rarely, dress conservatively, and are routinely criticized by their mothers for their looks. When Erika beats her mother in their scuffle in the opening scene, Mrs. Kohut says that Erika should have her hands chopped off for this offense.

Later, when Mrs. Schober is speaking with Erika about Anna’s damaged hand, Mrs. Schober says that the criminal should have his hands chopped off (the perpetrator is assumed to be male). Mackenzie 62

Erika speaks sparingly throughout this conversation, but when Mrs. Schober makes the comment, “we sacrificed everything,” Erika interjects that it was not “we,” but Anna who sacrificed everything. Erika’s correction easily feels like it could be directed at her own mother, who similarly speaks of “our sacrifices,” rather than “Erika’s sacrifices.” Based on these strong parallels, there exists the possibility that Erika hurts Anna not out of sadism, but in an ironic and radical act of benevolence. Since Erika empathizes with Anna, it is possible that sabotaging her is an attempt to free young Anna from a life in concert pianism, and therefore from the toxic pressures of a domineering mother. On a similar note, Erika’s refusal to settle down and reproduce (another manifestation of her interest in unproductive masochistic sex) may be taken as an attempt to stop the perpetuation of sadistic mother/daughter dynamics. However, the final scene of the film shows Anna back at the conservatory despite all of the abuse she has endured, still being shepherded by her mother, still dreaming of being a pianist. Therefore, it might be more useful to suspend the assumption that Haneke’s film operates according to the principles of realism. In his comparison of Jelinek’s novel and Haneke’s film, Willy Riemer notes that all of the novel’s flashbacks to Erika’s abusive childhood are absent from the film. Riemer suggests that in the film, “Kohut’s childhood experiences are not remembered, but demonstrated with

Anna” (Reimer 274). Despite the appearance of linear time then, the world of The Piano

Teacher is steeped in masochistic repetition that keeps temporality folded in on itself in a perpetual cycle. In other words, Anna is like Erika’s doppelgänger, albeit from the past. Rather than proof of her sadism, Erika’s assault of Anna is a masochistic act of self-destruction, for they are essentially mirror images of one another. Mackenzie 63

The mirroring of Erika and Anna suggests that temporality in the film may not be as stable as it appears. Though the narrative apparently follows a linear progression, time is noticeably unanchored in this film, as it is unclear how much time passes in between various scenes. It is equally plausible that the film took place over a matter of days or several months, just as it is evident that we are given incomplete views of the interactions between Erika and

Walter. At their first meeting, Walter and Erika discuss how appreciating classical music and holding recitals is an anachronism, which implies that them standing in a classical music recital hosted by Walter’s family places them in the past. Erika comments about Walter’s aunt and uncle that “families like this are no more,” but of course this statement is nonsensical because the family does exist. When Erika returns home late after her voyeuristic excursion at the drive-in,

Mrs. Kohut greets her with a slap in the face, telling her “your father died this afternoon.” Erika previously told Walter that her father died in an asylum, so Mrs. Kohut is likely speaking about the anniversary of his death, but the instance indicates how the past coexists with the present in this film.

In contrast to Vaida’s claims about the film, Erika’s masochism (rather than sadism) is primary. Haneke’s use of masochistic aesthetics and themes, such as denying visual and aural pleasure and the Erika/Anna mirroring, implicitly support Erika’s sexual desires while her critics disapprove. The stigmatization of her desires extends beyond the film to the critical responses.

The vast majority of reviews for The Piano Teacher are remarkably positive, but a consistent theme in every critique, positive or negative, is registering disgust for Erika’s “unhealthy” desires. Richard Roeper (Roger Ebert’s longtime collaborator on At the Movies) calls her “a sick and evil woman” (Roeper). Another critic concludes that Erika possesses “a psyche as damaged Mackenzie 64 as any serial killer’s” (Moore). Indeed, the spectacle of Erika’s perversity is apparently central to the marketing of the film. “Obscene, scandalous, perverse,” reads the German DVD release.

The Kino International DVD release proudly repeats David Denby’s declaration (writing for The

New Yorker) that the film has what “may be the strangest sex scene in the history of movies” (referring to Erika and Walter’s bathroom encounter) (Denby). Even though Denby probably intended this as a compliment (he loved the film), the widespread critical emphasis on just how bizarre Erika’s sex life is begins to feel excessive. This is not to say that she is a paragon of sexual “normalcy,” considering her latently incestuous relationship with her mother and her desire for her student, but the film does not necessitate such a heavily pathologized understanding of her either.

There is no better example of this prudish and pathologizing attitude toward Erika’s desires than Robin Wood’s frequently cited analysis of the film, “‘Do I disgust you?’: Or, tirez pas sur La Pianiste.” Wood begins by critiquing contemporary society for not truly being sexually liberated, and claiming to desire a world where sex is “as natural as eating and drinking” and where unsimulated sex becomes commonplace in mainstream films (56). Wood states from the outset: “I identify with Erika totally. True, I have never done the things she does or wanted those that she (for the film’s first three-quarters) believes she wants, but I perfectly understand and empathize with her predicament” (55). Nevertheless, Wood then enters a lengthy digression on the dangers of Erika’s masochistic desires:

It’s all about power and domination, the very structures of capitalist

culture, pervading and corrupting all relationships within it, from the family

to the workplace, from parents/children to employer/employees, and then Mackenzie 65

outwards to global politics, President Bush’s evident desire that America

(and himself) should dominate the entire world. Why would we invent, and

presumably enjoy, games in which we hurt (or pretend to hurt) other

people, or in which we enjoy being hurt, being the ‘slave’ to a ‘master’?

Even exchanging roles midway (as I am told practitioners often do)

scarcely alters the fundamental unpleasantness of such ‘games.’ And

surely the fact that people perform s/m because it ‘turns them on’ casts

doubt on its status as ‘just play’? If you can’t ‘get it up’ unless you feel you

are in a position of power over someone who is (if even momentarily)

disempowered, is not something seriously wrong? (57)

Wood’s rant continues for many more pages, during which he concludes that all practitioners of sadomasochism are “sick” (61); he even places s/m practices on the same continuum as child abuse (57-58). I think it is fair to say that Wood’s claim of “perfectly” understanding Erika is somewhat undermined by his complete disavowal and utter repugnance for her most fundamental desires. His argument is that through the juxtaposition of Erika’s highly repressed mother and

Erika’s sickening perversity, the film “brilliantly encapsulates the history of human sexuality over the past hundred years by showing a woman totally governed by the extremes and their brutal clash, knowing nothing in between” (58). Wood’s conclusion that Erika merely “believes” she wants masochistic experiences for three-quarters of the film, and that she apparently learns her lesson in the end when Walter rapes her, is typical of the implicitly conservative responses to the film that relegate Erika to the status of victim. Erika is a victim of Walter, a victim of her mother, a victim of society, a victim of Haneke’s. These readings, which focus on male sadism, Mackenzie 66 aim at a useful social critique of patriarchy and violence against women. However, in making this argument, the “purely impersonal element” of sadism that Krafft-Ebing described overwhelms the film and its interpretation. Erika is taken as a symbol for all women, just as

Walter is a symbol for all men. In the process, both of them are stripped of their individuality and rich characterization. These problematic responses also implicitly insist that the (male) critic knows the female masochist’s desire better than she does. These readings pathologize Erika (and

BDSM in general), by assigning societal or familial sources for her “sick” desires, which may partially be attributed to the looming shadow of the film’s literary source material in so many critical readings of the film.

Jelinek’s novel, Die Klavierspielerin, is an incisive critique of patriarchal structures in contemporary Austrian culture, and Western culture in general. The narrative is basically identical to the film’s, but the novel generates no sympathy for the characters; Erika, and especially Walter, are intensely unlikeable from the outset. On the subject of adapting Jelinek’s work, Haneke said: “I would say that my version of looking at the story is pretty distanced and cool, while the novel itself is almost angry and very emotional. The novel is much more subjective and the film is much more objective” (quoted in Brunette 92). Haneke’s distinction here is apt, because the film eschews the subjective thoughts and psychological motivations that provide the bulk of the novel, which has sparse dialogue and consists almost entirely of the characters’ lengthy private thoughts in each scene. Comparing the narrative structure or thematic concerns of the film and the novel can be useful in illuminating different aspects of both, as

Vaida and Riemer accomplish in their analyses. However, the frequency with which critics of the film turn to Jelinek’s novel in search of hidden truths behind Erika’s oftentimes inscrutable Mackenzie 67 actions and expressions onscreen is detrimental to the deliberate, productive ambiguities of

Haneke’s film. Important questions raised in the film’s narrative, such as what Erika’s motives and desires are when she places shards of glass in Anna’s pocket, or how Erika and Walter experience that violent sex in the conclusion, are nullified by using the novel as a companion piece to fill in the gaps of the film.12 The ambiguities of the characters’ motivations and thoughts are what make The Piano Teacher a truly provocative film; one that challenges typically passive viewers to take an active role in filling in those gaps.

In spite of their diverse strategies of engagement, Haneke’s films are always concerned with foregrounding spectatorship and its attendant though often overlooked responsibilities. As

Haneke attests in an interview: “I try to make anti-psychological films with characters who are less characters than projection surfaces for the sensibilities of the viewer; blank spaces force the spectator to bring his own thoughts and feelings to the film” (quoted in Vaida 218). Though this film features superb characters, Haneke refuses to provide clear psychological motivations for them, and deliberately leaves large gaps in the narrative. Many critics see these “blank spaces” as a weakness of the film, and so turn to the novel for answers. In describing the climax when

Walter bursts into Erika’s apartment, Peter Brunette writes: “Unfortunately, this is another example of a moment in which the movie, by following the book, demonstrates its courage and power but also comes off, especially in terms of character motivation, as inexplicable and illogical, because we aren’t privy to Jelinek’s complicated (and often contradictory) verbal descriptions of the characters’ mental processes” (100). Rather than consider them a weakness, these “inexplicable and illogical” moments are the source of the film’s power because they refuse

12 As previously mentioned, Anna is not in the novel (she appears to be a combination of multiple female students in the novel), but the novel’s version of Erika does dump shards of glass into a young female student’s pocket. In the novel, it is made explicit that this is done out of jealousy because Walter was flirting with the girl (see Vaida 212). Mackenzie 68 to give easy answers (particularly about Walter assaulting Erika) and thus make the content of the film easily consumable for the viewer.

The editing of the film creates ambiguity by emphasizing that we are not being shown important details. For example, when Walter is reading Erika’s letter filled with her masochistic desires aloud, periodic cuts to Mrs. Kohut bumbling around outside the bedroom door prevent us from hearing anywhere near a full account of the precise scenarios Erika wants Walter to perform. As Walter humorously points out before he starts reading, it is a very long letter, and we certainly do get the gist of it, but the gaps underline the ambiguity of the film’s crucial penultimate scene when Walter returns to assault Erika. In that scene, Walter quotes lines from her letter that we never heard him read aloud before, reminding us of how much of the letter we missed and how little we truly know about the desired parameters of this violent encounter. This leads us to the most provocative question raised by the film’s ambiguity: When Walter sadistically rapes Erika, has he rendered her powerless, or has she successfully manipulated or recruited him into acting out a violent sexual fantasy of hers, demonstrating the omnipotence of her masochism? (‘Ravishment’ is the preferred term in BDSM culture for rape fantasies, in order to distinguish between the consensual fantasy and the reality of rape.)

Another frequently cited piece of evidence for Erika’s supposed sadism is that she “takes obvious pleasure in humiliating several young students” (Brunette 93). While teaching students,

Erika is often blunt or outright cruel in her critiques, but the conclusion that she takes “obvious pleasure” from this is questionable, just as it would be difficult to claim that she obviously does not. In truth, there is nothing self-evident about Erika’s pleasure or displeasure throughout the film: she is resolutely expressionless in almost every scene. She could very well be taking great Mackenzie 69 pleasure in humiliating students, but Erika’s emotions are always difficult to interpret. This is particularly true in her sexual encounters, in which Erika’s face is blank, she is usually completely silent, and her entire body seems frozen in position. When she goes to the private porn booth, Erika sits perched on the chair, breathing into a used tissue; the most we see is that her eyes flutter more than usual, the rest of her body resembles a statue. When Walter is reading

Erika’s letter full of her sexual desires, she sits frozen and silent on the bed; even when he starts to massage her breast, she does not react, though her face suggests deep affect. In the hockey equipment room where she tries to seduce Walter, she falls to the floor and lies prone, begging for him to climb on top of her. Given her expressed desires for bondage in her letter to Walter,

Erika’s almost complete immobility in all sexual encounters may be a form of self-inflicted bondage; her silence, a self-inflicted gag.

The ambiguity of Erika’s pleasure or displeasure in the film can be seen more broadly as the continuation of the long history of struggling to portray sexual pleasure onscreen. In her book, Screening Sex, Linda Williams analyzes the decades-old dilemma of representing female sexual pleasure and the female orgasm onscreen. Williams cites the mid-century work of sexologist, Dr. Alfred Kinsey, as an important step towards debunking many of the myths about female pleasure, one of which was the assumption that sexual pleasure is visually apparent on a person’s face. Kinsey wrote:

Prostitutes who attempt to deceive (jive) their patrons, or unresponsive

wives who similarly attempt to make their husbands believe that they are

enjoying their coitus, fall into an error because they assume that an

erotically aroused person would look happy and pleased and should smile Mackenzie 70

and become increasingly alert as he or she approaches the culmination of

the act. On the contrary, an individual who is really responding is as

incapable of looking happy as the individual who is being tortured (quoted

in Williams, Screening Sex 162).

Kinsey’s simile is apt for discussing Erika’s painful pleasure, since visually depicting masochistic pleasure is another steep challenge in screening sex. One of the greatest misconceptions about masochism is that pleasure in pain should be visibly apparent; the belief that when a masochist is whipped they smile instead of scream. As Kinsey reported though, even vanilla (non-BDSM) sex does not lead to visually apparent pleasure, and masochistic sex is no different. Since critics of the film so frequently turn to literature to support their claims about

Erika’s feelings, it is worth noting that in all major masochistic narratives, such Story of O and

Venus in Furs, the masochistic pleasure of the protagonists is almost always revealed through private thoughts, while outwardly they scream and beg for the maltreatment to stop. This is, after all, why safe words exist in BDSM culture; pleading and begging for the pain to stop is part of the fantasy. The critical point is that Erika’s complete inertness when Walter ostensibly rapes her is not, in itself, evidence of her lack of pleasure. The question of Erika’s pleasure or displeasure is another example of the film’s productive ambiguity, and the onus that it places on the viewer to consider the various answers and their implications, which leads us back to the film’s most ambiguous moment and its most provocative question: is Erika raped or ravished? Is this scene about patriarchal sadism crushing Erika, or the subversive power of masochistic pleasure? Mackenzie 71

Most critics take it as a foregone conclusion that the penultimate scene of the film depicts

Walter raping Erika and destroying her fantasy, but the scene is deliberately filled with irresolvable questions that problematize this facile conclusion. Even if we concur that Walter rapes Erika and acts completely outside the dictates and rules of her letter, this lack of consent does not preclude the possibility of Erika taking masochistic pleasure in her violation. Deleuze argues that the masochist’s consent is paramount (“the masochistic contract implies ... the necessity of the victim’s consent”), and that without agreeing to and asking for the torture beforehand, the masochist will not enjoy being beaten or humiliated (75). However, using one of the same texts that Deleuze bases his argument on, we can see that the masochist’s consent is not an absolute requirement in all cases. In the climax of Venus in Furs, Severin is tied up and whipped against his will by the sadist, known as the Greek, while his beloved Wanda watches.

In this horrible moment, Severin admits “what was most humiliating was that at first I felt a certain wild, supersensual stimulation under Apollo’s whip and the cruel laughter of my Venus, no matter how horrible my position was” (150). It is possible that even if Walter sadistically rapes her, as most critics contend, Erika may still take masochistic pleasure from the attack. She might thereby undermine his sadistic, patriarchal attempt to violate her.

The even more radical possibility still exists that Walter is not a sadist, but a masochist, albeit a very conflicted one. When Walter bursts through Erika’s door, he tells her he has been masturbating under her window and that she has perverted him. He angrily asks her, “You want to give everyone your illness, don’t you? Not me!” Walter’s subsequent attack can be read as another of the film’s instances of masochistic role-switching. Walter vehemently disavows and escapes his own masochism (“Not me!”), which was established previously in the bathroom Mackenzie 72 encounter when he plays the masochist to Erika’s torturer. Here, he takes on the role of the torturer for Erika. Walter quoting Erika’s letter to her throughout the encounter, as well as her lack of any real resistance, allows the possibility that this truly may have been the exact fantasy she detailed to Walter in that lengthy letter from which we only hear a few brief sentences. In that letter, Erika specifically explains to Walter that she wants her mother to hear them from the adjoining room while he tortures her, which is precisely what happens. She tells him to hit her and to verbally abuse her: “Ask me why I don’t cry out to mother or why I don’t fight back.

Above all, say things like that, so that I realize just how powerless I am.” If we read the final scene when Erika stabs herself after seeing Walter as a sign of her anger or disappointment with him, it may be that what disappointed her about Walter’s performance is that when he attacks her, he chooses vaginal sex and he orgasms inside her, which goes against her evident interest in unproductive oral sex that never culminates in orgasm. For his part, Walter may be so conflicted and angry because he also secretly wishes to play the masochist, not the torturer. It is significant that after this assault, he goes to listen to her performance at the concert, which has already been established as a metaphor for Erika’s public torturer persona that he so clearly enjoys being subjected to earlier. Erika stabbing herself in the lobby of the concert hall and refusing to perform may be seen as her finally bringing her private masochism into the public sphere.

Rather than a story about the incompatibility of a sadist and a masochist, the film may in fact be about the incompatibility of two masochists, both of whom are unhappy playing the role of the torturer for the other.

The ambiguity of the film, those “blank spaces” that Haneke refers to, allow for the radical possibility that the brutal assault is entirely scripted by Erika; that despite appearances, it Mackenzie 73 is not overwhelming her capacity for pleasurable pain. Surely the final scene, in which she stabs herself deeply in the shoulder and then briskly exits (not limping or cringing), proves that she can handle tremendous amounts of pain without even making a sound. In the letter, Erika tells

Walter not to worry about her mother’s reaction because she can handle her mother, which is apparently true. The mother does not call the cops afterwards or report the assault in any way.

When they go to the concert together, the likelihood of Erika having to face her attacker while the bruises are still fresh on her face does not concern the mother for a moment. There is so much that is inexplicable about these final two scenes that it is impossible to make definitive claims about whether this is rape or ravishment; whether Erika is rendered powerless by patriarchal sadism or her masochism undermines and triumphs over everyone. The viewer fills in those blanks, so it is troubling that many critics, like Wood, Žižek, and Vaida, render Erika a helpless victim by concluding that it is obviously rape that destroys, rather than fulfills, her deepest fantasies.

What can be concluded is that this film does not necessitate pathologizing Erika, or viewing her as “a deeply traumatized woman” (Žižek, Pervert’s Guide). Haneke’s subtle use of masochistic aesthetics throughout the film support and legitimize Erika’s desires and her mode of unproductive sex that never really climaxes. Haneke’s withholding strategy is found in the classical music that is always interrupted. The mirroring of Erika and Anna that disrupts the notion of a purely linear narrative. The framing that gestures towards but ultimately hides explicit images, all the while occluding the possibility of identifying solely with one character or another. So many critics assume that masochism, both in the theater and in the bedroom (or bathroom, as the case may be), is a just passive surrender to another person’s power. As a result, Mackenzie 74 its subversive power is overlooked. The masochist always holds power over their torturer by virtue of their contract, and the masochist’s capacity for extreme pain always holds the potential for subverting sadistic assaults that aim to destroy the victim’s pleasure. Meanwhile, the potentially problematic dichotomy of powerful/powerless in a masochistic relationship is thoroughly undermined by the inconstancy of the roles and attributes of the masochist and the torturer. At any moment, those roles may reverse, and at any moment, the masochist may be the most powerful and the torturer powerless. Thus, the act of submission can be an unlikely route to supreme control. The Piano Teacher unsettles viewers by removing their conventional filmic anchors, like an easily identifiable protagonist or normative sexuality, but this empowers the viewer to postulate what the film’s ambiguous blank spaces contain. The ultimate recognition of the instability of all the answers and potential positions within the film is precisely why it is such a powerful and subversive depiction of masochism.

Mackenzie 75

Conclusion

In the final scene of Funny Games U.S., Peter explains the plot of a science fiction film to

Paul. In this fictional film, there are two universes, one real and one fictional. Therefore,

“everything is its mirror image.” Peter explains, “the problem isn’t only how to escape the antimaterial world and go back to the real one, but also how to communicate between the two worlds.” Haneke foregrounds this dilemma of how to effectively communicate between fiction and reality (communicate with the viewer) in each of his films. In a play on Jean-Luc Godard’s famous dictum that “cinema is truth twenty-four times per second,” Haneke has said that, “film is twenty-four lies per second at the service of truth, or at the service of the attempt to find the truth.” Simply by pointing the camera, a director cannot avoid manipulating the audience to a certain degree. Haneke’s solution to the inescapable lie of cinema is to highlight everything he does that might manipulate the audience. For example, in Funny Games, Haneke mimics many of the conventional suspense-building techniques of Hollywood, but then turns the villain towards the camera, where he points all of these things out to the audience. By alienating the viewer and revealing the artifice of cinema, Haneke empowers them to be critical viewers who can draw their own conclusions to the problems he presents. As I have argued in the preceding two chapters, this relationship to the self-aware viewer is best characterized as a masochistic invitation.

In Funny Games, accepting this invitation yields a new awareness of the sadism inherent in the conventions of filmic violence. This sadism is present not merely in the gory imagery onscreen, but in the very narrative structures and editing that make violence so easily consumable. Haneke’s Funny Games films are certainly not easy to watch, but this is precisely Mackenzie 76 their point: violence should never be easy to watch. The focus should be on the lasting effects of violence, not the thrilling spurts of blood. This is why young Georgie’s death is entirely offscreen, while his parents’s unfathomable heartbreak is recorded in a frozen ten minute long take. These twin films demonstrate that masochism is a conscious decision by making the viewer aware of all of their power, including the power to leave the theater, before inviting them to relinquish that power so that they can learn something about themselves and the violence they so readily consume elsewhere. These films thus show that masochism can be a radical path to freedom from sadistic control.

As in Funny Games, The Piano Teacher demonstrates masochism’s capacity to undermine sadistic assaults. The Piano Teacher does more than this though, as it also highlights the radical instability of roles within the masochistic dynamic. Despite the fantasy of strict adherence to rules, the relationship between the masochist and their chosen torturer is filled with uncertainties and ambiguities. This is reflected thematically in the film through the ambiguities of the narrative. The constant role-switching and the shifts in power and control between those roles undermine any attempts to definitively decide who is in control. This is why the sadist and the masochist can never truly be paired together. The sadist is always in control. The masochist is endlessly oscillating between positions of power and vulnerability. Unlike the certainty of sadism, masochism’s instability makes it impossible to locate it within normative societal structures as so many critics attempt to do. Masochism cannot accurately be figured as a surrender to patriarchal society, or the power dynamics of capitalism, or the active/passive dichotomy of heteronormativity, because masochism is so precarious at all times. The Piano

Teacher demonstrates that masochism simultaneously offers supreme power and utter Mackenzie 77 submission, all of which is steeped in a cloud of fantasy that makes determining which is which all but impossible.

Masochism is not a passive fall into the dull, trance-like state that Brecht bemoans in his theory of theater. It is an active, conscious decision, and it is this active nature of masochism that further accounts for its clash with sadism. While it may be too simplistic to think of them as opposites, they are aesthetically competitive impulses, and that competition stems from the essential active impetus behind both. Haneke’s Funny Games films and The Piano Teacher encourage and legitimize such active masochism on the part of the viewer. The viewer is never forced into this position. Rather, Haneke extends an invitation to engage critically with the film and its characters. This is the defining quality of his films, and it demonstrates that despite the disadvantage the rule-abiding masochist may face against sadistic cruelty, the masochistic aesthetic can successfully contain and subvert even the most sadistic impulses. Mackenzie 78

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