“Absolutely disgusting”: The Steven Spielberg scene Michael Haneke hates
Few directors have been able to make such consistently fantastic and simultaneously subversive movies as Michael Haneke, who has earned significant critical acclaim throughout his career. It’s not easy to depict taboo subjects with grace, ensuring that there is a lack of sensationalism, but Haneke has mastered it. From the satirical Funny Games to the unforgettable The Piano Teacher and the shocking Caché, the filmmaker is interested in digging under the surface of humanity to assess our base desires, our propensity for violence and pain, and the way that social structures significantly impact us.
Haneke’s first film, The Seventh Continent, was a slow and repetitive endeavour, but it was incredibly clever. The filmmaker builds an uneasy atmosphere, changing subtle parts of the characters’ routines until reaching an intense finale. The movie certainly isn’t for everyone, but its brilliance lies in its ability to linger in your mind for a long time after watching it, haunted by the movie’s final scene.
The director often refrains from showing particularly graphic scenes, such as in Funny Games, a meditation on the consumption of violence. We simply see the blood-stained television following Georgie’s shooting, and we’re forced to watch his parents’ emotional response to their son’s death. By holding explicit details from us, Haneke asks the audience to consider the effects of violence rather than indulge in a young child’s murder for the sake of entertainment.
Thus, when he saw Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust drama Schindler’s List, he was not impressed with the way that violence was depicted. For Haneke, tricky subjects like murder, torture and sexual abuse should be explored on screen, they just have to be depicted with the care they require. He told IndieWire: “It’s actually out of respect for the importance of what happens there. It’s, of course, very tempting, if you don’t have that kind of respect, to just sit on that spectacular event, and that’s what a lot of Hollywood films do.”
He subsequently called attention to the scene within Schindler’s List where showers are shown, leaving audiences waiting to discover whether water or gas will rain down on the people cramped into the room. In this respect, Spielberg turns a harrowing true event into a spectacle, manipulating the viewer into thinking that gas is about to emerge, only for the characters to joyously discover it’s just water. “I think it’s absolutely disgusting to show that. One must not show such things,” Haneke added.
In another interview with Time Out, he elucidated on the same subject, explaining, “I don’t want to judge the works of other colleagues in interviews. […] You can only do something like that with a naive audience like in the United States. It’s not an appropriate use of the form. Spielberg meant well – but it was dumb.” For Haneke, such atrocities shouldn’t be treated so naively – the severity of violence and torture is shown with careful consideration within his films.
Additionally, Haneke believes that the audience should be allowed to project their ideas and “fantasies” onto his films. He told IndieWire, “The audience has to make their own pictures, and whatever I show means diminishing the fantasy of the viewer.” Yet, Haneke sees Spileberg’s manipulative lens as catastrophic to his film and the audience’s experience, toying with them in an unacceptable way.
