benny’s video (w&d haneke)

Pub quiz question. In which Haneke film does the British queen make a cameo appearance? The answer… is Benny’s Video. A clip from Spitting Image lampoons the royal family, but this is just one of the panorama of seemingly random images which populate Benny’s screens and to which he will contribute his own devastating additions. Benny’s Video is from 1992, a time just before the internet was about to transform our lives into a restless sea of images, and in this Benny feels like a preternaturally modern character, one step ahead of his peers, right down to his savage amorality. However, this amorality perhaps has a more complex root than sheer information overload. Talking to the young girl he will soon murder, Benny tells her that the violence in the films they watch is all fakery, composed of paint and plastic. He, and perhaps even she, wants to rediscover a reality beyond the movies, to discover what real blood looks like. (Something which Haneke can paradoxically only show with fake blood, no matter how shocking it might seem.)

Benny’s quest for the real, which doesn’t seem to change him at all, also ties in with his parents post-Nazi amorality, driven by petty bourgeois greed and fear (to be revisited in White Ribbon). Like so many post-war austro-german auteurs, Haneke is also a captive of his nation’s past, and aware of the fact. What this means is that there are multiple factors which contribute to the listless amorality in which Haneke’s film is apparently immersed. The absence of value is only of them, even if within a world of images, this is the one that comes to the foreground. The extended and seemingly irrelevant Egypt section, which goes on for perhaps ten minutes, feels like another manifestation of this: if all images are of equal import, from the killing of a pig to a Spitting Image clip to a  camera view of the street outside, why shouldn’t a film just be composed of arbitrary images, which have no relevance to plot or character? Except that there has been a key development in this sequence, which is that the mother has picked up the camera herself, she has become one for whom the production of images is a way of fending off their meaninglessness, as has been the case with Benny. Two of the videos he has made, one of the killing of the girl, the other of his parents’ acknowledgement of their complicity in his crime, will determine everything that occurs, and in so doing, Benny becomes actor/ director in his own drama, rather than mere passive recipient. It’s not a comfortable space, it’s fucked up, but it affirms the fact that, for better or for worse, he is alive.

The echo into the 21st century of this philosophy is chilling: a world where people only come to life through the manipulation of their image, a manipulation that goes beyond good or evil, transforming the subject into a kind of aestheticised zombie, seemingly in control of their image/fate, but actually atomised, all at sea, lost in a maze of empty referents.