On Michael Haneke and Postmodern Existentialism, by Egg God

The crypto poet himself, Egg God, ruminates on Haneke's 'The Seventh Continent' and the postmodern conditions that the film depicted

Modern life is the furthest thing from life – thus, it is the furthest thing from death. This concept is best captured and reinforced through cinema, as the camera’s eye is an eye through which we see the world. Michael Haneke’s first film, The Seventh Continent (1987), gets more right about the spiritual limitations of postmodern political economy than almost any work of its era. The plot involves a small and alienated petty bourgeois Austrian family who meticulously plan and execute a group suicide. In typical Haneke fashion, the film’s climax doesn’t explode outwards in the way that viewers anticipate. For even in death, the family resorts to an orderly, machine-like method of self-destruction. In an effort to leave no traces of themselves behind, they cut and tear with scissors their surplus clothing and smash records with impassive, assembly-line precision. By the night’s end, they slug down poison while watching the television. Snowy static, then a fade to black.

A nagging but necessary question pulses through the film: how is it possible to have so many things and to also want nothing? The family in the film has everything a family in the West could desire: all the trendy breakfast appliances, stable, upper-middle class jobs, and the free time and money to go on vacations. So why the pain? Why the crying in the carwash? An excavation into the interiority of the late-modern individual, as well as an examination of the chasm between wants and needs is necessary in order for the film to make any sense. And yet, this is not an easy task. The Seventh Continent, after all, is a study of the paradox of the first world, where the individual’s relative lack of material suffering is accompanied by a poverty of meaning. This is partly due to the fact that a wealthy life is literally built off the backs of the domestic and international working class, and partly due to Freud’s pronouncement that “in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.” This is not to say that Siysphean toiling or “grinding” forever comprises some kind of desirable habitus. This is to say that once you have everything you’ve ever envisioned yourself having, in the material sense, you may come to realize that you, as well as others working in your service, have devoted soul, spirit, and energy to nothing but the interminable and solitary process of capital accumulation, which may explain mass listlessness. While this is not always the case, our culture’s canonized tales of suburban malaise do not come from nowhere. 

In America, in the very heart of empire, a consumerist version of utopia has been realized. With visible war in the past, history has all but ended, and the “Good Guys” have won. Within our society, however, the cost of admission to this utopia wears on the psyche like a wound doomed to never heal. From an education system that functions as job training to corporate propaganda masquerading as news and entertainment, it is plain to see that our country, despite its riches, is impoverished in nearly every sense of the term. Those attuned to art and beauty are permitted little more than a culture of refinement, sequels and remakes. That the humdrum of these media mirror the sluggishness and torpor that plague the everyday person is no coincidence. Like automatons affixed with two on-switches, work and consume, we wander through this wasteland with neither pleasure nor dread, just a pre-programmed injunction to earn and spend. Therefore, there is no need to rest (I’ll sleep when I’m dead). A period of stasis might better enable us to engage our critical faculties and reassess our surrounds; and yet, the downtime needed to do this is all but discouraged. In The Burnout Society, German philosopher Byung-Chul Han notes the governmental utility of this mass sleepwalking effect. Referencing Peter Handke’s “Essay on Tiredness”, Han writes:

“The society of achievement and activeness is generating excess tiredness and exhaustion. These psychic conditions characterize a world that is poor in negativity and in turn dominated by excess positivity...Tiredness of this kind proves violent because it destroys all that is common or shared...As the I grows smaller, the gravity of being shifts from the ego to the world. It is ‘tiredness that trusts in the world.’” (31).

This absence of negativity is typified in the difficulty, or rather, the inability, that the individual faces when trying to conceive of new and less oppressive ways to live. Although we don’t immediately associate lifestyles with things that can be bought, these consumer choices are nearly all we have left. While some Western lifestyles, like the neo-Buddhism depicted in Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, are indeed antithetical to the capitalist mode of production, and thus radical, these lifestyles are easily commodified and sold back to us as products which signal a collective nostalgia for a bygone way of living.

When there are fewer ways to live that don’t seem banal, oppressive, or egregiously hyperreal, suicide presents itself as an alluring option. The transcendence of life through its negation, the immortalization of the self as an epitaph etched in blood: “would rather be elsewhere” or “forever out to lunch.” Perhaps this is what the family in The Seventh Continent realized: death is only an answer when it serves as a direct refutation of life, a signal for change

Death itself occupies an interesting place in this epoch. Never have we had less to live for, yet we’ve never feared death to this degree. This idea was best realized during the Coronavirus pandemic, where media figureheads and wealthy liberal elites made it clear that bare life is all that remains and all that should be protected. The only measure of a successful life is bodily preservation and the accumulation of years. To clarify this position, I would argue that abandoning the social for a prolonged period of time would in fact be necessary if Covid’s fatality rate more closely resembled that of a plague, which did not end up being the case. That said, if you have nothing more to live for than the preservation of life, any threat to bare life, no matter how small, should be treated with the utmost severity. The logic is consistent in the following Rob Rousseau tweet from November 2020: “the ‘it only has a 1% mortality rate’ people are confusing to me. if there was a 1 percent chance my skull would be crushed by an anvil any given time I went outside, I would probably stay the fuck at home.” It is obvious that Rob, the neoliberal bugman par excellence, is no intellectual outlier – he is speaking for the whole Democratic political establishment. Not to mention, there probably is a 1 percent chance that your skull can be crushed at any given time, or at least that some death looms with some probability at all times. Because, we’re mortal…

If nothing else, The Seventh Continent teaches us that when life becomes unbearable, it is not implausible to seek a way out. The problem is, everyone wants out, but few find transcendence. If you're unfulfilled, perhaps the solution lies in doing the opposite of what you’ve been conditioned into doing. To live to work, to wake up just lucid enough to crawl through the day, only to go to bed and do it again is not a life worth living. This compliance fetish, this love for domination, constitutes life’s antithesis. And so we must live in spite of this fact if we are to rescue anything back.