FUNNY GAMES – Continuing with my slight Haneke resurgence, thought I'd revisit the obvious – the notorious 'Funny Games', from 1997. As most of you will know, it's a brutal and disorienting foray into 'home invasion' territory, and shows us what happens when two sinister strangers inveigle their way into a middle class Austrian family's holiday villa. Even if you haven't seen it, I'm sure you can guess what follows. Or maybe not... Haneke set out to make anything but a genre film. He's all about critiquing media violence here, or at least violence served up as entertainment. Except, I'm never very certain of Haneke's motives. His stated premise is that Hollywood violence is bad, because it manipulates the viewer to the point where they don't recognise they're being manipulated. This is because of the emotional identifications such films seamlessly elicit. I've talked quite a bit about this sort of thing here recently, you know, the whole 'vengeance' thing going on in certain films, films which are more than capable of drawing out and, more importantly, directing hot, angry feelings from even fairly knowing audiences. I agree with Haneke on this score – I think there is a general media analogue. It's in the interests of power to use images in a certain way, which maybe results, for example, in the 'cheerleading' of the bombing of entire countries, or the scapegoating of social groups. But Haneke is a bit mandarin and not a little inscrutable, and I wonder whether his real project, in the face of mainstream depictions of violence (read – Hollywood's cultural dominance), is an attempt to reinscribe the role of the Euro-auteur. Interesting that he remade 'Funny Games', pretty much scene for scene, ten years later in America for Warners (for reasons that still remain ambiguous even if not mockingly ironic). So anyway, what we get with 'Funny Games' is basically a deconstructed horror thriller, one which uses genre trappings then trashes them, either through Brechtian effects (the hilarious 'rewind' scene), or just through an insistence that affects related to violence – namely, awful, excruciating suffering and sorrow, rather than sensation and excitement – are really pushed into the viewers face. The agony endured by the film's central couple is gruelling to sit through, and light years removed from any satisfying retaliatory pay off. But Haneke isn't interested in simply getting you to feel – he wants you to think, and to reflect. Like 'Salo', it overwhelms its audience twice, once with images and affects / emotions, then with questions. Whatever level you take 'Funny Games' on, it's an intense, thought provoking and necessary film.
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