trigger warning: this post contains mentions of rape and sexual assault.
I recently re-watched Benny’s Video with a friend at the Metrograph. I had forgotten how the movie opens: with a grainy handicam shot of a pig being slaughtered. The lights go down in the theater—immediately, before any credits roll, we watch hands press a bolt gun to a pig’s head and kill the pig. The footage rewinds and we watch it again in slow-motion. Then the rest of the movie plays.
After watching this film—a brutal experience in which a bourgeois teenage boy kills a lower class girl from the suburbs and his parents try to cover up for him, only to be ratted out by him, their own son—I wondered why I subjected myself to this movie a second time. What had been my relationship as a viewer to this film? Why did it leave such an impression?
I remembered that Haneke had said something about “raping the viewer.” I certainly felt uncomfortable watching Benny’s Video—and had a muddled angry feeling about the pig dying. But what did he mean by rape?
I wanted to remember what Haneke said, so I googled it:
“Every film is manipulative, raping the viewer. So the question is: Why do I rape the viewer? I try to rape him into being reflective, and into being intellectually independent and seeing his role in the game of manipulation. I believe in his intelligence.”
Upon re-reading, I was surprised to find that he suggested all films “rape” the viewer. Of course, this language is violent and I don’t think Haneke would get away with saying it now, even if we decide to read it as a figure of speech or a metaphor. but during my search for this quote, I came across a different way of reading his strategy.
In order to find that Haneke quote, I (unfortunately) googled something like “film as rape” and also came across the J-Stor sample of an essay called “No Lies: Direct Cinema as Rape.” Thanks to a friend’s login, I obtained the PDF of the essay and read about a well-known short film from the 70s which intended to give the viewer the experience of being "raped.
“Mitchell Block's No Lies…although it is a narrative film, subverts narrative tradition and offers an alternative to the customary treatment of rape in the movies. Using unorthodox—and, to some, unethical and offensive—means, it shakes us into a first person encounter with rape and betrayal and forces us to confront our customary voyeurism and passivity as it is evoked by our usual cinematic experience.”
Since I haven’t been able to watch this short film, I’ll rely on Vivian C. Sobchack’s summary:
“The action of No Lies is simple. A young woman, Shelby, is interviewed by a student filmmaker, Alec, as she is preparing to leave her apartment to see a movie. During the course of her preparations and banter with the filmmaker and as she moves around in the limited space of three rooms and a narrow hallway, she reveals that she has been raped the previous week. She seems cool about the event, almost reportorial about her doctor's magazine article response that it happens "all the time," almost incredulously amused at her suspect treatment by the police. Alec's hand-held camera wavers as he starts to question Shelby, revealing his surprise at and disapproval of the young woman's seeming nonchalance. He proceeds to verbally attack and photographically corner her until she breaks down in front of the camera. After Shelby's emotional outburst about the rape (the climax of which begins this article), Alec apologizes but continues filming until Shelby goes off to see, appropriately perhaps, Night of the Hunter, closing the apartment door on the filmmaker who has promised to join her as soon as his film runs out. The screen turns to blackness and credits appear, informing the audience that the entire film has been a constructed and directed fiction, a narrative and not a documentary.“
Sobchack goes on to say that “by the film's end, the audience has been subjected to three rapes rather than one, and has experienced them on increasingly threatening levels.” By these three rapes, Sobchack means: the experience the woman tells the cameraman she underwent, the cameraman’s invasion of Shelley’s boundaries and, finally, the audience’s lack of initial knowledge that the film has been staged and is fictional. The lack of consent moves from character to camera to audience.
Using this way of thinking about consent with(in) cinema, Haneke’s pig slaughter opening could be seen as a deliberate violation of the ritualistic consent a commercial filmmaker makes with their audience. Without opening credits or a title or any other introduction, the first footage we see after static or darkness is “raw” and possibly dangerous.
A few weeks ago, I had a couple of friends over for dinner. After we’d finished eating, we were all admiring a new object I had acquired in my apartment: on my filing cabinet sat a tiny 9” TV/VCR—a prop leftover from a film I’ve been working on. As a morbid joke to myself, I had also bought a VHS copy of The Ring off of eBay for five bucks. I felt compelled to show off my retro technology, so I slid the VHS into the TV and pressed ON. We all felt a shiver of nostalgic pleasure at the sound of the machine inhaling the tape. Then, immediately, that old familiar Ring sequence played.
Creepy, old, greenish black and white film: a washed out montage of a ladder against a wall, a woman brushing her hair in a mirror, that same woman jumping off a cliff, a tree on fire, maggots, etc…
This all played as soon as the VHS tape rolled—before the copyright WARNING, before the trailers, before the credits—without an introduction of any kind and, since we remembered the movie’s story, we knew that the act of watching the sequence effectively cursed us to death. The tactic worked—perhaps we had had too much wine, but we were freaked out and turned the TV off before the cursed montage ended.
I was struck by how The Ring does a similar thing, formally, to Benny’s Video. It also breaks the rules of consent by showing us the cursed tape’s contents before the credits arrive. We had agreed to watch a horror film—not an unmediated recording of violence.
But why do a Haneke movie and a Japanese horror remake both use this technique? To start, both films explore the aesthetics and phenomenology of videotapes. How they can be made by anyone who can afford the consumer technology. How they can be left in a cabin without a label. How you never know what might be on them. And how the effect of watching something unlabelled could be violent. This affords the possibilities for mystery and horror. What can this chaotic neutral medium do to our psyches?
To say nothing of our current time, Benny’s Video and The Ring acknowledge how videotapes have allowed for the distribution of previously forbidden images. Or—recordings of real instances-turned-images. Both films at their core are about the murder of a young girl and the results of its ongoing trace existence through an unregulated recording. Both films suggest that such a crime would have once been invisible. The video acts as uncensored witness and its consequences are new and chaotic.
For one of these films, the videotape helps articulate abstracted class violence. We like to forget that we have our farmers kill pigs for our bacon. In watching a real pig die, we are seeing through the eyes of a young man who has been alienated or desensitized to the point where he replicates the violence himself. Benny can only see his own violence from his own recording of it. In The Ring, on the other hand, the videotape serves as proof that evil exists and must be destroyed. Our attempt to understand the meaning of the videotapes’ sinister, garbled images—an attempt at empathy —will only lead to our own demise.
Chaotic neutral. The non-consensual formal strategy the videotape’s existence has enabled these films to use allows for two opposing political statements or views of humanity. In one of its most effective narrative twists, The Ring undermines the notion that violence is an avoidable chain reaction to previous traumas—that hurt people hurt people simply because they’re hurt. When Naomi Watts’ character pieces together the origins of the cursed VHS, uncovers Samara’s story, finds her bones and acknowledges her trauma, she believes she has lifted the curse and healed an open wound, closed the cycle of violence. Then her ex-boyfriend and confidante gets killed by Samara in the famous scene when the greasy-haired girl-ghost crawls out of the TV. Naomi Watts’ character realizes then what her son already knows: evil is evil, so forget all that liberal trauma-victim-rehab nonsense.
Perhaps The Ring, then, is profoundly conservative. Evil people exist and thus should be thrown in wells, not seen, heard and treated (moreover, Samara messed up her parents’ horse breeding business by scaring their horses). Benny’s Video, on the other hand, spends much of its story emphasizing Benny’s family’s bourgeois status and implicitly links this status and lifestyle to the violence Benny commits. He is insulated and protected from real class violence, which allows him to experiment with committing it directly himself. Here, the emphasis is that even if Benny is psychopathic, he is a product of a psychopathic society. In one film, a young girl is murdered because her lower class allows a bourgeois boy to get away with it. In the other, a girl’s anti-family, anti-business powers cannot be contained, so the only solution is to murder her.
In the last scene of The Ring, the mother teaches the son the lesson that the only way to survive is to expose someone else to the tape. Or, to rephrase, the only way to survive is to teach others by example: by exposing them to the tape, they too will have to learn that they need to protect themselves, not empathize or connect with an ostensible antagonist. It is better to be complicit in evil than to suffer at its hands. In Benny’s Video, Benny’s parents implicitly teach Benny that he is immune from the consequences of his actions. He can kill a little girl and nothing will happen, because they will cover for him—his mother will even take him for a vacation to Egypt while his dad disposes of the girl’s remains. Status ensures safety. It is Benny who must teach his parents a lesson: when he shows the police the tape, Benny’s conscience glimmers through the class insulation his parents had enshrouded him in.
And yet, this all comes back to the pig. Sobchack’s essay on No Lies focuses on how we the audience don’t know until the end that the movie is fiction. How is this possible? It is so obvious that it bears stating: unlike a novel or an oral story, a film (usually) involves a recording of real people existing. All fiction contains the essence of people who live or lived. No Lies’ ethical ambiguousness lies here, in the fuzzy boundaries between reality and performance. Even if it’s not real—is it not real? The actors did say those things and emoted that way, even if it was planned. Am I an audience member or a voyeur? Am I a victim or a participant? I think the seriousness of this question can be felt in the difference between Benny’s Video and The Ring. Despite its attempt to scare us, the videotape in The Ring is all suggestion, all trickery. Ultimately, evil is a compelling story some of us tell ourselves to separate us from others’ pain. But, in Benny’s Video, and in reality, a pig really did die for our bacon.