“Benny’s Video” (1992): a Look at Violence Through the Screen.

Another Michael Haneke’s film that you can’t stop arguing with yourself (if you’re watching it alone) or with someone else (if you’re not watching it alone). On the one hand, it’s just another teenage psychopath movie, but since I’m pumping up my skills as a film critic every day, today I’m going to try to dive in a little deeper.

And this time I got carried away thinking about the movie, and I started remembering that movies are known to be an illusion, and therefore Benny, obsessed with movies and looking at the world 24/7 (this is interesting to note, by the way) as if through a screen/mirror/glass/camera lens has little understanding of what’s happening to him at all. That is, what he observes or does is just an illusion to him, nothing more than a frame from a movie directed by himself.

This, of course, does not justify his bastard actions, but it gives them at least some meaning, and moreover, since we, the audience, like him, watch the movie and believe with a clear conscience in what is happening, how are we any better? Roughly speaking, if, like the main character, we tolerate violence on the screen, provided we perceive it as real while watching the film, are we not also tolerating violence in real life, if real life itself is, in principle, not much different from the film?

This idea is confirmed by the fact that in “Video Benny” there are screens, screens and more screens, which creates an absurd derealization when you look at the screen yourself. In short, if you look at one screen through the second, and the second through the third, and so on, it’s like they neutralize each other (like in math, which I hate — minus for minus gives you plus) and you involuntarily think that the point of having this guide to film reality — the screen — is nothing at all.

And once again, I can’t help mentioning the fact that in Haneke’s films it’s absolutely impossible not to get hooked on the detailed filming of fragments of life: all sorts of tapes, equipment, cups, and so on. For some reason, you pay special attention to all this in his films, and it’s like walking through a historical museum and admiring, “Look at this cool shit!”