Benny's Video

Michael Haneke’s Benny’s Video (1992) anticipates his later film Funny Games, in that both are concerned with the nature of screen violence and how our desensitization to it precipitates a sense of ambivalence rather than fear or apprehension.

Benny (Arno Frisch, serving as a precursor for his later role in Funny Games) sits in his room and watches homemade videos of a pig being slaughtered, in addition to the constant barrage of national images of violence, and becomes so in tune with the filmed violence that he eventually ponders what it would be like to experience a murder himself. When his family goes away for the weekend, he invites a young girl over and sets up his video recorder. He is never sexually excited by the girl, but only by the video of the killing, and in this manner Haneke questions us as to where our sexual drive comes from, be it from filmic violence or from live flesh. After the inevitable killing, we watch Benny go about his day nonchalantly and eventually reveal the murder to his parents vis-à-vis the video tape of the killing.

His parents, for their part, decide to dispose of the body to protect Benny and while the father butchers the body into small pieces so that the girl can never be found, the mother takes Benny to Egypt. That the film stays with the mother and Benny during this time is a wonderful poke at our naturally curious desire to watch how the father disposes of the body, and that Haneke denies us this uncomfortable pleasure is readily apparent. He wants to deny us this primal thrill, even as he exposes the awareness of that voyeuristic thrill to us.

The film ends on a subversive reversal extolling redemption, but this reversal doesn’t embody any true redemption. Benny tells the police what he did, in effect undermining his parents’ disregard of the law. Yet there does not exist any explicit reason for this action. Instead, we can only take away those small throwaway glimpses of Benny’s humanity, such as his showing of posthumous respect for the dead girl, covering her legs when her dead body is splayed on the floor.

Despite a bravura bit of filmmaking where Haneke lures the audience into wanting to view the central murder of the girl, and again questions our need for such complicit viewing even as he hides most of the images offscreen, tantalizing us with only sound, Benny’s Video isn’t quite ready to sophisticatedly cover the terrain that Funny Games covers, and so it never quite achieves the same exceptional and uncomfortable quality that Funny Games is awash in. Certainly a good film, but never quite great.

Benny's Video: 6.5/10