Funny Games! Toons! Characters! Downloads!


Monday, Netflix finally delivered the original, Austrian version of Funny Games, Michael Haneke's mean-spirited home-invasion snuff film that adds insult to injury by explicitly blaming the audience for watching it. The ostensible point of the film is that movie violence--American movie violence--is so whimsical that it undercuts the painful ugliness of violence in reality, and it makes this point via lots of painful ugliness. Violence is bad, you see. Haneke's new shot-for-shot English-language remake of Funny Games, and his attempt to scar a whole new demographic, has been the topic of a lot of debate in the past month or so, even among the personal blogs I read. (Ben wrote a typically thoughtful journal entry on why he won't be seeing Funny Games that Haneke would congratulate himself for prompting. Tasha Robinson came up with the ingenious technique of beating Haneke at his own game by watching the DVD at double speed, reading the subtitles and absorbing the story, but neatly sidestepping the emotional manipulation of the film.) So I watched the old version out of curiosity.

You can go to Rotten Tomatoes and read any number of more competent plot summaries than mine, so I'll just give you an oversimplification of the story: An upper-middle-class couple shows up at their isolated vacation home with their preteen kid and their dog. Two mannerly sociopaths talk their way into the house under the pretext of borrowing eggs and then spend the rest of the film violently torturing the family. Ta-da.

It may be "torture porn," but not in the way you're thinking. The focus is on the emotional torture of violence, so the camera tends to linger on other characters' reactions to seeing hurtful acts that we, the viewers, do not see in progress. We just see their grim aftermath. The "games" of the title are simply the villains' gimmick: they present the pain they inflict as the consequence of the victims losing a series of unwinnable "bets." (It's not a new gimmick, nor is it meant to be, I don't think. Sticking with the "film violence" theme, we can assume the characters themselves stole the idea from, say, Jeremy Irons's riddle-spouting terrorist in Die Hard with a Vengeance.) And the element of the film that's become the most controversial is the way one of the villians keeps turning to the camera and glibly chastising the viewer for his complicity in these "games." Haneke has repeatedly said in interviews that the only people who will make it to the end of Funny Games--and, in the process, be abused, sickened, and scolded into submission--are those who really need his perverse version of tough love in the first place. The correct response is to be horrified and walk out somewhere along the way. That attitude itself is why Funny Games doesn't work at all.

To be fair, I watched Funny Games more than a decade after its original 1997 release. I was in high school when it came out, so I don't have much of a frame of reference for the larger state of cinema at that time. Furthermore, in the years since its debut, dozens of films have been released that will color how newcomers view Funny Games. It's difficult to keep in mind that the original was released in a world that hadn't seen Panic Room or Saw or In the Bedroom or Adaptation or any number of other popular movies that cover similar narrative or thematic ground. Maybe it was a better film back then.

However, given that the new Tim Roth/Naomi Watts Funny Games is evidently so identical to the German version that it could almost be classified as a rerelease, we can assume that Haneke thinks his original vision is timelier than ever. More importantly, he thinks we still desperately need his foul medicine, so I guess I'm not supposed to question whether its relevance to the entertainment landscape has changed. Okay, fine. So I watched, prepared to be taught a lesson.

And you know what? Upon the film's completion, I didn't feel gutted, outraged, or manipulated. It may be that I'm even more reprehensibly nihilistic than Haneke anticipated--beyond his "help," as it were--but I think it's because from the first moment the villain winked into the camera, I wasn't buying. Part of it is my own stuffiness, I suppose, since the "breaking the fourth wall" technique is one of those tricks that I simply can't see as innovative anymore, or even for 1997. It was cute for the title characters on The Monkees and It's Garry Shandling's Show to break the action and comment on the silliness of our collective participation in what we were seeing. Will Smith's constant nattering at the camera in the first couple seasons of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, on the other hand, most likely marks the point at which the technique moved from cheeky to tiresome. By the time Haneke got to the notion of using these asides as a means of directing the viewer's reactions, it mostly comes off as condescending, no different from Spike Lee opening Bamboozled by having Damon Wayans preachily define the word "satire," lest we none-too-savvy viewers miss the boat.

Furthermore--and from here forward, I'm potentially spoiling whatever there is to be spoiled--Funny Games' climax hinges on action that barges in randomly from outside the film's diegetic world, on which I call shenanigans. I don't want to sound like I expect directors to hew to some Dogme 95-style list of creative rules, but if you keep pointing out to me that I'm watching a narrative fiction and that your characters are little more than Sims who can't do anything except go where you tell them to go, it's hard for me to get invested in their fate no matter how powerful the actors' performances may be. Worse still, if you're trying to castigate your audience for their tacit approval of violence by confronting them with its terrible realities, it makes no sense whatsoever to completely divorce your film from its own reality at a crucial point.

At any rate, at Funny Games' conclusion, I just felt like I'd watched another black-hearted "satire" in which a filmmaker wanted to get away with horking a wad of unspeakable cruelty up at the screen without taking any responsibility for what he'd created. Like the lunkheads who think that by saying, "I'm just keeping it real," they are immunizing themselves against any repercussions for whatever antisocial thing they are about to blurt, Haneke says, "I'm just going to swing my arms like this, and if you get hit, it's your own fault." It's a splattery mess, and when it was over, I just sort of rolled my eyes.

What really offended me, though, was the interview with Haneke on the DVD, because he maintains his self-righteous tone of knowing more than his audience while giving completely nonsensical explanations as to his motives on this film. I haven't seen his other films yet, and I hear some of them are magnificent, so I'm not entirely dismissing him as a hack, but in the DVD interview (and those I subsequently read), he seems to be extemporaneously bluffing his way through questions of why he made Funny Games in the first place. For example, he claims that the villains aren't characters as such, but are merely sketched "artifacts." But then he goes on to praise his own insistence upon making all his characters as fully developed and intelligent as they can be (before backpedaling and explaining that this somehow applies to "artifacts" too underdeveloped to qualify as characters.). And he also claims that he'd wanted to explore real-life middle-class psychos he'd read about, who kill just because it makes them feel something, and what happens when social contracts are violated. It's a lot to take on in a film that he also claims is a deconstruction of Hollywood violence.

Another example: In that interview, he claims to be worried that the original DVD's success in America was an indictation that his message was being misunderstood (because, of course, it's so subtle), but in an equally contradictory interview with Entertainment Weekly, he justifies the remake by claiming "the German-language version did not find the English-language audience for which the film was originally meant." So I think he's full of crap from the get-go on this one, but what's really bothersome is his mantra that Funny Games is supposed to act as aversion therapy for the violence addicts who finish it, and will be of no use to anyone else.

It strikes me as very odd to claim that anyone who sticks with Funny Games long enough to be manhandled by its ever-increasing sadism is clearly in it for the sole purpose of enjoying a little of the old vicarious ultraviolence. I can't understand that notion at all. The closest I can come to a sensible translation of Haneke's point would be for him to say, "Once it becomes clear to the viewer that this film is nothing but a celebration of harming helpless people, it's irresponsible for that viewer to continue watching." But I don't think that's something that is clear to the viewer along the way. Funny Games is not a predictable film; in fact, Haneke delights in cruel plot twists. So for all its faults, it's not a film during which a viewer can make the informed decision, "I see where it's going and that's not something I want to be a part of."

To put it another way, if I were to make a film that began with an address to the audience in which I told them I would be spending the next 90 minutes stomping on babies, and then methodically did exactly that, there clearly would be something wrong with anyone who sat all the way through it. (Unless they work in a law enforcement capacity and are watching it as part of an investigation as to how I managed to secure funding to make this film in the first place.) Although Haneke admittedly gives us ample clues as to what's to come, even directly addressing us, he takes such glee in confounding moviegoers' expectations that it's not unreasonable to suspect that this, too, might be a "game." I think viewers who stick around are likely do so out of a desire to hear the end of the story and the humane hope that the family will escape their captors' clutches; not in some sophomoric expectation of action-movie blood and guts that Haneke can then undercut with real inhumanity.

Ultimately, all Haneke makes clear through his evasive, arrogant defensiveness is that his film has nothing useful to say. Ironically, Funny Games isn't nearly as effective at making a point about our desensitization to film violence as last year's Shoot 'Em Up was; in addition to being genuinely witty and enjoyable, that film contains such a surfeit of mayhem and gunplay that it provokes a ho-hum response even as characters are shooting one another while freefalling from a plane. That's a reaction that you can think about if you so choose, and come to whatever conclusion you wish without a guy like Haneke insisting that his is the only right viewpoint.

I certainly hope that people who know me would say I am a peaceful sort. The closest I've ever come to physical violence was taking an ill-advised swing at Scott MacDonald in fifth grade. (I missed, Scott courteously didn't deck me, and all was forgiven in a matter of minutes.) I admit that sometimes, I enjoy movies that are violent. I also sometimes enjoy movies that are not violent. I enjoy movies. Sometimes films are gratuitously violent. Sometimes nonviolent films are gratuitously stupid. Some movies suck. Within the context of a well-made film, though, there is very little subject matter that I refuse to sit through, and even then, I recognize that my personal reactions and sensitivities do not dictate what is appropriate for an artist to put on celluloid in the first place. Moreover, I recognize that there is a big, big difference between the acceptability of depicting something in a work of fiction and its acceptability in real life. Thus, I'm sorry to say that I don't feel guilty and I don't feel that society has been damaged just because I enjoyed, say, No Country for Old Men.

So basically, I sat all the way through Funny Games and yet all I learned about myself is that I think Michael Haneke's kind of a creep for making it.

CURRENT MUSIC: Say No to Being Cool, Say Yes to Being Happy by The Softlightes. (The latest incarnation of The Incredible Moses Leroy. Lightweight, upbeat indie-synth-pop that, as the album title suggests, would rather be friendly than memorable. Might make for good hangover music, to help alleviate the accompanying remorse.)
CURRENT MOOD: Headachey.
CURRENT SITTING POSITION: Slouched and cross-legged.