What we Talk about when we Talk About Reality: Michael Haneke's Cache

Cache opens with a static shot of a house facing a street on the Rue des Iris; superimposed on the scene are film credits moving interminably across the screen. The audience, lulled into complacency, assumes no need to watch carefully; it's an ordinary day on an ordinary street, a bicyclist peddles by, birds chirp. Two voices, those of George Laurent, a popular French TV show host, and his wife, Anne, discuss the image. Only when white lines appear across the screen do we realize that we are watching a surveillance videotape, enlarged to the size of the theater screen. We are thrust into the perspective of the screen characters, ripped from the protection of the extra-diegetic camera, forced to question: What is the real information of our senses? From what perspective should we view the events on the screen? Who, or what information, can we trust?

The surveillance videotapes sent to the couple similarly interrupt the complacent rhythm of their well-ordered bourgeois life. There is no actual threat in the videos, they are of locations—the outside of the couple's house, George's family estate, a shabby area of Paris. Yet the threat of surveillance is omnipresent and terrifying. Their source? Perhaps a practical joke of their adolescent son, Pierrot, or a crazed fan of George, who is the Charlie Rose of France. The tapes begin to arrive wrapped in sketches of a small boy spitting blood; these crude drawings act as a spur to memory.

A long buried and seemingly forgotten incident from the father's childhood begins to emerge from repression, first in intrusive thoughts while George watches a videotape and then in dreams. Images of an Algerian boy, his mouth covered with blood, later, a dream scene presumably from George's childhood: The same boy cuts the head off a rooster, raises his ax and advances threateningly toward George while the rooster flops headless in the barnyard. George keeps his suspicions about the origins of the videos to himself, tracking down the rundown apartment building seen in one of the tapes and encounters Magid, the now-grown Algerian boy whose family had lived and worked on his parent's estate. Magid, had been left orphaned after an infamous incident in France's recent history when in 1961, 200 Algerian citizens were drowned in the Seine during a political protest. George's parents had planned to adopt Magid, but presumably because George told his parents that Magid had threatened him, Magid was sent instead to an orphanage. The two had not seen each other since George was six years old, the incident seemingly forgotten by George and his family, much in the same way that the drowning of 200 Algerians had disappeared from the French consciousness.

Magid, now a broken man living in poverty, denies any complicity with, or knowledge of, the tapes. Soon after their meeting, a videotape of their conversation, filmed by a hidden camera, arrives at the Laurent house, much to the chagrin of Anne, as George had told her nothing of his meeting with Magid or his suspicions. Other suspicions emerge from beneath the calm exterior of the Laurent family. Lies and half truths abound. Is Anne having an affair with her boss? Is their innocent appearing Pierrot actually the one who is sending the videos? On Pierrot's wall, his poster of Eminem warns white parents of the danger of their children. Other lies—the lie of the “spontaneous” discussion in George's TV studio that gets edited, the lie of George himself, with his veneer of civility in his role as a liberal social commentator, when in reality he remains the same bully he was as a child.

As the climate of terror is heightened, Pierrot goes missing for an evening; George has Magid and Magid's son arrested on the suspicion that they are involved in Pierrot's disappearance. Despite a lack of evidence, Magid is arrested and driven to the station in the back of the police van, once again a second class citizen. Pierrot returns the next day, having spent the night at a friend's house. But the tapes have set events in motion, careening towards the single manifest violent act that forms the center of Cache. Magid summons George to his home. In front of George, Magid slashes his own throat. This act propels the final recovery of memory that has set the events of the film in motion. True to the filmic traditions he has developed in Funny Games and Benny's Video (1997/2008) Haneke offers no simple solution, no salvation, no easy solution to the dilemmas provided. At the end of the film, we are left to speculate as to the origins of the tapes.

Cache explores the consequences of the destruction of memory and the interrelationship of personal and societal repression. Yet the film reaches beyond an allegory of the French suppression of their Arab citizens or a condemnation of the bourgeois family. Cache invites a textured, multileveled examination of the ways in which trauma, defense, and repetition interact, and the role of visual media, with its potential for creating an alternate, infinitely mutable, perceptual reality, in offering a novel mode through which emotion can be dulled and guilt avoided.

In Cache, interlaced themes spawn alternate interpretations that admit no final closure on meaning. Lying on the border between the hyper reality of technology and unconscious fantasy, Cache allows the evidence of the camera to be taken as “real” at the same time that its place in the overall story is continually altered. These shifts in perspective lend the film a dream-like quality, where what appears as reality is actually the product of multiple condensations, displacements, and an association driven, rather than a linear, narrative. We see the video of George's childhood home; in the next scene he is visiting his mother in that house. George receives a videotape wrapped in a picture of him in the television studio; in the next scene, he is in the studio speaking to his boss. Only the capacity for secondary revision allows sense to be made of these juxtapositions. The film becomes a screen for multiple projections, those of the audience, those of the unconscious fantasies of the characters, and those engendered by the possibility of omnipresent surveillance.

Haneke, acutely sensitive to the visual media's capacity for deception has made its effects on behavior central to his work. In Benny's Video a boy repeatedly views a tape of himself slaughtering a young girl; in Funny Games the same actor as a homicidal young man rewinds the film to alter the progression of the plot. Previous films suggest the characters' actions result from the deforming of human relationships by bourgeois society. Cache, by providing the genetic roots of George's dilemma, highlights how our technologies interact with intrapsychic conflicts. The datum of our senses is no longer trustworthy, “real and virtual,” to quote Gilles Deleuze, can be used to defend against what is “real and actual.” One consequence is that the structure of the ego's mutually dependent autonomies from its motivational core as well as external reality are altered. As drive representations become more isolated from potential correctives and limitations in reality, there is a paradoxical intensification of the power of unconscious fantasy in the creation of a disavowed, yet active ongoing narrative of the self. By allowing for the editing and control of data that the sensory apparatus perceives as authentic, the visual media create an image veil that fosters alienation from the authentic matrix of the drives and related primary affects of love and hate that provides a resistance to reality as well as fosters its creative elaboration through subliminatory channels.

What substitutes for transformation, progression, and symbolic representation is the primitive structure of repetition. Several repetitive themes form the center of the iconography of Cache. These include the repetition of the boyhood conflict between Magid and George, (as adults, little has changed between them, George maintains his unassailable privilege, Magid is left only physicality as a response) the repetition of the cutting of the rooster's head, now retold as Magid's self-beheading, the repetition of Magid as orphan and his son, orphaned by Magid's suicide, the repetitive structure of the rewound tapes.

Augmented by its dream-like qualities and density, the power of Cache lies in the way Haneke induces in the audience the potentially disruptive affects generated by these technological changes. Through the combination of the absence of a standard narrative and his extraordinary use of long shots, Haneke forces us to take an active role in the narrative's construction, making it imperative that fantasy enters into our interpretation of the film, while compelling us to look at that which would normally elude attention. By destabilizing our position as safe observers, we are unable to find a secure point of view; as our identifications continually shift, so does our perspective. Each time the outside of George and Anne's house is shown, our perception is altered; the static banality of the long shots become infused with terror. The ever accruing knowledge breeds suspicion, paranoia, and dread as the polite surface falls apart—not just within the film, but induced in the audience, who are increasingly implicated in the filmic event. The involvement of the audience transforms Cache into a profoundly moral and ethical film, one that demonstrates how attempts to disavow our past are futile, leaving one, at best, empty, and at worst, forced to repeat.