Movies: Who is this Michael Haneke and why is he saying these horrible things about us?

As promised, Screamers and Screamettes, today we tackle Michael Haneke's Brechtian home invasion art-thriller Funny Games. I'm going to be talking specifically about the 1997 original, so folks who signed on to the remake might find their mileage varies. Though, from what I've heard, the two flicks are relatively interchangeable.

In a previous review of Michael Haneke's Caché, I suggested that there are two Michael Haneke's at work in any one Haneke film.

First, there's a somewhat ham-fisted and predictable moralist who seems ever ready to browbeat audiences with a simplistic lesson along the lines of "racism is bad and all white people are guilty of it" or "enjoying fictional media violence makes you complicit in violence, um, somehow" or "love is all you need" or any of a million other fortune-cookie grade platitudes that modern artists can find drifting among the detritus of post-1960 liberalism. This is holier than thou Haneke that many critics and film-goers justly cannot stand. In the interview attached to the Kino edition of Funny Games, Haneke announces that only the people who "need" his film will set through it. More well adjusted, smarter, right-thinking folk will figure out his message right away and leave. Only the violence hounds with a pathological need to watch suffering will stick it out and such people "deserve to be tortured."

The stupidity of this statement is so multi-faceted, that it staggers the imagination and can drive even naturally reserved viewers, like myself, to give their utterly innocent television sets, who were honestly just following orders when they showed this interview, the finger.

But, before one can get mad enough to do actual violence to the guiltless appliance, this same Michael Haneke – the one who says he built a flick to justly torture blood-junkie troglodytes – says that it is a failure of the artist to lapse into easy moral judgments and that he has no interest in "denouncing any person." Later, he also agrees with a comment by another great directorial-sadist, Hitchcock, that "the more intelligent the villain, the better the movie" and discusses how he diligently and happily constructed the film to ensure that his victims were truly and thoroughly screwed.

Wha?

One possible answer to this seeming paradox is that Haneke is a hypocritical douche-nozzle who can't even keep his own story straight. And it is hard to argue against that.

But, if you'll humor me, I think that what we've got here is the second Haneke that I was talking about. The second Haneke isn't particulary interested in teaching the sort of moral lessons you expect to find at the end of "very special episode" of a particularly un-edgy sitcom. Despite himself, he's too interested in what makes films work, how genres are built, how audiences interact with films, and how all these things can be manipulated. He simply wants to make a tight, functional, flawless machine of a film and he can't concern himself with making a coherent political statement.

Haneke claims Funny Games is his only piece of agit-prop. But even a cursory examination of that film reveals a work of art too weird, too complicated, and too unruly to even serve its own master's purposes.

We're going to run through the plot quickly.

We start with a family: two parents and one kid. Following the pattern of Haneke's The Seventh Continent (1989: Anna and Georg), Code Unknown (2000: Anne and Georges), Time of the Wolf (2003: Anne and Georges), and Caché (Anne and Georges), the couple at the center of Funny Games is named Anna and Georg.

Haneke's habit of using the same names gives the viewer who has followed his career the weird feeling that Ann(a or e) and Georg(es) are the Kenny of the Haneke film universe. It is as if there's just this one family and the angry God of their reality – Haneke the Merciless – just goes out of his way to absolutely fuck them over in the worst ways his omnipotence allows. If at any time during Funny Games you think Haneke's being unnecessarily brutal to the lead victims, reflect on the idea that this is just one of five horrific fates Haneke has, to date, dealt them.

The film opens with the family on the road, headed to their secluded lake home. Why, oh, why does anybody even go to secluded lake homes anymore? They are, of course, subjected to a home invasion by a duo of relentlessly polite, relentlessly brutal young men dressed in tennis whites and sporting finicky white gloves.

These two assailants, who refer to themselves by a host of different names (Peter and Paul, Tom and Jerry, Beavis and Butthead) and offer a couple of alternative "origin stories" (beating Nolan's Joker to that particular gag by more than a decade), proceed to put the family through a torturous gamut of children's games that have been twisted to accommodate homicidal punchlines.

And, just to spice things up, the assailants are aware of the fictional nature of the film they are in and not only regularly break the fourth wall and directly address the viewer, but also manipulate the medium – with the help of the director – to ensure their uncontested dominance over their victims. They can, for example, rewind sections of the film and erase plot twists that don't go their way or use editing cuts to eliminate in-film space, allowing them to see into and retrieve items from a room on the first floor of a house without ever leaving a different room on the second floor.

One could just wonder how the family stands any chance against such superpowered – for lack of a better term – opponents and, SPOILER ALERT, they don't. All the family members are toyed with and then killed, their suffering intentionally stretched out by the name-shifting villains to fit into a suitable one and one-half hour running time. When the last family member is dead, the duo goes to another house and, with a knowing look at the viewer, the whole thing is presumed to start all over again.

Let's talk about what isn't the major facet of genre subversion here. Haneke 1, and many of the critics who despise him, will tell you that the self-aware monkey-shines of the attackers, especially the way they directly address the audience, makes the audience aware of the fact that they are "accomplices" to murder.

Except that's absurd.

This position might be defensible in some abstract way with regards to some generic "violent films" category, but it is hard to advance this thesis with evidence from the film Haneke made. Why? Because Haneke's po-mo shenanigans aren't just add-ons he slapped on a Straw Dogs remake to make it palatable to the Cannes set. The movie's plot only works if it is a movie in a literal sense. Without the killers' self-awareness as fictional characters and their ability to openly manipulate the film medium in which they exist, the plot doesn't progress the same way. The result is to repeatedly declare to viewers that what is going on is not "murder," but make-believe. At one point in the film, one of our poly-monikered murderers asks the viewers if they believe the family has any chance of surviving the film. "Who are you betting with?" Far from being an indictment of viewers' dubious empathic responses, the effect reminds viewers that neither chance nor sympathy are really at play here. Insomuch as Haneke, by proxy of his imagined killers, is completely in control of his fictional universe, all these characters are simply aspects of the story Haneke tells and their fates were sealed long ago. And not in some meta-discourse film studies way – but as an in-film aspect of the story we know these characters are just and only that: characters. For contrast, during one of the murder scenes, Haneke gives us a long shot of a blood-splattered television. On the TV is stock footage of a race car wreck. Meant, I suspect, as little more than a visual metaphor for the family's worsening condition, it also provides a telling counterpoint to Haneke's overly cinematic tension as it gives viewers the chance to compare a truly random incident of violence within an entertainment context and the highly mannered and overtly manipulative staginess Haneke gives us.

Ultimately, it lets everybody off the hook. Haneke, like his white-gloved killers, never gets his hands dirty because he made a film about violence, rather than a violent movie (though I think it should be noted that there's a single on-screen act of gory violence in Haneke's flick, and that happens to one of the baddies – Haneke's film is really light going compared to the extremes horror fans regularly subject themselves to these days). The viewers are off the hook because the not so "sub" subtext of the film is that the emotional response of the audience is easily manipulated by any halfway competent director. Consequently, how can viewers be held responsible for "who they bet with"? It isn't their choice.

If there's anything truly subversive about Haneke's flick, it all comes from a single scene: a long, emotionally ravaging single take that occurs after the death of the son, the first family member to go. After killing the young boy, the killers leave the house (an inexplicable act until you understand that the killers, by manipulating the film, simply cannot lose – they might as well take naps, run a marathon, or go to grad school in the interim; the universe of the film bends to their/Haneke's will and they can do what they want). Shocked and drained, the parents struggle to liberate themselves from their duct tape bonds. What's notable about this scene is how Haneke, free to explore the emotional range of his characters because he's made their emotions and their impact on the viewer the real crux of his pix, gives the viewer the full and genuinely harrowing reaction parents might have to the violent death of their son. This isn't some stereotypical scene that resolves in a quick cry followed by a vow of revenge or an urgent, "We've got to get going! Now!" These characters really let it all out. Especially Georg, whose gasping and wailing sobs might very well be the single loudest sound on the film's soundtrack. This single scene tells us more about the artificiality of media violence as we usually consume it than all the film's broken fourth walls and meta conversations about the blending of fact and fiction. It gives us a glimpse at what the fantasies we enjoy so effortlessly and without any sacrifice might actually cost. It is in that one moment that Haneke gives genre fans something important to ponder.

Is it the duty of fans to be so self-reflexive? Just because one enjoys the cartoonish violence of gore cinema, must you spend serious consideration on the pain and suffering of real horror? I don't have an answer for that. I feel that there's something so asymmetrical about the easy consumption of symbolic violence and the mind-numbing reality that the relationship demands attention. I also think that denying the impact of violent media – where the individual studies are always too limited, but the literature reviews are never rigorously focused enough – has taken on the same stanky strategies climate change deniers deploy. But does that really make my consumption of media violence any different from somebody who doesn't feel that same? I doubt it. In the special features interview that follows the film on the DVD, Haneke says that being self-reflexive immediately exempts you from the moral complicity of media violence. That sounds more like a statement of an academic's faith in the inherent redemptive value of intellectualization rather than a logical position on the issue.

Speaking of genre conventions, this is a blog review and I've already gone on too long and failed to give you a take-away judgment on the flick. I can't give you back the time you've spent reading this, but I can give you the executive summary. If you're reading this blog, Michael Haneke probably hates you. He doesn't think you're very bright and I'm fairly certain he thinks he's a better person than you are. This is a shame because he makes really good movies. In fact, his movies seem to be more complex and generous than he is. Funny Games is one of his better films. Watching it is something like watching the rules that govern the genre suddenly stand up and start dancing. My recommendation: dance along and leave before the musician starts telling you what they think. When was the last time you heard your favorite musician say anything that struck you as deeply and profoundly as their songs did? It's like that.

Movies: Revenge is a dish best served competently.

German-born Austrian director Michael Haneke makes political films that are great films full of weak politics. Watching something like Funny Games (either the 1997 or 2007 version) or Caché, you get the weird sense of two different people at work. First there's the genre-subverting, meticulous, unsentimental, and rigorous artist. This Haneke does all the work. Then, throughout his flicks and somewhat at random, a second Haneke – a ham-fisted, ingenuous, and simple-minded – drops in awkward political asides that are so egregiously thoughtless that many otherwise sympathetic and astute viewers assume that they're being insulted. It's even become something of a critical cliché to assume that all of Haneke's flicks are little more than elaborately constructed insults directed that the audience members and the only two positions one can take towards his work is to either side with him, taking up arms against a sea of philistines and by opposing offend them, or hate the director right back, declaring him just another insufferable hipster doofus pandering to the intellectual prejudices of those across the pond (and those domestic doofi who deserve them).

In the U. S. of A., this was more true with Funny Games (which I hope to get to later this week or early next) than with today's film, Caché. Not because Caché's political content is any more or less goofy, but because Funny Games hits us were we live (especially horror fans, some of whom – in a truly heroic gesture of genre-provincialist egotism – suggested that it was specifically constructed to insult the beloved мать ужаса). Games's target was media violence, our favorite luxury good and, for some of us, our livelihoods. Caché, on the other hand, involves European racism and the legacy of French colonialism in Algiers. Not having any dog in this particular fight, American audiences seem much more content to allow Haneke to jumble together all manner of haphazard moral equivalences and serve up a half-baked Buergenlandisches Erdbeerkoch of liberal white guilt, generic left-leaning isolationism, with a tart hint of class warfare.

In fact, the most strenuous objection anybody seems to have put forth to question the painfully simplistic platitudes of Second Haneke is the actual movie made by First Haneke, a flick more complex and morally ambiguous than Haneke 2 will allow.

We're going to talk specifics now, but I feel it fair to warn you that I'm going to uncharacteristically spoil the crap out of this flick. If you want to see it without me tramping my dirty footie prints all over it, this is where you should check out.

Georges and Anne are a model of bobo coupling. Georges, played with seething self-righteousness by the excellent Daniel Auteuil, is minor television celeb that hosts a critically well-received and mildly popular literary talkshow. Imagine a nation where a literary talkshow could survive on the tube – and people say that only supernatural horror can break the shackles of the mundane everyday world! Anne, ably handled by a Juliette Binoche who is given way too little to do, is an editor of pop poli-sci tomes on evergreen lefty topics such as anti-globalization. They live in a modernist two-floor townhouse in an upmarket section of Paris. They have a single child: Pierrot.

The film opens with the discovery of a videocassette that has been left on their doorstep. Somebody videotaped Georges and Anne's house for several hours. The tape comes with no threatening note. There's no hint of violent intent. The camera work isn't even that invasive. It is a static, almost stately establishing shot that more resembles the early work of the Brothers Lumière than it does the work of a voyeur or snoop.

The tape is the first of many. Again and again, there are shots of the family's Paris home or the country estate Georges grew up on. However, the subsequent tapes include child-like drawings depicting a boy vomiting blood or a rooster with blood spurting from its neck. Georges and Anne go to the police, but – as all police are in any movie that isn't a cop actioner – they are useless. After receiving the video of his childhood home, Georges claims he knows who is sending them, but he refuses to tell his wife on the grounds that he doesn't want to finger the guilty party until he's sure.

In truth, Georges is hiding the fact that the culprit is most like a young Algerian boy he wronged when they were younger. Much later in the film we learn that when Georges was still a boy, an Algerian couple helped his parents work the estate lands. They had a son named Majid. In 1961, Majid's parents went to Paris to take part in protest march. That march, an actual incident in from France's tempestuous 1960s, ended in the slaughter of an estimated 200 French-Algerian civilians, many of whom were herded into the Seine by the police and drowned. Majid's parents were among those killed. Back on the farm, Georges's parents decided that they would adopt Majid as their own. Georges, in a fit of juvenile jealousy, claimed that he'd seen Majid cough up blood. A doctor was called and Majid was given a clean bill of health. The still ragingly jealous Georges told Majid that Georges's parents wanted the rooster in the barnyard butchered. In a flashback scene that includes actual footage of a rooster being beheaded and, literally, running around with its head cut off, we see Majid believed Georges. Georges later told his parents that Majid, angered the Georges had the doctor summoned on false premises, had slaughtered the chicken in front of Georges and then threatened him with the same hatchet. As a consequence, Majid was sent to an orphanage.

Following hints left in one of the videos, Georges manages to confront Majid. Majid claims that he has not sent any tapes. Unconvinced, Georges threatens to do Majid harm if any more tapes arrive. Still wanting to keep his role in this secret, Georges tells his wife that he followed the clues, but there was nobody home.

Shortly thereafter, a tape of Georges and Majid's confrontation, including Georges's clear threat, arrives at the home. Faced with clear evidence that Georges has been keeping her in the dark, Anne demands to know the whole story, but Georges once again refuses to confide in her. The same tape showing Georges threatening Majid – or, as those unfamiliar with the backstory would see it: a tape showing a well-off white Parisian hassling and threatening a lower income Algerian man – arrives at Georges's television station. Georges's boss tells him that they've destroyed the tape and that he's not interested in Georges's personal problems, but, hey, by the way, we're still reviewing next season's line up and I'll let you know if you're picked up or not.

In what appears to be retaliation for the threat, Pierrot vanishes on his way home from school. The police, previous uninterested in the tapes, immediately set upon Majid and his son, a well-spoken and tightly-wound man in his early twenties. Both men are held through the night, but released because the police have got no hard evidence that links them to Pierrot's disappearance. That's because Pierrot was not actually kidnapped. He was hiding out at the home of a schoolie. When Pierrot returns to his home, his mother asks him to explain himself and he answers with vague accusations that suggest Anne is cheating on Georges with a coworker. In keeping with the theme of violated trust, Haneke violates the viewers' by never revealing whether Anne is or is not pursuing exo-domestic knookie. We have no proof, but doth she protest too much? Hmmmm.

In the meanwhile, Georges's gets a call from Majid. Come over, Majid says, and I'll explain everything. Georges goes and prepares to argue with Majid again. Instead, Majid cryptically states that he wanted Georges to be present and then, using a small razor or knife, opens up his own throat. Blood sprays and Majid falls dead. Georges leaves the scene.

Georges comes home and tells Anne the whole story. He confesses about what happened when he was six and Majid was just a boy. He tells her what happened at Majid's apartment. Anne tells him that he must go to the police.

Cut to the next day. Georges is headed into his office where he is confronted by Majid's son. Georges accuses the son of working up the video scheme, claiming Majid was too crazy and feeble to have pulled such a scam. The son denies that he had anything to do with the tapes. Majid asks Georges what it feels like to have a man's life weigh on his conscience and Georges responds that he feels no guilt. Majid's son replies that Georges's answer was what he expected. Is he confirming that he thinks Georges is a dickhead? Or is he making a veiled threat on the basis that he thinks a man's life wouldn't weigh on his conscience either?

That night, Georges dreams of the day Majid was dragged from the farm and shipped off to the orphanage.

The film ends on one of Haneke's trademark long, stable shots of Pierrot's school steps. Kids are leaving for the day. We don't see Pierrot among them, but the screen fades to black before all the kids finished leaving the building. Are we supposed to understand that Pierrot is missing? Was this what Majid's son was threatening to do? Has Pierrot run off again? Maybe he just didn't walk out of the school yet?

[Update: Eagle-eyed reader Sue points out that I missed not only Pierrot in this final shot, but I somehow didn't notice that he appears in the final shot with Majid's son! D'oh! While this raises a whole new set of questions, at the same time it makes my set of questions invalid. Read the comments for Sue's take on the flick.]

Visually, Haneke is an acquired taste. Either you'll find his affection for the extended, immobile shot a soporific affectation or you'll see how it converts even the most mundane of scenes into a sort of landscape painting. Similarly, his rejection of film scores and needle-drops – if I recall, no Haneke film includes any musical soundtrack (odd for a man who has also directed operas) – is either going to strike you as the obvious choice of somebody who meticulously creates soundscapes of everyday noise to accompany his living landscapes or it will simply add to the feeling that nothing is happening in this film. The only defense I can offer is that Haneke is very aware of his own style. In fact, the videos the Georges and Anne get are so similar to what Haneke might shoot anyway that a running visual gag throughout the film is deciding whether the shot you've been watching is going to be revealed to be another cassette or is "in action," so to speak. Still, having an artist intentionally do something you think is stupid doesn't make it less stupid, just intentionally stupid. While watching Caché, I thought, "This is pretty neat, but if I was even slightly in a different mood, I'd be asleep already." So forewarned is forearmed; you know what you like.

As to the politics, here's how Haneke 2 wants you to read this whole weird story. Georges is guilty of a great wrong. In this, he parallels the injustices France visited upon the Algerians during the colonial period. His behavior specifically parallels France's national attitude to the 1961 massacre that was, for years, unmentionable in the public sphere. Instead of enshrining the image a couple hundred French Algerian corpses clogging up the Seine, France chose to elevate the self-serving and heroically liberal image of the student uprisings as paradigmatic of the 1960s. In this, the nation parallels the easy liberality of Georges and Anne. Majid's revenge on them is just. Their union is based on a false sense of self and though Majid cannot ultimately harm them (he instead dies rather pointlessly), his campaign of terror can reveal the rotten core lies they've built their house upon. In this, Haneke 2 comes about one short hair's width away from outright endorsing terrorism as a weapon of oppressed people.

But Haneke 1's film doesn't actually jibe with this reading. First, is there any real parallel one can draw between the emotional life of a six-year-old child and the foreign policies of one of Europe's longest lasting nation-states. Is it valid, or even remotely useful, to understand the 1961 massacre through the metaphor of a child worried that a new child might steal his parents' affections? The link is arbitrary and forced. Even within the world of filmic morality, where it makes sense to spend a vast fortune and absurd amounts of time on obsessively revenging incidents from one's childhood (a considerable chunk of Argento's giallo-work and the popular Oldboy sell this premise without blinking), the actions of Majid seem asymmetrical. He's no avenging angel. He's just a stalker. The clumsiness of his plan is more tragic than his backstory – one almost feels bad for him when its revealed that the police saw right away that his suicide in the presence of Georges was just that, a suicide. Majid worked so hard, but it was just more than his quite limited mentality could pull off. Haneke 1 made Majid a born loser. He's no avatar of oppressed people everywhere. Instead, he's a guy who caught a spectacularly bad break and could never let it go. It ceased to be a moral issue because, long ago, the sin committed left the realm of violation and forgiveness and, instead, took on the force of a creation myth. Georges offers apologies, but apologies are no good here because to accept an apology would be to invalidate all those years of suffering and pain that made him who he is. Majid managed to get on with life, but it poisoned him. He passed this poison on to his son. And then one or both of them began terrorizing not only the presumably guilty party, but two innocents as well. Where Haneke 2 comes close to becoming a terror apologist, Haneke 1 creates a picture of the mentality that produces terrorism and it is irrational, pathetic, immoral, ineffectual, and ultimately self-destructive.

And, finally, Haneke 1 puts forth a more interesting moral quandary than Haneke 2 does: What is our moral obligation to those who want to destroy us? Especially if that hate is at the very center of their identity and displaces whatever moral framework of reconciliation might be used to close the chasm between us. Do we kill them? Is that any different then letting them destroy themselves in their mad effort to get us? Do our moral obligations to other people vanish the second we perceive a threat from them? Or should we hold ourselves to ethical standards even when doing so may pose an existential threat?

This moral thicket, the impossible imperative to love our enemies, is the genuinely provocative idea hidden inside Caché.