Issue 4: Summer 2009
Cache
Phillina Sun
In the politics and aesthetics of bourgeois democracy, transparency surfaces repeatedly as a prominent issue and trope. The question of transparency is the question of everyday participation by the people in political processes. As long as the doors of editing suites, board rooms and government cabinets remain closed to the public, the truth is rarely, if ever, certain. This irony is all too apparent with the increasing pervasiveness of technologies of hypervisibility, for the untested corollary arises that everything is visible or, rather, everything is available for viewer consumption. Within popular imagination, video - a technology of hypervisibility - is the machine with the potential to expose what is hidden, conspiratorial, and anti-democratic. Video takes on the aura of transparency, which Michael Haneke uses to inquire into the transparency of what it is seen and expose the repressed crimes of the colonial past in Caché (2005).
CONSPIRACY TEXT
Opening scene: a sunny day in a middle-class neighborhood. A bike whizzes across the frame, at which point the scene is rewound, rendering it secondhand, a pre-recorded moment, for the audience. The effect of rewinding signifies the first disjuncture, both a temporal interruption (of the present by the past) and a spatial dislocation (from the public to the private). This disjuncture calls on the viewer to notice the discrepancies between and within these spheres, while the apparatus of video asserts itself as the instrument by which Georges, the protagonist, is terrorized.
The ubiquity of surveillance technology has alarmed many, spurring dismal fantasies of a nearly realized dystopian society, e. g. Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985) or 1984. However, while CCTV monitors those areas that are the locus of conservative ideological fantasy - wherever economic and libidinal relationships, illicit or not, can be made - the technology is ideologically neutral. Video can oversee the unruly bodies which so vex the nation-state as well as catalyze political action against agents of State control. The Oakland BART shooting of Oscar Grant on New Year's Day and the harassment of Ian Tomlinson, shortly before his death during the G20 protests in London, have been recent instances where video captured evidence of police brutality. These have been replicated and disseminated on a wide scale, whether via mainstream TV channels or Youtube. As media scholar John Fiske points out, video's "authenticity . . . allows the weak one of their few opportunities to intervene effectively in the power of surveillance, and to reverse its flow." (1) Video's aura of transparency operates behind the shock we may share with Georges. Georges is liberal, affluent, and cosmopolitan - the ideal citizen of twenty-first century France. He is no typical subject of surveillance, i.e. "deviant" and patently criminal. Therefore when surveillance is turned unto Caché's protagonist, we are compelled to ask why.
Here we are cued into the nature of the film as a conspiracy text, in the sense that the conspiracy text's protagonist is usually a middle-class citizen thrown into the murky waters of national security and state terrorism. According to Fredric Jameson, the political surfaces in this genre as "a literary, representational or narrative constraint or feature," whereby the structural opposition of private and public spheres is created (2). The domestic becomes the last domain of personal power left to the individual in a bourgeois democracy; only among his family does a man take his 'natural' place as patriarch, a position to be defended at all cost. But Caché is not a conventional conspiracy narrative. Instead, the film collapses the opposition between individual and State; it shows that the domestic is no innocent realm left outside of the dirty wars of history.
What has transpired is a conspiracy, by the protagonist, against history. Haneke questions the rightfulness of the subjectivity of the European subject. He proposes a reassessment of the affluent Western subject's position in history. By what means has he reached his place in society? How has he acquired what he has? By the film's denouement, the route to Georges' accomplishments is not so morally certain; deceit underlies all that we see of his reality.
THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE
Throughout the film, the producer of these videos continues to haunt Georges. Through whose eyes are we seeing him? The conspirator knows where he works, has visited his childhood home, has observed the exchange between Georges and Majid, his suspected but never-confirmed videographer, via a hidden camera. The conspirator is everywhere and nowhere. Often it is not certain how we are observing a scene: via the eyes of the filmmaker or those of the conspirator?
We are even taken into Georges' dreams. Filmed in video, what is dreamed seamlessly, and disconcertingly, merges with the ‘real'. How reliable is the viewer's vision? How do we know what is real, remembered or mutilated by the desires of the dreamer? Is the real penetrated by our fantasies? Does the real interrupt the processes of remembering via the subconscious? Dream is a projection by the dreamer, Jean-Louis Baudry writes in response to Freud, who sees the dreams as outside of himself, "evok[ing] a distinctly cinematographic use since it involves images which, once projected, come back to the subject as a real perceived from the outside." (3) The real of the past returns as if a dream or, more appropriately for Georges, as a ghost within the machine, haunting him via video.
This haunting takes on socio-political nuance. Sociologist Avery Gordon writes, "Haunting occurs on the terrain situated between our ability to conclusively describe the logic of Capitalism in State Terror, for example, and the various experiences of this logic, experiences that are more often than not partial, coded, symptomatic, contradictory, ambiguous." (4) Spectres haunt the totality of neoliberal Western reality, at the junctures where capitalist triumphalist discourse would function as common sense. Georges refuses to connect the past to Majid's poverty, deflecting its spectres by addressing only the terror that the videos have elicited. Only his wife Anne confronts him after viewing a video of Georges's confrontation with Majid, do we discover that Majid had lost his parents on 17 October 1961, when hundreds of Algerian protestors were beaten to death by the police, or thrown into the Seine, where many drowned. The episode became an interlude, forgotten by both Georges and his parents. "What should I call it?" responds Georges when his wife questions his word-of-choice. "A tragedy? Maybe it was a tragedy. I don't feel responsible for it. Why should I?" Even as Georges confesses his connection to Majid, he persists in lying - for Georges' parents would have adopted Majid, had not Georges deceived them, so that they were compelled to send his rival to an orphanage. This refusal to acknowledge the truth lies at the heart of his politics; this refusal is a metaphor for mainstream France's refusal to address its colonial past.
Colonial loss, it has been argued, has tinted mainstream French response to immigrants and non-whites. Muslims, in particular, are reminders of a war that has been described as operating within "a semiotic twilight zone" (5) . The Algerian War was perceived by many in the metropole as illegitimate, drawing uncomfortable parallels with the Germans fighting the Resistance in WWII France. The war is rarely discussed within French national discourse; only until 1983 was post-WWII history taught in schools. The French philologist and historian Ernest Renan wrote, "Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical enquiry brings to light deeds of violence which took place in the origin of all political formations." (6) Forgetting is an active process, the vigilant erasure of the signs of violence, of revolution and colonial conquest, by which national unity had been fostered.
To maintain the body politic, the French democratic subject must be reified via the repression of ethnic difference, which operates as signs of alternative ways of being and relating. Hence the calls for banning Muslim headscarves from schools, integration which begs the erasure of Muslim difference, and anti-immigrant rhetoric á la le Pen. The violence of the original rift between colonizer and colonized is repeated again and again; 60% of xenophobic hate crimes in France are perpetrated against people of North African origin, who are predominantly Muslim.
La Haine (1995, Mathieu Kassovitz) depicts a sharply polarized world, between the affluent centre of Paris and its suburbs, little more than ghettoes for a discontented, multi-ethnic underclass. In one scene, a reporter and her cameraman attempt to interview Vinz, Hubert and Saïd - members of this underclass - from the safety of their car, to the young men's rage. A disjuncture transpires. Two visions simultaneously operate: while the media proffers the familiar image of an angry, ethnic Other - uncontrollable, violent, and ever-threatening - the film critiques the position of the media. Apropos, Hubert compares the treatment of their neighborhood to that of a drive-through zoo. Quite clearly, the film illustrates the problematic of citizenship in France, namely the practices of exclusion obscured by abstract and universalist calls of fraternité, liberté, and egalité.
TRANSPARENCY AND CONSPIRACY: OF THE SAME COIN
In Caché, as in La Haine, we are asked to re-think the transparency of the media itself. Georges eats, converses, and loves in a media-saturated environment. While media is ubiquitous, its quality is questionable. Ideas are commodities, with expiration dates, currencies that follow fashion and viewing figures. Images of war and hunger are ghostly TV transmissions, rendered as interludes, simultaneously severed from the past and receding from our present, so as to defy immediate historical understanding. War and famine are rendered into exceptional events that happen only to strangers, outsiders beyond the national body.
Disjuncture is ever eminent, wherever transparency is assumed. What we assume is the present of George's show is revealed as footage in mid-edit. The technology of the video apparatus signifies, as it does in the first scene, the disjuncture between the real and the projected. Visual information is edited so that the experienced is undetectably rearranged into that which is imagined. Georges, as a high-ranking media worker, occupies a position to deceive, not only to disclose the truth. Where transparency appears to exist, a conspiracy is created on a mundane and everyday level. The media converts soundbites and publicity into 'truth', where the triumphalist discourse of bourgeois democracy takes on all the power of common sense.
IMPOSSIBLE CLOSURE
As long as Georges refuses to remember, closure is impossible. In the final scene, Majid's son exchanges words (unheard) with Georges' son in front of the latter's school. The interaction is almost missable, embedded as it is within a setting where, it ostensibly appears, everyone mixes, regardless of class or race, in a successful Republic, where all may exercise the privileges and virtues of due citizenship. It is a scene of apparent democracy, of apparent innocence. But, due to the apparatus of video, we are left unsure of who is watching the sons - ourselves, or the ghost haunting the machine.
Phillina Sun is a poet, reviewer and researcher. She is often seen watching birds along the waterways of Galway
E-mail: phillina.sun@gmail.com