Michael Haneke (Austria, born 1942)

The White Ribbon (2009)

(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here only for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)

Early in Michael Haneke’s shimmering White Ribbon, a young boy asks his older sister about death. Is everyone going to die?, he asks. Everyone? Including me and you? It’s a conversation that is both frank and tender- she tries to sugar-coat the news by smiling sweetly and saying that it will not happen for a long time, but she is honest with him.

Yes. Everyone is going to die. Everyone we know. All of us. There is no way out of it.

Everyone.

This sets the tone, really. The White Ribbon is a piece that examines, amongst other things, the way people interact with each other (verbally and otherwise), and what it means to be a human and why we make the kinds of decisions that we do. This is but one of the many conversations that occur across the movie in which characters speak to each other in a manner that is strikingly direct. Sometimes these conversations are antagonistic, sometimes they are relatively civil, but there is an openness to the dialogue which I found served several purposes: it afforded the film realism, it gave a compelling edge to its narrative and characters, and it allowed the viewer a ‘way in’, so to speak, and to effectively get to grips with material that could so easily have been impenetrable, infuriating, tedious.

The film concentrates on a single German community in 1913 and 1914. Their lives are insular- the inhabitants rarely seem to leave the village, and when they do, they don’t go far. With this kind of material, immediate touchstones would seem to be Béla Tarr’s Satantango and Ermanno Olmi’s Tree of Wooden Clogs, both of which I think The White Ribbon surpasses. But they’re different beasts, anyway- for one thing, The White Ribbon operates on a far more caustic level than Olmi’s slice-of-life movie; it doesn’t have a documentary flavour, even when it depicts conversations that have a high degree of verisimilitude. Leviathan might be a more pertinent reference point, although Haneke’s scope is wider than Zvyagintsev’s, and we get to see far more of this microcosmic settlement than we did in that film.

In any case, The White Ribbon is quite the masterwork. Practically everything about it is absolutely superb. The cinematography is stunning, while the pacing and general structure of the piece possess the precision of a finely made pocket-watch.

Director Michael Haneke has commented that his decision to shoot in black and white enabled him to create a ‘distancing effect’. Despite this, I found the film to be a deeply immersive experience, almost to the point that there were times when I felt like I was actually living in the town. Not unpleasantly, either; these people may lead incredibly staid, austere lives, and they are often cold, hard people who behave disagreeably, but there was something about this mesmeric, magnificent film that I found oddly soothing. I enjoyed the sweet, quiet courtship between our narrator, the schoolteacher, and the shy young Eva. For me, it was just as important a part of the movie as any of its political, philosophical or sociological themes. Maybe more.

It was only after I had finished the film, and done some background reading, that I understood the film is meant to comment on the rise of the Nazi Party. I didn’t think about this once when I watched it- after all, the film is set just as the First World War is about to start, not the Second- and subsequently I believe that you can watch the film, and appreciate it, without any thought to Nazi subtext at all, just as you can, for example, take William Basinski’s album sequence The Disintegration Loops as a general lament on death, decay and, indeed, disintegration just as much as you can listen to it as a specific artistic reflection of the September 11 attacks. Perhaps more controversially, I also believe you can watch 25th Hour with that same spirit.

Anyway, as with many other aspects of this movie, the exact ties to Nazism are ambiguous, and involve the viewer exercising their own judgements. Few of the characters or their actions are shown to be outright evil; the exception is the doctor, about whom we are left in no doubt, and his scene of astonishing yet casual verbal cruelty served, for me, as one of the movie’s darkest and most portentous moments. Things are less cut-and-dry when it comes to the pastor. He is tough with his children, yes, and emotionally cold, and some of this toughness may possibly cross the line into cruelty, but his intentions seem to be decent enough, and this is 1913, and we’ve been led to believe that that’s what things were like back then, so it’s to be expected, right?

The White Ribbon is a probing, questioning film, disguised somewhat as an elegant period piece, and leaves these sorts of issues nestling in its undertones for you to pick through and analyse yourself. I wrote of Melancholia: ‘Maybe von Trier is making a direct comparison between the literal end of the world and instances where peoples’ own small, insular worlds ‘come crashing down’, and purposely making the point that the latter can somehow feel just as bad.’ There is something of a parallel here in The White Ribbon’s latent suggestion that the kind of everyday cruelty we have all seen and experienced is part of the same behavioural tapestry as the Holocaust; one may be far more extreme than the other, but they essentially draw from the same stagnant well of human impulse. This is a bold proposal, and one which has the potential to draw a storm of criticism from those factions who believe that if you compare one thing to something else, it is automatically saying that these two things are just as bad as each other, that they have an equal level of insidiousness. But the Holocaust simply wouldn’t have happened were it not for the in-built human tendency to bully and to subjugate, and consequently I am among those who think that these theories and hypotheses have genuine sociological weight.

I called Almost Famous ‘a snapshot of a moment’, and of course this is too, as we engage with a world that is teetering on the precipice of the most momentous conflict modern civilisation had ever seen up to that point. As the screen fades to black on an ensemble shot of the whole town’s populace, we again find ourselves in a position of making presumptions about these characters’ futures. We know their lives will be unimaginably upended not once but twice over the next thirty years; for some of the adults, old age, if nothing else, will have done for them by the time 1939 rolls around. What we’re seeing are the final moments of peacetime, and regardless of whether you like these characters or not, or whether they necessarily deserve to live their lives undisturbed, there is a deep, icy, melancholic beauty in that.

Amour (2012)

Amour is about an elderly French couple, married for many years, who are living out a quiet but satisfying retirement in a spacious Parisian apartment, filled with books and other indications of the intellect that has thus far defined their lives. One day, the woman, Anne, suffers a stroke. It doesn’t look too bad at first.

But it is. And physical incapacitation soon becomes mental degradation. And Anne’s slide into dementia is swift and merciless. As it progresses, Amour carries with it the uneasy feeling that Haneke is deliberately crafting a cruel picture that is as feel-bad as possible. But perhaps it serves to show us just how much sugar a typical movie has in it, to the point that we barely notice, and just how unwilling a typical director is to make one that has nothing in the way of comfort. We’ve seen films before that didn’t offer any easy answers- Lost in Translation was one, and Inside Llewyn Davis, with more pointed levels of anguish and despair, was another- but both of those examples featured far more in the way of general filmic vibrancy; for one thing, the characters in those two movies move around, they visit places. We’re not just staring at the interior of the same apartment for two hours.

Another potential problem is that Haneke’s sympathy for these characters is underplayed and sometimes barely in evidence at all. Again, maybe this is just an indicator of the amount of ‘sympathy’ most filmmakers will readily shoehorn into their movies and spoon-feed to the viewer just because that’s the standard, that’s what’s expected. Maybe they’re worried that if they make a film that’s not warm or tactile enough, it won’t make as much money, something that doesn’t seem to concern Haneke at all, or other artists in this mould such as Nuri Bilge Ceylan.

It is alienating though. For one thing, there’s something too intimate about how closely we are shown Anne’s condition; a condition that, were she real, she would want kept private from her family and friends, let alone the general public who are able, under these circumstances, to observe her like a bug under a microscope- pitilessly, should they choose to. There’s also something decidedly unfair about all this- she’s led a cultured, dignified life, and all that is irrelevant as Haneke’s camera chooses to show us these wretched days instead. Her husband, Georges, is depicted at his worst too. The inference, amongst others, is that this is what we all become in the end, even if we’re lucky enough to avoid dementia- shells of our former selves, regressed to a quasi-pathetic state, taking up space and arguably better off dead.

It shares some superficial thematic fabric with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, but its approach and the conclusions ostensibly drawn by the respective movies are diametrically opposed. One important difference is, of course, that Jean-Do Bauby had a full team of medical professionals tending to him at all times, and Anne Laurent doesn’t. Another, possibly even more crucial difference is that he hadn’t lost his mind- on the contrary, one of The Diving Bell’s most defining characteristics was the power and vitality of Jean-Do’s psyche, and how much solace he was able to take in its vigour.

My DVD is rated by the British Board of Film Classification as a ‘12’. I think a ‘15’ would have been more appropriate, even though the movie contains no sex, very little bad language and no explicit violence. Why? Well, I suppose because it’s shocking. It’s a shocking film which I found to be deeply unpleasant, containing themes and concepts which are far too mature for a 12-year-old to process, that even someone of my rapidly advancing years struggled with.

Yeah, I had a hard time with this one. Enter at your own risk.

Caché (2005)

Just like their namesakes in Amour, Georges and Anne Laurent, played by Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche, are the quintessential Middle Class couple, the very embodiment of the comfortable cosmopolitan elite. They’re not very happy about it, though. Georges is irritable and gets into street arguments. Their son Pierrot lives in his own teenage bubble, doesn’t appear to particularly like either of them and wants to be left alone. Anne generally spends her time in frustration, trying to get answers, or simple conversation, out of her prickly, patronising husband and surly son.

Then there’s the tapes. Someone is sending them footage of their own house, leaving video cassettes on their doorstep, wrapped in crude but nasty drawings of stick figures and blood. We don’t see Georges and Anne’s lives before the tapes start to come, but we can surmise that they have made existing problems worse, rather than created them wholesale.

What to make of all this? In a remarkable coincidence, Caché arrives very soon after The Headless Woman and Zodiac, a fact that, in itself, accentuates the bizarre and rather awful sense of displacement that this Haneke monstrosity hands dead-eyed to the viewer, taking the shadowy, obtuse evasions of those two films and bringing them to the very forefront of its filmic landscape, employing an even harder, more vicious and more surgical tone than either.

More than any other movie on this list, Caché is a puzzle, by which I mean it actually operates as a conundrum, a brainteaser, where clues are metered out, as opposed to a movie that just happens to be ‘puzzling’. If you’re thinking about watching it, I would recommend going into it as cold as possible, and imbibing it completely on its own terms without any prior warning. Then you can go online, as I did, and contemplate the theories from there, building your own opinion from the ground up.

I didn’t like it much when I was watching it. One reason for this is that movies with such an unfeeling tone and arrhythmic structure are often inherently difficult to like. As with Amour, the film’s events are presented without a shred of sympathy for or identification with the characters at all- if anything, they ‘deserve’ it. Another reason for my apprehension was, I think, that to cynical eyes, the movie doesn’t really do anything or go anywhere. We’ve been trained to expect a certain narrative arc when this sort of plot is presented to us- typically, the tapes would have gotten more and more foreboding and intrusive, with footage of the characters sleeping, for example, and the deaths of some unfortunate fringe characters- then, eventually, we find out who the antagonist is and what motivation, flimsy or otherwise, they may have had. That would, of course, have been something of a predictable, run-of-the-mill horror film, and barely notable, but still, the fact that Caché doesn’t do any of these things- a single burst of shocking violence notwithstanding, it’s ‘just’ a drama, where arguments, interpersonal tension and subterfuge are prevalent- leads one to question exactly why it exists and why anyone felt the need to make it in the first place. Even Roger Ebert, who really liked the film, openly asks at one point ‘What was Haneke’s purpose with Caché?’, going on to state ‘I suspect it was to inspire just such questions as we’re having’.

Questions are certainly one thing that the movie indubitably offers. When some other films ended with unanswered mysteries, like The White Ribbon or Inception, I felt the ride itself was good enough that, for me, there was no feeling of being ‘short-changed’, ‘double-crossed’ or ‘played’ by their ambiguities. Not so with this one. It was a frustrating, itchy, dissonant watch that felt less elegant than either The Headless Woman or Zodiac, and I mentally prepared myself to write a lukewarm review.

However, then I started to read some theories surrounding what may really be going on. In particular, it’s suggested that the sender of the tapes is none other than Haneke himself, a proposal that, on the face of it, seems ridiculous, but starts to carry more credence when you recontextualise Caché as an experimental piece that, as part of its deviant nature, merely resembles a ‘regular’ film and features recognisable, esteemed actors. Roger Ebert discusses the movie’s possibilities at length (I should say that from this point the review will not make any sense if you haven’t seen the film, and contains spoilers). For some reason, he doesn’t mention that particular theory; assuming he was aware of it, maybe he doesn’t want to introduce any preternatural aspects to his analysis or the film in general. Instead, he runs through the movie’s characters and assesses the probability of their involvement, settling on Majid’s son and Pierrot as the likeliest guilty parties in an unholy alliance.

He finds Majid’s assertion of innocence wholly convincing, and on this basis, practically rules him out. I don’t- yes, he appears honest and decent, but so do lots of people, and some of them are very good liars. He touches on the possibility that Georges may be sending the tapes to himself, but rejects it, which again, I don’t. This latter hypothesis would mean one of four things, all of which, I feel, are intriguingly valid: 1) Georges’ sanity is much more tenuous than it appears; 2) Georges is sane, but enters fugue states akin to sleepwalking where he does inexplicable things and doesn’t remember them; 3) Georges is relatively sane, and fully aware of what he is doing at all times, but is a pathological liar who does things like this for attention and to torment those around him, similar to someone with Munchausen syndrome; 4) Georges’ guilt has supernaturally manifested itself, with or without sentience, and is sending tapes to the source of its own creation. This theory is made even more tantalising by the scene which sees Pierrot ask his father ‘What’s with that card you sent?’ before handing one of the grisly stick-figure cards to him and saying ‘My teacher gave it to me at recess. She didn’t get the freaky drawing but said it’s weird you sending me cards at school.’ This exchange occurs right around the small cluster of scenes that Roger Ebert identifies as a ‘smoking gun’.

Another possibility occurred to me, which may not necessarily be original, and that is that the drawings the tapes are wrapped in look child-like because they were actually sent by a child- the adolescent Majid, who has somehow achieved a form of time travel to deliver missives from the past. With this theory, when Georges visits the adult Majid and he convincingly claims his blamelessness, it’s genuine; the character both did and didn’t send the tapes, like Schrodinger’s cat, and this adult version of him is innocent.

Haneke has said that any interpretation is just as correct or incorrect as any other. It’s that kind of film. Anything goes, and conclusive answers simply do not figure in the movie’s make-up. This leads me on to my own personal favoured theory; it happens to be the one I mentioned earlier. Ebert points out the difficulties inherent in making such tapes- the static shots of Georges’ house appear to have been filmed from an impossible position, a patch of thin air. You could achieve such a shot with specialist equipment, and might be able to do so unnoticed at night, but not during the day. Who would be able to capture footage lasting hours under those circumstances? A similar point is true of the film from inside Majid’s flat- who had the requisite access, and who possessed the wherewithal to prepare it and start filming before Georges turned up? The answer to both these questions- Michael Haneke. He has access to everything- he can film Georges, or Anne, or anyone, any time he wants, completely unseen. They are utterly at his mercy. This theory also ‘explains’ somewhat why Majid, for no apparent reason, very suddenly and shockingly slits his own throat- as both director and screenwriter, these choices are Haneke’s alone, and that was simply what he compelled his character to do at that time. It was his will. Majid had no say in the matter- and neither, of course, do any other fictional characters, in any work. It also explains why none of the cast are definitely, obviously guilty- yes, Pierrot appears to resent his parents and acts as if he could be hiding something, but that’s what teenagers are like. Yes, he and Majid’s son meet in the film’s final moments, and it’s pretty weird, and it’s suggestive, but it means nothing, really, in terms of cast-iron guilt. The simplest and easiest solution is that none of them had the implausible skills needed to negotiate the technical aspects of creating the tapes, and none of them put so much time and effort into the undertaking of such a bizarre and ultimately rather fruitless endeavour. It is Haneke himself who is malevolently crossing the fourth wall, and the characters are all equally under the force of his puppetry.

Is all of this conjecture diverting? Absolutely. Have I enjoyed engaging with it? Yes, up to a point. Did I actually enjoy the film? Not so much. But if you’re of an art-film disposition, and you like your cinema dark, enigmatic and conniving, with undertones of harsh and scabrous social commentary, then I suppose Caché comes highly recommended. I’ve certainly never seen anything quite like it. And there’s something to be said for a movie that induces such disquiet, and in its own way operates very effectively as something of a horror film, yet leaves almost all of its characters alive at the end, without them being in any obvious imminent danger.

A confounding, provocative work, to say the least.

The Castle (1997)

The Castle, an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s elliptical novel, sees K, an enigmatic ‘land surveyor’ and probably one of life’s drifting journeymen, arrive in a town, apparently with a job to do. He has no contacts (notwithstanding the two laughable ‘assistants’ that are assigned to him). He has no accommodation. He doesn’t even seem to have any instructions to follow. The obdurate locals do everything they can to make him feel displaced, including telling him that the job is completely unnecessary, has always been so, and has in fact been cancelled and revoked.

In keeping with the lack of clarity that this picture is built entirely around, it’s unclear as to whether it was intended primarily for Austrian television- Wikipedia seems to say that it was, but then also tells me that it was released theatrically in several countries, including the USA. In any case, it certainly plays as if was made for TV. The look and feel has no ‘cinematic’ bent to it at all. The Castle is possibly a ‘passion-project’ that attempts to bring the book to the screen as absolutely faithfully and closely as possible, right down to the fact that the novel ends mid-sentence and this piece similarly ends mid-scene, though without any of the brutal grace or arrythmic poignancy that is sometimes achieved through clipped and sudden denouement- when ‘everything’s been said’, so to speak. To this end, there does appear to be a palpable amount of effort involved in its execution, and its choice of stars- Ulrich Mühe, recognisable from The Lives of Others, and Suzanne Lothar, recognisable from The White Ribbon, both extremely capable- also reflect a clear attempt to ‘get it right’, to do full justice to its source material.

Unfortunately, what I experienced was a dull, dry piece that looked grey, dingy, dreary and cheap. Some of these aesthetics, I admit, may have served to accentuate the austere position that K is in and how much one would hate to visit- let alone live in- this horrible town, miles from anywhere, where people speak in code, symbols and outright non-sequitur, producing effects not too dissimilar to Werckmeister Harmonies. It’s not a point, however, that needs to be made for over two hours. Neither is the one-note bureaucracy-gone-mad overarching theme, with occasional stabs at sardonic comedy which felt just as flat and colourless as the rest of the film’s components.

There is very little, if any, trace of a master’s hand on this workmanlike piece, which noticeably lacks the distinct flair that Haneke brought to his other movies, certainly the later ones which I have seen myself. One feels that the principal audience for The Castle, if not the only really viable audience, is people who already like and understand Kafka’s oeuvre; for the rest of us, I would suggest that this one, with respect, is a bit of a damp squib.

Happy End (2017)

Happy End sees Michael Haneke take another long and withering look at the moneyed middle classes. This time, the film incorporates cellphone videos, social media posts and onscreen text messages to tell its story, which is initially quite jarring- is the old master trying to give his work a fresher, funkier and more modern twist? If he is, then it’s a mere surface-level change, although it does give Happy End a less studied and less serious air than The White Ribbon, Caché or Amour, and seems to suggest that Haneke may be loosening up a little.

This possibility is accentuated- at least initially- by the film’s relatively meandering and unfocused story, which documents another terrible family, following several simultaneous plotlines and using something of a vignette structure. For at least half of the film, perhaps two-thirds, I did not know where Haneke was going with any of this or what the point was going to be, if anything. That wasn’t a huge problem, since the picture was watchable despite its apparent lack of focus. Then came a scene that I felt marked something of a turning point for the film (spoiler ahead). The teenage daughter of the family, Eve, who is quiet and introverted and has just survived a suicide attempt, tells her father Thomas, a highly respectable surgeon, that she has been reading his e-mails and she knows that he does not love her, and that he doesn’t, in fact, love anyone. One expects a strenuous denial from the father, whose outward persona is that of a sometimes distracted but perfectly upstanding member of society, something like ‘Of course I love you! You’re my daughter! Someone must have hacked my e-mail account, etc. etc.’ But this consoling denial doesn’t come. Instead, the camera closes in on actor Mathieu Kassovitz’s face. He is annoyed at being caught out. He is irritated that someone knows his secret. He is pondering on what his next move is going to be. His priority is perennially himself.

Eve has an extremely dark secret of her own, and is possibly the worst person in her entire brood, yet chillingly, she is thoughtful, well-behaved and mature for her age- qualities that everyone in society usually respects without a second thought, especially when the teenage girl in question is going through serious family problems. Meanwhile Isabelle Huppert, as Anne, gives a supporting performance reminiscent of that in White Material, with perhaps slightly more bite and a touch less pensiveness- though clearly a woman of intelligence, fortitude and resolve, she is also distant, cold and odd. It is perhaps her character that gives the viewer their most significant psychological puzzle. We are told the secrets of Thomas and Eve, and privy to their inner darknesses, but Anne’s remain uncovered, undisclosed.

Happy End is, of course, an act of subversion, a movie that flies in the face of traditional movie tropes whereby the characters grow and learn and become better people, and interfamilial disputes are resolved, and mistakes are greatly regretted but forgiven, and everyone hugs and cries at the end, ideally at a wedding or a christening or somesuch, over Adele or Dido or Sarah McLachlan. The film is essentially an outright mockery of such a supposition. Nevertheless, it feels less conceptual, and subsequently less of an essay, than both Caché and Amour, especially the former. Happy End might even be- I say it tentatively- something of a comedy from Haneke; its tone is certainly more irreverent than any of his four previous movies that I have seen so far. This irreverence is not really evident until the final twenty minutes of the piece, in which, amongst other devilishly sardonic set-pieces, granddaughter Eve and grandfather Georges form an unholy alliance of sorts- one where neither particularly cares if they are liked or trusted by the other.

When watching The Castle, I felt that its apparent attempts at comedy failed and led me to suspect that, for all his skill, comedy was beyond Haneke. I was wrong. This is not mainstream comedy by any means- it’s not mainstream filmmaking by any means- and for most of its runtime you could not even consider it a comedy at all. It also doesn’t really feel like a masterpiece- despite me personally disliking the latter two, The White Ribbon, Caché and Amour possessed the kind of undiluted focus and singularity of vision that lends itself to that sort of stately mantle. By comparison, Happy End is somewhat trifling, with little to no gravitas. However, as a piece of twisted, witty entertainment, which I presume was the intention, I found it succeeded extremely well, with style and assurance to spare. For the discerning viewer who wants something that has plenty of arthouse muscle yet is not unrelentingly sombre, this offering- slick, sly and brimming with offhand intellect- is a bullseye.

Benny’s Video (1992)

Benny’s Video features a startling opening sequence. On grainy camcorder footage, a bolt pistol is pressed to a pig’s head and the trigger pulled. As a viewer, I had a moment of extreme trepidation where I knew what was about to occur before it had- and then, the result was worse than I had feared. The pig doesn’t just die, it judders violently and experiences death throes, probably without full knowledge or understanding of what has happened to it. Agonisingly, the tape is then re-wound and we immediately watch the pig suffer in the exact same way again.

It’s pretty sickening stuff, and is the nastiest imagery that I have seen Haneke portray so far, including Caché’s throat-slitting scene; in this instance, as the very first thing we see in this movie, it was stark portent for how the film might ensue, and suggested that things might actually get worse from here.

In my view, nothing in the rest of the film is quite as awful to watch as that, despite (spoiler alert) the protracted and harrowing murder of a teenage girl that our titular Benny commits. It’s mostly offscreen, and it’s mostly through audio- we hear the victim’s screams and cries without actually seeing her in convulsions, as we did the pig. These two violent sequences aside, the movie is straight drama and character study- very sober and deliberately slow and dull, with strong emphasis on how mundane evil can be, and how it can occur in the most pedestrian of settings, by people that are quiet, unassuming and composed (25 years later, Haneke would echo this very theme again in Happy End and his even-younger character Eve). Benny doesn’t care that he’s killed the girl, requiring lead actor Arno Frisch to give one of those blank, flat-affect performances that is nigh-on impossible to assess conclusively, though when one considers his age- about 16 at time of filming- there is a commendable level of self-possession, poise and control to his portrayal. His parents, Ulrich Mühe and Angela Winkler, who (another spoiler alert) decide to help him when they discover what he’s done, give us a little more characterisation to chew on, especially the latter, who is the only one of the three to be visibly upset.

Critic Bartłomiej Paszylk suggests that the film is structured in a way that makes it tough to recognise the movie’s true villain. Though the film purposely exists within queasy grey areas, I generally tend to disagree with this assessment- Benny is the one that pulls the trigger, he is the one who blithely and casually allows his parents to clean up his mess, and the fact that, for most of the picture, he doesn’t really behave like a villain is, I think, part of the point.

Alongside its pathologically detached depiction of listless, directionless evil, Benny’s Video throws a perrenial question at us- What would you do in this situation? In this instance, it is not just a chewy thought experiment but a hulking moral quandary that can’t really be resolved. Would you turn your child in? It’s very easy to make snap judgements from your armchair when it’s never happened to you and likely never will. The behaviour of Benny’s parents is unquestionably immoral, of course it is- when your son murders someone, you don’t take him on holiday to Egypt. And the fact that Benny’s father appears to be more calculating than Benny, and more psychologically aware of what he is doing, perhaps suggests that his culpability is more acute. However, it’s perfectly possible that he is in shock, and that his kneejerk reaction is to stay as resolutely calm as possible and try to work out the very best way forward through pure logic and deductive reason, principles that may well have stood him in extremely good stead for his entire life up to this point.

Reading other peoples’ thoughts on Benny’s Video online, I have seen the suggestion that it is about neglect. If this is indeed an intended thematic strand of the film, it hums in the background undeclared. Again though, it infers that the parents are really to blame, and again, I don’t feel convinced by this theorem. They provide for him, and he is comfortable. He lives something of a solitary life, often holed away in his bedroom- many teenagers do, including me when I was that age. Can they really surveil every single thing he watches? Should they be bowling through his bedroom door unannounced? There is nothing in the film to suggest that his parents are abusive to him in any way, either psychologically or physically, other than the scenes where his father shows disappointment and annoyance in his son, which for me does not come under the umbrella of ‘abuse’ at all. There is nothing to suggest that either his mother or father would ever have committed any crime, let alone a violent one, if their son had not set these events in motion. That they come across taciturn and uninvolved is, for me, circumstantial- parents aren’t perfect, and not all of them can be exceptionally tactile and attentive, and if they’re not, it doesn’t give their son carte blanche to go and kill someone with a bolt gun.

In the real world, there are often no answers for these sorts of actions- they can’t be summed up or explained, and Benny’s Video, I feel, reflects this. Gus Van Sant would go on to make very similar points eleven years later with the Palme d’Or winning Elephant. No-one knows for sure why these atrocities occur- sometimes they can be traced back somewhat to traumatic past events, and sometimes they can’t. Benny is asked outright why he did it, and before he delivers what is probably the film’s most pivotal line, ‘I just wanted to see what it felt like,’ he first says ‘I don’t know’. And if Benny- fictional but representative of a great many real-life perpetrators, along with Elephant’s antagonists- doesn’t even know himself why he did it, then what hope do the rest of us have of ever understanding?