Réflexion Cachée

“…the ‘subject’ is no more than a unifying reflection.” (Lacan paraphrased in Dayan 109)

What I found striking about Michael Haneke's Cache was not the lack of reverse-shots: there were multiple instances when Haneke chose to follow this convenvention for most scenes that included a conversation (perhaps to avoid a complete revolt from the audience). Nor did I find the lack of a knowledge of “who is watching” particularly peculiar. What was so jarring about Haneke’s Cache, was the lack of subject –the lack of a unified whole with which the viewer can identify.

In his blog, Michael Jacob note

d that in viewing the opening shot of the house “continues until the frame begins to rewind – [when] we realize that we are seeing the point of view of George watching a tape.” While I fully agree with Jacob’s use of this moment in film, I would like to make one correction; when we see the frame begin to rewind (we know this through the black and white swiggles across the screen) we realize that we are watching what the director wants us to perceive as “a tape”. We have absolutely no knowledge of many things we expect to be aware of. As Jacob points out the lack of a reverse shot makes us conscious that we have no idea who filmed it. Yet even stranger to me: we have no idea who is watching it. We begin to hear the voice-overs of Juliette Benoche and Daniel Auteuil - Haneke is clueing us into the fact that we are among a small group of spectators. Yet, in becoming members of this small group, we presumably join them in their space – their off-screen space. We are now privy to the fact that we are not just watchin

g a house but joining in three separate gazes: that of two disembodied voices and a third with whom we never

 come in contact. This becomes as disorienting as the scene in Being John Malkovich when we adopt the view of John Cusack looking out into the world through the eyes of an unknown individual. Yet even then the director, Spik

e Jonze. gives us a mask to indicate to us that we are looking through someone else’s eyes.

Haneke gives us no such aid – at least at first – and I believe that it is this moment of disorientation (and the dialogue’s claim of its creepiness) that sets us up to perceive the later lack of counter-shot as unsett

ling. Yet I would claim that it is this distance that allows us to view the very world of its characters so differently. Rather than succumbing to persuasive power of one point-of-view (what Dayan and Bonitzer call ideology), we are detached – forced (apparently unfortunately f

or most American viewers) to maintain our own point-of-view.We are not connected enough to the character of George Laurent to r

ealize instantly that the small Arab child that appears on screen is a moment of flashbac

k. Here we must maintain our own frame of mind rather than letting Haneke reframe it for

 us. Yet this is difficult: Haneke gives us no individual with whom we can ground our confusion 

and th

us gives us no place for identity within the fantasy of the on-screen space. In his essay “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema” Daniel Dayan points to Jacques Lacan’s theories of the forming of human reality as a useful tool to understanding the role of film (108-109). Quite si

mplified, Lacan agrued that a child without language (us without a grounding in the on-screen space) identifies with their mother (the subject-usually the protagonist whose thoughts we share) and through this identification imagines their reality as a unified one analogous to that of the subject.

If one were to do as Dayan recommends and compare to film language to spoken/written language – to look at it on the level of a sentence – one would find that Haneke’s film is a sentence without a subject. This signifies a disappearance of the “imaginary” (which serves to unify as one subject) and places the viewer in the place of the schizophrenic: struggling to make one identifying “truth” out of the plurality of (unnamed) views provided for them. But in this film there is distinctly no distinct truth, in fact, as Haneke said, “film is a lie at 24 frames per second, but to serve the truth.” And this is, indeed, far more “true” than being sewn (sutured) into the ideological viewpoint of one subject whom you are supposed to reflect.