Tres Fatigued … is the state of being.
I have not yet managed to gather up the courage to sit through another viewing of Haneke’s Cache. That 30-second shot of violence has not yet released its grip on my guts which feel, as yet, ripped out. The visceral reaction is, in part, due to a deep sympathy with the character of Majid in the movie as well as a, possibly morbid, fascination with the act of self-destruction as a wonderfully viable ( and maybe, Powerful? ) form of subversion.
I suppose the above is the reason for desisting from writing anything about the movie – I need to see it once again, regardless of how masochistic such an intention might seem. However, especially after reading all that I could on the subject ( from the Internet, of course ), I still felt that there was more to the movie than meets the eye. One of the ( rather ) persistent threads of thought is that the Identity of the stalker/terrorist and his/her motives are inconsequential and, maybe, incidental. Yes, the issues of Guilt and Responsibility do figure in the history that we see unfold on-screen; and yet, I felt that the movie had more to do with exposing the insularity of the ( relatively ) well-off ( Urban? ) Intelligentsia of the world. It probably also had a bit to do with the skewed nature of the statistics that we see all around us – a disproportionately miniscule size of people controlling the regime of Information for the Majority, and thereby, all else that follows therefrom.
In a superficial sense, I read the movie as a microcosmic view of what transpired in the year 2003 in the Middle-East. You take a Powerful Entity, envy of the Civilised World, threatened by overt terrorist acts a few months earlier. The perpetrators are unknown, faceless and anywhere, inasmuch as they can be, in a multi-cultural paradigm. The said Powerful Entity is incapable of looking at its own past and what it may or may not have done, to invite such a retributive whiplash, and will not look, not if it can help itself. It just has to dissemble appropriately and be seen to take action. Efforts to act against the suspected terrorist agents have come to nought. There is a growing sense of domestic unease. There are also, seemingly convincing reports of another of the terrorist sympathisers having developed the capability to deploy and utilise WMDs against the Powerful Entity. What does the latter do?
Like I said earlier, it does not matter who is sending the tapes and for what reason. You just get to see, and rather well wrought out too, how the supposedly threatened Entity solipsistically destroys all that is connected to itself.
Do you feel secure enough, finally?
