Haneke on funny games

A pair of polite, bland-ish German teenagers encounter a woman, her husband and son in a remote lakeside cottage, then spend the night terrorizing them with "funny games.

The writer-director Michael Haneke has one ace up his sleeve: the handsomer of the two sociopaths is given asides to the camera, on the order of, "You are on their side, aren't you? This is the kind of picture that gets bluenose types all huffy, and prone to pronouncements on the order of, "This is the most repellent movie ever made!

Haneke makes the victims as dull and uncharacterized as the victors; removes just about any plausible means of escape or table-turning; and subtracts any reason for us to care about the outcome, except our desire not to witness hideous suffering.

But so what? So would a videotape of anonymous torture, or the capture and abuse of an animal. It's a wallow.

And you know what side the filmmakers are on when one of the sadists terrifies a little kid by slipping on a CD in a neighbor's house the kid has escaped to, and the music is that well-known favorite of middle-aged bourgeois people on vacation John Zorn and the Naked City. This kind of Extreme Cinema has worked much better when practiced by artists in totally disreputable sub-pulp forms--like Lucio Fulci and Ruggero Deodato, whose sometimes almost unwatchable films engage in a spiritual wrestling match between the desire to go to the limits, and the conscience that watches over the mayhem.

I was shocked to discover that Haneke is nearly sixty--this picture has the sensibility of a kid turned on by the autopsy pictures at Amok Books. As he sticks bamboo under our fingernails, your mind is so unoccupied it asks other questions. Like: Why would any sane family entertain for a minute two young strangers wearing fingerprint-proof gloves in the middle of summer? And: Is the actress playing the mother this terrible because no one else would take such a degrading role?

FAQ 1. What is the purpose of having Paul talk to the audience? Details Edit. Release date March 11, United States. German French Italian. Technical specs Edit. Runtime 1 hour 48 minutes. Dolby Digital. Exterior scenes were filmed on Long Island. Card Games Egyptian War. This is probably my all-time favorite card game, and I don't think that I have ever won even once. If you want to play a card game and you have exactly four players, I highly recommend the game of Spades.

Uno or Other Special Card Game. Amazon Prime. CBS All Access. Facebook Watch. Our list of fun games to play at home includes suggestions for every age and level of capability. Pencil and Paper Games. Hide and Seek. Treasure Hunt. Indoor Bowling. Hot Potato. Guess the Sound. Funny Games works far better, in other words, as an exploitation film than as a commentary on the ways in which film exploits us. The moral weight of the atrocities Haneke puts on display--including the brutalization of a young boy--is simply too great for the flimsy philosophical scaffolding undergirding them.

I learn from Variety that " Eight Below " is inspired by a Japanese film, itself based on real events, but in the "true story," seven of nine dogs died. Where the Red Fern Grows. One dog dies from a mountain lion attack and the other misses him and refuses to eat, ultimately dying of starvation.

The Hobo's dog in American Psycho He lets off some steam, and though you don't see much, the chilling off-screen yelp is enough to crack your heart open. And, yeah, it's sad that the homeless guy dies , too. Nonetheless, Funny Games is also an attempt to make its audience aware of the close psychological connections between its ability to agree with this political statement and its ability to enjoy the very things this political statement rails against.

This is the crux of the confusing audience guilt that Funny Games expertly induces in its audience. Critics often claim that the version is inferior because it adds nothing new to the original and contains an attractive Hollywood movie star cast. The high attractiveness of Naomi Watts is often interpreted as a way that the version minimises some of the horror present in the version. According to this line of thought, the casting choice of Naomi Watts allows the audience to be titilated by the sexual and psychological brutality inflicted on her by Peter and Paul.

The problem with this attack on the version is it ignores the extent to which this audience titillation is actually adding a layer of depth not present in the original version. This depth comes about because of the specific guilt that the version creates in its audience. Both actors are attractive, but not unusually stunning or glamorous as is the norm of a Hollywood film.

The visual ordinariness of Muhe and Lothar gives the Farbers a relatability which inspires immediate empathy in the audience. As the Farbers are brutalised and humiliated throughout the Funny Games, the reaction from the audience is one of sympathy and revulsion. It is ironically this sympathy and revulsion which minimises the horror of looking at a frightened mother being psychologically and sexually dominated by two men in front of her family.

When the reaction of revulsion and sympathy is coupled with an awareness of eroticism, we are presented with a much more disturbing portrait of our own character. We are, in effect, confronted with the fact that we can understand the pleasures of the very oppression we simultaneously are revolted by.

In experiencing not just the horror but the potential eroticism of cruelty, we are experiencing the potential amorality of our own psychological reactions to the world. There are few things more horrific than believing oneself to be moral while being forced to encounter our ability to imagine pleasure gained from doing something unbelievably nasty.

This hypothetical sadism is the flip side of universal human empathy. In much the same way that we can imagine the pain of others, we can also imagine the joys of inflicting it. No matter what level of moral virtue we attain as human beings, we still operate with a set of desires that are plastic enough to become expressions of benevolence or cruelty.

In order for these desires to become expressions of benevolence, we must first be honest with ourselves about the limits of our moral virtue. Because we have an impossible to get rid of biological capacity for mischief and sadism, we can never be completely free of the ability to imagine having fun at the expense of others. Mischief, like eroticism, can be a warm expression of affection. Yet both mischief and eroticism can be inconsiderate, selfish and sadistic ways in which humans enjoy the thrill of dominating others.

We may morally disapprove of the selfish and sadistic ways in which we have the capacity to enjoy these thrills. Nonetheless, we can never rid ourselves of the capacity to imagine the enjoyment of cruelty. As ethical human beings trying to attain competent, socially acceptable levels of moral virtue, this aspect of who we are is horrifying.

Funny Games does work to acquaint us with this element of our moral psychology by commenting on how mainstream cinema is normally dishonest in the way it also tries to grapple with it. Mainstream films allow us the voyeuristic thrill of watching others suffer. Yet those same films reassure us of our own moral virtue by allowing protagonists to either escape or get revenge on the very movie villains we get a mischievous and sometimes erotic thrill from watching.

A conventional thriller will showcase a conventionally beautiful actress being brutalised by charismatic and very masculine male villains who she then can defeat while saving her family. We can be entertained by and enjoy the cruelty of the charismatic male villains because we know they will ultimately be defeated.

We can enjoy the brutalisation of the attractive female lead because we know that she will ultimately be powerful and strong enough to defeat the male villains. We can assure ourselves that we are in the audience to watch a strong and clever woman become empowered in a difficult situation to save her family.

The villains themselves will be stereotypically masculine, with big, broad shoulders, and strong bodies that normally fuck smaller-framed, traditionally beautiful women in pornographic media. All of these cinema cliches trigger the primal part of ourselves that has fun watching violence and the sexual domination of others.

Here, we are in a confrontation with the darker side of who we are. In Funny Games, we do get an idyllic family tortured by charismatic bad guys. We also get a beautiful actress in the role of the strong and noble mother who shows an incredible amount of bravery and strength in fighting for her family.

Unlike mainstream cinema, all of her efforts fail. Her husband George is completely ineffective and helpless like most men would actually be in such a situation.

Anne is sexually humiliated in front of both George and her ten year old son Georgie. All three members of the family, throughout the running time, are harassed, brutalised, and then casually killed. It is the ten year old son who is killed first, being shot by Peter though the head. Parents Anne and George are forced to watch.

Throughout all of this brutality, we never see any nudity or onscreen violence. Worse yet, the two killers are charismatic without being particularly masculine. Peter and Paul look like two handsome, slightly effeminate teenagers who are terrifying because their manners are more dainty than aggressive; more boyish than grownup. By the logic of both Hollywood movies and heterosexual porn, Peter and Paul are visually neither potential brutalisers or potential lovers of women who look like Naomi Watts.

In mainstream cinema, they are normally the sons or nephews of such women. The lack of traditional masculinity in Peter and Paul is no coincidence. Rather, it is part of an attack on all social roles. Because Peter and Paul represent the selfish pathology of upper middle class manners, they function so as to create social destabilisation. While this destabilisation winds up destroying some reactionary social roles, it is ultimately too destructive to replace them with anything positive.

The roles disappear simply because the people who have internalised the roles are being systematically destroyed by Peter and Paul. Here, the film is doing more than merely commenting on the vapid dishonesty of mainstream cinema that depicts violence. It is also holding a mirror to the psychology of an audience clever enough to understand the way the film comments on class politics. On the one hand, Funny Games is illustrating that middle class politeness is a mask for a horrific form of anti-social pathology.

In this regard, the film is playing up to the progressive sympathies of the probably left-leaning fans of art cinema and director Michael Haneke. On the other hand, the film is acknowledging that even this audience is there to see bad things happen to the rich and beautiful Farbers.

More importantly, the enactors of such carnage are two men normally seen as having less social and sexual power than the Farbers. As members of the Funny Games audience, this is also the position that we are in. When Peter and Paul address us by breaking the fourth wall, they are sarcastically reminding us that a part of us is secretly thrilled by the domination of the Farbers.