Sunday Review: Funny Games

Not for everyone

By Bob Boldt

Franz Kafka wrote:

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.

Although Kafka was speaking of literature, the same might be said of the films of Michael Haneke.

I finally finished viewing Haneke’s 1997 Austrian film, Funny Games, arguably the toughest film I have ever had to get through. I think it actually produced a mild case of clinical posttraumatic stress disorder in me. Watching it, I became so emotionally convulsed that I had to stop several times before I was even half way through it. After finishing the film, I feel like the rape victim who is not quite ready to relive it.
    It is the mission of some works of art to present to audiences or the observer a distillation, a condensation of reality. Haneke has created a lethal cocktail here. I think perhaps he may have gone too far. He tells us that he must go too far because our culture has finally become too toxic for life to bear. So he has given us a strong dose of smelling salts under the nose to wake us. Unfortunately, I’m afraid too many would rather sleep on and probably couldn’t make it through a complete, uninterrupted screening. I don’t think I could.
    It is not too much of a stretch to say that the behavior of Peter and Paul, the two psychopaths in the film, reminded me of the obsequious language and innocuous demeanor our brutal leaders use as they dupe, degrade, and humiliate us. I found this a chilling resonance in the way the two boys tortured the family. The inability of the victims of these funny games to take any action that could change their fate also reminds me of the terror I feel for our ship of state, with its increasingly panicked passengers, under full sail toward the reefs with our smiling, charismatic, oligarchic Captain at the helm. “All my means are sane. My motive and my object mad.” (–Ahab, Moby Dick, by Herman Melville)
    I was troubled at first by some of the devices used in an otherwise seemingly naturalistic film; e.g., the lines delivered to camera and the illusion-breaking device of rewinding the tape in order to “save” Peter from a fatal gunshot wound. Then it dawned on me that there was no fourth wall in this film. The drama included, indeed required, my participation, my interaction, remote always at the ready, as a vicarious actor. I think films like Haneke’s Funny Games and Benny’s Video are particularly devastating when viewed on a home TV. That is why I had to stop the DVD so many times and flee from the story’s overwhelming horror. I could not stand my own participation in the drama. It was like watching an autopsy preformed on a live person – performed on me, or at least my psyche. By involving me so viscerally in the action and even inviting me to bet on the outcome, Haneke created a reality that submerged my own being for the time I was in front of the TV. This story became the only reality – the way good drama is supposed to.
    And yet Funny Games went beyond that. It captured me and, like an exceptionally bad dream, it did not allow itself to be readily shaken off upon awakening or when the screen went dark. At first I was confused about the reality frame in which the film is set. Then I realized this confusion had been a deliberate trap set for me by the director.
    Many kids think that no one dies on TV. I have heard criminologists say that some young people do not really understand what death is. They have been so dosed by the ever-present media environment that they actually don’t realize that death is permanent and the victim cannot be rewound back to life like rewinding a tape. This seems bizarre beyond belief and yet I think this is the kind of world Haneke is introducing us to in a profound way. This is an indictment of, not just a generation, but a whole society.

"Looking into the Abyss"

    Do not see this film if you can possibly avoid it. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

And don’t think you will have it any easier in the 2007 English version remake Haneke also directed, starring Naomi Watts and Tim Roth. Hermann Hesse said it best in his introduction to his novel, Steppenwolf: “Not for everyone. For madmen only.”

Copyright © 2015 by Bob Boldt