Why Funny Games remains just as shocking 20 years… | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

Why Fun­ny Games remains just as shock­ing 20 years on

18 May 2017

A young man with dark hair sits on a bed, looking thoughtful.
A young man with dark hair sits on a bed, looking thoughtful.
Michael Haneke’s home inva­sion hor­ror is a chill­ing satire of vio­lence in pop­u­lar entertainment.

Par­adise Lost’ is one of the most cel­e­brat­ed texts in the Eng­lish lan­guage not because of its author John Milton’s stat­ed aim to jus­ti­fy the ways of God to men,” but because of the char­ac­ter of Satan. He’s the allur­ing pro­tag­o­nist of the epic poem, who gets all the best lines and is a far more appeal­ing fig­ure that the more pious, com­par­a­tive­ly two-dimen­sion­al oth­er characters.

The rea­son Mil­ton wrote in fet­ters when he wrote of Angels & Gods, and at lib­er­ty when of Dev­ils & Hell,” opined William Blake over a cen­tu­ry lat­er, in a now famous com­ment on the appar­ent con­tra­dic­tion between Milton’s pur­pose and his exe­cu­tion, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil’s par­ty with­out know­ing it.” Sure, Mil­ton might have believed him­self to be express­ing the glo­ry of God, but sub­con­scious­ly he couldn’t help but immor­talise Satan and his all-too human rebel­lious instincts, the very thing he had set out to condemn.

The same can be said for Michael Haneke’s meta home inva­sion hor­ror, Fun­ny Games, which pre­miered at the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val 20 years ago. The dev­il in this case is vio­lence in the mass media, and slash­er films in par­tic­u­lar, which Haneke deemed to be both moral­ly rep­re­hen­si­ble and point­less. Yet in mak­ing what was intend­ed as a dour satire of vio­lence as enter­tain­ment in pop­u­lar cin­e­ma, the Ger­man direc­tor inad­ver­tent­ly made an exem­plary hor­ror film – one that shocked its audi­ence in much the same man­ner as the films he was chastising.

The plot is pared down and sim­ple. A mid­dle-class Aus­tri­an fam­i­ly com­pris­ing of Georg (Ulrich Muhe) and Anna (Susanne Lothar) and their son Georg Jr (the two names often used by Haneke) trav­el to their hol­i­day home in the coun­try. There they encounter two young neigh­bours, Peter (Frank Gier­ing) and Paul (Arno Frisch). At first they seem polite and inno­cent enough, but upon being invit­ed inside grad­u­al­ly pro­ceed to ter­rorise the fam­i­ly, ini­tial­ly impos­ing them­selves beyond com­fort­able social cus­tom before even­tu­al­ly assault­ing, tak­ing hostage and play­ing sadis­tic games on them.

The esca­la­tion of events is hor­ri­fy­ing to behold. The per­for­mances and tone of the film are unusu­al­ly nat­u­ral­is­tic, with the pace slowed down to fit the mun­dane rhythm of every­day life, and there’s a dis­tinct lack of the kind of cin­e­mat­ic arti­fi­cial­i­ty com­mon­ly found in hor­ror cin­e­ma. Haneke is a mas­ter of tech­nique, and he shoots every­thing in this film with a cold, clin­i­cal eye, build­ing unbear­able ten­sion as effec­tive­ly as any­thing in the genre.

Yet Fun­ny Games is far from being a straight­for­ward exer­cise in genre film­mak­ing, as is made clear by its noto­ri­ous fourth wall break­ing. The first instance of this occurs when Paul, sub­tly and in extreme close-up, winks sin­is­ter­ly at the cam­era. Lat­er on the two vil­lains total­ly oblit­er­ate the bound­ary between on-screen char­ac­ter and audi­ence, as Paul and Peter direct­ly address the view­er, ask­ing us what we think is going to happen.

It’s dis­tress­ing to wit­ness, and serves to high­light the aca­d­e­m­ic pur­pose of the film – to star­tle the audi­ence out of its nar­ra­tive spell by show­ing how fake the whole thing is, and to call us out on our com­plic­i­ty in the char­ac­ters’ point­less­ly sadis­tic behav­iour (and what Haneke sees as irre­spon­si­ble and gra­tu­itous vio­lence in main­stream cinema).

So deter­mined was Haneke to get his mes­sage across that he made a shot-for-shot Eng­lish-lan­guage remake of the film 10 years lat­er, and wrote an essay enti­tled Vio­lence and the Media’ explain­ing his fears that the omnipres­ence of vio­lence in the West­ern media was desen­si­tis­ing soci­ety to vio­lence. His assump­tion was that audi­ences will all too read­i­ly iden­ti­fy with and take the side of the per­pe­tra­tors of the vio­lence – hence his asser­tion that, when watch­ing Fun­ny Games, any­one who leaves the the­atre doesn’t need this film; any­one who stays does.”

What Haneke failed to under­stand, how­ev­er, is that any­one who stays until the end is not doing so out of apa­thy towards the vic­tims, but rather out of empa­thy. The film’s nat­u­ral­ism ensures that the char­ac­ters come across as real peo­ple expe­ri­enc­ing real fear and real grief, so that the expe­ri­ence of watch­ing Fun­ny Games is akin to the victim’s suf­fer­ing. When, in a moment of star­tling auda­cious­ness, Paul fix­es a mis­take in the vil­lains’ plan by using a remote to lit­er­al­ly rewind the film, we don’t feel less sym­pa­thy for George and Anna due to sud­den­ly becom­ing aware of the film’s arti­fice; we’ve been aware the whole time of the film’s fic­tion­al­i­ty, but have become emo­tion­al­ly invest­ed nonetheless.

This rewind­ing scene may be Haneke’s way of prompt­ing us to ask our­selves why we are watch­ing, but it is also an exam­ple of great hor­ror tech­nique: much in the same way as the sight of Fred­dy Krueger’s tongue pok­ing out of a phone blurs the phys­i­cal world with that of our worst night­mares, the abil­i­ty of the char­ac­ters in Fun­ny Games to manip­u­late real­i­ty only make them more pow­er­ful and terrifying.

A Night­mare on Elm Street may have been designed to be con­sumed while main­lin­ing pop­corn, where­as Fun­ny Games works best in the stony silence of an art-house cin­e­ma, but that doesn’t mean the fun­da­men­tal tech­niques of the film­mak­ing on dis­play – and the audience’s appro­pri­ate response – aren’t the same in both cas­es. Haneke is so good at cul­ti­vat­ing fear that it’s hard to believe that, when mak­ing Fun­ny Games, he wasn’t indeed sub­con­scious­ly in the Devil’s party’.

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