Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher

In 2001, Michael Haneke directed a film called, The Piano Teacher. Haneke’s attitude, as conveyed to the spectator, is not to rail against pornography, per se, but to rail against its impact as generated by a capitalist patriarchy. This stems from a similar modality introduced by Linda Williams1 in which she “...moves beyond the impasse of the anti-porn/anti-censorship debate to analyze what hard-core film pornography is and does” (Slade 656). Haneke’s method portrays a patriarchal approach to a cinematic narrative, but does so through the gaze of a woman and her scopophilia. “Scopophilic, arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight...developed through narcissism and the constitution of the ego, [and] comes from identification with the image seen” (Mulvey …show more content…
Mainstream movies generally show violence as the norm and sexuality as taboo, however, Haneke depicts pornography inversely. Elevated expectations, lets down the viewer in every sensuous scene to exemplify a truer nature of explicitness. “...[P]ornography is neither explained nor accounted for by its explicitness (...by leaving out elements, by heightening expectations), for the development of a feminist politics of pleasure it might be necessary to reverse the process and account for how the explicitness does operate” (Stern 217). A capitalist patriarchy that treats pornography as a secret fetish/commodity can alter how we treat one another. If a society can change the portrayal of sex and violence, it might be able to overcome the repressive states in which violence is the status quo and sexuality the taboo in the sense that it does not promote stable