I'll get the ball rolling. Here's an essay on The Piano Teacher...
Pair a literary work and a film and analyse how each represents ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’. Compare and contrast how each accomplishes this task in the specific medium.
“Power saturates all relationships, power is everywhere, and therefore any human situation can simply be boiled down to the question of whose orders are being carried out.”
Drew Daniel
It is possible, if a little naïve, to view Michael Haneke’s 1999 adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek’s 1983 novel The Piano Teacher as the story of an unsuitable relationship that goes wrong. Indeed, one could summarize the plot thusly: Erika Kohut, a thirty-something teacher at the Vienna Academy who still lives with her mother, finds herself entering into an extra-curricular partnership of sorts with one of her students, the young, blonde and handsome Walter Klemmer. For reasons beyond her control things do not go to plan, the unity is shattered and, in true melodramatic fashion, Erika’s life is irrevocably changed. This summary, knowingly reductive as it is, ignores the crucial element that underpins the novel and the film: sexuality and its impact on inter-gender relations. This essay intends to look at the role that the ‘world of sexual desperation that feeds on perverse fantasies and grim sado-masochism,’ plays in shaping both the narrative of the texts and the characters within.
Jelinek and Haneke present the consumer, be it the reader or the viewer, with a uniquely tortured, female-focused sense of representational sexuality that encompasses S&M (and specifically the paradoxes that underpin submissive/dominant relationships), scopophilia (via the mediums of pornography and peep shows), and the Freudian overtones that one associates with unbearably close adult mother-daughter relationships. Because of this, I feel that textual analyses, with their ability to ‘uncover the processes involved not only in the production of textual meaning but also in the relationship between text and spectator,’ of key scenes that hold dramatic power, and raise interesting theoretical notions, in the texts to be key to decoding the codifications of Erika’s desire. These readings will be, in part at least, influenced by psychoanalytical and feminist theories of film.
The role that sex and gender play in The Piano Teacher, and in La Pianiste is slightly different (to take a brief diversion, it is interesting to note that Haneke’s use of a French title, which, like the Jelinek’s Der Klavierspieleren, emphasizes Erika’s gender as well as ‘her agency as a piano player, rather than facilitating of agency to others as a teacher,’ something that is, obviously, lost in the English translation). Jelinek’s focus, arguably, is on ‘‘body politics and the pornographic exploitation of women’s bodies,’ whilst Haneke seems concerned with the viewer’s response to the ethics of cinematic sexuality, and how we, as spectators, define our relationship to it. Films ‘about’ sex, by which I mean films that nominally, at least, place sexual identity at their thematic core, force the viewer to consider their reaction to sex in response to the relationships and reactions portrayed on screen. Haneke, a director with an interest in spectatorship and the mediums of cinema, video and television (see the pig slaughtering footage in Benny’s Video, the on-screen, in-film rewind in Funny Games and the tapes that are sent to Georges in Cache), forces us, during the course of La Pianiste, into questioning ourselves as to why we watch sexual material. Is it for titillation, the voyeuristic thrill of watching sex on a big screen in a dark room? For the purpose of identifying, or attempting to identify, with the actors onscreen? ? Or for the mere joy we take from looking at things?
For the sake of the essay, let’s decide that the second possibility is the most accurate one, leading us as it does, to questions regarding spectatorship, identification and the gaze. Foregrounding female sexuality is more common in literature than film but Jelinek’s novel still has the power to shock, largely because of its use of narrator and narrative. The most obvious difference between the texts is their use of narrators, and narrative structures. Jelinek employs a third person omnipresent narrator who, as one would expect, is privilege to the thoughts and motivations of the three central characters of the novel (and film), Erika, Walter and Erika’s mother. Thus Jelinek can tell us internalizations about these people such as ‘more than anything, she wants to prevent Erika from being thoroughly reshaped by a man,’ or, ‘Erika gets to the heart of artistic and individual considerations: She could never submit to a man after submitting to her mother for so many years.’ Our narrator, in a move that Haneke reflects in his film, is as obsessed with Erika as Erika herself is with Walter Klemmer, and the promised on unbridled sexual freedom that she comes to associate with him. Haneke’s constant framing of Erika as focal point allows me to introduce the work of the theorist Laura Mulvey, best known for her work on the ‘male gaze’ (film’s traditional codification of viewing as a male pleasure) and her idea that, in film ‘too often the erotic function of the woman is represented by the passive.’ Despite working outside the mainstream, and presenting us with a female lead, Haneke, admittedly hemmed in by his source material, can only present Erika as a passive spectator of her own sexuality.
The reader and viewer are first confronted (and a case could be made for the authors of both texts as being confrontational) with the uneasy sense of sexuality that Erika displays when, early on, she visits a peep show. This is changed to a pornographic video booth in the film, and the implications of this will be discussed. This viewing of sex, wherein we are spectators of Erika’s spectatorship can be read as a comment on the scopohilic nature of sex, being as it is ‘always minimally exhibitionist.’ It could be argued that film propagates the notion of scopophilia (the joy found in merely looking at something) as, ‘a double phenomenon occurs: first, cinema constructs the spectator as subject (the beholder of the gaze); second, it establishes the desire to look.’
In Jelinek’s novel, Erika Kohut travels to a peepshow. Her actions, and relatively unselfconscious stance in the face of an overwhelmingly masculine, and female-objectifying atmosphere marks her out amongst the crowds of men who insert coins into an ‘insatiably gaping slot’ . She assumes the role of the jaded female, the astute outsider, aware that the women on show blur into one whilst:
‘The men, in contrast, have individual personalities: some men like one thing, some like something else. On the other hand, the horny bitch behind the window, beyond the barrier, has only one urgent desire: That asshole behind the glass window should keep jerking until his cock falls off.’
This quote demonstrates both the explicit, pornographized language of modern sexuality, and the demarcations between the looker and the look-ee. The customer (and shows of this type present sex and sexuality as a gender-specific commodity with an inherent hierarchical structure) has a barrier placed between themselves and that which that gaze at. It is perhaps this sense of agency (with the paying customer as the agentic partner in the relationship with the performer) that results in Erika’s assertion that she ‘doesn’t want to act, she only wants to look.’ Acting out sexual impulses can, as the reader and viewer will find out, be problematic.
In the film, the protagonist enters a video booth and passively gazes into the screen in front of her. In the film sequence, after entering the booth, Erika is presented with a series of images that focus on male centered pornography . She selects a video that features a woman lying prostrate on a table performing oral sex on a male porn actor. Cutting between a shot of the act being carried out (from a side on perspective), to Erika’s passive face, to a further section of the video (wherein the camera has shifted to the male’s perspective, watching him force his penis down his co-stars throat) and back to Erika, Haneke displaces the viewer, seemingly questioning why her reaction, or lack of, disturbs us. The reaction in the film is the same as in the book: she picks up a semen-encrusted tissue, holds it tightly to her face and inhales deeply. This riposte to the material she is viewing is an, ‘inversion of the excesses of masturbation,’ and furthers the notion that the piano teacher pursues a passive form of sexuality. Reacting to something ‘specifically designed to sexually arouse’ in this manner alters the viewer to the possibility that the character’s sexuality does not fit in with societal, and generic filmic norms.
The following section of the essay is concerned with what this writer feels is the most crystalline, and interesting, illumination of the power balance in the sexual relationship and gender battle (an admittedly awkward phrase, but one that chimes with Beatrice Hanssen’s identification of Jelinek as being a writer with militaristic tendencies), that is, the letter that the teacher writes to her student. This list of demands, of ceded permission and agency, of bodily subservience, performs two functions in the texts: it allows the reader or viewer to ‘discover’ that which Erika has been hiding, and thus what drives her and the relationship she forges with Walter, and it also acts as a fetishistic object and signifier of the importance of both clarity of expression and communication in the transferal of individual desire into a mutual, agreed upon sexuality.
Before commenting on the content, as represented by Jelinek and Haneke, an examination of the form and its theoretical offshoots is necessary. Writing a letter is a process of mediation and modulation. Turning the clutter of thoughts into a series of ordered and coherent sentences requires a precision that the spoken word may often lack. In writing a letter we have a perfect addressee in mind: the receiver of our letter is as much an imaginary as a real figure. We project upon the person we are writing for and as a result the letter can be viewed as ‘a fetish object…and in the midst of a text, there is always the other, the author.’
The Barthesian notion of the author draws attention to an idea that the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan had about unsent letters. When a letter is sent meaning is lost (this loss of meaning when the written becomes read is the basis for Barthes’ famous ‘death of the author’ theory) – meaning, as in an author’s ‘intended’, or ‘inherent’, or ‘true’ meaning of a text is untransferable. So, in this case, Erika’s desires are sublimated by her desire to see Walter reacting favorably to the written form they have taken. The intended shared meaning does not transfer. Thus we can bring back Lacan by questioning the legitimacy of Erika sending the letter, as:
By saving the letter…we are not relinquishing our ideas or dismissing it as foolish or unworthy, we are, in effect, saying that our idea is too precious to be entrusted to the gaze of the actual addressee, who may not grasp its worth.’
Walter Klemmer does not ‘grasp its worth’ and the idealization of communication that Erika wishes for is shattered.
A letter, and specifically the letter in question here, is a written declaration of risk. To draw attention to the quote from musician and academic Drew Daniel that opens this essay, we can read a letter as an establishing of a power relationship. Erika’s letter seeks to establish a clearly defined sexual relationship of control and submission. She has codified and structured her sexuality, fetishized her fetish, and ‘a fetish has to be kept, mastered, held, like the photograph in the pocket.’
Written sex and sexuality can be seen as having advantage over cinematic representations because we can be made privy, if the author so wishes, to the reasoning behind the desires that drive the characters. A voice-overless, chronologically linear film with very, very little expository dialogue does not have this luxury. Even though Erika Kohut never leaves the narratorial field of vision (Haneke’s focus is always on her, the ‘world’ of the film does not exist or function without Isabelle Huppert), the back-story, the explanation of why she is who she is, is left unspoken, It is in this scene where the disparity between literary and cinematic sexualities is at its most obvious.
Shot in a tightly enclosed bedroom, the letter reading acts as the central dramatic scene in both texts. What should act as the starting point of an embarkation of a fully functioning sexual relationship becomes the death of desire and the beginning of a sinister dichotomy. Erika’s wish to be controlled (surely springing from her unusual home life) results in the deterioration of the sexual feeling Walter has for her, but also causes him to think about acting out her demands out of spite. The content of the letter, in which amongst other things sees Erika tellingly write:
‘Gag me with some stockings I will have ready. Stuff them in so hard that I’m incapable of making any sound…for that is my dearest wish, to be tied and locked up next door to my mother, but out of reach behind my bedroom door”
is a manifestation of her dream of being dominated. But is this not a form of domination itself? For Erika to write the letter indicates the creation of a secondary inter-personal relationship of power: she is begging him to perform acts on her that he has no inclination to carry out. If ‘sado-masochistic sex is a complex, ritualized sexual performance between adults,’ Erika’s letter is the moment the ritual breaks down.
The reader of this essay familiar with the texts in question will notice several key omissions: I have not referenced the scene that proceeds the unveiling of the letter in which Erika performs a sex act on Walter in a toilet in the academy (after having placed crushed glass in the pocket of a younger student who was friendly with Walter), the scene that follows the letter reading, in which Erika attempts to perform oral sex on Walter but chokes and vomits, or the climatic scene in which Erika is raped by her student (who acts out the wishes of his teacher, ‘this is exactly what you wanted’ ) . This is intentional, an echoing of Haneke’s style of film making in which, the ‘spectator’s desire to see the sexually explicit and voyeuristic is either frustrated by the use of off-screen space or directly confronted by the rescindment of satisfaction.’ For an essay on a blocked, unrealized sexual obsession, this ending is only fitting.
― the Shearer of simulated snowsex etc. (Dwight Yorke), Thursday, 21 February 2013 17:48 (twelve years ago)