FUNNY GAMES

The 50th Cannes Film Festival was held from the 7th to the 18th of May 1997. The main competition for the Palme d’Or hosted twenty films, including Michael Haneke’s Funny Games. Haneke’s fourth film would launch his career into conversation for the next century and get a complete remake in 2007. Haneke’s films reflect actual portions of life in realistic, disturbing, and unforgettable ways. The logline of the film: two violent men take a mother, a father, and a son hostage in their vacation cabin and force them to play sadistic “games” with one another for their own amusement. In this paper, I will continue the conversation for the modern audience to spark debate with its themes of violence, sadism, and influence. The violence within the film medium is never on screen, yet voyeuristically implicating the audience to change their violent paths and change their own narrative. Don’t make the same mistake again.

Crack two eggs to make an omelet. The two villains in this story are invading the German bourgeoise private home on a private lake with a big yard and a sailboat. As the narrative unfolds, the world around this perfect couple comes crumbling down in an instant. It was a mistake not to kick the two men out. They suspiciously came through an opening in the fence from the house next door. The couple stopped outside the gate of their neighbors with friendly banter of a golf game later that day. For the two villains the funny game has begun, inviting themselves to be kind and grab some eggs. Oops! Eggs are broken. The psychological game ruining their perfect life has succeeded. Now, they are here creating drama for the sake of their own entertainment. The entertainment is sadistic by juggling with the family’s lives. Three lives are at stake for the sake of entertainment. As an audience member, you root for the protagonist. You want the family to live and kill these two big men. Arno Frisch plays the main villain and breaks the fourth wall to address the audience. This awareness plays with the expectation of the typical horror narrative where the protagonist defeats evil. The narrative closes with openness by creating the same inciting incident of asking for eggs. The ending closes with a fourth wall break telling the audience that if their behavior doesn’t change, villainy will prevail.

Audiences love to watch villains. The viewer subjectivity through the film is to focus on the villains. The villains are intruders in this perfect weekend narrative. The subgenre of horror of home invasion is rooted in domestication. The invasion is slow through shot composition. The beat feels long. Once the two bad guys are in the house, it’s impossible for them to get out. They have invaded the house and the film. Paul breaks the fourth wall for the first time after he kills the dog and plays a game of hot and cold with where the dead dog lies. By hijacking the narrative to focus the viewer upon the villains, Haneke breaks the typical horror convention. He bends the narrative into noir. Noir through tradition allows viewers to watch film through the lens of the villain. This hijacking emotes a sense of discomfort through the lens; an audience member shouldn’t feel safe. They know what’s coming, but are you not entertained? Audiences are generationally used to seeing and feeling horror by 1997, because film has been around for generations before. This generation of viewers are now more in tuned with violence through multiple mediums including video games. The audience through generations has become desensitized to violence even if it’s off-screen. Video games were not in everyone’s household but the bourgeoise gave their kids everything they wanted to…spoiled rich kids.

The Skillet is hot. The opening of the film is placed onto the family from the first frame. The first frame is an overhead shot remediating Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead and even further back to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Classic horror establishing shots establish a sense of isolation by being wealthy and comfortable. The house they reside is gated. A gated community with a private lake and sailboat. The family has everything they need to survive: food, water, electricity, firearms. This private residency is polite, and nice. The bourgeoise appear to be approachable enough for an unexpected attack. Haneke made an example of the family’s politeness by invading the home through an open area in the fence down by the water. The two killers were never seen with the previous family. However, after they saw the two strange men through the gate, they came over shortly after. This amount of space within the first act allows the family to settle in: get the boat set-up, clean vegetables, drop-off luggage. That should be enough to kill a family, but not a worth enough for a full-length feature film. And not enough distance between the two to hear the other families scream. The families are wealthy enough to have peace and quiet until it all comes crumbling down within an evening filled with entertainment. The German bourgeoise physically are built weak and feeble. They are trained to carry a gun, but these two men came in unsuspectedly during the time when the family is just getting settled in.

Egg White. In Western Cultures white is ordinary. The color white is calm. The opaque white void in contemporary films establishes the calm ordinary society view. This intention was spun around to be clinical. The white in the film Funny Games is clinical and pure. Paul, the leader of the two, wears opaque white collared shirts, short mesh white golf shorts, clean white shoes. This whole white outfit is out of ordinary; it’s pure, and uncomfortable. Outside of the outfit, white is present in almost every frame throughout the film. Friends greet the family in a white sailboat. There are white windows on the barn. The wife wears a floral pattern that matches the curtain in the background of the kitchen scene. Paul never gets his hands dirty doing dirty deeds and playing these funny games. He goes out to hit a white golf ball but instead kills the dog. He sprayed the white walls with red after killing the boy with the shotgun, yet his gloves remain clean.

Implication of violence never shown. A televised race plays while blood drips down the screen. Funny Games establishes a horror narrative without showing any violence in front of the camera. The first violent scene is the eggs. The eggs are dropped after the wife gives them to Peter. The image of the eggs feels violent. The two eggs broken on white tile floor. The yellow yolk spread like a blood spill. We fill our heads with subtextual horror and violence while watching this film, it allows time and space for our minds to be filled with the horror of this narrative. The screams, hits, whines, all the struggles get worse each second that goes by in this film. Funny Games has a chokehold on our minds through sound and edits. The slow pace fills our minds with what can potentially happen. The implication of violence is subconsciously in our minds due to amount of media consumed.

Throw away your television. The television was turned on by Peter as he waited for Paul to arrive with Georgi. The television plays in the background, and it not entertaining Paul and Peter as much as this sadistic game. Georgi dies while the camera follows Paul in the kitchen making something to eat. After Georgi dies, a long close up of the television is airing a professional race. The game feels at end because Peter killed the kid, so they leave. They left the television on with the mother tied and the father knocked out and the boy dead. In a long shot of the living room, the film sits to four beats until the mother finally gets up and turns off the television. Television to these two is not as fun to watch. They need something more. The television to them is hollow and empty, just a series of images and sounds. The emotions of witnessing your son get killed fill the room as the two big bads leave and decide what to do next. The father and mother are slowly experiencing this sadistic game after the first kill.

Even their backstory is a game. The dialogue between Paul and Peter prove they have watched their television when they first sit down on the couch. Paul tells Peter’s troubled past of drugs, abuse, neglect, and weight. Peter chuckles at Paul telling his story because they are just words. These killers truly never show a motive other than for the sake of entertainment. They add the backstory to add to the drama. They have seen their fair share of television, yet they seek more. These two are examples of desensitized audience members seeking entertainment through sadistic games. Haneke’s vision was aware of the generation’s desensitization. He knew if the future generation wouldn’t change their ways, this film could be a moment not a future horror of the adject. The writing is on the wall.

Don’t make the same mistake again. During the climax of the film, the father and son have died. Leaving the mother with Paul and Peter. For the first time, the mother strikes! As she is being talked to by Paul, she reaches to grab the gun. Immediately firing at Paul. Killing him instantly! The protagonist has prevailed! An unexpected point in the narrative. As an audience member, I scream for this moment because it’s a relief. But wait! Paul frantically looks for the remote. The remote represents our expectation. We were wanting the protagonist to prevail, but that’s not how this narrative is supposed to go. Paul is the one in control. He hijacked this film from the beginning. Paul finds the remote and rewinds. The edit physically rewinds like a VCR tape and we reset to see him stop the mother from grabbing the gun. This beat was the first act of violence seen on the film. Paul is allowing the audience to see it only to toy with expectations. Paul represents consumption and how that typical narrative isn’t this film. He’s here to make sure you don’t get what you want throughout this narrative. No happy ending. You don’t get to leave the theatre with a pleasant idea.

Fast Forward to April 20, 1999. Haneke’s warning was right. Two shooters walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado and the rest is history. Within two hours, twelve students and one teacher died. The two shooters committed suicide. The FBI concluded that Harris was a clinical psychopath and Klebold was depressed. Parents blamed violent video games and media were the reason the massacre happened. The story of Harris and Klebold can be paralleled to Paul and Peter in Funny Games. Paul has no fear of death and finds death as entertainment. Funny Games was remade in 2007 in effort to reach a larger audience that weren’t aware of it previously. The film would spark the conversation of media and desensitization overseas.

The emerging conversation between viewer and material. We need to take responsibility as viewers for subjectivity. Funny Games is an example of contemporary history exploring psychological horrors of media consumption and its desensitization. As an audience member, we see something once that will horrify us for a lifetime. Once we find something else that is much worse it makes the previously horrifying thing less valued. The continuation of pushing the envelope has weight on the creator and the viewer. The material is here as a warning. The film tells us we should change our ways of violence because it’s harmful. Violence is glorified through film and television yet when it becomes real it’s traumatic. Funny Games is a traumatic narrative because it allows the audience to sit with the decision to sadistically play with our own expectations. We were the real target for Haneke’s film, not the family. The fourth wall breaks were encouraging us to think about the next steps in our lives because we are seeing the last moments of the family.