Movies, Violence, and Michael Haneke (Part III of IV)
Posted on 04 April 2008 by Gary Karbon
Michael Haneke's Funny Games (2007) can be approached at three different levels of analysis. He wins hands down at the second level but loses badly on the first and (the most important) third levels.
Level 1 is obvious – this is not a film but, as the New York Times movie critic A. O. Scott has called it, a "gruesome spectacle of senseless cruelty" and "pornography of blood and pain."
Pornography is love and lust taken out of its local social context and reduced to its sheer physical universality.
Haneke's violence is pornographic in a similar manner. It reduces violence to a universal mechanical act with reason-defying randomness. It becomes a snake that feeds on its own tail; an act that exists only for itself.
Especially cruel and inexcusable are the scenes where the perverts torturing this perfectly beautiful family on their weekend outing look directly into the camera and wink, and ask us, the audience, if we like the plot "so far"?!
That's when you shudder, realizing that Haneke now makes us a part of Evil as well.
He creates the illusion that we are consenting to torture where in fact no such consent is ever given.
Such debunking of the presentation layer is nothing new.
Alfred Hitchcock did it with that famous original wink into the camera in the very last scene of his last movie, Family Plot (1976).
Hitchcock also made us aware that we were actually watching not a real story "out there" but a movie, a total cultural construct. Good joke. Fine.
But here Haneke launches a direct assault on all movie fans assuming that we are just as guilty and corrupt since we have chosen to watch his movie.
It's an unfair ambush. It's like being invited to the screening of a supposedly E. M. Forster movie only to discover that we're in for a cheap porn flick.
By sealing the tunnel of hope completely and refusing even a sliver of light seep in, Haneke not only violates a time-honored plotting taboo but the best intentions and loftiest aspirations of human nature as well.
So at this level it is clear that Funny Games (2007) is an act of aggression masquerading as a film.
It's not "funny" and it's not a "game."
Its heartless deception and merciless entrapment is perhaps never seen before in art history. It can probably best be understood by talking to Haneke's psychiatrist, if he's got one.
The second level though is more interesting.
That's the same platform from which Marquis de Sade back in the 18th century had launched his unrelenting critique of the bourgeois morality of his day.
At this level Haneke is a true humanist because he is shoving our presumed "collective hypocrisy" down our throats.
He is saying "you want violence, I mean REAL violence?! So here it is! Enjoy it if you can, you evil bastards posing as movie lovers!"
At that level he is forcing us to consider the fact that we might actually be no different than the Roman masses that had a "good time" at the Colosseum at the expense of the slaves torn to pieces by the Gladiators and wild beasts.
We might be heading for Hell in front of our wide-screen sets and we don't even know it!
At that level I have to admit that we owe Haneke a sincere thanks since he forces us to question our own motivations for watching a film like Funny Games.
There is however another and third level of analysis where Funny Games again fails totally. I'll go into that in the next and last part of this series.
See: Part 1 and Part 2
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