Within are spoilers about Michael Haneke’s Cache, Sam Fell and Chris Butler’s Paranorman, and Joel Edgerton’s The Gift. Be advised.
The 1990s came in with a rage, but went out with a whimper. The early ’90s were seemingly defined by a range of groups and mentalities that were pissed off and they were going to let it be known that something isn’t right. Rap groups like Public Enemy and NWA were finding mainstream acceptance for their unapologetic presence from the African-American community. The aggressive Riot Grrrl movement’s first manifesto was released in 1989, paving the way for the next wave of the feminist movement in pop art. Nirvana and the grunge era started paving the way for the angry white kids who were sullen about…something. The gay movement was finally coming back online and was angry as hell about the 1980s. Rush Limbaugh went national in 1988, and fanned the fire of the angry religious right. It seemed that everybody was getting in touch with their inner anger.
These bits of anger were fueled by ongoing disputes. In 1992, Rodney King was beaten by the police, leading to the LA Race Riots. Starting in 1995, the government made regular moves to ban abortions and birth control. Matthew Shepard died in 1998, and was protested by the Westboro Baptist Church. Toss in a series of church burnings, domestic terrorism bombings, censorship cries, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and the rise of shouting heads as news (Fox News launched in 1996), the majority of the decade felt like it was one big angry culture war. Through all this, by the end of the 90s, the cries of the oppressed were finally falling on open ears. The ongoing annoyance of the Westboro Baptist Church finally drew attention to the plight of the homosexual, and, along with media-friendly depictions of happy healthy homosexuals (Ellen, Will and Grace), the gay culture was finally coming out of the closet.
Even with all that, the culture started changing in the mid-to-late 90s. The economy was picking up, the internet was taking off, pop music moved from Rage Against the Machine to Barenaked Ladies. Political fire gave way to bubblegum boredom. Anger started fighting with happiness.
With one event in 1999, all that anger became confusion. On April 20, 1999, a couple of kids shot up their high school and became news media darlings. Initially spun as outsiders who were bullied by their peers, the Columbine shootings became one of those flash points in American history asking us who we were and what we stood for. Were the actions of these boys despicable because of the loss of life? Was it understandable given the never ending torment and bullying that many people associated high school with? Could these actions become heroic in a certain light, if they called attention to the plight of bullying? Were you a bad person for even considering these thoughts?
With a single event, American culture had to face its fetishization of vengeance and victimhood. If these kids were wronged for years, then why did this vengeance that had been fetishized in pop culture – ranging from Cop Killer to Death Wish to The Living End – feel so wrong? Why did we feel for the new victims created by the old victims? Suddenly, being a victim didn’t justify all your actions and the last remaining aggression dissipated in the contradiction.
This thought process has been picked up in three separate films over the years: Michael Haneke’s Cache, Sam Fell and Chris Butler’s Paranorman, and Joel Edgarton’s The Gift, a movie caught between the two. Through twist-and-turn narratives, all three films challenge modern society’s fetishization of the victim and their right for violent vengeance.
Haneke’s Cache opens with a moderately wealthy family discovering videotapes containing recordings of their house. They’re being watched. Georges, the head of the household, follows clues laid out by the videotapes that lead him to Majid’s apartment. Majid was a man who had lived with Georges and his parents when they were both boys, but they had not spoken in many years. When they were children, Majid’s immigrant parents had been working for Georges’ parents when they were killed in the Paris Massacre.
Georges parents, out of respect for their employees, adopted Majid as their own. However, Georges concocted a scheme and story about Majid causing his parents to send Majid to an orphanage, severely neutering Majid’s potential. Instead of starting out with the wealth of his adoptive parents, he was delegated to extreme poverty and struggles. The videotapes leading Georges to Majid recall the memory of Georges’ bullying behavior that destroyed Majid’s life. Though Majid and his son deny they were the ones making the videotapes, the guilt of the memory takes a huge toll on Georges and his family.
By the end of Cache, Georges can barely keep it together. The memory keeps him up at night, and he has to take time off from his job. But, then, after his son goes missing for a night, Georges blames Majid for kidnapping his son, pushing Majid to kill himself in front of Georges. Ultimately Majid pays the final price, but Georges life is now a shambles as well, having to confront his own injustices.
Ostensibly about French colonialism in the Arab world, as well as how we treat minorities, Cache finds questions about dominance and bullying running at multiple levels. If there could be one running theme running through Haneke’s work, it’s the bourgeois question “what is just?” Are any of the consequences that befall Georges and his family in the modern era justified because of what Georges did to Majid in the past? Was there even any justice achieved? Was it just a big mess that became even messier? These questions constantly plague Haneke throughout Cache,who never provides an easy answer. The final scene of Cache is of Georges’ son and Majid’s son sitting on a wall together before they leave separately.
The question of bullying and long time vengeance is the hidden central theme of Paranorman. Norman lives in a town that takes pride in its history of witch burnings. Norman, who can speak to ghosts, is bullied for his channeling ability and overall inability to fit in. Every year, the town has to perform a ritual to quell the anger of a ghost who appears annually to wreak havoc on the town. We only discover the origin story of the spirit at the end of the movie. In the climax, Norman arrives at the unmarked grave of the witch said to be terrorizing the town. There, he faces the spirit of a young girl, Aggie, who was bullied and burned for her channeling ability which was interpreted as the sign of a witch. The girl’s spirit wants to burn the town down because of the extreme injustice that happened to her hundreds of years ago.
In a way, Paranorman is Cache for children, and has a more simplified message to match its younger audience. Paranorman makes it strictly clear that, even if Aggie has a legitimate reason to be angry (and she does…good lord, they burned a little girl to death), she does not have the right to take revenge on her tormentor’s ancestors. Norman leads the scared and raging young girl to a moment of happiness, where she can find peace and pass on to the afterlife, saving the town from future harassment. The town moves forward, celebrating Aggie rather than condemning her as a witch. The past cannot be changed, but we can try to do better.
As simplistic as this message is, there is also the secondary message complicating the surface moralization. In actuality, Aggie throws metaphysical tantrums, seeking righteous justice for her victimization. Because her tantrums cause people to pay attention to her, her plight is finally on display for the town to see and deal with as they may. But, the reality is that she had to throw a tantrum in order to uncover the injustices in her past. Even if her tantrums aren’t OK, they were completely necessary to achieving peace.
The Gift presents the flip side of Paranorman. The first hour asks the audience to empathize with Simon (Jason Bateman) or possibly his wife, Robyn (Rebecca Hall), as they’re friendly-stalked by an old high school acquaintance, Gordo (Joel Edgarton). After a possibly-chance meetup in a furniture store, Gordo starts dropping in when Simon isn’t around, and bringing gifts that could serve as house warming presents but come off as more than a little strange. We’re meant to be weirded out by Gordo and his socially immature behavior but not enough to make Robyn’s faith in Gordo’s good nature seem naive or immature. Well, maybe just a little.
At the end of the first act, Gordo invites Simon and Robyn to dinner at his house, which is a expansive mansion. After serving drinks, Gordo ducks out to take a call, leaving the couple alone in the house. Simon, who has shown no love toward Gordo, wastes no time in mocking Gordo for various bully-esque reasons but in a comedic manner. By the time the B-story comes to light – that Simon spread a rumor about Gordo getting it on with a boy, causing Gordo’s dad to beat him within an inch of his life and send him to military school – the audience’s sympathies for Simon have already worn well past thin. He has belittled and gaslighted his wife, been a complete liar, and shown to have dossiers on Gordo and various other people.
The kicker at the end of The Gift is that Gordo has had a long term plan of revenge. Gordo gifts Simon a CD recording of Simon’s dinner party mocking – which is played back to far less hilarious results – and a video tape of Gordo molesting a drugged and passed out Robyn that suggests he may have raped Robyn and the baby she just had might be his. In turn, Gordo lies to Robyn about the extent of his injuries, further solidifying her earlier resolve to divorce Simon.
Where Aggie of Paranorman was acting out on the ancestors of her bullies (making a not-altogether healthy allegory about the echoes of racism on top of the actual story), Gordo is acting out directly on his childhood bully (and, the bully’s wife). Where Aggie’s actions are consistently seen as wrong and out of proportion, Gordo’s are fairly equal in response to what Simon did, and potentially satisfying to the audience.
Yet, the finale of The Gift is contrastingly complicated. Even though the audience has a bit of emotional catharsis by seeing a broken Simon (losing the security of his house, his job, his wife, and his son, he’s last seen crying on the floor of the maternity ward while a nurse closes the curtains between him and his soon-to-be-ex-wife and son), the squick factor of the Gordo’s treatment of Robyn as well as the final shot of him abandoning his arm brace (he’s as much a liar as Simon) seems to suggest that Edgarton doesn’t think Gordo is any sort of hero either. His vengeance was aimed directly at his bully, but does that give him the right to abuse Robyn like that? Are they both terrible people? Is she acceptable collateral damage?
The moral complications of each film reveal a complicated relationship to our history. Whether it’s the French and their history of colonization, America and its history of oppression (women and minorities), or a bully and his history with a classmate, each film offers no easy or definite path to reconciliation. Destroying Simon isn’t as satisfying as it should be. Saving Aggie is twinged with sadness. And, Cache is nothing if not complicated.
The easy takeaway is that being a victim doesn’t mean your actions are automatically just. But, it also doesn’t mean that unjust actions are automatically wrong. Being a wronged party gives you weight, but it doesn’t make you right. To automatically condemn the actions of a wronged party for being rude (or worse) without understanding the why of the behavior is wrong. These dilemmas of moral grey areas continue today through the practice of protest and interruptions. Modern times are increasingly feeling like we’re starting to get back in touch with our anger, and people may act in ways that are simultaneously understandable and unacceptable. How you respond says a lot about you.
Michael Haneke would probably agree with that final statement.