On display in Media Burn are Martha Rosler’s photomontages juxtaposing images of war with advertisements for consumer goods, entitled Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful. In one composition, casualties of the Iraq war vie for attention with airbrushed models inside an Ikea environment. In another, troops wander through a decrepit, bombed-out building wherein a multitude of cloned housewives spray fabric freshener over pristine sofas. These collages are the contemporary incarnation of a series with the same name that Rosler completed during the Vietnam War. Not much has changed between 1967 and 2004 – a war fought overseas is experienced second-hand by an American public consumed primarily with consumerism. Therefore, the subject matter of the two series is identical. Only the hairstyles and home décor of the 60s have been replaced with today’s fashion, and the weaponry of yesteryear has been eclipsed by the contemporary technology of death. The collages of Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful simply and bluntly capture the contradictions of American culture. It’s like placing a gun on your silver canapé platter. It’s there whether you can see it or not.

As American citizens, how do we cope with the repercussions of our nation’s foreign policy? How do we continue to live our everyday lives in the face of violence and injustice? Have I benefited personally from the spoils of war? Do I take action, or do I continue to pretend I am oblivious? How guilty should I feel? These questions, especially the last one, evoked by Rosler’s work echo the conundrum I was left with at the end of Michael Haneke’s Hidden.

Hidden, like Rosler’s collages, is very much about the relationship between personal domestic life and larger political events. The twist is that it is cleverly constructed to make the very notion of guilt the actual problem. The film’s protagonist, Georges Laurent, and his wife are terrorized by a series of videotapes planted on their front porch. As the content of the tapes becomes more personal, Georges begins to understand their origin. He suspects that the tapes have been sent by Majid, an orphan who shared his family home for a year when he was only six years old, but who was sent way because of Georges’ jealousy. The guilty event from the past, which comes to haunt the Laurent family in the present, is a result of a real-life, post-colonialist atrocity in France’s history – specifically, the drowning-massacre of demonstrating Algerians that took place in Paris in 1961. It is this event, mentioned only in passing, which left Majid parentless. Georges is at once guilty and innocent in that the ‘crime’ he committed (telling lies so that his parents would not adopt the young Majid) was a result of the natural self-centeredness of a six year-old, only child and cannot be seen as truly malicious or evil. Likewise, it is never revealed whether it is Majid or his son who is sending the tapes to torment the family. This ambiguity pervades the film, in fact, every potentially guilty character – including Georges’ wife, who is accused by her son of having an extramarital affair – remains blameless, as all of the questions posed around culpability linger unanswered at the rolling of the credits.

Hidden and Bringing the War Home also share a pointed use of mass media imagery. The single, unedited surveillance shot dominates Hidden, accompanied by flashes of contemporary news coverage on the flat-screen TV in the Laurent’s living room. Instead of filming scenes in a conventional style with multiple viewpoints, wherein conversations are constructed with over-the-shoulder shots, the perspective Haneke provides is often limited to one angle. In many scenes we therefore only see the backs of certain characters, and where this is not feasible, as with the dinner party for instance, when the characters deliver their lines, each is given an individual close-up. In this way Haneke mimics the filming of the chat show which Georges hosts in a previous scene. In mirroring the commonplace, single-camera viewpoint of the media and CCTV cameras, Haneke emphasizes the limitations of individual perception. In the director’s own words: “[I]f 300 people are in a cinema watching it, they will all see a different film, so in a way there are thousands of different versions of Hidden. The point being that, despite what TV shows us, and what the news stories tell us, there is never just one truth; there is only personal truth.” Therefore, the monocular perspective of the camera, which we associate with objectivity, impartiality and truth, is used in Hidden to underscore the individuality and subjectivity of perception, suggesting that there is not one truth but many. The potentially restrictive single-camera perspective of surveillance utilized by Haneke to highlight the existence of multiplicity of subjective truths, in turn challenges mass media’s opposing claim.

While Haneke’s film and Rosler’s pictures provoke and befuddle, Cronenberg’s A History of Violence may offer a potential solution. Perhaps, when we think we are in need of a serious makeover, an alter ego, or a witness protection program, what we really require most is a passionate spouse and a loving family – a refuge from the public and political.

The plot of A History of Violence, like that of Hidden, revolves around the revelation of the protagonist’s past which comes to haunt him and his family. In A History of Violence, ideal husband and father, Tom Stall becomes a local hero by bravely killing two ‘bad men’ who attempt to rob his small-town coffee shop. The incident drums up national media coverage and brings more ‘evil’ into the town in the form of big-city gangsters, in search of Joey Cusack, the dangerous man Tom Stall used to be. The gory acts performed to protect his family from the gangsters seem to redeem Tom’s past, since they would not be possible without the expertise and skill developed in his life as a criminal. Because the manslaughter committed by Tom is protected by law as acts of self-defense, the protagonist is, in a way, innocent. Tom, like Hidden’s Georges, is simultaneously culpable and faultless. As a point of contrast between the two films, the discord and mistrust between the couple in Hidden is not found in A History of Violence – though clearly Tom’s crimes were far graver than Georges’ childish motives. Tom’s undeniably brutal past is accepted by his wife and fuels the couple’s love life. The initial shock caused by the disclosure of Tom’s violent past is quickly replaced by overt acts of loyalty and passionately aggressive sex.

Whereas in Hidden the guilt of individuals is left ambiguous, in A History of Violence it is made obvious. So I asked myself if there were political metaphors embedded in the latter film. At the culmination of History, Tom kills his gangster brother to put an end to all threats to his home. To do this he must leave the safety of his rural apple-pie community and travel to the rough streets of a distant city. This journey away from home seems an apt metaphor for the way in which America sends its soldiers overseas to confront foreign enemies that supposedly threaten homeland security. In fact, the entire film can be read as a metaphor for America’s relationship to its own history of violence. The evil that threatens the Stalls comes from outside as well as from within and the method for coping with this that the family and America share, is to deny our own immorality and locate blame in the ‘evil’ other. America forgets about the past, denies its guilt and blames the other in order to maintain the illusion of the ideal, happy family. And when violence does resurface in America it is acceptable in the name of self-defense, entertainment and titillation. The film seems to propose that it is okay to send young men off to war as long as a home-cooked meal of meatloaf, carrots and mashed potatoes awaits their return, as it does for Tom Stall at the end of Cronenberg’s film.

It seems no passing coincidence that all three artists discussed above were born during WWII; Rosler and Haneke in 1942 and Cronenberg in 1943. I would argue that growing up in the wake of such catastrophic events and then reaching maturity during the Vietnam War has drawn the three to make works that meld the personal with the political. In 2004, at the advent of the second Gulf War, all three were actively engaged in creating the works that reflect the effects of collective guilt on the individual, though only Rosler directly references America’s new conflict.

© Oriana Fox 2007