Metro Cinema, which is a terrific cinematheque operating here in Edmonton, is presenting a full retrospective of the films of German provocateur Michael Haneke this spring. In conjunction with this event, Bill Beard (a film teacher at the University of Alberta who has written, among other things, excellent scholarly studies of the films of Clint Eastwood and David Cronenberg) has commissioned essays on the various titles in the series, which he will be compiling into a publication that Metro will be making available at the box office.I was tremendously flattered that Bill asked me to contribute to the anthology, although I had some trepidation about the films he assigned me, the original German version of Funny Games as well as its recent American remake. (I lobbied for The Seventh Continent, but Beard had dibs on that one himself.) I had only hazy memories of the original, and the American version was not exactly one of my favourite films of 2008. Rewatching the two movies didn't exactly change my opinion, but I did find writing my essay to be a surprisingly enjoyable experience. I don't get to write at this length at my day job at SEE Magazine, and it was fun to write an essay whose function was to introduce a film to an audience, to appreciate it rather than assess it. Here's how it turned out — see what you think of it. At the very least, you can see that academia didn't exactly suffer a great loss when I went into the mainstream.
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In a video interview included in the DVD for his original 1997 version of Funny Games, Michael Haneke claims that his film was inspired by newspaper accounts he had read of violent crimes being committed by young people from the German middle class. Since the perpetrators came from good, financially prosperous families, the crimes could not be blamed on any of the social factors — broken families, financial deprivation, drugs — that often drive young people growing up in poverty into committing violently antisocial acts. Haneke says he found the phenomenon troubling, and channeled that unease into the script for Funny Games.
It’s an odd statement to make — partly because it sounds more like he’s describing his 1992 film Benny’s Video (about an alienated German teenager so numbed from hours of watching violent videos that he brings a girl to his bedroom and kills her), and partly because Funny Games seems completely uninterested in providing sociological motives of any kind for the actions of Paul and Peter, the two young men who spend pretty much the entire film humiliating, torturing, and finally killing a mild-mannered family in their summer cottage.
Indeed, Haneke deliberately includes a scene where Paul laughs off Georg, the father’s, attempts to understand why they’re doing what they’re doing — first Paul spins a story about Peter’s troubled home life, then claims they’re both drug addicts who kill nice families to support their habit. Paul is doing more than merely lying here — he’s making fun of the very idea that their behaviour could have an explanation, that it could arise from anything other than an irrational urge to cause pain and misery. (Viewers may be reminded of a similar running gag from The Dark Knight, in which The Joker tells a different, contradictory story every time someone asks him how he acquired his grotesque facial scars. It’s almost as if Paul, Peter, and The Joker have no past — or at least, their actions are so purely irrational, so beyond any simple psychoanalysis, that looking for an explanation for their actions would be a wild goose chase.)
That said, Haneke provides enough clues to suggest that Paul and Peter come from the same privileged social background as Georg, Anna, and their son Schorschi. Their hair is neatly cut. They wear tennis whites, clean sneakers, and deck shoes. Paul appreciates Georg’s expensive golf clubs and, as we find out in the film’s final sequence, he also knows how to handle a sailboat. In the early scenes, they conduct themselves with such politeness that it’s almost obnoxious — always making sure to refer to Georg as “sir” and claiming to take offence at even the smallest breach of etiquette. Indeed, when we first meet them, nothing about their appearance seems out of place within this upscale community of weekend yachters and golfers. That’s how they gain admittance so effortlessly into Georg and Anna’s home — Peter only has to appear at the back door politely asking to borrow some eggs and Anna lets him right in.
Haneke’s ambiguous characterization of Paul and Peter is one of Funny Games’ shrewdest touches. Right up until the end of the film, it is impossible to figure out what they’re up to, how they choose their targets, or even what their relationship is to each other. Why, for instance, do they go through the whole charade of borrowing eggs, and then “accidentally” smashing them? Does it amuse them to annoy their victims in this way? Do they take pleasure in seeing how far they can prevail on their politeness? Are they perhaps hoping to provoke their victims into doing something rude — is it only when their sense of propriety is offended that they feel justified in going on the attack?
More questions arise. Are Paul and Peter’s little spats — as when Peter angrily tells Paul to stop making fun of his weight and calling him “Tubby” — for real or just another put-on? Why do Paul and Peter leave the house after killing Schorschi, only to come back an hour or so later to torment Georg and Anna some more? Just to toy with them? In Paul and Peter’s minds, do Georg and Anna “deserve” their fate? Is there anything they could have done differently to have convinced Paul and Peter to leave them alone?
Funny Games has been compared to Cape Fear, the 1962 thriller directed by J. Lee Thompson in which Robert Mitchum played an ex-con who attacks Gregory Peck’s middle-class family — but in that film, Mitchum’s attacks were “justified” by the fact that Peck was the lawyer who had originally put him away, using some trumped-up evidence to do so. Funny Games may be more aligned with Martin Scorsese’s 1991 Cape Fear remake, which toyed with the idea that the con (this time played by Robert De Niro) had arrived almost as punishment for the father’s “sins” against his family (adultery, moral hypocrisy, and so on). The family in Funny Games gets a minimal amount of characterization, but they’re introduced driving to their cottage in their SUV, playing some kind of “guess-the-composer” game with their collection of classical music CDs. They seem like a loving, cultured family — but is there something about their life of comfortable complacency (living in their beautiful, white homes, ordering so much meat they can’t possibly eat it all themselves), something about their carefree conviction that nothing bad could ever befall them, that Haneke finds so offensive that he can’t resist vandalizing it? (The ultra-abrasive John Zorn music that Haneke plays over the opening credits, full of chattering vocal gibberish and an eardrum-piercing saxophone solo, drowning out the Handel CD they’re listening to, is the audio equivalent of someone angrily scribbling over a poster in the subway with a black Magic Marker.) Are Paul and Peter like malevolent spirits, summoned up like Robert Mitchum or Robert De Niro’s sweaty Max Cady, to give them a dose of reality?
And as the film progresses, it starts to look like Paul and Peter may not even be technically “human” in the way that Georg, Anna, and Schorschi are — they’ve shown up at Georg and Anna’s cottage to torture and kill them purely because that’s the function Michael Haneke has created them to carry out. Paul is even conscious of the fact that he’s in a movie, and occasionally even talks to the audience. (Curiously, Peter doesn’t seem to have been granted this level of consciousness — at one point, Paul addresses the camera while Peter sits beside him on the couch, snacking, apparently unaware of the fourth wall being shattered right in front of him.)
Contrary to many people’s memory of the film, Haneke breaks the fourth wall only a handful of times — I counted only five (okay, possibly six):
(1) During the scene where Anna goes looking for the body of the family dog while Paul coyly gives her directions, Paul turns to the camera and gives the audience a smug wink. (In the 2007 American version, Paul merely satisfies himself with a smirky smile.)
(2) When Paul puts a pillowcase over Schorschi’s head and bets Georg and Anna that their entire family will be dead in 12 hours, he turns to the camera to ask the audience if we think they’ll survive, sardonically remarking, “You’re probably on their side, aren’t you?”
(3) Later on in the night, when Paul explains to Anna the rules of the game he calls “The Loving Wife,” he once again starts talking to the audience, telling us how he’s only giving us what we want: “a story with plausible plot development.” (Curiously, the American version omits one of the funnier jokes from the 1997 original, when the killers remark, “Besides, we’re not up to feature length yet.” The fact that the actor delivers the line at the 91-minute mark — when the film has technically achieved feature length — doesn’t diminish its humour.)
(4) In the film’s most outrageous moment, Anna grabs a hunting rifle from a coffee table and blows a bullet right into Peter’s stomach — whereupon Paul picks up a remote control and literally rewinds the movie to a point a few seconds before Anna got the gun so that this time he can snatch it away from her before she even gets a chance to shoot it. This moment probably makes more sense on home video than in a theatre — I’ve never understood how Paul is able to rewind a movie like a VHS tape when it’s actually being projected from a booth on celluloid.
(5) In the final scene, Paul shows up at the back door of a cottage owned by friends of Georg and Anna’s, asking to borrow a few eggs — presumably intending to start the whole kill-and-torture process over again with a new family. As the wife heads off to the kitchen, Paul stares into the camera, whereupon the image freezes and the closing credits play while Paul’s image continues to look ominously at us. Can he see us? Will he be coming for us one of these days as well?
(6) I’d also make the case that the playing of that cacophonous John Zorn music over the opening credits counts as a meta moment as well. It’s the film’s only instance of non-diegetic music, and it gets the film off to a deliberately disorienting start. Later in the film, Haneke uses the song almost as Paul’s theme music — when Paul corners the runaway Schorschi in the upper floor of a neighbour’s empty house, he plays the Zorn CD on the stereo as scary “mood music” for the final stages of their chase — sort of like Michael Madsen in Reservoir Dogs playing “Stuck in the Middle With You” before he tortures the cop. (This is another moment of the film whose logic bothers me. Was Paul carrying around that John Zorn CD in his shorts all night long, just waiting for the proper spooky occasion to play it? Or did he just spot it in the CD collection of the house’s owners? I don’t know... they didn’t seem like Zorn fans.)
One of the most striking aspects of Funny Games is the way Haneke incorporates these flagrantly artificial moments into a film that otherwise places such a high premium on naturalism, from the completely deglamourized, makeup-free performances by Susanne Lothar and Ulrich Mühe (whose characters’ agony, both physical and emotional, is never less than utterly convincing) and scenes like the grueling, unbroken 10-minute-long shot in which Anna, in her underwear, her legs bound and her arms tied behind her back, slowly gets to her feet, frees herself, and then helps her injured husband stand up and limp downstairs.
Haneke films that entire, excruciating scene from a clinical remove, like a scientist coolly observing his subjects from behind a pane of one-way glass. But there’s a paradox here: Haneke is definitely carrying out an experiment in Funny Games, but Georg and Anna aren’t its subjects — we are. We’re the ones, in Haneke’s view, who deliberately seek out violent entertainment, who understand the rules that Hollywood movies play by in order to manipulate our responses to onscreen violence and even sometimes get us to approve of murder; and he’s the scientist who wants to see how we’ll react when those expectations are deliberately upended.
Haneke peppers the film with details that seem to be setting up Paul and Peter’s defeat, but none of them pay off. The friends of Georg and Anna whom Anna invites over for dinner just before Peter comes by to borrow the eggs? They never show up. That knife that Haneke shows us falling onto the floor of the boat? The one the killers don’t know about? Sorry — just a red herring. That pregnant line of dialogue about Peter not being able to swim? Nope — he never falls overboard. Georg, Anna, and little Schorschi all die, one by one, in the most casual, anti-dramatic, meaningless ways possible.
Subverting audience expectations is something all good horror and suspense directors learn to do — both genres thrive on misdirecting audiences, leading them to expect one plot development and then walloping them with another. If the writer and director do their job well, audiences might even laugh with delight at how cleverly they’ve been fooled.
But in Funny Games, Haneke seems determined to make you feel guilty for deriving any enjoyment whatsoever from the events onscreen. He’ll deliberately shape his narrative to provoke a certain response from his audience, and then condescendingly scold them for having that response. (“You’re probably on their side, aren’t you?”) It’s hard to think of a more perverse movie — Funny Games is a movie created to condemn the kind of people who would go see a movie like Funny Games.
Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, “the kind of people who would go see the kind of movie that Funny Games only appears to be, judging from the poster.” Because here in Edmonton, the original German version of Funny Games was not seen by the consumers of violent mainstream entertainment; instead, it played to a tiny handful of art-film connoisseurs at Metro Cinema. Haneke himself seems aware of that fact — and frustrated that the very mainstream moviegoers who most “needed” to see a paradigm-smashing movie like Funny Games are precisely the ones most resistant to watching anything with subtitles.
And so, in 2007, Haneke somehow convinced Warner Independent Pictures to finance a remake of Funny Games, this time in English. And unlike poor George Sluizer (whose English-language remake of his own Dutch thriller The Vanishing removed the original’s terrifying, bleak final scene and substituted a notorious Hollywoodized “happy” ending), Haneke insisted on restaging his original film nearly shot-for-shot.
Haneke’s fidelity to the original Funny Games seems to reinforce the notion that the film is less a living, breathing artistic creation than a controlled experiment that requires every element to be duplicated precisely in order to achieve the desired effect. It’s kind of fascinating to see how many of even the smallest, most inconsequential-seeming details show up in both films: the shot of the family dog making a nuisance of itself, sticking its head in the refrigerator as the mother (this time simply named Ann) unpacks the groceries; the televised auto race that plays moronically in the background after Paul and Peter leave the house and Ann tries to free herself from her bonds; the absurdly large sweater that Ann puts on before climbing out the kitchen window to look for help.
But there are a few subtle differences that creep into the American film as well, through some mysterious confluence of the new actors’ physical appearances and their fleeting, in-the-moment acting choices. This is all very subjective, but to my mind, Peter comes off as a much more cretinous, loathsome figure in the American version than in the German, where he merely seems clumsy and hapless — Brady Corbet, who plays the role in the remake, grins a lot more often, almost as if he enjoys being subservient to Paul. Also, and maybe this is just my imagination, but in the remake, I get the feeling Haneke deliberately plays up the father’s impotence, his humiliating inability to fight back these intruders on account of his smashed kneecap — perhaps a further attempt to subvert and frustrate the expectations of the American audience?
Or are they the expectations of audiences all around the world? Has the entire globe been colonized by American movie conventions? And if so, perhaps it’s incumbent upon Haneke to keep remaking Funny Games over and over again, in Spanish, Japanese, Swedish, Hindustani, Italian, Tamil — subjecting one upstanding family after another to game after identical game of “The Loving Wife.” Maybe that’s why Peter and Paul don’t die at the end of Funny Games: they know they have lots more work ahead of them.
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