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.
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