Lemmings: Tale 1: Arcadia

“Individuals without love for life can be born; others may lose it for a short or long time, perhaps for all the life they have left; and finally . . . here, perhaps I’ve got it: also groups of individuals may lose it, epochs, nations, families. Such things have happened; human history is full of them.” 

– Primo Levi, Westward¹

In Primo Levi’s short story “Westward,” two scientists study the mass suicide of lemmings – small rodents who exhibit a herd mentality of frequently migrating to a body of water to drown in. Where the first scientist, Anna, struggles to understand why anything would not want to live, the second scientist, Walter, explains it biologically – as a literal lack of the will to live. Eventually, the two scientists create ‘Factor L,’ a drug that restores this will. After offering this remedy to a tribe called the Arunde, whose population is slowly declining due to the accepted practice of suicide, Walter is ironically killed by a herd of lemmings while attempting to test the drug. Days later, Anna receives a letter from the Arunde rejecting the drug, with the leader stating that the Arunde people “prefer freedom to drugs and death to illusion.”²

Where Levi’s story seems to put a positive spin on Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous aphorism that humans are “condemned” to freedom – one where suicide is preferable to illusion – Michael Haneke sees the herd mentality of lemmings as a metaphor for absolute social collapse.³ Instead of purposeful freedom, Haneke’s lemmings are products of violence and malaise passed down through generations, creating a nation filled with those who, reduced to “pure biological survival,” lack the justification to live.⁴ It is in Haneke’s made-for-TV film Lemminge Teil 1: Arkadien (Lemmings Tale 1: Arcadia, 1979), that he explores the consequences of this lack. Specifically, the film is about Haneke’s own generation of young adults that came to age after World War II in Austria. While a film such as Ingmar Bergman’s Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries, 1957) views looking towards the past as a dreamy yet melancholic endeavour, Lemmings is instead anti-nostalgic, tracing the path of bourgeois youth into self-destruction rather than as a place where innocent mistakes are made. Moreover, Lemmings is representative of the approach in many of Haneke’s films of an “antinarrative form of representation” in that it features the “lack of an ability” to rationalise and explain its violent happenings, instead simply presenting the self-destruction as fact.⁵

However, Lemmings is also unique in Haneke’s oeuvre as the only one of his films to feature explicitly biographical elements, where the viewer is partly invited to empathise with Haneke’s own experiences. This avoids Haneke’s later purposeful glaciation, with viewers being able to understand the personal significance of this period in relation to the rest of postwar Europe, and framing the violent young characters in the film as partial victims of their environment rather than as fully irredeemable. Lemmings, therefore, is a personal study of a generation emerging under the postmodern condition – where young adults see no path to enlightenment due to witnessing their parents fail in their own lives, instead creating a generation of disaffected individuals who are bored, aimless and violent.⁶

The opening shot of Lemmings establishes this anti-nostalgic view. After the camera pans slowly over the night in Austria, we cut to a microcosm of destruction – that of the typical bourgeois family car being destroyed by young hooligans. Through the cracked wing-mirror of the car, we first see the culprits. This is Haneke’s rejection of nostalgia: much like the audience views the culprit through this cracked mirror, Haneke views his own generation through the same distorted lens – a metaphor of how looking back on the past wistfully is foolish. Instead, it is only through the lens of destruction that one can see what horrors have occurred, with this destruction being soundtracked with a jaunty popular song on the radio – something meant to distract the populace from reality.

While Haneke claims that “there is violence in all [his] films,”⁷ Lemmings is an early effort to explore the psychological violence passed down through generations – which he would return to in Das Weisse Band (The White Ribbon, 2009) – rather than the overtly physical violence of a film like Funny Games (1997). Throughout Lemmings, a stark disconnect exists between parent and child. The parents are portrayed as violent and controlling figures – either through smaller actions, such as telling a friend to go away without consulting their child first, or through the demanding red light of Sigurd (Paulus Manker)’s bedridden mother that calls him to her room, as well as the domineering violence of his father. Haneke depicts these parents as the generation of fascism, filled with hate and a lack of joy for anything that slowly creeps into the psyche of their children, turning them into violent and careless creatures with no hope for their futures. It is a deconstruction of the claim that “Austria was Nazi Germany’s first victim”: Haneke allows the bourgeois middle class no escape from guilt, instead exposing their violence in the family sphere.⁸ Haneke also depicts how the parents subconsciously imbue a duty onto their children, such as viewing a young person’s suicide as letting down their parents who saved them from the war, never repaying them for this act. These forms of violence mostly occur in the bourgeois household – an uncaring symbol of the uselessness of wealth – with Haneke casting these spaces in shadows and cool tones, turning them more into dungeons than welcoming homes. 

Whilst many of Haneke’s films deal with suicide, Lemmings depicts it as a final act of self-violence, preceded by social self-destruction and a lack of wariness. As the parents of Lemmings outwardly transfer their violent malaise and control onto their children, the children in turn act with both self-aggression and outward aggression.⁹ The tryptich-esque nature of the film explores three varying acts of self-aggression masked as outwards destruction. In Fritz (Christian Spatzek)’s affair with his professor’s wife, Sigurd and Sigrid (Eva Linder)’s act of destroying cars, and Christian (Christian Ignomar) and Evi (Regina Sattler)’s careless sexual relationship, Haneke illustrates how this growing generation seeks to destroy itself through recklessness and rebellious freedom, much like Levi’s Arunde. It is in the wake of these acts that Haneke’s trademark unblinking camera gazes at its subjects, transforming them into objects of despair ruined by a violent society. Haneke reveals how quickly joy transforms into this despair – focusing on Evi’s hysterics after she and Christian carelessly have sex, with her lying naked on the bed crying. Haneke thus bears every consequence of violence to the audience in order to make them truly see what is occurring. He also illustrates how this outward aggression transforms into self-hatred when Sigi asks his maid Anna (Hilde Berger) to choke him. Eventually, the consequences of these acts of self-aggression are the suicides present in the film. After Sigurd jumps off the ladder, the audience watches as his parents grieve his death. Haneke, however, continues to afford the parents no leniency as the audience, witness to their earlier aggressions, understands that they are the root cause of this death. This all culminates in learning of Sigurd’s final statement – “yet another cripple in the family” – which acts as one final rebellion against his parents. In his suicide, Sigurd confirms that he has become just like his parents, with his path ultimately ending because of the start his parents set him off on. 

Lemmings Tale 1 illustrates the generational violence inherent in societies doomed to collapse because of hate and malaise, with Haneke’s two-part film series acting as an early, unique example of the themes he would go on to explore in later efforts. The ending of the film, with Christian moving backwards and Sigrid moving forwards, indicates how Haneke views the cycle of violence: much like lemmings, both of these characters are headed nowhere, except to their own doom later in life. It is the final shot of Christian sitting at the train station – a sort of in-between world – that reinforces this. There is no return to Arcadia when you were born outside of it, Haneke claims. You can only be stuck in the in-between – the space where the lemmings are rushing towards the ocean – an area with a sense of movement, but destined doom at the end. As Levi himself says, we “cannot return to Arcadia,” instead only hoping that we stop this cycle of violence and cease “heading west.”¹⁰

Lemminge Teil 1: Arkadien/Lemmings Tale 1: Arcadia (1979 Austria/West Germany 113 mins)

Prod Co: Schönbrunn Film Production Company Prod: Robert Siepen, Wolfgang Ainberger, Jens-Peter Behrend Dir, Scr: Michael Haneke Phot: Jerzy Lipman, Walter Kindler Ed: Marie Homolkova Sound: Johannes Paiha Cos Des: Barbara Langbein

Cast: Regina Sattler, Christian Ingomar, Eva Linder, Paulus Manker, Christian Spatzek, Hilde Berger, Walter Schmidinger, Elisabeth Orth, Bernhard Wicki, Gustl Halenke, Kurt Sowinetz, Grete Zimmer, Rudolf Wessely, Ingrid Burkhard, Kurt Nachmann, Helma Gautier, Lena Stolze, Zoltan Paul, Elisabeth Schwarzbau, Manfred Neuböck 

Endnotes