Who did it? An interpretation on the film Caché, by Michael Haneke By Sérgio Tavares-Filho ([email protected])

The analysis of the present work is on the film Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005), and the attempt is to propose an answer to the question that has originated the conflict on the film. That would constitute an essay on theory and critic of narratives, and the reflections over Caché would, hopefully, pose questions upon how texts are viewed by the viewers nowadays and if there are possibilities of subvert, create or enhance the experience of interpretation. Finally, the essay makes a modest attempt to classify Caché as a modernist, remodernist or postmodernist film, trying also to advocate that some film categories doesn’t necessarily lack meaning, but rather make meaning out of form.

Reader, narrator and author: at the same room An interpretation on the plot solution of the film Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005) leads us to a conclusion that may open a discussion of an unusual form of narration. The relevance of such discussion is upon new ways of creating meaning and interaction with the viewer, a gap that may be broadened by new media supports as, in example, the internet as a supporting media

to film, books or other 'texts'. Therefore, this is not the film’s analysis, but the plot solution analysis. The mystery proposed by the script consists on who delivered a videotape to the main characters of the story. Some clues are given to the audience, but in the end the question remains unanswered. According to Tzvetan Todorov, Russian formalist, the gender of the “fantastic” narrative can belong to the “eerie” universe (as Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, where mysteries are solved by unusual, but rationally explainable coincidences) or to the “marvelous” universe (where facts are explained by supernatural phenomena). However, a particular interpretation on Caché permits us to a peculiar form of narrative: an “acausal” gender, where the fantastic event (in Caché, the mysterious delivery of the tape to the protagonists) has no cause inside the story’s world (the diegetic world of the story). Its cause set outside the narrative’s universe. Thus the fact is not completely acausal, having its genesis on the author himself, that intervenes on the story as a direct agent, without empowering any character to make such interventions. Usual interventions made by authors consist in this empowerment: the author instruments a character, makes up a thunderstorm, creates coincidences (if the story follows no supernatural occurrences). In another case, the author will create ghosts, haunting or other phenomena that will act upon the narrative to the author’s desired direction. But in Caché, who delivered the videotape? Differently from a fantastic tale where tapes “materialize” on a room (it is very unlikely that Haneke was trying to write a sci-fi film about spontaneous materialization of objects, nor an eerie story about dream and madness, being the case of the characters imagining the whole thing), it is possible to affirm: who delivered the tape was Michael Haneke. This direct intervention of the author on the universe of the narrative changes the perception of the whole narrative experience, since the reader knows (or get to know after the story has ended) there is an external agent acting on the diegetic (fictional) universe of the story. Furthermore, this agent (the film director) shares the same world (or level, or dimension) as the reader: Haneke is in Germany while the viewer is watching the film, but he was able to “sneak” inside the story and put the tape at the character’s house.

That refers also to Michel Foucault's text “The Author Function”, where he affirms that “this aspect of an individual, which we designate as an author (...), are projections”. With the intervention of the author on the diegesis1 of the narrative, the author is not only a projection, but rather an actual presence, an alien object to the narrative. The lack of a logical, rational or supernatural explanation within the narrative that explains the appearance of the tape in the character’s bedroom implies on an agent located outside the whole universe of the characters. In other words, it is an agent that is able to travel between the real and fictional world. Such position may set a fracture on the narrative diegesis and weaken its verosimilarity; however, as the reader realizes that this agent is someone who is part of the real world (someone that shares the same world as the reader) this strategy may create an exciting experience of the story. We might think of it as what would have happened if Alfred Hitchcock in one of his anthological cameos had changed the position of the crime evidences, or stashed the crime weapon somewhere else. In this manner, it’s easy to imagine the effect, although in Haneke’s case we (the viewer) will only realize the director’s interference after the movie has ended. But Hitchcock and his cameos are an interesting way of perceiving the director within the narrative waiving to us, the viewers.

Haneke: a playful filmmaker

1 The (fictional) world in which the situations and events narrated occur. (wikipedia.org)

A reality-game? Regarding the problem of diegesis and verosimilarity, it is proper to claim that a strong diegesis is based on a coherent set of laws that rules the created universe, so if the characters remain loyal to their natural and spontaneous reactions, the diegesis coherence is preserved. If “every fictional work projects purely intentional objects outside the narrative” (ROSENFELD, 2005, p. 15), the story would remain referring to these objects (people, places, the real world) that may or not be ontically autonomous objects. The correspondent object to the agent would be the author, which is a real person and therefore an ontically autonomous object, but not projected, as the author in this case is the agent himself. If it is possible to say that the narrative would become a fictional world that suffers direct interventions from the real world, a very contemporary and popular analogy would be the reality-shows, where characters set on a closed environment suffer specific external influence by an agent. That places the reader on a superior field, as an accomplice to the author, witnessing the author’s intervention over the “aquarium” where the characters are: in a way, the feeling of standing on the shoulder of a giant that not only had the power to create all the narratives and character, but also to intervene on it the way he wants. The means to reveal this “intervention”, from the ludologist point of view, the means to reveal this “agency” action (MURRAY, 1998), will depend on the author’s creativity. Will the reader realize the agent is the author only after the end of the narrative? The reader may even become part of the author’s game, becoming another character trying to figure out who delivered the tapes. Or on a written/narrated text, even the narrator, allegedly omniscient, might question who performed that action. After that, it is possible to ask when the story has really ended – if we have reached a point where the reader is one of the characters, does the narrative end in the aftermath, in the real world? When do the reader realize what really happened? Would that be a “post-reading” status setting the end of the story? We might also wonder about how narratives could suffer this same intervention in the beginning of the film – the viewer might know that is this kind of “real-world director” or “godlike director” who performed the direct interference. Or it is even possible to imagine how the

characters would react within the story if they knew that someone is able to do such illogical interferences. New media, channels and platforms allows the viewer to have much more power of interaction – even a power that the viewer may not want to have. But taking interpretation on account, we might discover such potential of interaction and “agency” in other ways than simply letting the viewer to interfere on the narrative. Supporting websites, cross-media of all kinds, puzzles, enigmas, investigations gathering different kinds of media are possible, making the opera even more broad, abstract and open. As the content of internet is unlimited and overtly accessible, an author might even lead the text's intention to the web and the range of possibilities gets even broader. Such “freedom of choice” is not always welcome by the viewer, who often prefers to be a spectator rather than a co-author (maybe Jean-Paul Sartre would say that as we are doomed to choose, the passive viewer finds relief on linear and conventional storytelling!). But apart from viewers co-authoring and making their own intentions as author over texts with intentions of their own, it is possible to realize that when author, narrator and reader reach the same level, there are also less hierarchically fixed parts and, thus, a puzzling and exciting experience may be proposed, somewhat differently from what viewers are used to.

The Characters of Caché: rationality won’t solve Haneke’s game.

Modernist, Remodernist, Postmodernist: Conclusion We might straight-fowardly ask: are we all characters on Haneke’s story? Regardless if we are or if we are not, as a viewer, we must find the path from difficulty of interpretation to the stability (perhaps to the instability) of realizing the obvious fact that he’s at the same the same physical world as the director, a director who can cross the frontier of fictive and real world. It is important to remember that after the reader realizes this, there is a change on the paradigm, and the reader assumes the role of Haneke, if not the role of an agent, the role of an accomplice of the director.

Postmodernist film is usually more concerned with graphics, aesthetics and subverting the chronological order of the narrative (“Postmodernist film”, Wikipedia definition). In Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hours Party People the main character speaks directly to the camera, breaking the “4th wall”; or in Karel Reizs’s The French Lieutenant, a film where actors’ and characters’ lives interconnect and overlap. Haneke himself has a wide use of 4th wall break and fictive universe subversion in Funny Games (Denmark, 1997, and USA, remake, 2007), where the characters speak and look at the audience and even rewind the movie in order to change the order of facts happened within the narrative. We can se a prominent participation on the viewer here, not in the “web 2.0” mode, but one step closer to that – participation and interaction seem a reality much closer from these narrations than previous types of narratives. It is discussable, however, that films which subvert the narrative structure do not show a deeper meaning. Caché, for example, tells a controversial story about marriage, parenthood and xenophobia, not necessarily using the narrative disruption, but for sure influenced by it. It is not possible to say that the human dilemmas discussed in the film would be told in the exact manner if the film was told in a more conventional way of narration. Taken altogether,

conclusions would suggest that even aesthetics, “4th wall” break and change in the chronological order might deeply impact the narrative. The depth of meaning will depend, of course, on the main theme explored by the filmmaker, and some ideas will reach the desired impact only with the “tools” developed on postmodernist film – it is not always that a viewer goes to the movie theater and only in the aftermath realizes that the director had been played with him as well as he was playing with the characters, and communicating with you in a much closer level than the usual. However what you think of that is a question which remains unsolved — but perhaps it was nice of him to ask.

References Barthes, Roland. "Death of The Author." Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill & Wang, 1978.

Caché. Dir. Michael Haneke. Perf. Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche. Film. 2005.

"Caché." International Movie Database. 2001. IMDB. 5 Dec. 2008 .

Diegesis. Wikipedia.org. 14 Oct. 2008 .

Eco, Umberto, and Richard McKay Rorty. Interpretation and Overinterpretation. Ed. Stefan Collini. New York: Cambridge UP, 1992.

Foucault, Michel. The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon, 1988.

McHale, Brian. Constructing Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Postmodernist film. Wikipedia.org. 19 Nov. 2008 .

Rosenfeld, Anatol. A Personagem de Ficcao [The Fictional Character]. Sao Paulo, SP: Perspectiva, 2005.

Todorov, Tzvetan. Pour une theorie du recit [For a Theory of Prose]. Sao Paulo, SP: Perspectiva, 2001.