"Comment ça, rien?": Screening the Gaze in Caché

Hugh S. Manon, Oklahoma State University

Abstract

Film theorists sometimes introduce their work as reading a certain cultural artifact "through a psychoanalytic lens." This essay reads the opening long take of Michael Haneke's Caché (2005) as a psychoanalytic lens, one that both magnifies the desire of protagonist Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil) and exposes his actions as a catastrophic performance for the desire of the Other. As such, the opening shot (and others like it later in the film) can be understood as an invitation to look at, indeed to scrutinize, what Jacques Lacan calls le regard-"the gaze"-a crucial psychoanalytic concept that has suffered decades of misinterpretation by theorists of various stripes. Whether or not Haneke is familiar with Lacanian theory- and I make no such claims here-it is to the writer-director's great credit that Caché represents the gaze with all the complexity Lacan intended.