Funny Games (1997)

Let’s talk about stuff that hasn’t held up. Every decade has a few things that just end up seeming dated after it’s over and we’ve all had a chance to analyze the settling dust of said decade. Like the 60s had the whole Woodstock hippy thing, the 70s had prog rock and acid, and the 80s had Reaganomics and weird PRMC hearings trying to say anything fun was witchcraft. Well, I’ve recently found an interesting one from the 90s – movies that really, really wanted to be smart about how VIOLENT and DANGEROUS movies were making America. Like Funny Games.

Director: Michael Haneke

Starring: Arno Frisch, Frank Giering, Susanne Lothar

IMDb

This is kind of a weird social commentary type of movie where the villains break the fourth wall and talk to the audience occasionally. It’s not done much and not in very interesting ways – usually just a wink or a nod, or maybe a paltry bit of dialogue about how they want to make it to feature-length movie time or something. I guess it’s interesting but it’s hardly even all that obtrusive. I guess there’s some dialogue about reality perception and stuff, but that’s so on the nose it comes off as hokey. Without real character traits for these guys, it feels empty and gimmicky to me.

I have to give the movie props – it’s well made, and director Michael Haneke has a great command of putting together expert scenes and making this tense, sparse atmosphere, focusing on the pain of the victims of these two sociopathic killers. It’s more uncomfortable than a lot of thrillers at some points because they take their time to show the victims’ anguish in this very quiet, stark way, and don’t have any deus ex machina type shit to save them. So it does get its point across at least in the beginning.

However, the whole messaging and blunt “point” of the film is what ended up bothering me – oh, we’re complicit in violence because the killers can talk to us, and should we even be watching movies that have this kind of violence in them? It’s kind of condescending actually. It’s like the movie is the scolding parent wagging their finger, telling us not to watch violent films because they’re bad for us. Like, pretty sure we can make our own decisions there, bud. Natural Born Killers, another edgy 90s flick, is very similar in its messaging, and even goes further by totally un-subtly throwing the news media in there – that one is so obvious in its messaging you can see it from space. But I’m sure a lot of people thought this stuff was, like, so deep, man.

I mean it’s really just kind of a weird puritanical kind of thing. I know Haneke likely didn’t mean it that way – he wants to reflect on the violence and all that and it’s not like he’s literally running a Sunday school class. But come on. Violence in movies isn’t some insidious plot. It’s fucking fun. It’s entertainment and catharsis to escape whatever bullshit is going on in the real world – which, these days, is a fucking lot, if you’ve seen the news lately. Not everything is gonna be about knitting circles or a guy who finds a lost puppy or something. Occasionally we want to see a guy get stabbed with a bayonet on fire or something.

‘Movies are violent, we’re complicit in violence’ - yeah, it’s called escapism. It’s enjoyable. That’s been going on since, Jesus, like the dawn of civilization? It’s not like Hollywood was the first thing ever to invent violent made-up stories. The ancient Greeks had stories about guys fucking their moms and killing their dads. Shakespeare had violent disembowelments and all sorts of murders going on, some of them even via bears. Did they also contribute to the downfall of society? Maybe we never had a fucking chance.

And yeah there are movies that are in poor taste and are exploitative – no doubt about that. Some things are bad. But other times it’s just for fun. I think things have just changed in the last 20 years. Especially in these last few, with the ascension of Trump to the presidency and the surrounding chaos that seems to have enveloped everything in our public view. These days everything just seems so much more dire and serious than when we had the luxury of going ‘oh, isn’t our violent media consumption such an issue? Pass the caviar, Angelina.’ The stakes have all changed. So maybe that’s a part of why Funny Games didn’t strike me. That’s always funny about art; how it changes depending on an indefinite number of factors.

Maybe it’ll strike you different. For me this missed the mark. I might’ve found it really deep when I was 13 or so.

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