While watching Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games,” a shot-by-shot remake of his German film of the same title made 10 years ago, I had the feeling there was not enough space in the half-empty theater. There was no escape from the film’s icy grip.
“Funny Games” begins with a man, his wife and their son returning to vacation at their beach house.
After they arrive, the man and boy go out to fix the sailboat ashore; the woman, meanwhile, stays in the kitchen, getting comfortable with fresh vegetables. The spacious estate, its calm ambience and their tranquil lifestyle all bespeak the comfort of the upper middle class.
Two boys, staying as guests at the neighbors, later arrive on an errand. Apparently, the neighbor was out of eggs, and so a few were needed, if one had them please. This encounter kick-starts the crucial confrontation in which our serenity vanishes quicker than a Caucasian in Baghdad.
The reader loses nothing in knowing Haneke unleashes an episodic crescendo of brutality on the family. Nothing is spared in what he assumes is an education on our obsession with gore and tragedy and how modernity affects our ability to communicate.
“Funny Games” destroys its audience’s ability to feel. Each agony builds on the absurdity of its predecessor, and by the end, we are broken not by our emotions but instead by the sustained thunderbolts of the plot. It shatters the audience’s sense of propriety. Haneke lifts the veneer off our pretense at civility, our belief that “no cultured person would do that.”
To create an alienating effect, Haneke breaks the invisible wall separating characters in a performance from the audience.
This is actually an underhanded attack on both the bourgeois presumption that criminals come only from the economically downtrodden and also our association of criminality with ugliness.
In a scene, as the couple, bound hands and ankles, repeatedly asks, “Why?” one of the boys, nattily dressed in all-white golf gear, taunts them, asking “Why not?” In another scene, he notes that he, like the other torturer, had a happy childhood where both parents lived together and in which none of them were abused.
The moral is well taken: all strata of society have their vermin.
Some might even be good-looking.
Haneke then shifts gears, casting his cool gaze on our incapacity to communicate with fellow man. At a certain point, the wife uses her cell phone to call 911; the first time, the phone does not work – battery is dead; second time, the operator cannot hear her. Here the phone represents a contrivance we rely on in creating an illusion we are always connected, when in reality, we are a dial tone from being alone.
We now live in an existential black hole where no one hears our screams. This social malaise mirrors a deeper spiritual vacuum. With our hectic lifestyles, our reliance on technology and the wonders of science, human beings have lost sight of any cosmic entity higher than themselves. When the wife is asked by one of her torturers to pray, and she is unable to remember any prayer, his response becomes pertinent: “Where are we?”
In essence, “Funny Games” toys with our ideas of violence and fun. We have grown so accustomed to murder, such as the innocent first person shooter games we play, like Halo 3, that when Haneke holds up a mirror, we do not recognize the reflection.
Some critics have objected to his sanctimonious didactism. Who bestowed him with the power to lecture on what should be watched on television? Besides, these critics note, Haneke leaves no exceptions. To him, everyone is complicit in the degradation of society. This has led to reviews with headlines like “Torture, Pure and Simple” and “The Repellent Funny Games Thinks it’s Smart, Don’t be Fooled.”
The most incisive critique is that Haneke indulges in the same behavior he condemns. By his unrelenting pedantry, he provides cover for other filmmakers to exploit the torture porn genre.
I have sympathy for those kinds of sentiments but not the luxury of disregarding the film’s message.
How can I explain deploring Funny Games, when just weeks ago I applauded films like “No Country for Old Men” and “There Will be Blood” as they walked away with Oscar gold? Should we judge films only by the sparkle of the exterior and disregard the content lying within? Does a film’s cinematography, screenplay or performance have greater cachet than its underlying worldview?
Haneke laughs at these pretensions to rational criticism.
“You want a real ending with plausible plot development,” the torturer jests.
Haneke invites our contempt. And though I might chide him for insensitivity to the audience’s discomfort, I cannot in good conscience cast the first stone in condemnation. I stand guilty and accept his reproof.
Lessons can be learned from even the onanistic rant of a sadist disguised as truth.
—-Contact Freke Ette at [email protected]