Taste Log 005
Why Michael Haneke is the perfect filmmaker to watch right now.
Every day I wake up and wonder how it can only be February when it feels like we are at least six months into 2025. There's a constant and overwhelming feeling of always needing to catch up, and then, when I finally do catch up, there’s already a plethora of new things to know. It made me aware of two things: I’ve built the habit of mindlessly clicking on every news-related post I scroll past, in my email or on Instagram, to the point that my day is derailed and I don’t leave bed for hours, and I needed to find ways to reclaim my attention and consume more intentionally. So, I’ve made some loose consumption rules for myself: 30 minutes per day on Instagram, 15 minutes per day on the Substack app, reading one newsletter about Tropicana’s administration per day (I really like Vox’s The Logoff), and setting aside some time on Sundays to read any longer news pieces. It’s my way of gaining control over my attention while still staying informed about what’s happening. Information overload is a tactic to make us feel helpless.
I’m trying to build more good consumption habits for myself too. Last year, I spent way too much time on TikTok. While it’s fun and at times informative, in other ways it’s a time-sucker, it’s ruining my attention span, and it can make me feel so disengaged from the real world. What else could I do with my time instead of spending three hours—yes, I’m serious—scrolling on TikTok? Engage with culture, not on the internet. One film per day, if time permits; one poem per day; one cultural date per week; zooming in on one filmmaker per month; logging all my rabbit holes; and, when it’s warmer in New York, one long stroll per week with the sole purpose of discovering something new. It’s a way for me to intentionally expand and sharpen my point of view. My good friend Naima has taken up knitting and teaching herself to draw and paint, which I’m inspired by and might also indulge in. Thanks to J Wortham, I also signed up for The David Lynch Foundation’s transcendental meditation course, which is free for survivors of domestic abuse or sexual assault in Los Angeles and New York City.
This year, I also wanted to try to do something different and write my Taste Logs more often, aiming for once a week instead of relegating them to the end of the month. I always have thoughts, and I want to get in the habit of sharing them and thinking about them sooner than later; everything doesn’t need to be a reported essay (me to myself). So, here are some things I’ve watched, loved, bought, and used over the past few weeks, as well as some longer thoughts on why Michael Haneke is a great filmmaker to watch right now.
Before we get into it all, I also want to share some places to donate to, if you are able. As I plan to paywall most of this newsletter going forward—both so that I can hold myself accountable and because I work hard on this—if you donate $30 to one of the orgs below and send me your receipt (tahairston24@gmail.com), I’ll add you to my paid subscribers list for free for the next three months. If you aren’t in the place to do that, please remember no amount is too small.
A fundraiser for Omar Hamad, a tailor in Gaza who makes clothing for children. Donating will help him buy fabric.
A fundraiser for the Martin family, who lost their home in Altadena due to the fires and currently hasn’t raised any funds yet. There is also this list of Black families in Altadena who were affected.
South Brooklyn Sanctuary, a grassroots non-profit organization that works to train everyday New Yorkers to help support immigrants who can’t afford legal fees.
Isla Immigration, a legal services organiza that defends the rights of our immigrant communities and advocates for just and humane immigration policy
Make the Road New York, a grassroots organization that works to provide education, legal services, and health services to immigrant and working-class communities.
Sudan Solidarity Collective, a grassroots organization, made up of a group of Sudanese undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and community members, working to support people in Sudan who are currently in a political and humanitarian crisis.
Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit org that provides free legal services to low-income trans, gender non-conforming, and intersex people in New York.
As always, I’d love to hear from you—so please DM, comment, or reply to this email if you have thoughts too, or if you want me to answer any questions (this can be anything from what to watch or read to what to buy or how I feel about something) in my next Taste Log. I’ll try to answer them directly or in my next Taste Log. Don’t be shy :).
Also, I’ll be moderating a panel with makeup artist Raisa Flowers and nail artist Dawn Sterling next Tuesday for the Black Beauty Club. There will also be a talk about beauty with rapper JT. Tickets are here, if interested.
On Michael Haneke
I spent the month of January engulfed in the world of Michael Haneke. And, after watching 11 of his films, I got a clear sense of his codes and what he consistently aims to convey. Haneke is exacting in his message, usually exploring guilt, communication, repression, and interrogating human actions or inactions and their ripple effects. He wants to deprogram our minds by showing us reality, without gimmicks, manipulations or resolutions. “Film for him is an active medium, not sedative. He wants to wake you up,” said Juliette Binoche about Haneke in a New Yorker profile. Socratic, uncompromising, perturbing, and provocative, Haneke’s films aptly meet our current moment.
The first film I watched was Caché, which on the surface appears to be a whodunnit thriller, but there’s an almost instinctual moment when you realize that’s not actually what it’s about. Instead, Haneke shows us what happens when you don’t reckon with the harm you’ve caused to others – it haunts us. Caché explores both collective guilt – referencing the Paris Massacre of 1961, where Algerian protesters were murdered by the French police, an act that France didn’t acknowledge for almost four decades – and personal guilt, as the film’s main character is riddled with guilt over an incident from his childhood, but instead of taking accountability, pretends like everything is fine. It reminded me of the current genocide in Gaza and the complicity of those directly financing and committing war crimes, as well as our own complicity in thinking we can disassociate from such atrocities because it’s happening abroad, which has proven to be false. As Haneke said in an interview about his film The White Ribbon, “You don’t have to be wicked to be guilty. You can also be ignorant about something, whatever that is.”
The White Ribbon felt like a prequel to Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest; ironically, the actor Christian Friedel plays a character in both films. The White Ribbon explores one of Haneke’s themes—repression—but also how blindly following an ideology can be a breeding ground for evil, through his lens that evil is fascism in Nazi Germany. That he uses children, who are just following the puritanical beliefs that their parents bestowed upon them—children who later grow up to be Nazis—makes the message even more insidious. It reminded me of how so many people were indoctrinated into Zionism as children and have been uncritically following it, no questions asked, ever since. Or, for me personally, blindly subscribing to the idea that representation politics will save us all. It’s what Nietzsche meant by encouraging people to create their own values, instead of blindly following traditional morals because that’s what one should do. “I wanted to make a film where you understand that any ideal is corrupted, as soon as you take it to the absolute extreme,” said Haneke in the same interview.
Television, the medium Haneke worked in before making feature films, and the media often feel like a character in his films. In fact, all of his first three films,and maybe his most unbearable—The Seventh Continent, Benny’s Video, and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance—were based on stories Haneke learned about in the news.
The Seventh Continent follows a middle-class family over the course of three years, leading up to their plans to destroy all of their possessions and escape to “Australia,” or their idea of paradise. It’s existential. The film spends most of its time showing the family—mom, dad, and daughter—not so much living their lives, but doing mundane daily tasks: feeding their fish, getting ready for work, sitting down for dinner; it's notable that they barely speak to each other. And, while the idea of destroying all of your possessions might seem liberating, Haneke deliberately had their actions mirror the same mundane way they were living before—this was not freedom for them. (“That’s the saddest part about the film,” he said in an interview with The Criterion Channel.) What’s wonderful about the film is that it’s open to interpretation; Haneke gives us no exact reasons for the family’s behavior. I interpreted it as meaning that while escapism and disengagement might seem like a path toward peace, it’ll never bring true liberation. Or, it even brings me back to Nietzsche—Haneke did study philosophy—and how nihilism is inevitable but can be overcome by affirming life and creating our own personal meaning for living. Or, it could even be an indictment on consumption and privilege; he did say that the film was a portrait of rich countries, and the family does flush all of their money down the toilet.
Benny’s Video and Funny Games are two of Haneke’s most didactic films, both exploring violence and desensitization; one points the camera back at the viewer. Benny’s Video was inspired by Haneke reading multiple newspaper articles where the young boy’s answer for committing a murder was, “I just wanted to see what it was like.” While it’s clearly a message about the danger of not being able to differentiate reality from the images you see on screen, the main character, Benny, only experiences his life through a screen. Instead of looking out his window or engaging in a party at his house, Benny observes through a recording on his television. It’s a prescient look at how social media has severely altered how we interact with each other: hurling insults, surveilling, bullying, and desensitizing us from a connection to the other person as a human being.
The most haunting part, to me, was Benny’s parents’ reaction to his crime. Like in Caché and The White Ribbon, they too wanted to sweep everything under the rug in fear of how they’d be perceived, and as a result, they teach their son to repress his guilt, which will continue to haunt him for the rest of his life. Benny’s Video walked so Funny Games could run. I first watched the American version in college, and then—and still now—it’s one of the most jarring films I’ve ever seen. He said that he made the American version, shot-for-shot, because he knew Americans weren’t going to read subtitles, and we were the intended audience, which I think is hilarious—because is it not true? In Funny Games, Haneke plays with the thriller movie genre and interrogates how it manipulates us, instead showing what would really likely happen in a home invasion. Haneke thinks about everything, like how he wanted the perpetrators and the victims to be from the same class because if they weren’t, it would be a different story, or how he doesn’t show any violence on screen, just the aftermath.
And then there’s my favorite of Haneke’s films—The Piano Teacher. A movie that follows an emotionally abused and sexually repressed piano teacher, brilliantly played by Isabelle Huppert. It’s about female desire; it’s about shame; it’s about wanting to be seen but feeling ignored; it’s about the male ego; it’s about power; and it’s about consent. And I interpreted that scene (which you will know if you’ve seen it or when you watch) offers a look into what consent really means—a yes can become a no when the other person maliciously exploits your kink, shames you, and it’s no longer about meeting your desires, but the other person’s ego.
In an another interview with The Criterion Channel, he explains the difference between obscenity and pornography in film:
“Pornography exploits its characters and exploits its people. Obscenity is a different matter. Whenever a film transgresses the norm, it becomes obscene, difficult to bear, awkward to watch. I hope dramatic art will always do that. It’s acceptable now to show any kind of violence; that’s what I find pornographic—this conspicuous, showy violence that’s designed to titillate.”
And, for all his intentions, many viewers and critics still misunderstand him. In my research, I found so many reviews that called him a nihilist and diagnosed him with having contempt for his audience. There’s also this oddly centrist and harsh comment from New Yorker film critic Richard Brody about Haneke, in which he says that he doesn’t like his films because he thinks they are “hostile toward liberal society” and don’t offer or propose any solutions.
I disagree with Brody about Haneke (and also about Hit Man being one of the best films of 2024, but that’s a discussion for another time). Especially given that Haneke has repeatedly said that he critiques the bourgeoisie because it’s what he knows—it’s how he grew up. Haneke is unnerving in his message, but he knows he’s guilty too.
It reminded me of his dislike of other films that I loved (The Zone of Interest and Roma), in which it seems like he wants filmmakers to hold his hand and do the work for him. It made me think about what we should expect from films. Should a filmmaker give us the answers? Haneke thinks that, “It is the responsibility of art to ask questions, not give answers. And to ask questions in such an emphatic way that the audience spends a lot of time reflecting on them.” And I tend to agree with him. We are already inundated with images, from television to films to the news, which aim to manipulate our feelings by being overly sentimental, so I love Haneke’s films because he is intent on making us see. He doesn’t need to coddle, which I actually think is contemptuous. He deals in static shots and unfettered truth. And Haneke trusts us, the viewers, enough to believe we’ll self-reflect, ask the right questions, and even admit when we just don’t know; he knows that nothing is that simple. Isn’t that the utmost tell of respect? In a profile of Haneke, writer John Wray ends with this: “Those we love best are those to whom we tell the truth.”
It’s also funny because Haneke himself is quite jolly; the characteristic mentioned over and over in his profiles is his infectious laugh. On why such a seemingly happy man consistently decides to make us uncomfortable with his “colder than reality” films, he says it’s about desire.
“In an age when God no longer exists, the desire for another world remains. I don’t mean desire for heaven, but for another image of the world. I think you can only evoke it by avoiding showing it because it immediately becomes flat. If you force out a desire for it by pointing your finger at things that are wrong, that’s the best way to evoke it. I’m not religious, but of course, my films are the expression of a desire for a better world. Art, at least dramatic art, has never agreed with the status quo. You should always rebel against what’s wrong, against evil. You can rebel against that by showing it, but by showing it in a way that gives you a desire for the alternative, not in a way that makes it consumable.”
See what I mean about Haneke being the perfect director to watch in these times?
Other great Haneke films I watched: Amour and Code Unknown
Some things I loved
Hanni
Being ashy and not realizing it until I’m out and about is one of my worst fears. A fear that has come true too many times to count. I’ve been using Hanni products–currently the Splash Salve, the Good Aura oil, and the Water Balm–for the past several months. At first these products were gifted to me, and then I loved them so much I replenished them. I have dry skin and I’ve never trusted in-shower lotion products because they always leave me dry, but Hanni is playing a different game. I even had my mom, who is not seduced by good product design, try the products and she also loved them. It’s also perfect for those days when even showering feels overwhelming, and it removes one step from my routine. Next, I want to try the cleansing bar serum and the moisturizing stick. I haven’t been impressed by a beauty brand in quite a while.
Dark Muse: Balanchine and Blackness
While looking for tickets to the New York City Ballet’s Winter 2025 shows, I went down a George Balanchine rabbit hole and came across this amazing video of a symposium from journalist and dancer Theresa May Howard.
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