‘The Piano Teacher’: Me-Core And The Death Of Popular Nuance

Maddy Maguire
53 minutes ago
4 min read

A black and white photo of a grand piano — Photo by Julia Barrantes via Pexels (licensed under the Pexels Licence)

Erika Kohut, the piano teacher, stands in her ultralong skirt and perfectly modest blouse, clutching the chest from which blood now oozes – a self-inflicted stab wound. She does not cry. She exits the concert hall in which she is set to perform and disappears into the streets of Vienna. The credits roll. Congratulations, viewer, you may now mark ‘The Piano Teacher’ (Michael Haneke, 2001) as watched on Letterboxd. For extra cool points, be sure to leave a one-sentence review. The resounding response? ‘She’s just like me!’

This year, ‘The Piano Teacher’ turns 25 years old; the novel from which it was adapted, of the same name and written by Elfriede Jelinek, will be 43 years old. Critical acclaim has hardly been denied of either – take Jelinek’s Nobel Prize in Literature and Haneke’s Grand Prix prize at Cannes. It is a uniquely unsettling story, with a distinctly European (in a continental way) flair. Upon release, however, audiences overwhelmingly disagreed with its non-traditional portrayal of female sexuality, and thus arose a sort of oh-so-niche mystique: a film only the most expansive of minds could ever hope to understand. Throw Isabelle Huppert into the mix, in all her trenchcoatness, and it was a one-way ticket to the Cinephile Hall of Fame for ‘The Piano Teacher’.

That is to say, not so very long ago, there was a time when having ‘The Piano Teacher’ in your canon meant a lot to the Depop Wizards who ran Film Twitter, Letterboxd and all other hellish landscapes of online artistic performativeness. Posting a still of Huppert’s face with a ‘I have got to smoke a blunt with the bitch’-esque caption circa 2020 was the ultimate display of nonchalant intellectualism. Alas, where there’s a will, there’s a TikTok. 2025 reared its head, with 35mm screenings of the film and a Criterion Closet mention from Best Actress Mikey Madison, and in came the edits. First to Radiohead, then to Björk. It’s your favourite horror movie. It’s bad how much you relate. It’s about love, and a man and a woman. Erika the pervert. Erika the misunderstood. That’s all fine. That’s all good. Art is for the people – the more, the merrier. And there’s always some satisfaction in seeing gatekeepers fail to keep.

But then again, is short form content ever the way to go? Not at all. ‘The Piano Teacher’, with its ongoing retrospective growth in popularity, is proving why that’s so.

Erika is a victim, but she’s a bad one – that’s the ‘point’, if you wish for one. Clipped to the beat of Bjork’s ‘Play Dead (Tim Simenon Orchestral Mix)’, Erika is instead the ultimate Girlfailure. According to the authority of TikTok commenters, she viciously disfigures her female student’s hand to save the girl from a fate like her own. Her pornography habits, through which she wrongfully identifies love as objectification and therefore subjugation, are very ‘slay’. Even Klemmer, who is, to be frank, a rapist, is provided with the fresh new identity of Man Whose Feelings Confuse Him. It’s like scraping the meat out of a crab just to gnaw on the shell. These simplifications serve an algorithm – it’s about finding ‘the target audience’. Sift through all the introspection and throw together something repostable. After all, it’s a ‘For You’ page, and being seen with all your trophies is much easier than actually winning them.

What’s lost in all this chopping up and beat-syncing is much larger than any creative vision. In a post Amber Heard world, it is more than a little disheartening to see a film about a less-than-perfect victim be so heavily sanitised – to see Erika stripped of all her ugly and made relatable. Slap a few trending hashtags over everything and long gone is the message of a patriarchal power that no woman, no matter how horrible and no matter how presumably powerful, can evade. But perhaps the film itself has always encouraged this, and TikTok users are not wholly to blame, with promotional posters of Huppert and Benoît Magimel, who portrays Klemmer, caught in a romantic embrace with their mouths pressed together. Bums must be put in seats somehow, meaning a touch of mass appeal is hard to avoid; that’s the nature of film as a business. So, surely there must be some hope for us all? These CapCut edits made by teenagers cannot displace the sensitivity and respect with which ‘The Piano Teacher’ has traditionally been treated with in critical or scholarly circles, right?

It’s far from breaking news to point out that social media platforms have long since ceased to be considered playgrounds of mindless fun and meaningless content. Ultimately, these posts – often tied to the aptly named concept of ‘Me-Core’ – are consumed with the same attitude one might have when reading a peer-reviewed academic paper because, well, they can be. To click on somebody’s profile and take a look through their reposts is akin to wandering through a library of their beautiful, cultured and totally-not-overly-curated mind. It’s much less ‘here’s a collection of edits I enjoy’ and more ‘look at what I am reposting and divine my intelligence from it’. In short, what has emerged is a monstrous, often-pontificating evolution of the niche-posting ‘The Piano Teacher’ has long been acquainted with. As a result, valuable voices are disregarded. Compare the likes on an edit of Erika and her mother using a Charli XCX song to that of the introspective analysis of any young woman who did not stress the importance of buzzwords such as ‘femcel’ or ‘freaky’ or ‘girlhood’. The former will almost always win. It’s not fair, and it’s not a phenomenon reserved solely for Haneke’s film, either. Lionsgate, home of ‘La La Land’ (Damien Chazelle, 2016) and ‘American Psycho’ (Mary Harron, 2000), for example, took the initiative and began hiring fan editors last year. Maybe, as years pass, this tactic will prove itself to be the saving grace of cinema and words will be eaten. Right now, however, it’s looking like short attention spans and cultural poseurism might be the new norm.