Director Michael Haneke is an auteur fascinated in 1997’s Funny Games by everyday Peter and Annah’s reactions to highly stressful and/or traumatic situations – preferably where said stress is heightened one startling notch at a time.
Essentially a meditation on hyper-gratuitous violence in mainstream cinema (the bigger the explosions, the more gushing the blood, the merrier the popcorn and Coke go down), and the audience’s implicit complicity as safely remote voyeurs, Funny Games was widely condemned for its sadism and brutality – though most all the violence occurs outside the camera’s frame. Indeed, compared to your average PG-13 blockbuster, Haneke’s film is gore free.
What so unnerves the viewer as the film progresses – outside of the emotional realism – is that they become aware of their implied presence: “If you enjoyed this film, you missed its point,” reminded Haneke, who later awarded the Palm D’or at 2009’s Cannes Fest for The White Ribbon.
Funny Games is what happens when you, your wife and kid go to your holiday home for the weekend, and two politely smiling young men knock on the door. Only thing is, you’re out boating with the kid and the wife recognizes them: She saw the two chatting amiably with the neighbors as you pulled into the driveway. Soon, and subtly at first, the world starts going wrong.
Wife opens the door, and the first of the two protagonists – soon joined by the other – politely asks if he can borrow some eggs. By the time she returns from the kitchen, the two have slipped into the entrance hall. This seemingly innocent trespass, combined with their identical white gloves, and the fact that they keep alternating names, depresses alarm-buttons.
When Husband returns a minute later, the wife insists he throw them out. The two, however, are there to stay, and swiftly their conversational manipulations become menacing. Husband finally loses his patience, striking one of them, and they transition to physical manipulation, breaking one of his legs with a golf-club.
From here, the evening degenerates into the morally void twosome drawing the family into increasingly sadistic games. When one of the two (his name is interchangeably Paul, Tom and Beavis, to the other’s Peter, Jerry and Butthead) announces: “I bet that by tomorrow 9 a.m. you will all be dead,” the atmosphere within the camera frame is tangibly nauseating. As the family members look to one another for assistance which won’t come, Paul/Peter turns to the camera and asks you, the viewer, which way you bet.
Through various ingenious techniques, Michael Haneke keeps bringing the audience to question their ethical role as viewers, slyly slinking you into account. The result is a chilling film – and a complex, brilliant interrogation (and anticipation) of the desensitizing age of hyper-mediation.
[First published in Muse magazine.]
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