The Filmgoer As Sadist
michael haneke takes “gore-porn” to a new level
You’ll hate this movie. You should hate this movie. It will make you feel sick with yourself, with everybody involved in its production, and with society in general. Which is why it’s absolutely brilliant.
I took my mother to the opening night screening—it actually made her cry. These weren’t tears of sadness, or even tears of relief (director Michael Haneke would never let you have such a pleasurable moment of release), but tears of unfiltered anxiety. It’s fitting to note that she teared up only after the movie was over: Funny Games is like food poisoning—you don’t realize just how nauseous it makes you until you’ve fully ingested it. And that’s because, like tainted food, it looks just fine on the surface. The poison lies subtly within.
The meat of the film is in the same vein as Saw, Hostel, House of Wax, and any other gore-porn thrill-fest that’s dominated the box office over the past decade: Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet play two semi-nameless “gentlemen,” clad in monochromatic, Clockwork Orange-esque attire who are slowly but surely terrorizing an unspecified Northeastern vacation spot. They go through each upper middle class summerhouse one by one, taking each family hostage and torturing them, both physically and mentally, before they finally kill them, which almost always seems like an afterthought. It’s the chilling demeanor in their complete detachment from humanity that resonates most intensely after the lights come up.
Tim Roth, Naomi Watts, and Devon Gearhart make up the picture-perfect family with whom we are intended to sympathize, but the stellar performances by this reputable cast are nearly inconsequential—the players are simply pawns on Haneke’s filmic chessboard. In this chess game, the camera functions as the merciless queen, the element that takes a tried-and-true scenario and garners a completely novel and entirely progressive reaction to a twisted subject matter.
Quite simply, Haneke points his camera in a direction relatively unfamiliar to the genre: away from the action. What would you rather see: a ten year-old getting shot in the face or Michael Pitt getting snacks from the fridge? Now, any rational person in the real world would balk at such a question—who in the hell would want to witness a child murdered? Answer: the filmgoer.
Movies aren’t really real, so what’s the big deal? The cinema presents us with voyeuristic opportunism with seemingly no real-world consequences—they’re just images, they aren’t real people! The reel finishes, the lights go up, and Devon Gearhart continues his press tour unharmed. So with your ass on a plush folding chair and a bucket of popcorn in your lap, you secretly want to see that kid get shot. Trust me. You want it, even if you don’t know that you want it.
You, like nearly every other filmgoer, like being brought to the precipice of humanity, to be dangled over the edge so you can stare down into the abyss. You love the thrill of getting nose-to-nose with evil, so long as you’re jerked out of harm’s way when it’s about to snap. So while you may turn away from violence in reality, you’re drawn towards it in the theater. Haneke knows this, and he does everything in his power to use that against you. Namely, he makes Funny Games.
Pardon the spoiler, but you don’t see the 10 year-old getting shot in the face—Haneke turns his camera away from this and makes you watch the fridge raid, keenly aware of what’s going on in the next room. It makes you feel cheated—you endure every ounce of tension in the buildup and get no climactic payoff. And with the camera in this position, the lens catches a unique angle, one that we’ve never seen before. Slightly off-axis, it manages to pick up a ray of reflective light, and for a moment, you can catch a glimpse of yourself watching the movie: a snarling, drooling sadist, hooked on the thrill from watching others suffer. Hey, everyone’s thinking it, I’m just saying it. Follow that up with a nearly 10 minute-long shot that holds the child’s corpse in the corner and you’ll begin to feel sick at what you had initially felt cheated out of seeing.
Haneke surely leads you to that sought-after abyss, but unlike those other gore-porn directors, he doesn’t pull you back at the last moment. No, it’s quite the opposite, actually—he slowly advances, pushing you further and further towards that precipice, and just when you think he can’t push you any further, he smirks as he watches you fall into that pit that we love to look into, but dread to be in. \\\