I sometimes consider Benny’s Video (and the tone and texture underlying all of the Glaciation Trilogy in some ways) as being an interesting companion piece to Bret Easton Ellis’s novel of American Psycho, which was released around the same time. The fetishisation force of, particularly video recording technology, as a kind of distancing barrier that both allows every moment of an action to be seen, pored over and recorded in explicit detail but at the same time on subsequent playback without the visceral immediacy of actually being there and performing the actions. What’s done is done and what is left, is the imagery. The technology shows us more than we could ever expect (or needed, or arguably should be allowed) to see, whilst simultaneously putting up an empathetic barrier towards actually having to get one’s hands dirty oneself. We are given this pile of imagery and left to make of it what we will, and get out of it what we wish to, or (maybe even subconsciously) put of ourselves into it.
This post might get into some really uncomfortable areas, and I will try to walk the tightrope between providing some context whilst not being too detailed, but I want to preface the following with the warning to absolutely not do anything to Google or look into some of the subjects I might talk about below (Also mods, feel free and I would completely understand if you wished to amend or remove this post if it goes past the guidelines for the forum for content that is allowed to be discussed). Whilst I feel that it is good to know what is out there, and that forewarned is forearmed in case you might come across references to such material out in the wild, I would strongly warn away from watching any material relating to real life violence and death. Not only because it is morally questionable and disrespectful to the victim of violence for their fate to be reduced to the status of a curio to be gawked over (or worse put on as a staged spectacle) , but also because of the psychological damage that it can inflict on a viewer who witnesses such material. There is very little fictional material, no matter how violent, that I would dissuade people away from if they wish to view it, simply because it
is fictional, but real life carnage is another matter. I can only describe it as soul-scarring and no amount of natural and understandable human curiosity about such material is worth seeing things that you will never be able to un-see.
That is really the theme of Benny’s Video, of the enquiry into which came first. Is it the technology creating the sociopathic empathy-lacking main character? Or (as with American Psycho's main character constantly using the need to "go and return some videotapes" as his conversation ending gambit. And Haneke’s later characters in Funny Games and the daughter in Happy End) was the bourgeoisie, affectless, somewhat sterile family dynamics and – in this case - consumer goods focused environment almost tailor made to create someone who feels a numb sense of emotion or affection towards the people around them, and the technology provides a glimpse into a more directly visceral world of death and killing which is different from the somewhat cushioned environment that the character otherwise inhabits. Which gets filtered through the technology that allows that shocking imagery to be manipulated, rewound and replayed or step-framed through for maximum savouring of the fleeting moment that was otherwise irreversibly devastating, with horrific consequences for actual beings in reality.
Does seeing such imagery numb a viewer into eventually carrying out such actions themselves, to sort of bring the visceral reality of death out of the screen and into their sterile life, as with the main character in Benny’s Video? In some ways I think there has to be something already deeply wrong with a person to begin with to make that extra leap into actualising something they see on screen into their own lived experience (If pressed I suppose that I would more agree with the line in the first Scream film, albeit ironically stated by the killer themselves, that “movies don’t create psychos; movies make psychos more creative”)
Did the technology create the societal reality, or did the technology come about as an outgrowth
from the societal reality that required it as the logical next step? It is probably a situation where it is coming a little from both forces, each influencing the other in a feedback loop.
Catering for the morbid fascination and commemoration of death is nothing new. This is a situation that has been there since recordable media was invented. There are those posed death photos of hunters or of the recently deceased as noted in a film like Wisconsin Death Trip. Or viscerally haunting crime scene photographs such as of the victims of Jack the Ripper or the Black Dahlia. With film most notoriously there was the mondo film genre in the 1960s (epitomised by the films of Jacopetti and Prosperi) that itself escalated into something less ethnographically veneered and more nakedly exploitational in the Faces of Death series in the 1970s.
Benny’s Video in some ways occupies an interesting point in our technological development and taps into the video age, where the power to obtain, create and manipulate imagery is becoming democratised through accessibility, though still rather insular and privately circulated, if at all, and only for those with the money (or the wealthy parents) to afford the technology to use in the creation. With the advent of the internet the ability to obtain, create and manipulate imagery aspects were only enhanced, plus to that was added the key extra element of democratising
distribution as well as production so everyone began to have a voice and a platform to use for whatever purpose they saw fit.
With that democratisation the moral questions moved from gatekeepers of the medium (who would themselves occasionally ‘overstep their bounds’ and have to be held in check by overarching state powers such as censors) to the users themselves. Morality went from being Catholic to having its Protestant Reformation, if you like! And inevitably there will be those who abuse that privilege, and leave us with a legacy of their horrific criminal acts captured on film, such as the one carried out by Luka Magnotta.
With the internet the issues underpinning Benny’s Video have only multiplied out further in an exponential manner. There is always the danger on the fringes of video sharing sites of being exposed to gore clips or some dumb wannabe-shocking edgelords editing in pop up shocks of
Ronnie McNutt's livestreamed shotgun suicide or the various notorious livestreamed attacks into the middle of seemingly benign at first videos to catch the unwary off guard. People who have taken the most extreme and/or charged imagery and turned actual death into a meme for a reaction from their viewers. Is that being jaded or opportunistic? Or just cruel and unempathetic to both the people in the footage they are using and those that they then go on to inflict their footage upon?
Also in a very closely entwined sense politics and real-life gore imagery have always gone hand in hand in a symbiotic content creation way. From the ethnographic mondo films of the 1960s trying to explain the upheavals on the African continent post-independence through a retreating colonial lens up to something like the ISIS staged executions and the livestreamed Christchurch shooting, there is often a reason why someone is doing the filming, and it is usually to get at some sort of audience. A statement, a warning, an attempt to strike fear in those who witness their actions? Always it will be the very definition of the word ‘exploitation’. And there is always a new conflict somewhere to add more grist to the mill and keep the battlegrounds fresh: from the mass graves of Yugoslavia and Chechnya, through the disturbingly professionally filmed ISIS executions and South American cartel videos to now the trickle of videos coming out of the Ukraine conflict, there will be new atrocity creators out there, on a 'professional' rather than 'amateur' level, feeding their footage onto the internet, just as they went onto underground mix tapes in the years before online connectivity.
In some ways I think that is what most connects back to Haneke’s use of such imagery in Benny’s Video with the more sociopolitically pointed use of the CCTV footage in Cache or the war photographs in Code Unknown, where perhaps there is a statement or equation (or warning) being implied that a disaffected and amoral youth with a video camera and looking for a subject in their bedroom can somewhat easily morph into the war photographer or television journo looking for the best angle on a story rather than the most decent angle on it, and also serve as an early symptom for a wider societal malaise. Or at least represent as much of a symbol as the generation of kids in The White Ribbon were implied to become, growing up to adulthood during the 1930s to then apply their reasonings out on a far wider scale.
