Michael Haneke
Michael Haneke doesn’t have Facebook. He doesn’t use Snapchat, or post Instagram stories, or even tweet – despite the short-lived popularity of a parody Twitter account under his name. Haneke simply has “no time for this kind of things,” he explains through a thick Austrian accent, over sparkling water one afternoon during TIFF. “I have my email, I have my phone, I send SMS. And that’s all,” he says. On those around him he has seen the remarkable effect: “There was God before. Now it’s the internet. ‘I confess to the internet and I hope it will grant me absolution.’ It’s amazing.”
Haneke’s new feature, the deft and provocative black comedy Happy End, deals extensively with the internet as religious experience, and loathes its latest manifestations: video live streams and instant messaging, viral videos and salacious chats. But Haneke was not so much compelled to address the ills of social media as obliged to by circumstance. He felt there was no way around it. “If you are dealing with society today,” he says, “then you have to depict it. This is just how things are.”
So he did his research. Scrupulously. He familiarized himself with the apps and websites he’d never ordinarily touch. He read first-hand accounts of the turmoil suffered by young people online. “Probably it affects young people more than old,” he says of what he found, “but all of us living in the world are using forms of communication that have totally changed thanks to the internet and social media and almost no one, at least in the first world, has been left untouched by that. I believe that never in history has there been a revolution like this. And we are just at the beginning. We have no idea how this will develop. We have no idea at all.”
And yet despite the novelty of our digital obsessions, the pain we bear is the same as ever. Happy End deals extensively, too, with a sort of intergenerational conflict — with the grief and the trauma we each take on and pass down again in turn. For Haneke this is sempiternal. “That’s how it’s always been,” he insists. “We are all victims of our upbringing. But at the same time despite that we all possess a certain potential to some degree of liberating ourselves from that past. It’s been the daily drama of humanity for millennia.” It’s up to us to dredge our sorry selves out of the muck that we inherit. Even if, as Haneke believes, our efforts will likely be for nought. “Education may be hopeless,” he laughs, “but it’s nonetheless necessary.”
This attitude will hardly surprise admirers of Haneke’s work. A certain nihilism is, after all, his metier. “Family exists as a neurosesproducing construct,” he says at one point, it doesn’t really matter in what context — the sentiment radiates from deep within every one of Haneke’s movies. But while contempt seems the prevailing register of so much of his oeuvre, Happy End included, Haneke maintains that he is not contemptuous of his characters. He doesn’t hate everyone, as critics often like to claim. “I love all of my characters, otherwise I’d be unable to write them,” he says firmly. “It’s extremely boring to write someone you don’t like.”