elephant's graveyard: I am a pianist, not a poet

ELEPHANT'S GRAVEYARD
3 days ago
11 min read

The Piano Teacher (2001) — *The Piano Teacher* (2001)

✦ ·┈๑⋅⋯ welcome ⋯⋅๑┈· ✦

Hello, and welcome back! I’m super excited to be semi-motivated to write a blog, and I’d like to make this a bit more structured, as I tend to stray from the script.

I watched The Piano Teacher (2001) during finals week with my friends, and I have so many thoughts

and feelings about it. Since then, I’ve rewatched it three times, and I’ve found a new area to appreciate each time. My introduction to The Piano Teacher came from online spaces that had raved about it, alongside movies like Secretary, which display perversity and dominant-subordinate relationships. Initially, I went in with more expectations that this story would be perverse—yet romantic—it was nothing of the sort. I think this is the first time I have ever turned off a film because I was so disturbed. I’ve seen gore and brutality in art, but this movie made me so uncomfortable near the 2/3rd point, where I physically couldn’t handle it. Incredibly triggering, and hit some sore spots for me. Among my mommy issues, I have a particular relationship with sexuality, agency that this spoke to.

I want to disclose that before anything further, there is a strong content warning for BDSM themes, incest, abuse, and rape. If these topics are at all sensitive or uncomfortable, please leave.

After I had turned off the movie, I spent most of the evening reading about analyses and general social commentary about the film. I felt it was only appropriate to pick up where I had left off, and to finish the movie before sharing my thoughts and feelings. In this, I hope to make sense of Erika Kohut—a socially inexperienced woman— and the world around her as she traverses perversion, sexual autonomy, and independence.

Walter Klemmer

In my analysis of Walter, and by extension, all the characters, I believe that none of them are two-dimensional, with only set intentions and characteristics. I believe that Walter is incapable of seeing aspects of his personhood, and he cannot fully see nor understand the violence and perversion that he has underneath. He views himself the way he tries to present himself: kind and charming.

One of the prominent comments I had seen online was people defending Walter’s actions and claiming that he was equal to Erika, and that, in fact, he didn’t know any better when interacting with her. It’s made abundantly clear from the start that he’s incredibly assertive; the first time we see Walter really act out of the norm, he’s climbing over a bathroom stall to Erika after a student was harmed by her.

Walter, until this point, has only been depicted as a gentleman, expressing admiration for Erika’s work and stepping in to help others when they’re in need. After they’re making out and expressing desire for one another, He is put off by Erika’s frigid & domineering personality, even though she has not displayed anything short of stoicism.

She tries to assert dominance by edging Walter and choosing when to engage with him sexually; her unwillingness to abide by stereotypical sex scripts frustrates Walter significantly. Erika lacks submissiveness and outlines that she will only consent if she can choose what happens to her. Even though they want the same thing, he becomes dismissive, belittling, and tries to initiate sex without listening to her.

To be a successful performer is to know your audience, and Walter understands how to socially maneuver himself to achieve his goals. He’s conventionally attractive, charming, and is generally speaking a multi-faceted, talented person. He professes his love for Erika so strongly, despite not knowing her, in order to bring down her walls. In comparison to Erika, he’s miles ahead of her sexually and socially, and her odd social graces are off-putting to him. It’s very clear that he’s doing this because he sees her as an inaccessible woman and a challenge to conquer.

Erika will not budge, despite Walter’s expression that he finds going through all these hoops ridiculous. Walter’s compliance is not merely out of submission but out of necessity if he wants to have his desires fulfilled. Erika’s inability to perform the stereotypical sex script emasculates Walter, leading to defensiveness, agitation, and aggression: pieces of his personality that are not often put on display.

Erika allows Walter to have time to process her request, even telling him to call her later and let her know if he’s interested. She wants him to have the ability to choose for himself as long as she’s able to have control over her submission. After rejecting her and expressing disgust at her desires, he finds himself masturbating in front of her home, and blaming her, saying that she has infected him with her perversity. These sexual acts are still wanted and expressed by Walter, but they are only acted upon when she is under the impression that her written requests will not be fulfilled. Her knowledge and agency have been stripped from her, and he has successfully removed her from the decision-making on how they proceed with their relationship together. When they are in the ice rink closet, he calls her disgusting and says he cannot be near her because she smells so bad after vomiting from his throat-fucking. She leaves, per his request, but when Walter is raping Erika, she is being told that she did a bad thing, “abandoning” him at the ice rink, and she humiliated him, even though she obeyed his request. In fact, the entire time, he is blaming her for being non-reciprocating and taking no accountability for his actions.

Some had said that it wasn’t Walter’s fault, because he had “tried” to love her normally, but she could not comprehend normal love. So his raping her was his attempt at “loving her in the way she knew best.” It’s clear that Walter does not see fault or error in his actions, and that her lack of consent was more of a bother and an inconvenience rather than a sign to stop. He felt no guilt about hurting her and was quoting her letter the entire time as she was asking to stop. It was not a true fulfillment of her written desires, but rather a mockery of her attempt to have agency over her submission.

“Becoming a man requires that the boys learn to be indifferent to the fate of women. Indifference requires that the boy learn experience women as objects. The poet, the mystic, the prophet, the so-called sensitive man of any stripe, will still hear the wind whisper and the trees cry. But to him, women will be mute. He will have learned to be deaf to the sounds, sighs, whispers, screams of women in order to ally himself with other men in the hope that they will not treat him as child, that is, as one who belongs with the women.” ― Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

Especially at the end, he’s running off to the recital seating, greeting Erika, and smiling with his family like he did nothing wrong to her the night before. I think that it’s true in the sense that Walter does not see himself as someone who has done something wrong, but I don’t think he’s innocent. He is blind to his actions, and because his perversion aligns with social sex scripts (male initiation, pursuing, and dominance), he sees his actions as more socially acceptable or “justified” because his relationship and interactions with Erika actively emasculate him. This, the act of dominating Erika, and “putting her in her place,” is a way for him to reclaim the masculinity he feels was stripped from him.

Erika Kohut

Erika is such an interesting character to me because, until she had sexually violated her mother, her

interactions with sexuality reminded me a lot of myself and other girls I knew when I was younger. There are a lot of layers to my personal experience with developing my sexuality; part of me never really knew how to express my sexuality without being incredibly extreme. I—-similarly to Erika-—prior to becoming sexually active, engaged with extreme pornography, thinking this was what was expected of me, and this is what will prove I’m experienced, and I have control. I believed that if I said I wanted to be choked and hit, it would make me more valuable and worth something. That is, until I realized that men don’t care and will hit you, no matter if you ask for it or not.

Erika has so many kink-related toys hidden away, yet has never even had any sexual experience. She is private and expresses her sexuality in a very immature way, partly due to her inability to be independent from her mother—— literally sleeping beside her. Her voyeuristic tendencies developed from a sense of being stunted, with a desire to look behind the curtain into the real world. She wants these real-world experiences, but is incapable of really having them. So she expresses her sexuality through others, whether that be watching a couple having sex in a car, or watching and collecting porn, or sniffing tissues used by men at a private pornography screening room.

As a matter of fact, she does this in most aspects of her life; she gazes among ice rinks and parks, and, most importantly, she is the piano teacher, not the pianist. Voyeurism is stereotypically seen to be more of a masculine role because it asserts an unwilling omnipotent dominance and power over others. We see a lot of non-traditional, more masculine traits in Erika, where she’s asserting her sexual agency over Walter instead of crumpling at his feet from the first encounter. She wants to have control over her surroundings, over the people she scans, and control over herself and the situations she subjects herself to.

She uses this domineering persona in order to compensate for not knowing much at all about real relationships and sex, not the pornography sold. Inside, she is a very inexperienced and insecure woman; the moments where she actually reaches the moments of real sexual encounters, she will physically react by coughing, gagging, or not know where to go from there. All she had learned was artificial, and she finally gets a peek behind the scenes and freezes. An example of this is after Walter reads her letter to him, she begins to frantically fumble through her sex toys, trying to show that she knows what she’s doing—that she’s qualified. To me, she reminds me of a little girl trying to impress the people around her and prove she’s “grown up.” Although grown-ups don’t need to prove that; her view of sex and relationships is naive and immature.

Erika & Her Mother

Together their relationship is such a foundational piece as to why Erika is the person we see. Her mother is a domineering figure, despite being much smaller than Erika herself. They’re both cognizant and capable of traversing living alone, but they still live with one another—and not just live with one another, they sleep next to one another each night with twin beds pressed up against each other. Erika is in her later adulthood, late 30s to 40s I presume, and is bound to her mothers rule as if she’s 15. Her mother cooks, sets a curfew, and goes through Erika’s clothes. This relationship style SIGNIFICANTLY stunts any social growth that could come from her in all aspects—socially, sexually, emotionally, professionally, etc.

Mother is afraid that Erika is thinking now, and she expresses her fear. A person who doesn’t speak could easily be thinking. Mother demands that Erika reveal her thoughts, rather than let them eat into her. If Erika thinks anything, she has to tell Mother, to keep her informed. Mother is scared of silence. ― Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher

A point brought up when I was reading in online analyses was that in a way, there was an aspect of emotional incest happening between the them, where her mother refused to have Erika live independently, and stay by her side at all times as if she was her husband. Now, do I think what Erika did was right, coming onto her mother? Absolutely not. But when thinking about Erika, she’s a child stuck within an adult body, with adult feelings, and adult standards, with child rules. I don’t believe Erika did this out of some twisted pining for her mother this whole time, but to express that she has no clue what to do with her sexual feelings, and her mother barricading her from society and cock-blocking her had lead to an angry, immature, emotionally and sexually-driven outburst.

She is expected to live the life of a husband without any human autonomy, she is not allotted social and sexual freedom and this was an immature and immoral lashing out at her mother. Erika is an example of someone who isn’t a perfect victim, and she is portraying how when this abuse goes untreated, it’ll result in repeating the cycle of abuse to whoever they cross paths with. Like how she had hurt her student out of jealousy, and her mother out of anger, and herself out of self loathing. She was never taught how to properly resolve her feelings, even when others have harmed her. Even when she had conflicts with her mother early on, it was like whiplash—going from spitting hatred towards one another, to crying and hugging one another. Incredibly unstable, and incredibly unsafe.

Dominance & Agency

For the first thing a proprietor learns, and painfully at that, is: Trust is fine, but control is better. ― Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher

There is much to say about the way dominance has been portrayed, and The Piano Teacher is a strong

example of how dangerous pornography is and how incredibly harmful it is to the women who participate in consuming and engaging with violent sex. I feel it is necessary to say there is a valuable difference between erotica and pornography. Pornography centers on the violence and abuse of women, while erotica centers on sexual autonomy and equal power between consenting parties. While I do hold strong critiques of pornography and sex work, I do not criticize women who are trying their best to navigate a world that was built to commodify their existence.

“Women will only be truly sexually liberated when we arrive at a place where we can see ourselves as having sexual value and agency irrespective of whether or not we are the objects of male desire.” ― Bell Hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

Erika is so fascinating to me because, despite being placed in a world that wants her to conform to female gender expectations, she’s a very masculine woman and falls under the stereotype of an Iron Maiden. She’s incredibly assertive, stern, and doesn’t carry herself softly. Only after she reveals her soft underbelly, that is, her letter to Walter, does she begin to shrink down and become smaller. Even though Walter never saw any aspect of subordination within Erika, he insisted on being the one in control of their sexual relationship, but only when he was given permission to be dominant did he express disgust. The only time when he wanted to be dominant was not when she asked for it; he didn’t want her to have control over her subordination.

It’s really frustrating to see that online people assumed that their sexual encounter at the end was him respecting her wishes through that letter, because it was all but respect. He degraded her, calling her disgusting for expressing her desire, and allowing him time to think it over, and consider if this is what he wants. Walter had never expressed that he was willing to go through a dominant-subordinate relationship; therefore, it is not fair to Erika if he continues to harm her without the prior shared agreement. With sexual relationships that have such a strong power imbalance, it’s so important to establish things like safe-words, boundaries, and to be able to comfort one another after the fact. When he had raped her, it was not a fulfillment of her sexual requests; it was a mockery that she had the audacity to want a say in how she was treated within their sexual relationship.

Violent pornography doesn’t teach the viewer about consent and respect for your partner, and only exudes exactly what it is: violence. It’s why it’s so dangerous to have the sexually inexperienced—and quite frankly, mostly anybody exposed to such a thing, because it places these ideas of what sexual partners SHOULD want, and SHOULD expect. Erika didn’t know what to expect from a real sexual relationship that wasn’t scripted, and when it was happening in real time, it was then that she realized how mortifying this act truly was.

I’ve had experiences where I thought I knew what I wanted because pornography had taught me that

this is what women were supposed to want, but when I was actually experiencing the real thing, I felt like a deer in headlights. This is not to say that one cannot crave or truly want sexual power dynamics like this, but it’s important to have lengthy discussions prior to any sexual relations because it DOES harm those who do not. Even though the next day, Erika went out as she normally did, the sexual violence had consumed her to the point of stabbing herself in the heart, and killing herself.

Overall, I’d say this movie was incredibly gut-wrenching, and I don’t think I can ever watch it again unless I am going to reference it in writing. It was beautifully written and spoke to me very deeply, and I hope that my thoughts about it made some sort of sense to you all.