Digital Dwelling and Defensive Domesticity: (De)constructing Spatialised Hospitality in Michael Haneke’s Happy End

With Calais often configured as a site of passage rather than a site of dwelling in contemporary cinema, Michael Haneke’s Happy End (2017) is a portrayal of those who call Calais home. Created following the disbandment of the ‘Calais Jungle’, the film forgoes a depiction of France’s migrant ‘guests’ to foreground its white, bourgeois ‘hosts’. This article uses Happy End to interrogate the spatialised construction of hospitality as it plays out across private and national dwellings in the symbolic border-zone of Calais. In particular, it proposes Haneke’s exploitation of digital dwellings in the film as a vehicle for rethinking hospitality through space. In the first instance, it will explore how hospitality is constructed spatially in the homes of Happy End, demonstrating how this construction upholds structures of inhospitality in contemporary France. In the second instance, it will consider the heterotopia of cyberspace as a further place of dwelling in the film, which Haneke exploits to (de)construct the defensive domesticity of home. To conclude, it will emphasise Haneke’s challenge to the dominant spatialised theorisation of hospitality, illustrating how he opens up Happy End to the possibility of a more equitable and expansive conception of hospitality that transcends markers of place.