Austrian writer-director Michael Haneke captures a portrait of technological alienation and dehumanization in Benny’s Video. The titular Benny (Arno Frisch) is a teenager in middle-class Austria, a kid whose world is predominantly mediated through video images; he prefers to watch the street outside his apartment through a camera feed rather than looking out the window. He repeatedly watches footage of a pig being slaughtered, replaying it and letting it run in slow motion. He does this without displaying shock or disgust or pleasure or any sort of affect at all. The clip is just a series of images that exist to be consumed.

While Benny’s Video tackles voyeurism, it doesn’t approach it in an intensely psychological way, as Hitchcock might. In that kind of understanding of voyeurism, the whole process is a struggle for power, with the voyeur remaining hidden and unapproachable, the object of their gaze coming under their control and full understanding, and the image — the cinematic image, especially — is the method of capture (in all the senses of the word) that joins the two. Consider Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window as the quintessential example; he uses his lenses to make the world a coherent system he can control and dominate. In this view, the images that the voyeur craves have power because of their connection to reality. They capture something or someone in a form that the voyeur can control.

This isn’t what Benny desires from his video images. In fact, with his blank and robotic interaction with the world, it’s hard to say if he has any desire at all. The central conflict of the film revolves around an act of brutality that Benny commits, an act that is captured on his camera, and the rippling aftermath of that act. Benny cleans up his mess with an efficiency borne not out of ruthlessness but out of disengagement — one that is so deep-seated that he takes a break in the middle of mopping up blood to have a snack and a glass of milk.

The key here is in the act of consumption; it’s not about the images as means towards approaching something real, but as objects to be consumed in and of themselves. While Benny’s parents (Angela Winkler and Ulrich Mühe) are obsessed with the real-life consequences of their son’s actions, Benny barely registers that there are consequences, or even a real life. He screens the incriminating footage for them as if it were no different from the pig-slaughter footage, or a recording of his sister’s party games, because to him there is no difference. In this way, Benny prefigures the disaffected protagonist of Antonio Campos’s Afterschool (#6), whose blistering survey of Internet videos conflates hardcore pornography with footage of Saddam Hussein’s execution. While the clunky magnetic videotape of 1992 may have been superseded by the ethereal digital space of YouTube in 2008, the principle is the same: these disconnected images, in the eyes of these boys, bear no connection to reality. They are merely products to be consumed.

These are characters at the edge of our understanding, and especially in Benny’s case it would be simple enough to dismiss him as a case of sociopathy. But the simple explanation can’t actually explain Benny. What makes him more chilling than any Hitchcock psychotic or slasher villain is there there is nothing to look to — no parent-inflicted trauma, no structural pressure, no life-altering breaking point — that says “This is why this person became a monster.” We have actions without causes, and the audience is left to pick up the pieces.

(The Film School Thesis Statement Generator says: “The expressionistic play between sound and history in Benny’s Video exposes stereotypical conceptions of Islamofascism.” Not sure what the Generator’s going for, but it is interesting that just like in Sheer Madness (#44), if you are trapped in an alienating and threatening German-speaking society, the place of ideal retreat is Egypt for some reason)