Let’s talk about nipples for a moment. Bear with me, this intro is actually relevant. Certain people seem to be fascinated with nipples. Penn and Teller can’t go more then a single episode of their television show Bullsh!t without showing some of the female variety and my girlfriend can’t go more then a night without threatening mine.
Now before you start thinking I am telling some lurid tale of our bedroom escapades let me reassure you that this fascination of hers has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with dominance. You see many social animal species have varying ways to determine which animals are the dominant ones in the group. Dogs will often physically stand over another to show their dominance, and my girlfriend’s way of “putting her leg over me” and all of her previous boyfriends was to attack their nipples.
It wasn’t long after we started dating that I discovered this rather awful trait of hers. It is violent, uncaring and abusive behavior so I did what her other boyfriends were to frightened to do, I banned her from touching my nipples. It didn’t matter what the context was, any physical contact or even an attempt at such would be met with a swift rebuke.
You see her other boyfriends were scared of her and how she might retaliate if they attempted to gain any form of dominance in the relationship. Would she become more violent? Perhaps even threaten body parts more necessary then male nipples? No, she buckled like a belt at my authority.
Now sure, she may not have actually learned that hurting people just to see “what would happen” is wrong, but her behavior changed drastically for the better as she learned to curb her vicious and obnoxious urges. If only Benny’s parents had attempted to do the same with their son when his own form of sociopathic behavior surfaced. They might have taught him how to become a successful and contributing member of society, like I have done with my girlfriend.
Benny’s Video is the tale of a young boy who is obsessed with American action movies who then develops a queer obsession with a video he shot of a pg being slaughtered. Benny (Arno Frisch) struggles to recognize the difference between the action he sees on the television screen, and the actions that take place in real life. Soon, his parents will come to the horrific realization that Benny isn’t quite like the other children and how they resolve to help him just might explain why Benny is the way he is.
Director Michael Haneke often lumps his first three feature films (The Seventh Continent, Benny’s Video, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance) together as a sort of trilogy devoted to the inevitable downfall of relationships in modern civilization. He focuses his thesis on how society will slowly drift away from identifying with reality as it becomes more modern. Benny’s Video is simply one of many salvo’s Haneke would launch at First World culture in what has become a career spent battling against complacency.
The most obvious attack by Haneke in Benny’s Video is against a world seemingly inundated with video imagery. Benny himself is obsessed with video, often times renting several movies a day, and even viewing the world outside his room through a video monitor rather then simply looking out of the window. This separation from reality only worsens throughout the film as Benny increasingly interacts with the real world from behind the lens of a camera rather then head on.
But Benny is not the only member of his family who is not in touch with reality. His father Georg (Haneke favorite Ulrich Mühe) shows the same disconnect when he concocts a brutal plan to protect Benny from the consequences of his horrific transgressions. That Georg is seemingly fully immersed in reality makes his actions as monstrous as his son’s and provides the most obvious proof that Haneke is also attacking the dissolution of the nuclear family.
Time and again Georg and his wife Anna (Angela Winkler) are seen acting surprisingly complacent when faced by the questionable and sometimes terrible actions of themselves and their children. Early in the film when Georg and Anna come home to find their eldest daughter Eva (Stephanie Brehme) has thrown a party at their apartment without their consent while they were out of town, and even more shockingly, using the party to run a pyramid scheme. Georg simply calmly asks everyone to leave and for Eva to warn them next time she wants to throw a party so they might cater it for her. Then later in the film Georg and Ana are shown throwing their own party and using Eva’s pyramid scheme for their own financial gain.
But while Benny and Georg are clearly intended to be the monstrous character in the family, Anna also shows time and again that her inability to take a stand is a primary reason why these acts ever occur. Her complicit nature when Georg is detailing his horrific plan allows him to convince himself that such action are both rational and logical.
But far be it for Haneke to take the easy way out and merely implicate the parents. In a number of brilliantly subtle throw away scenes Haneke implies that Anna simply sitting down to eat breakfast and spend time with Benny after such tragic events have occurred will not only have zero effect on anything outside of easing her own conscious, but that it is gallingly naive and impractical for her to think merely sharing toast and jam over the breakfast table will do anything to alter the course of these events once they have been set in motion.
It isn’t often for one to watch a film in which every main character is so painfully horrible, yet Haneke continues to be a master at turning such unwatchable events into compelling cinema. Even with Benny’s Video as one of his first feature films, he clearly is already more then capable of skillfully manipulating audiences into questioning the events and the world they live in.
It would be easy to classify Benny’s Video as a knock on the United States (and in the hands of someone less subtle and skillful like Lars von Trier it most certainly would) with its purposeful placement of American action films as Benny’s primary means of entertainment, but Haneke take the far more difficult and risky approach of turning the lens towards his own cultural heritage and upbringing, blaming the bourgeois attitudes and upbringing of Europeans into the discussion. That type of cavalier attitude has followed Haneke throughout his entire filmography. That he came out of the starting gate unafraid to broach such controversial subjects is to be admired and lauded.
But for all of Haneke’s statements that Benny’s Video is part of a trilogy involving his first three films, it seems rather obvious that both Funny Games and his recent masterpiece Caché are equally capable of being involved with this discussion as their own trilogy of sorts. But where Caché uses video to build a web of confusion that creates unbearable tension as the viewer attempts to discern “reality” from “fiction”, Benny’s Video, and to varying degrees Funny Games, seem almost clunky in their delivery by comparison.
While Caché and Benny’s Video thrive on subtlety to challenge the viewer, Caché is better able to maintain its mystery and pacing throughout the entire film, where as Benny’s Video comes across more as a morality tale styled train wreck which invokes a gaper’s block response from the audience. These events are so astonishing that one is compelled to linger on with each scene in an attempt to comprehend the depravity within them, often times resulting in the stagnation of the narrative. Caché , and Funny Games as well, does a far better job of drawing the viewer into the film, making them an active participant as the events unfold. One could even argue that Benny’s Video was so subtle in its rebuke that Haneke clearly felt the need for a far more in your face style in his follow up film Funny Games, then with time crafted a startlingly different form of lecture with Caché. In Benny’s Video you are the oblivious parents, Funny Games the vile perpetrators, and in Caché the victim.
Benny’s Video isn’t a great movie, its stylistic choices far too often hamper the goals Haneke is clearly after with the film, but it certainly deserves recognition as one of Haneke’s riskiest and off-putting creations. Considering the catalog of almost surgically aggressive films Haneke has directed, that is saying quite a bit. But it is also clear that Haneke’s vision may not impact those that need it most, for throughout my screening of this film my girlfriend continually threatened my nipple with a straight pin. She simply wondered “What would you do if I stuck you with this?” I can assure you after watching Benny’s Video I most certainly won’t be complacent.
