BENNY’S VIDEO. Michael Haneke’s Shocking Drama Explained

To clarify, let’s briefly recall the plot of the Austrian director’s film. The titular Benny of Benny’s Video is a teenager from a good family. Neglected by his parents, he devotes himself to his greatest passion, which is cinema. Equally fascinated by death, at one point, he decides to find out what it would be like to kill someone himself.

In Benny’s Video, Haneke portrays Western society as becoming increasingly desensitized to omnipresent violence. There is also the theme of communication problems between people, which is one of the main topics in the director’s work. However, unlike in Funny Games, the author primarily focuses on depicting reality rather than playing with the viewer, although elements of that are also present. The film can be divided into two parts: in the first half, Benny is the main focus, while in the second, the perspective shifts, and Haneke becomes more interested in Benny’s parents. Let’s take a closer look at both sections.

Benny’s life is very monotonous. He goes to school, rents movies, and then watches them alone in a dark room. However, these aren’t ordinary films; Benny mainly focuses on action movies filled with death and cruelty. These aren’t high-quality productions either, as we see in a brief clip that Benny watches before renting the whole movie. He has no problem with renting these films—no one asks how old he is. We only see a hand methodically writing down the titles of the films. However, these are not the only things Benny watches. In Haneke’s work, we twice see footage recorded by Benny himself—showing his parents but mainly the killing of a pig. Each time, Benny rewinds the film to the beginning and watches it in slow motion, clearly fascinated by the animal’s death. This is important because he harbors similar feelings toward other people. When he meets a girl equally interested in cinema outside the video rental, he takes her home, talks with her, shows her the pig slaughter, and then they decide to have some fun.

It turns out Benny stole the tool used for killing animals, which he eventually points at the girl. Only on the third try does Benny achieve his goal—he kills her. This is also the only moment when his voice changes. Throughout the film, he speaks calmly and unemotionally, but when he hears the girl’s screams, he desperately tries to silence her, as if he cannot bear that she is fighting for her life and not dying instantly, like the pig. This is an extremely important scene also because of how it was shot. The viewer can barely see what Benny is doing to the girl. For a moment, we take the position behind Benny’s home camera, which is set so that the two characters are out of frame. Only through sound can we understand what is happening in the room.

It’s hard not to feel that Haneke is playing with the viewer at this moment (which he likes to do). On the one hand, one might think the director wants to evoke a greater horror of the situation in the audience, to shock them even more. On the other hand, he is intelligent enough to realize that a large portion of the audience will subconsciously be disappointed by this turn of events. Many people would likely want to see the murder scene, especially today when pop culture (and not only that) is increasingly filled with violence, treated as great entertainment. It’s also striking what Benny does afterward—as if nothing happened, he returns to his normal life. He only cleans up the room a bit but almost forgets the whole matter, arranging to meet a friend and go to a disco together. When his parents return home, he decides to tell them everything, doing so just as calmly—as if he were listing what’s missing in the fridge.

And this is when the perspective changes. Haneke begins to focus on Benny’s parents and how they react to what their son has done. This is perhaps the most disturbing and terrifying part of the entire film, and it is here that Haneke’s portrayal of social apathy is most evident. First, they are not shocked by the situation; they try to approach it calmly—they don’t yell at Benny, don’t cry, and don’t wring their hands. They sit in the living room and start discussing what needs to be done. Initially, only the mother shows some emotion, but even she quickly suppresses her feelings. It turns out that the most important thing for them is their reputation, which they enjoy in society as a wealthy family. They don’t want to call the police because that would mean everyone would find out what happened. They carefully question Benny about whether he knew the girl, whether she attended his school, whether anyone saw her with him, and whether he talked to anyone else about it.

Their next argument against telling anyone is that it would ruin their son’s future. He would have a criminal record, need therapy with a psychologist, and possibly someone would be held accountable—either Benny or the parents for not supervising him. So instead of doing what most normal people would do in their situation, they make two decisions. First, the father will stay home and deal with the body. This means he will have to dismember it and flush it down the toilet so that no trace remains. Both the father and mother treat the girl’s body as an inconvenient object that needs to be disposed of as quickly as possible. Secondly, the mother and Benny will fly to Egypt on a trip. It’s hard not to see this as a kind of “reward” for what the boy has done. In Benny’s Video, Haneke clearly blames people, saying it’s their fault that everyone is becoming increasingly desensitized to violence. By not reacting to what is happening around them, they allow this phenomenon to grow.

But the environment is also important in Haneke’s film. This mainly refers to televisions. Every time they appear in Benny’s Video, they are turned on, regardless of the time of day. Even more significantly, the only content coming from the screens is violence. The media constantly delivers news about accidents, wars, clashes between football fans and the police, or murders. It’s rare to see anything positive. This continuous presence of television and the associated coverage of brutal everyday events impacts every viewer. The more images like this a person sees, the more they start to get used to them. News of casualties no longer shocks anyone; only the number of victims is interesting. The omnipresence of cameras is also significant. They not only allow people to spy on others but also repeatedly watch recorded scenes, like the pig slaughter mentioned earlier. It’s as if Haneke is saying that something has gone wrong and people are using these devices in a decidedly wrong way.

All of this leads not only to the already discussed desensitization to violence but also to problems in human relationships. Benny’s parents don’t know how to reach him, and he, in turn, has no idea (and probably no desire) what to talk to them about. It also seems that Benny’s parents don’t really want to connect with their son. Both work a lot, have no time for him, but thanks to money, they can buy substitutes in the form of audiovisual equipment. Both sides are increasingly distancing themselves from each other, and their relationships are starting to be based solely on basic issues and norms imposed on everyone by the society and culture in which we live. So Benny’s parents ensure that he has a future on their level, that he inherits the reputation they enjoy among other people due to their position and the money they earn. These last things (because it’s hard to call them values) are the most important to them. It doesn’t matter what their son feels or does, only how it is perceived by others.

Michael Haneke is a filmmaker who makes very sad and often cold films. Through his works, he tries to highlight the problems that society faces, and he has been doing so for a long time. It’s hard not to feel that his message is falling into a void. After all, Benny’s Video is a film from 1992. A lot of time has passed since its premiere, and the issues the Austrian director raises are not only still relevant but also have progressed significantly. It seems that even if more films addressing issues like social apathy, treating violence as entertainment, or the related slow breakdown of human relationships are made, things may only get worse.

Written by Jędrzej Dudkiewicz