Mackenzie Haneke Thesis Full Draft

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

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