Review: Benny’s Video

Benny’s Video is a smug, contemptuous, passive-aggressive attack on the dehumanizing effects of media.

Benny's Video
Photo: Roxie Releasing

Michael Haneke’s Benny’s Video is a smug, contemptuous, passive-aggressive attack on the dehumanizing effects of media, without even the common decency to offer shrill sensationalism to punch up its subsequently feckless, reactionary, pomo assertions. Benny is a young, slate-faced neo-Nazi-to-be who checks out at least one violent video from the local video store every day. The desk in his room—in his parents’ swank high-rise condo—is so completely covered with a makeshift video-editing bay that he does his homework lying in bed while blankly watching Hollywood carnage. His favorite video, though, is a nasty piece of piggy snuff that he shot himself while on holiday with his parents at their country ranch: a jumpy one-shot affair capturing the slaughter of a pig with a captive bolt pistol.

Maybe it’s the cold-blooded efficiency of the slaughter that appeals to Benny and causes him to hypnotically rewind the footage over and over again, and maybe it’s the blunt force of the murder instrument that gives him a case of sticky fingers, but eventually the time comes for him to film a sequel. Having no pigs available back in the city, he invites a girl (Ingrid Stassner), pudgy and pink for a reason, who he often sees at the video store up to his room, trains the camera on a master shot, and shows her the losing end of the tube-shaped gun’s barrel.

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Haneke shoots the scene as he would most of Caché and The Time of the Wolf, both infinitely more intriguing films that tiptoe tipsily along the eschatological line between nihilism and a liberating sort of insane hope. Haneke’s early works, climaxing with the reprehensible—albeit cathartic—Funny Games, deploy both amusement and abuse in one-two fashion, usually at the precise moment where a little bit of the opposite effect would’ve gone a long way.

What are we supposed to do with a polemical screed against the numbing effects of violence-saturated media that insistently keeps its captive audience as numb as its characters? Are we expected to learn from Benny’s example? Probably not. More than likely we’re expected to empathize with Benny’s shell-shocked parents as they attempt to clean up their pathological son’s mess. Which, in the film’s final scenes, ultimately reveals Haneke’s undiluted bad faith in anyone stupid enough to take Benny’s Video seriously in the first place.

Score: 
 Cast: Arno Frisch, Angela Winkler, Ulrich Mühe, Ingrid Stassner, Stephanie Brehme  Director: Michael Haneke  Screenwriter: Michael Haneke  Running Time: 105 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1992  Buy: Video

Eric Henderson

Eric Henderson is the web content manager for WCCO-TV. His writing has also appeared in City Pages.

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