The Piano Teacher

Laurie
The Piano Teacher
Starbucks, August 19, 2007

We watched The Piano Teacher last night, a film I had wanted to see since reading about its treatment of sexual violence when it debuted in 2001. Michael Haneke directs, based on a novel by Austrian writer Elfrieda Jelinek, who won a Nobel Prize in 2004. The title character, Erika Kohut, is in her 40’s and teaches at the premier music conservatory in Vienna. She stands at a window, trancing out on Schubert and Bach, as her students try to excite her with their passionate notes, touching the keys as if they can stir her to feeling. The misery in their eyes show they will fail, and when she turns to them, she indeed delivers scorn. She shares a musty beehive flat with her elderly, domineering mother, and the women buzz each other with practiced enmity. Erika’s mother roots in her closet for clothes she considers lewd—really only adult looking dresses and coats bought on the sly—and calls her a whore when she discovers them. Erika is seething and passive, and Isabelle Hubert, with her girl-woman body and inexpressive mask face, deftly embodies the character’s contradictions.

Between classes, she dons a little scarf like Riding Hood and ventures into a forest of sex shops. She watches violent videos and spies on couples at drive-ins. Seeing a man mount a woman and hearing the woman’s cries at climax, she squats beside the car and urinates quietly, her eyes squeezed tight in release. When she opens them, she is face to face with the man, who calls her a disgusting pervert as she scurries away, her expression cool and enigmatic.

Another day, she arrives home from work in her nunlike garb of white shirt and dark skirt, her hair secured in clasps, and goes directly to the bathroom, unable to postpone what she’s been planning. Out of her purse comes a small paper packet from which she removes a single razor blade. She hoists up her skirt and, holding a mirror, cuts her vagina, shutting her eyes and suddering slightly. Blood drips into the tub, an image of mayhem we’ve seen many times: Alex, the rejected lover in Fatal Attraction, attempting suicide and murder; sleepwalking Charlotte Corday stabbing Marat in his bath. The blood rouses Erika from her reverie, and she swishes it down the drain, slips a sanitary pad into her panties, and comes to dinner in a robe. She sits glumly across from her mother, who keeps the TV blaring while they eat. Suddenly her mother notices blood running down her daughter’s legs and complains it’s unappetizing.

It’s against a backdrop of stuffy parlors and chilly rehearsal halls that Erika’s brutal inner life unfolds, and into this warring existence comes Walter, a brash and beautiful 17-year-old boy-man who offers himself first as Erika’s pupil and then her lover. She’s nasty and belittling, but he breaks her down. Once they go to bed, she writes out instructions about the kind of sex she desires, topping from below. She asks to be tied up and beaten. What gives her pleasure is absent of tenderness. He says he loves her, although we don't know what he means. He is forceful in pursuit, wanting to get through the wall of her, but he can’t, really, and he tells her he’s disgusted by her demands. Once the power shifts, she becomes in thrall to him. He’s by turns contemptuous and passionate, but, finally fed up with her histrionics, he charges up to her apartment, shoves aside her mother, locks the door of her room, and beats and rapes her. He asks if this is what she wants, what she’s imagined. Lying on the floor, holding her bleeding lip, she says no. Something isn’t adding up. She doesn't fight him off. She isn't enraged, rather dazed by the disparity between her imagination and reality.

We’ve seen a companion to this scene earlier. Erika and her mother share a bed and before she takes Walter as a lover, in a moment of great frustration she throws herself on top of her mother's body, pins her hands, kisses her mouth, and cries out she loves her. Is she wishing for this to happen with Walter? Does she really want to join with the body of the only person, up until then, she has known so intimately? It’s as if the movie, itself, convulses here, as sleepwalking Erika slices through quotidian, bourgeois life.

The movie doesn’t comment on why Erika and her mother share a bed. We don’t know Walter’s motives, because the film isn’t interested in what attracts him to Erika. Here is all the roiling, repressed nuttiness of Freud’s Vienna in tact in the 20th Century, but Haneke’s approach is unanalytic. He’s not interested in reducing the characters’ actions to an understanding of them. The characters articulate no understanding of themselves, and we have Hubbert’s mask face across which flutter the merest fluctuations when she is bullied by her mother, hateful to her pupils, or desperately jealous of Walter’s attentions to other women.

This technique, skirting notions of bad behavior and sick behavior, frees the viewer simply to look at behavior. The lack of affect in the storytelling—as well as in Erika—harkens to the strategies of Georges Bataille’s novels, particularly Story of the Eye. In Bataille’s view, sex is not corrupted by Christian morality and the neuroses it engenders (and therefore can’t be “fixed” by psychoanalysis); rather, sex is deeper than neurosis, a behavior closer to the warring of chimps and the rutting of bonobos than to most other human activites. To Bataille, sex really is dangerous and difficult to wrap our minds around. The narrator of Story of the Eye relates scenes of absurd sexual activity busting through the fabric of ordinary life—a frisky girl suddenly thrusts her naked ass into a bowl of milk; a young man imagines the white buttocks of his paramour as two peeled hard boiled eggs and feels the impulse to piss on them, and so on. These events unfold as if they were ordinary life, without apology or interpretation. The narrator’s containment allows the reader to fantasize freely. The reader can enter the text as if the story is about the reader.

It is the same with Haneke’s horrifying, dreamlike film, and rather than turn away from the characters we enter their story, finding the parts of ourselves that connect. Richard remarked it was a model for how we should tell stories, letting go as much as possible of the impulse to protect ourselves.