"Show Yourself and Say What You Want": Mocking the Objective Claim in Cache (Critical Essay‪)‬

In Michael Haneke's Cache (2005), videotapes begin to appear on the apartment doorstep of an upper-middle class French couple, Georges and Anne Laurent (Daniel Auteil and Juliette Binoche). The first of these tapes consists merely of static video footage of the facade of the family's apartment, running over two hours in length. As he watches this footage with his wife, a visibly-ruffled Georges asks, "Whose idea of a joke could this be?" Georges is suspicious of this video document, in other words, because he does not know what affect it carries: having no idea who made it, and therefore no sense of the motives behind the image, he has no idea whether to take it as comic, menacing, of menacingly comic. When he suggests to Anne that this could be a joke played by friends of their son, Pierrot, she doubts it, noting that "it's not particularly funny." She is right, of course, that nothing "particularly funny" inheres in this bare image of their apartment, an image so strictly documentary that, try as they might, they cannot impute to it a point of view. Starting with this unknown, Cache achieves a tone of terror. But when the film ultimately refuses to become a conventional whodunit, concluding without identifying the maker of the video images, we come to see that the very neutrality of these images--the idea that they could have generated themselves and have no purpose--might be the most terrifying prospect of all. (1) We propose that the full dimensions of Cache's critique can best be understood by situating the film in the tradition of the mockumentary and that, further, the tradition of the mockumentary can be more fully understood in light of Cache's critique. Mockumentary, as Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight offer in their study of the genre, Faking It, describes a "growing body of fictional texts" that "appropriate documentary codes and conventions and mimic various documentary modes" as "a commentary on, or confusion or subversion of, factual discourse" (1). We take this description to be largely accurate but for the inclusion of "confusion" in the series of achievements in mockumentary's designs. We prefer to restrict use of the term "mockumentary" to those fictional texts that appropriate the codes of documentary not for the purpose of gaining the status that facts have (the "confusion" of "fictional texts" and "factual discourse" in Roscoe and Hight's formulation) but in order to comment on or subvert the discursive power of factual storytelling. This restriction underlines the important distinction between those texts that fake the documentary and those that mock it. We would therefore, to offer an example, classify The Blair Witch Project (1999) as the former, and This Is Spinal Tap (1984) as the latter. While the fake documentary simply trades on the effect of documentary's authority, texts that mock the documentary do so in an effort to question its very status. Within that latter class of texts--the properly-termed mockumentaries--we might suppose that the impulse to mock has one of two purposes: first, to mock the pretensions of objective storytelling in order to expose how subjective this rendition of reality actually is; or, second, to mock the very foundational claim of documentary, that there exists the possibility of any objective telling of events.