Funny Games
Produced by Celluloid Dreams
Directed and written by Michael Haneke
Distributed by Warner Independent Pictures

After seeing Austrian director Michael Haneke’s film Funny Games, I experienced an unaccustomed urge.  I wanted to buy a .45.

I’m sure this was not the reaction Haneke was hoping for, but he can hardly complain.  After all, his film illustrates all too convincingly that savagery is always just outside our gates, and those who willfully refuse to acknowledge this universal truth are likely to become its victims.  Haneke demonstrates his case courtesy of the Farbers, an upper-middle-class family—husband, wife, and 11-year-old son—who find their vacation home suddenly and inexplicably invaded by two pretty-boy psychos wearing tennis togs and white gloves.  Invaded is not quite the word.  Too civilized to suspect danger, Anne Farber (Naomi Watts) lets the young men into her home after a perfunctory glance at them through her nearly opaque screen door.  In general appearance, Peter (Michael Pitt) and Paul (Brady Corbet), as they are impiously named, seem to fit into her privileged world, and she is easily misled by their polite manner and seemingly college-bred diction.  Peter has come with an innocent request: Could he borrow four eggs?  Then, upon receiving them, he promptly drops them and petulantly demands another four.  Only then does Anne dimly begin to recognize the threat she has allowed to penetrate her daintily screened existence.  When her husband, George (Tim Roth), asks the young men to leave, Paul insults him.  Stung by the boy’s impertinence, George slaps him.  This is the moment the invaders have been waiting for.  In no time at all, George finds himself rendered helpless to defend his family.  It is just here that a .45 tucked into the folds of Anne’s apron would have been especially useful, but, of course, such an instrument wouldn’t be available in such a household.  What follows is a night of all-too-imaginable horror as the young men toy with their captives.  Paul cheerily announces that he’s betting they will be dead come the morning, and then demands they bet against him.  Paralyzed by fear and disbelief, the family sits numbly on their couch across from their captors.  Finally, George asks, “Why are you doing this?”

Paul chirrups brightly, “Why not?”  He then looks at the camera and mocks the audience.  “You’re on their side, so who will you bet with?”

Funny Games is a remake of the film Haneke originally made in 1998 in Austria.  Since the original was designed as an attack on American films for fobbing off violence and sadism as entertainment, Haneke has said that it only seemed right to recreate it shot for shot for us here.

Further, he claims to want to confront us with our own complicity in the violence we patronize on our movie and television screens.  To achieve this end, he terrorizes us with scenes of grisly brutality visited upon the apparently innocent Farbers.  Of course, some would object that the Farbers’ supposed innocence is thoroughly compromised by their ostentatious affluence.  They own a gated vacation house in one of the wealthiest communities on Long Island, and, while driving there in their Volvo, they listen to classical music with a shamelessly self-satisfied air—unquestionably indictable offenses, well deserving of the punishment Haneke shovels on.

Haneke means to disturb and offend us, but, interestingly, he doesn’t do so by showing us the hideous consequences of Peter’s and Paul’s deeds.  He carefully, almost chastely, keeps the grislier aspects of their outrages off screen even as he makes us painfully aware of what’s happening just beyond the film’s frame.  He wants us to know he is no mere goremeister.  Like Alfred Hitchcock, he seeks to unnerve us by forcing us to take a large measure of responsibility for what happens in his story.  Hitchcock designed many of his scenes so that they would remind his audiences that they were complicit in the mayhem they were watching in his movies.  In Rear Window, he made sure we identified with the voyeuristic photographer, played by Jimmy Stewart, as he records a murder with the help of his telephoto lens.  Like Stewart, we are at once excited and horrified by what we see.  Unlike Haneke, however, Hitchcock would never have been so leadenly self-righteous as to deprive his audience of the entertainment they paid for.  Haneke lamely mirrors Hitchcock’s strategy by inserting an improbable discussion between his psychopaths.  Peter, the dimmer and loonier of the two, describes at length a video game in which the hero moves back and forth between two worlds.  The first world is real, he explains; the second, illusory.  Paul, however, begs to disagree.  If you can see the antimaterial world in the game, he reasons, then it, too, is real.  Just so.  Audiences have been trained to accept screen atrocity and pornography as if they are harmless.  Haneke makes the obvious point that this is simply not true.  What we see on a screen has genuine consequences, even when they’re difficult to gauge.  For evidence, he gives us Paul and Peter themselves.

Haneke seems at first to deny us an explanation of the boys’ motivation.  At one point, Paul mockingly parades the usual excuses—Peter’s parents are divorced, he feels jaded by the emptiness of existence, etc.  Then, he takes it all back with a sneer.  There is, however, a cause for their behavior.  The boys are creatures of popular culture.  “As they say on TV,” Paul cries out eagerly as he introduces yet another of his sadistic games, “let’s make a deal.”

Anne asks Peter, “Why don’t you just kill us?”

He smiles and gently admonishes her, “You shouldn’t forget the importance of entertainment.”

Later, when Peter himself wonders if they have gone too far, Paul calmly observes, “We’re not up to feature-film length yet.  You want a real ending with plausible plot development.”  Peter and Paul are the living consequence of our sensation-at-any-cost 24-hour wraparound media environment.

There is more here than an attack on media culture, such as it is.  Haneke also takes aim at that familiar target, the bland and blithe bourgeoisie.  Clearly, he intends to emphasize that the people who have the affluence, education, and power to shape society have abdicated their responsibility.  Like Anne and George, they have retreated into their electronically gated homes and hidden behind their supposedly refined tastes.  They simply ignore the savagery just beyond their carefully pruned lawns.  So, Haneke implies, Anne and George deserve what Peter and Paul inflict on them, and, by extension, we also deserve a film that refuses to let us off the hook by adhering to fictional conventions.  There is no satisfying fictional denouement here, no tidy, reassuring resolution.  Instead, we are constantly reminded that we are watching a film and, what’s more, that we have come to the theater expecting to be entertained by the anguish of others.  When Anne implores of Peter and Paul, “Haven’t you done enough?” Paul turns toward us.

“Have you had enough?” he jeers.

There is no other way to put it: Haneke toys with his audience maliciously.  He wants us to realize that, like Peter and Paul, we, too, are creatures of our media culture.  We unconsciously expect films to obey the reassuring conventions to which we have become accustomed.  But Haneke willfully denies us such comfort.  At one point, Anne seems about to strike a potentially decisive blow against her captors.  The audience around me fairly gasped their relief at her display of courage.  But Haneke, ever the feline tormentor, literally rewinds the scene and plays it over, replacing this fleeting moment of hope with a crushingly bleak outcome.

I agree with Haneke’s premises, but I find his methods deplorable.  Yes, we live in an unspeakably sordid culture that revels in the spectacle of pain and degradation, not to mention sexual exploitation.  Yes, those who know better have simply averted their gaze and ignored their responsibilities.  Worse, in many cases, the privileged have profited directly or indirectly from the moral squalor that has descended upon our daily lives.  (We don’t learn what George does to make his money, but we can easily imagine him serving the interests of some media corporation—say, Time Warner, the distributor of this movie—that markets filth and nihilism to glut its bottom line.)  But by sneering at us as he calls our attention to the artificial nature of his project, Haneke only succeeds in undermining his stated mission.  His method is a tiresome postmodern gambit that appeals to the perennial graduate student.  Look, he shouts, I’m so daring, so avant-garde, I won’t let you suspend your disbelief.  I’m charging you with being guilty of watching a film.  Such moralistic unmasking of the unspoken fictional contract has never impressed me.  Hitchcock’s witty indirection serves the same purpose much more effectively.

Haneke is too serious to cater to our desire to be entertained.  He is a puritan, and puritans put their faith in sermons.  That is exactly what his film is—an overwrought sermon tricked out with postmodern effects.

Further, Haneke’s disrespect for traditional narrative conventions demonstrates his failure to grasp their fuller significance.  There is little doubt that life is replete with injustice, that the good do not regularly prevail, that many problems are simply not soluble.  But isn’t this what fiction was invented to address?  The word itself comes from the Latin verb fingere, meaning “to mold, to shape.”  With fiction, we shape the world of our experience in order to invest it with a moral order.  Yes, most writers settle for melodramatic excesses and Pollyannaish inanities to please their paying audiences.  But the few genuine artists always give the devil his due.  While admitting the evils of confusion and despair, they also dramatize our very real opportunities to triumph over the incursion of the void into human affairs.  What else is tragedy, to take but one genre, but a testament to our ability to achieve human purpose in the very face of mortal disaster?

Haneke, of course, isn’t having any of these bourgeois notions about moral struggle, grace, and transcendence.  No, he is in the nihilist’s camp.  It’s so much starker, so much more pleasing to wallow in despair.

The Peters and Pauls of Haneke’s imagination have always existed and will ever bedevil us.  So what?  What’s truly interesting is that their numbers have always been so tiny contrasted with those of the men and women who arise daily and try to make sense of their lives, caring for one another, their children, and their neighbors.  These good souls may lose their way, stumble, and grow fearful.  They may even surrender to the numbness of a gated selfishness.  But somehow, their desire to be decent and to construct meaning is never wholly vanquished.  Fiction, good fiction, helps us to grasp this about our time on earth, and no postmodern mockery will ever rob us of its abiding insight.