Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Thirty-five minutes into the movie The Piano Teacher, there occurs an indelible scene. In a dim bathroom cluttered with drugstore label sprays, lotions, and other feeble concoctions designed to fend off decay, a middle-aged woman in a silk robe briskly zips open her pocketbook and removes a folded slip of paper, which she unfolds to reveal a razor blade. Armed with this instrument, she turns around, slips off her flip flops, opens her robe, and sits on the edge of her bathtub with her legs splayed. She moves resolutely but without authority, with a kind of robotic resolve, as if she were complying rather than presiding, mechanically obeying an inner necessity. The camera displays her in profile. A pink hand mirror rests on a ledge by the tub among bottles of various shapes and sizes. She snatches up the glass and holds it out between her knees with one hand, still gripping the blade in the other. Then Erika Kohut, the piano teacher, leans forward intently, carefully adjusts the mirror until she appears satisfied with her view, moves the knife towards her groin, and slices inside herself several times with strained and steady force. A curtain of flat auburn hair conceals all her face except her lips, which are puckered perhaps in pain, perhaps in concentration. She breathes heavily, apparently exerting great effort. Rivulets of crimson liquid spill out of her and into the porcelain basin. Then the mutilation is halted abruptly by banality. “Erika, dinner is ready!” her aging mother, with whom she lives in a cramped apartment, summons her from the other room. “Coming, Mother!” replies the dutiful daughter while snatching a thick menstrual pad from an open bag beside her and pressing it to the wounds between her legs. It has been reported that at the press screening for The Piano Teacher at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001, members of the audience guffawed at this scene. Their laughter in response to the self-mutilation just witnessed was as sickening as it was unwarranted — significantly more discomfiting than the blood in the bathtub. If the director, Michael Haneke, had intended the mortification to be funny — he does in fact have a profoundly twisted sense of humor — he should not have cast Isabelle Huppert as Erika. Huppert possesses a ferality which somehow does not mitigate her natural sophistication. And in the scene in the bathroom Huppert is feral in precisely the way that a woman’s hatred of her own womanhood is feral. Yes: a woman’s hatred of her own womanhood. It exists, it snarls in our bellies; and Huppert’s peerless performance is among its rare open expressions. She brilliantly communicates in the bathroom scene the gravity of her ferocious behavior. Owing to her marrow-deep conviction, conscious or not, of the significance of that drawn blood, the savagery that Erika Kohut perpetrates against herself is exhilarating. I do not mean to deny that it is also grotesque, revolting, and wrenching. And yet it is at the same time emphatically thrilling in the way that it is always thrilling when a person acts openly upon a perplexing, wounding, and unacknowledged truth. The blood is a shibboleth and the truth that it communicates extends beyond the inner torments of this piano teacher. Her action is symptomatic of the cruel reality that there is a long tradition — longer than most contemporary women know — of womanly self-mortification. Those streams of crimson encapsulate a common and time-honored and baffling compulsion: a woman’s compulsion to attack herself. What accounts for this propensity is a mystery, but the evidence for the compulsion is plentiful. Of course, most women, or more women, casually contract or stunt themselves rather than slice and starve themselves. But the slicing and the starving are hardly unheard of, and they are manifestations of the same proclivities, and are emphatically more common in women than men. Women are three to four times more likely to suffer from anorexia and bulimia and to cut than men are. Those numbers are strikingly reminiscent of another grizzly statistic: men are four times more likely to be murdered and to commit murder than women. It would seem that men brutalize one another