The Piano Teacher and The Limits of Desire

Romy keeps fantasising about Samuel, and it’s implied that BDSM now plays some role in her marriage. But, as in many erotic films, the threat posed by desire is eventually smoothed over and neutralised. Her life returns to normal, and what has happened with Samuel is folded neatly back into her relationship and job. Despite the hint that the fantasy persists it stays contained, safely quarantined within the couple and the world they already inhabit.

Pillion takes adifferent route but arrives somewhere fairly similar. Colin and Ray’s relationship is imperfect, asometimes uneasy meeting of fantasy and reality – but, as inBabygirl, the tensions between the two ultimately iron themselves out. Colin takes the more uncomfortable parts of his relationship with Ray as alesson, stepping towards aglorious new world of self-actualisation and asuitably updated Grindr profile.

What distinguishesThe Piano Teacher from such narratives is precisely its refusal to smooth such tensions away. WhereBabygirl andPillion translate sexual desire into narratives of self-discovery or emotional transformation, Haneke leaves desire punishing and unresolved. Fantasy refuses to open apath toward liberation or self-knowledge for Erika, and it is this lack of resolution that continues to give the film its force. The events of the film transform Erika’s subjectivity very little: she starts in abjectness and remains there.

Whether Erika learns something about herself over the course of the film is one question. Whether she knows anything about her desire in the first place is another. Using the easy psychological framework of contemporary sexual discourse, Erika does seem to know what she wants; it’s easy, in fact, to read her as someone with areal handle on her (admittedly perverse) desires. The letter she writes to her student Walter, coolly listing the many depraved acts she hopes to be subject to, doesn’t feel amillion miles away from an overly detailed Feeld profile.

Ultimately, though, Erika doesn’t seem to know what she wants at all. Unruly symptoms accompany her desire: she coughs uncontrollably when Walter asks to kiss her neck; feels the urge to urinate next to acouple having sex in acar; and vomits during sex. Even her sudden, violent embrace of her own mother near the end of the film seems to come out of nowhere, something like an involuntary spasm.

Erika’s piano playing suggests something similar, meticulous and mechanical on the surface but betraying something wilder, her primal connection with the music straining against the icy discipline meant to contain it. Hands, as Darian Leader remarks in his book of the same name, are not the obedient servants they seem to be. You might think of this as the return of the repressed: adesire so intolerable in its magnitude it can’t be faced directly.

Walter, the more ostensibly well-adjusted of the pair, also has aloose grip on his desire. Initially he seems to want something like anormal sexual relationship with Erika, recoiling totally from the humiliations she asks him to perform. Yet when he finally returns to her apartment he has transformed into asadistpar excellence, acting with aviolence that exceeds even the script she has written.

It would be tempting to read this as Walter simply revealing his ​‘true’ desire. ButThe Piano Teacheroffers no such clarity. Like Erika, Walter seems unsure of what he wants, even during the climactic scene itself. His breezy disavowal of his capacity for violence in the film’s final few minutes leaves his desire as opaque as before. Haneke refuses to psychologise or pathologise, and we’re left wondering how Walter understands what has happened or what his role in the affair really was. We never know whether Erika enjoys her final encounter with Walter or feels genuinely violated – or, perhaps most troublingly, both.

“Sex disorganises. What might contain it?” asks psychoanalyst Jameison Webster in her book ​‘Disorganisation and Sex’.The Piano Teacheroffers ableak answer: aworld in which desire, in all its disorganisation and excess, remains uncontained and uncontainable. Two decades on, it remains so transgressive precisely because it reminds us that our own desire is illegible – and that, try as we might, we can never know what we’re consenting to when we agree to be the object of someone else’s desire.