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In Plain Sight: Watching Michael Haneke's Caché

2021; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 14; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/thr.2021.0115

1939-9774

Michael Autrey,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

In Plain Sight:Watching Michael Haneke's Caché Michael Autrey (bio) I had been going to the movies alone since I was fifteen, hoping to meet a film that would save me from myself, and make me interesting. For as long as I could remember I had been trying to get away from something, and to be interesting would be a means of escape, though from what I could never say, not exactly, except boredom. At sixteen I was obsessed, briefly, passionately, with Nathalie Baye. I saw J'ai epousé une ombre (I Married a Shadow) four times in three days, and came to school Monday to tell my friends I was in love with her. En masse, they trooped to Cinema 21, to investigate, and they were not impressed. They had seen right through me; I was the boy who cried Art! While my father spent a decade dying, my habit acquired a new purpose; there was something definite to escape: my father, who had always inspired fear, and little else, unless it was pity. When close to suffering it is hard, but not impossible, to deny pity. I learned that then. In my twenties and home from college, friends from way back confided in me, over beers, that while they had enjoyed coming over to play and goof off back in the day, they always made sure to leave before my father returned home. They had feared him as much as I had; and I couldn't get away from him, not then and not now; and age, which had done so much to him, had done little for him. He had not mellowed. He remained committed to violence and self-pity, and to intimidation when unable to do violence. Here was a man who, a little less than two years before he died, in the middle of a six-week stretch in a rehab center, on oxygen while recovering from a lung infection that [End Page 593] nearly killed him, said, while sitting on the edge of the bed, in reference to the cane I had not hopped to get him: If I was a younger man, I'd beat you with it. At least I knew he wasn't lying; at least he had never said, This hurts me more than it hurts you. Dying embarrassed him; he griped and sighed. With him I waited in waiting rooms, for him I took notes while the doctors talked around his curiously smooth torso, so hard to look at: his organs just so much soft fruit in a skin bag. To spare him I read the dry, dire pamphlets—Lymphomas: A Guide for Patients and Their Families, Understanding Drug Therapy and Managing Side Effects (for Leukemia, Lymphoma, Myeloma)—scattered on the sick like propaganda dropped from planes behind enemy lines. Hospitalized with his second pulmonary embolism in a month I organized and brought, from the nearby bistro, a half bottle of Gigondas, a Spiegelau wineglass, and pappardelle with morels in port wine sauce, steaming in a porcelain tureen. While I was returning the dish the nurse slipped him two sleeping pills, contraindicated for his condition (his doctor had written No Sleeping Aids in his chart). He was convinced she was trying to kill him. For him I dozed all that night in a chair with my feet against the door, not to prevent her from coming in but to make sure I was awake when she was in the room. During the years he was dying I went, alone, to the movies more than ever. To escape, and to accelerate the arrival of whatever it was that was coming for him and for me. For me: some consequence for my terminal ambivalence; for him: some consequence for his inveterate violence. On the evening I went to Michael Haneke's Caché (titled Hidden in the UK) at the Fox Tower 10, a corporate art house, I'm sure I went with the hope that I would emerge interesting. I took a seat in the back row, right under the projection window, and only an elderly couple, distinguished and expensively coiffed, sat nearby, keeping one tasteful, empty seat between us...