White paranoia: Michael Haneke’s Caché reflected through Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novel La Jalousie

ABSTRACT

Inspired by Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novel La Jalousie (1957), the essay contends that Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005) takes its viewers inside a postcolonial white paranoia which is, arguably, the root cause of the exclusion, segregation and racist discrimination that many immigrants from the former colonies – and their children – are experiencing in contemporary France. It suggests that the entire film be read as the protagonist’s paranoid vision that imagines white privileges to be menaced by some non-white conspiracy. His obsession, which hinges on a fear of a reversal of the power inherent in ‘the gaze’, as brought out in the central ‘stalking plot’, informs the entire film’s narration and audiovisual make-up and explains, among other things, the serial repetitions and variations of certain settings and objects as the protagonist’s desperate attempt to create order in a threatening world. The construction of the film, however, also allows Haneke to critically comment upon his protagonist’s paranoia and demonstrate its ill-foundedness, for instance by pointing to a possible ‘banal conviviality’ (Paul Gilroy) between people of different ethnicities, cultures and religions.

KEYWORDS:

• Michael Haneke
• Caché
• postcolonialism
• France
• immigration
• Alain Robbe-Grillet

Notes

1. In the interview Serge Toubiana conducted with the director for the Artificial Eye DVD version of Caché, Haneke specifies that it was a documentary on the French-German television channel ARTE two years earlier that first drew his attention to the October 1961 massacre, ‘I was incredibly shocked: I said, “How is it possible in 1961 to have 200 people die in the Seine and nobody talk about it for years and years?”. I was so angry that I said, “We must talk about it in this context”’.

2. I owe the analysis of the hallway scenes to Thomas Y. Levin (2010).