Benny's Video
Directed by Michael Haneke (Austria, 1992)
With Arno Frisch, Angela Winkler
Premiered in Australia at the 42nd Melbourne International Film Festival
Reviewed by Margarita Windisch
Benny's Video is the second part of a trilogy by German-born director Michael Haneke, exploring the increasing emotional sanitisation of Austrian society.
More than a look at the effects of video violence, the film is a distressing insight into capitalist society in which reality is progressively distorted and replaced by the ever-expanding influence of sensational cinema and videos, leaving the viewer without space to form opinions or to extend the boundaries of experience and imagination.
Benny is a young teenager living with his rich parents in Vienna. The BMW is shiny, the apartment clean and sterile. Everything is stored away, including feelings.
Benny, although intelligent, is totally alienated and removed from reality. His fascination with videos, especially violent ones, becomes apparent. Reality exists only through the lens of a camera, and the camera is ever present.
One day Benny meets a girl his age in the video shop, and they spend a shy afternoon together in the empty apartment, until Benny encourages the girl to shoot him with a stolen abattoir gun. She can't do it so he shoots her. He is more concerned with the blood messing up the clean floor than with the actual murder. And he films it all.
Benny's parents are now confronted with the dead body of an unknown girl in their closet. There is no terror on the faces, no fear in their eyes — no emotions visible at all. For the family, the murder is a nuisance and a tarnish on the picture of the perfect bourgeois family. The parents have to make choices, and it all happens in the most controlled manner.
In the meantime, the camera keeps rolling. Although the parents get rid of the body and keep the murder secret to "help" their son, Benny turns them in to the police. And it doesn't even seem strange.
The film is not explicitly violent but deals very cleverly with a lot of subtle violence. It is a chilling statement with an emotionally cold and hostile landscape and no easy answers.
Benny's Video doesn't fall into the trap of depicting violent videos as the epitome of everything that is going wrong. It is more a warning of an increasingly alienated and decayed society.
The film is straightforward, the camera brutally honest and the alienation of the protagonists very real and scary. This is a courageous effort to go beyond scratching surfaces and offering answers full of moralistic and erroneous assumptions. It is also a challenge to the conventional consent-manufacturing media and western society as a whole.