Death with (In)dignity: Ageing, Disability, and Gender of Caring in Michael Haneke's Amour

Michael Haneke’s Amour criticizes and humanizes current biopolitical practices concerning old age, disability, care, gender, and death by telling a disturbing love story. Amour (2012) depicts an elderly French couple’s struggles after the wife, Anne suffers a debilitating stroke, and thus her retired pianist husband, Georges has to transform into a caretaker and eventually smothers his wife to end her—and his own—agony. By relying on various approaches to care within the medical humanities as well as disability- and gender-related insights of critical gerontology and film studies, the essay argues that Anne and Georges are primarily destroyed physically and mentally not by the illness experience itself but the debilitating and often transparent ideologies of care they are culturally submerged in. My reading of the film examines its cinematic depiction of the spatial and gender-related construction of (end-of-life) care in the face of the painful vulnerability of chronic illness.