Aesthetics of Equality by Michael J. Shapiro;

Author:Michael J. Shapiro;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 3.2 Laurent home bookcase in Michael Haneke’s Caché

Source: France 3 Cinema + Boudrian Film Vega

Once Georges and Anne have begun their evening meal, their son Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky) shows up a bit late and seems at that point to be a relatively inconsequential character, a typically laconic adolescent who delivers minimal responses to his parents’ questions about his day. However, he subsequently becomes an important figure in the film narrative. Early in the film his role is simply that of being a child of a bourgeois family. Thus, shortly after seeing him at dinner, he is a subject in another education-relevant sign, which surfaces when there’s a cut from the scene at the family table to a pool where Pierrot is at swimming practice. There he becomes part of a revelatory process, one which typifies a preoccupation of the French bourgeoisie, an intense focus on inducting their children into meritocracy. Rather than a space of leisure, the pool is an intensively surveilled classroom where a swimming coach is micromanaging the students’ form, continually shouting corrections to their strokes, breathing, depth, and turns. The class-shaping pressures to which Pierrot is subjected are reaffirmed when his parents come to witness his performance at a swim meet later in the film (in which fortunately for him, he wins his heat). Revealingly as well, it’s the only scene in which Georges and Anne appear emotionally in accord, seated paratactically (side by side), in contrast with their usual face-to-face bickering—it’s Anne and Georges rather than Anne against Georges (and vice versa)—as they cheer for their son’s achievement.

After a cut from Pierrot’s swimming practice, the camera is again still. There’s an even longer take of the Laurent residence, taking between four and five minutes, this time in the evening. In the midst of that long take are two shots of Georges, one that has him returning home while his residence is being filmed, another that takes us to his television studio as his interview program is signing off. Visible in the studio’s background is another floor-to-ceiling display of books. However, in this case there are no actual books. What is visible is a mural of shelves full of books without titles, implying once again that the film’s shots of books are meant to mark the class of those for whom they are signs of status (Figure 3.3). The scene speaks (in Jean Baudrillard’s terms) to a book’s “sign function value” rather than to what may be available in its distillation of thinking. As Baudrillard puts it, sign function value inheres in a “practice of objects,” a class’s engagement in a process of “sign exchange” that signals its status within a social hierarchy.64 The book images in Georges’s television studio are participating in “social pretention.”65

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