As far as Michael Haneke's Funny Games (2007) is concerned, there is another and third level of analysis the basis of which I tried to establish in the second part of this meditation.

By stripping off the protective layer of redemption within which all crime thrillers and even slasher movies are wrapped, Haneke is actually denying us our human yearning for better tomorrows.

He is declaring that we have no RIGHT to HOPE for anything better in the future.

He assumes the DISCONNECT between his reality and our images is proof enough of our eternal guilt.

The worst point Haneke misses is this – denying us the right to maintain hope through symbols and narration is tantamount to saying that we have no right to ANY art, period.

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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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Since the day our earliest ancestors pressed their hands on a cave wall in Altamira and Lascaux and sprayed paint on them we tried to improve the control over our fate by manipulating it first in a symbolic domain.

We proved to ourselves that we could hunt that mammoth or the saber-toothed tiger by first depicting it killed in a cave painting.

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