Michael Haneke makes films by, for, and about the bourgeoisie. They’re essentially intellectual exercises in sadomasochism punishing the idle educated for being idle and educated in a manner which only the idle educated would be receptive too. His films have the feeling of a callow provocation from a filmmaker who is far too old for such shenanigans. (He was 56 when Funny Games was released in the United States.) Haneke has infamously said regarding this film, “If you leave the cinema you don't need [Funny Games]; if you stay, you do." I’m not sure if that statement is as circular as it sounds, but certainly it reveals Haneke as something like the evil Stanley Kramer. He makes films to teach us something and hopefully we go to partake in his great wisdom.

At least, that’s what I think whenever I’m not watching a Michael Haneke film. It’s been more than six years since I first saw Funny Games and during this last viewing I’m struck more than ever at just how terrifying it is. Haneke apparently made the film to get fans of violent entertainments like Natural Born Killers and Pulp Fiction to begin to contemplate their attraction to the genre. He failed big time, the film has become a cult classic among horror fans (the very people Haneke was trying to reform!), and the anatomy of the failure is a fascinating one.

But if Funny Games does not work as an indictment of violence, it’s effective in the more traditional sense. Like a well-made thriller or horror film, the film is terrific escapist entertainment. Watching it expunges your anxieties and reassures you by showing horrible things happening to other people and then releasing you to the safety and comfort of your own home. Haneke’s fatal error was perhaps in believing that the “Brecht-ian” distancing devices of having the antagonist break the fourth wall and talk to the audience and otherwise remind us that we’re watching a movie, would somehow neutralize the traditional pay-offs of the thriller format. He might have done well in familiarizing himself with the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. However, the film’s various gimmicks are effective in providing us with a more sophisticated, more cerebral horror film. The joke of Funny Games is that Haneke gets us thinking about how we respond to violence, but our thinking of the response becomes part of the response itself. To put it more simply, Funny Games is a mindfuck but mindfucking is still a form of sex.

The film’s most frightening scene is the first of the initial “funny games” where serial killer Peter (Frank Giering) asks for four eggs from his potential victim Anna and then drops them. He then asks for four more eggs and drops those as well. This petty cruelty feels considerably more threatening than the more severe forms of cruelty inflicted on the family later in the film. Anna (Susanne Lothar) knows how to respond when her husband Georg (Ulrich Muhe) is hit in the knee with a golf club. But with these eggs, there is some confusion as to how to access Peter‘s maliciousness. Is he clumsy or is he playing a “game” with her? And what exactly is the cost of losing eight eggs? Is this worth getting in a fight over? It’s difficult to maneuver through the nuances of the social interaction and, in identifying with Anna, we find ourselves trapped.

I think the eggs may have symbolic value as well--as an embodiment of female sexuality. One of the spiritual forebears of Funny Games is Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. There is a moment near the end of this latter film that I have always found rather strangely disturbing. The anti-hero Alex DeLarge is being tested to see if his de-programming was successful. He is shown a picture of a nest full of eggs with a person saying “You can do anything you would like with these” and is asked to provide a response. Alex thinks for a moment and then says, “Eggy-weggs… I’d like to smash ‘em, real horror-show!” The implication is that he’s cured and has regained his rape drive.

The focal goal of Peter and his dominant partner Paul (Arno Frisch) isn‘t exactly to rape Anna, but to somehow otherwise violate her sexually. In offering Peter the eggs there is an implicit connection being made between Anna’s fecundity--her sexuality and female identity--and her role as homemaker. If one can see the notion of home as warm, nourishing and distinctly womb-like, Peter and Paul’s home invasion becomes a sexual violation. Their next “funny game” takes the very specific form of a sexual humiliation. The two men make her strip her clothes off so they can examine how well her body has aged. The next few “funny games” seem to be staged for her benefit as well as they revolve around her choosing which of her family members will be killed next.

In a key scene, Peter counts back and forth between Anna and her son Georgie (Stefan Clapczynski) from 35, Anna’s estimated age. We see Paul in the kitchen making a sandwich while Georgie is shot off-screen. Paul comes back in and yells at Peter. The person who was picked is supposed to be the one that survives. Now that the kid is dead, they aren’t going to get anything more out of them. They leave, but after a while come back to continue the fun. It seems that their argument was staged for Anna so that she would believe that blind fate dictated that her son would die and she would survive when in reality the death of Georgie was decided on ahead of time so as to better prolong her agony. In the next “funny game,” Anna is given the choice of who will die next, Georg or herself. It seems that they are giving her the burden of this decision because she is the one that they want to torment. When she refuses to decide and instead reaches for the gun, they shoot Georg. Anna is then the last to survive and is killed only when Peter and Paul finally get bored and hungry. This seems to confirm that she was the only person in the family they were truly interested in hurting.

The film’s sexual violence, violence toward women, essentially appropriates traditional thriller conventions for their own pragmatic utility. Most importantly, when violence is perpetrated against a woman the motivation is implicitly understood. The perpetrator is a sadist or has sadistic tendencies. He’s not trying to discover where the diamonds are hidden or necessarily trying to get revenge. He’s just trying to get his rocks off. (Indeed, this is usually a more plausible explanation for violent behavior than simple plot necessity.) I also believe, and I know a lot of people claim to not share these feelings (perhaps because I correctly if stupidly compared this to our feelings toward dogs), that women are inherently more empathetic than men. They tend to come off as more vulnerable and are more likely to express themselves externally. Men have to be tough and keep things inside and so they aren’t as interesting to watch in thriller situations.

But finally, it’s more fun to see women gain the upper hand and turn the tables on their captors. There’s the “girl power” aspect of it, of course, the shrieking damsel in distress finding a wellspring over inner strength and beating the man at his own game. But also, if a tough manly man kills the villain there is the sense that he is either merely fulfilling his purpose (boring) or even worse, that his act of violence is somehow morally equivalent to the violence committed against him. These considerations typically do not come into play when it comes to the Revenge of Woman.

This latter convention is the only one that Haneke directly addresses. In what might be the film’s most famous scene, Anna grabs the rifle from Paul and shoots Peter. Panicked, Paul finds a remote control and rewinds the action so that he can take the rifle away from her. When the film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival audiences reportedly cheered when Anna shot Peter and then abruptly went silent when Paul rewinds the action. This seems to confirm that the film is a completely visceral exercise even when it is being a cerebral one. Haneke’s denial of an emotional payoff is just as button-pushing as providing one. The audience cheers exactly when he wants them to and they clam up exactly when he wants them to. Again, the meta-fictional aspect of Funny Games simply accentuates the conventional emotional fruits of the thriller film. It’s “Home Invasion Thriller 2.0”—new and improved. I’m reminded of the rape scene in Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days where the rapist hooks his victim up to his virtual reality set so she can watch and feel what he feels, adding to her suffering and his excitement. Counterintuitively, our awareness of what the film is doing doesn’t distance us from the experience but involves us more intimately with it.

One of the interesting things about the remote control scene is the implication that the film is meant to be viewed on home video instead of in the cinema. If Paul can rewind the film, that must mean that the “real film” is on a home video format. The cinematography is meant to make us think of video. Colors are very dim and bland as though the film were being shot under some fluorescent lights in an office building. It doesn’t have the contrast that you would expect to see on celluloid. Everything looks muddy. Haneke moves the camera sparingly and oftentimes frames the action in wide shot. While this doesn’t tie the film in with video as explicitly, it does give it the feeling of a home movie (a snuff film perhaps).

The low-key hyper-voyeuristic quality of Funny Games strikes me as rather Warholian. It seems that Haneke wants to remove himself as a conduit between the audience and the film’s subject. All the wide shots and lack of camera movement, it suggests that there is nobody behind the camera. However, I think it would be an oversimplification to describe this film style as “objective.” In a traditionally cinematic film, the visceral excitement of the filmmaking would convey the terror of the captive victims; it would be told through their point of view. But Funny Games is told through the perspective of the serial killers. The visual style is deadpan because Peter and Paul are deadpan. Because they’re constantly in control and rarely shocked, there is no adrenaline released in the atmosphere.

The first shot of the film is a helicopter shot of the family’s car driving to their lake house. The reference section of the IMDB suggests that this is an homage to Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes, where the family of cannibals observe the incoming family of victims, which would mean that this “God’s Eye” view is a POV shot from the killers’ perspective! The Godlike detachment of omniscience is a principal characterizing attribute of Paul. This attribute is even more concretely asserted when he begins to address the audience directly. Haneke, Paul and ourselves are all on the same page. The perspective of everybody else in the film, including Peter who doesn’t acknowledge the presence of an audience, is limited to their own place in the narrative. They are unable to see the entire mosaic the way that Paul, Haneke, and ourselves can.

We begin the film identifying with the family and by the end find ourselves identifying with the killers. The shift begins the moment that Paul turns to the camera and winks at us—the breaking of the fourth wall. Importantly, he is doing this while Anna is looking for her recently murdered German shepherd. I’d hesitate to say that killing the dog is a taboo in the thriller genre. Just four years before the film’s release we had the underappreciated minor classics Needful Things and The Good Son, both ruthlessly killing off man’s best friend early on. But certainly this is a cheap and easy way to get an audience reaction. By turning to the audience and winking, Paul is calling attention to the device. He telling us, “Look what I’m gonna do. One of the nastiest tricks in the movie villain handbook!” Once we see the gears at work, we no longer identify with Anna. Once we have Paul, it’s as though we aren’t really able to respect her anymore. She’s responding to the “dog” stimulus like a clockwork ninny! The scene is still deeply disturbing, but it’s not because they kill the dog. It’s because they kill the dog and during the very process of her discovering the body we have gone to seeing it as emotionally gut-wrenching to the punchline of an ironically sick joke.

The most important moment in the film occurs after Paul and Peter have shot Georgie and left. The camera stays more or less stationary on Anna and Georg as they cry and bleed for an excruciating ten minutes. They go on and limp around to the cell phone so they can get some help. It has been submerged in water and so they have to disassemble it and let it dry. All the life has seeped out of the film and it‘s now terribly boring. This goes on for a bit until finally a golf ball rolls into the frame and we know that Paul and Peter have back to continue their “funny games.” And wouldn’t you know that we’re happy to see them. Anna and Georg are fucking boring. The only time the movie comes alive is when they are being psychologically and physically tortured by Paul and Peter.

I won’t deny that Haneke is nudging us toward liking Paul and Peter and kind of despising Anna and Georg. After shifting our identification to the killers through the constant asides to the camera, we are no longer rooting for the victims and aren’t particularly interested in seeing them succeed. But there is a bit of truth here. One of the lessons to be taken away from this scene is that it doesn’t take any real talent to be a victim. Anna, Georg and Georgie were more or less selected at random. They aren’t required to do anything more than cry, bleed and suffer. Being a killer though, that takes balls. You need to have the ambition, the will, the drive to circumvent conventional codes of morality and assert your dominance over other people. Not everybody is cut out for it. Murder, the film provocatively suggests, is not a sport for the mediocre.

This kind of thinking is really what is behind the audience’s cheers for Anna when she steals the gun and shoots Peter. That isn’t about Peter dying and Anna surviving the experience. It’s all about Anna killing him. Audiences like a killer. They realize that the killer is a breed apart from your typical asshole. And by making the killer the terrorized victim, the terrorized woman more specifically, the violence has a cleanliness to it and they are let off the proverbial hook. If Haneke hadn’t used the remote control gag, the organic direction for the film might have been to have Anna begin addressing the audience while she tortured Paul. Shooting Peter could have caused us to shift our identification back to her as it would have shown that she can play the game, that she has the drive to be a killer, and that she is on the right side of the “good vs. evil” conflict besides.

There’s a very subtle connection being made between Peter and Paul and the rest of the family. Subtle because it is based largely in a consideration of extra-textual elements. Normally, I wouldn’t entertain such thoughts and insist that a film has to stand up on its own two feet. But this is too juicy to pass up. The cover art on the DVD depicts Ulrich Muhe‘s Georg, sweating and with the right side of his face in the dark. If we look closely we can see that his son Georgie, his head in a pillowcase, is being reflected in his eye. If you haven’t seen the film you might reasonably think that Muhe plays the villain. I mean, he looks kind of sinister here doesn’t he? I don’t know how German audiences see the actor. I have learned that he was married to his screen wife Susanne Lothar in 1997 and maybe this has special relevance for Germans. Maybe this was part of the reason that Haneke did an American remake. I’m especially interested in his casting of Tim Roth as the Georg character in this new version. As English-speaking audiences know, even if they haven’t actually seen Made in Britain or The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, Roth might have played one of the killers if the film were made twenty or twenty-five years ago. Of course, implicit in Anna’s turning the gun on Peter is the idea that she has the heart of a killer in her as well. Also, we learn when they try to call for help that one of Anna and Georg’s friends is named Peter. There isn’t quite enough evidence to mount a solid case, but I suspect that there is something here. Peter and Paul are dressed all in white and share their names with the Apostles. And in addition to Paul’s omniscience and ability to recognize that he is in a movie, neither one ever shows the slightest hint of exhaustion despite staying up overnight to work on the family. This profound vitality doesn’t at all extend to Anna. To kill her they simply push her overboard, knowing that she won’t have the strength to swim.

Did the family subconsciously wish these boys into their lives? Are they an embodiment of their guilt? Of some sort of death wish? The New York Times’ Steven Holden described the film as “a German variant of Cape Fear“ and certainly that seems to describe the dynamic at play here. It might help to know a bit more about Georg and what he does for a living (we literally know more about Paul and Peter), but there is a sense that it doesn’t really matter. Generally speaking, it’s safe to say that all rich men are necessarily powerful men. They aren’t powerful because they are rich, they are rich because they are powerful. The kind of professions that command high salaries--doctors, lawyers, even corporate executives--are essentially largely impenetrable professions that have some kind of control over life and death. Power. And of course, with power comes ego. Nobody in their right mind would want to see a humble doctor.

So maybe Paul and Peter fulfill some kind of sadomasochistic need. By being a pawn in this “funny game,” Georg is relieved of some painful job anxiety. Or perhaps, in an even more abstract sense, Paul and Peter represent the inevitable downside of power (over business, over law, over medicine, et cetera) being concentrated on the few. Squeaky clean, well-spoken and unfailingly polite, the two boys could plausibly be seen as a personification of corporate malfeasance.

I’m unsure what exactly the relationship is between their appearance and the film’s characterizing Brechtian devices. Haneke could be claiming that, as a film artist, he wields the “power of the bourgeoisie” and its misappropriation could be similarly personified through Paul and Peter. I personally do not subscribe to this school of thought. Maybe this is just me fighting against the malevolence of the media studies crowd, but I don’t believe that the cinema is a substantial enough force in our lives to merit ethical consideration. Ethics belongs in the realm of public policy and personal day-to-day action. It shouldn’t affect the filmmaker insofar as deciding what stories to tell and which images to put on-screen. But again, talking in a broader sense, I think the film is attacking how we use our intellect to justify and rationalize abhorrent behavior. That is, behavior that we know intuitively is abhorrent. When Haneke condemns us for watching the film to the end, I don’t think he is talking simply about the fans of exploitation cinema. I think he is talking about arthouse audiences as well. If you work with the film as an intellectual exercise, you’re culpable in killing these people off as well.