[ Alternate Takes ] Funny Games U.S.

Funny Games U.S.

Written by James MacDowell. Published on Sun May 18 20:58:16 2008 in the Alternate Takes section.

Photo from the article Because it is quite so similar to its original, to talk about Funny Games U.S. is really to talk about two films. As such, this Alternate Take will be divided into two parts; firstly I want to discuss the film that both versions essentially are at their core: the self-conscious interpretation of the horror genre. Secondly, I’ll talk a little about the film that only the second version is: the ‘shot by shot’ remake.

Although there will certainly be differences between the two that are the result of the changes in actors, and the slight changes in staging, camera set-ups, and so on, we could only truly be able to discuss the potential meanings of these differences by closely analysing both films in detail side by side. After only two viewings of both films, this isn’t really possible for me, so in this first half I’ll (somewhat problematically, but nonetheless unavoidably) be treating the execution of the two versions as if they were essentially identical, since this is, importantly, how they ostensibly seem.

As I said in my short review, I have some problems with how Haneke describes the project of Funny Games. In interviews, he has time and again said that it is intended to educate its viewers into being conscious of the moral problems inherent in watching horror films. He sees it essentially as a didactic lesson - a commentary on movie violence that will shock complacent horror spectators out of their passive relationship to cinema, restoring their endangered conscience by daring them to keep watching; as he says: “Anyone who leaves the cinema doesn’t need the film, anyone who stays does”.

This seems to me a hugely pious, arrogant, and unintelligent argument, and one that reveals that Haneke doesn’t know very much about horror films or their audiences at all (and he has indeed admitted that he doesn’t watch very much horror cinema).

Firstly, it assumes that viewers of cinema in general are mostly passive, uncritical, and easily manipulated - that they are blind consumers, completely at the mercy of the films they watch, rather than conscious beings who don’t simply turn off their brains and moral compasses when entering a movie theatre. This is an argument that has been put forward since the beginning of cinema by many elitist critics of mainstream film (and popular culture in general), who see themselves as being far above the ‘average’ audience member, and it also unfortunately formed the basis for much insensitive film theory in the 1970s. It reveals an innately snobbish and condescending attitude towards ‘the masses’, and to popular cinema, and has actually been repeatedly disproved by audience research that has shown that the real responses of individual viewers are far more individual, complex, and critical than those of the mindless automatons Haneke implies. Even if studies hadn’t been undertaken that disproved the theory, however, simple common sense - and our own experiences of film-viewing - should be enough to dispel the myth of the wholly uncritical spectator.

Secondly, Haneke’s conception of Funny Games reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the horror genre in particular. From at least Psycho (1960) onwards, horror has consistently engaged with issues of voyeurism and audience involvement, and by no means always assumes it is addressing a passive, guileless viewer. From the shots from killers’ points of view found in countless slasher films, to the ‘found footage’ horror of Cannibal Holocaust (1980) or The Blair Witch Project (1999), to the self-reflexive postmodern horror films of the 80s and 90s, horror movies have continually played with the question of what it means to watch onscreen violence. Indeed, the very basis of horror’s persistent aim to shock lies in the fact that it is aware that the violence that it portrays is morally troubling, that it is something to be withstood and endured, and is thus implicitly asking us to question our relationship to it.

So, given these objections to Haneke’s explanation of his film, why do I still value and enjoy it? Basically, because I see it as a fascinating and very effective piece of horror cinema itself, and not as somehow standing outside the genre and hurling righteous criticism at it.

For a start, many of the pleasures that it offers are those often found in horror cinema. In particular, it repeats the always-interesting mainstay horror trope of ‘normality’ (read: predominantly white, middle-class, heterosexual, etc.) being violently attacked by forces that it doesn’t want to acknowledge, and is ill-equipped to defend itself against. In particular, here we have the bourgeois family under threat, as is the case in so many horror films - a situation that brings with it all the issues of family values and parental fears that the genre often plays on. In both Funny Games this predicament is treated in an agonizingly believable fashion, with the dialogue and performances ringing troublingly true. The sexual politics of this scenario are especially cuttingly dealt with, as when the intruders disable the father first, then mockingly keep referring to him as the “ship’s captain”, whilst forcing him to watch as they threaten his boy (who is named after him), and sexually objectify his wife.

Both films also use intelligently the familiar genre template of the threat to ‘normality’ actually being a perverted version of ‘normality’ itself - in this case, in the form of two clean-cut white, middle-class, young men. This is, again, something that can be dated back at least to Psycho’s depiction of its danger coming from the American family, and has been given many effective treatments since, not least of course in the terrifying cannibalistic family of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). These common horror film elements are revisited affectingly, carrying all the weight of social meaning and disturbing psychological undertones that are so often stirred up by the genre. The fact that they are being employed in a slightly self-conscious way (that is: they are used so boldly and uncomplicatedly as to seem distilled and paradigmatic) is interesting in itself (since it contributes to the distance that the film on one level creates), but it also testifies to the fact that these are in fact powerful and resonant tropes, and that Funny Games wouldn’t have access to them at all were it not for the work put in by the decades of horror filmmaking that preceded it.

Secondly, the film is interesting because, while it does tell a very effective horror story, it also simultaneously encourages a sense of distance from the agonising events it depicts, both through one of the intruders repeatedly turning to the camera and addressing the audience directly, and through the infamous ‘rewind’ moment. The result of these Brechtian devices is more complex than it might at first appear, since it doesn’t only draw attention overtly to the fact of our watching, but also to the fact that what we are watching is of course fictional, and thus not truly rationally deserving of the intense involvement we have likely been experiencing.

This creates an interestingly doubled kind of viewing experience: on the one hand we have been getting very emotionally involved in the story of this family’s suffering (‘Tom’ is right when he says, “You’re on their side, aren’t you?”), but, on the other, this emotional engagement threatens to disappear at these moments when the ‘fourth wall’ is broken so overtly. This is a familiar potential problem for works of art using Brechtian alienation techniques, and not necessarily one that Haneke has fully taken into account. This is because the morally troubling experience of watching the psychological and physical torture of the family (which it is surely Haneke’s aim that we should feel) rests to a great extent on our caring about the characters, and this empathy is severely compromised, not heightened (as seems to be Haneke’s plan), by these asides that tell us: “You’re watching a film, you’re watching a film…” On the other hand, these acknowledgments of the make-believe status of the scenario are also fascinating precisely because they periodically drain the believability out of the otherwise extremely realistically and painfully realised drama.

As such, these devices, rather than complicating our moral relationship to the action (i.e.: making us feel uncomfortable to be watching the violence, or threat of violence), can in fact act to relieve us of our sense of responsibility towards the events on screen to a greater extent than the less self-conscious kind of horror film that Haneke is supposedly criticising. While the sense of watching something that perhaps we shouldn’t be is routinely created through the point of view shots of a film such as, say, Halloween (1978), if the illusion of its fictional world was forcefully broken - as happens in Funny Games - this kind of film wouldn’t have nearly as much scope for creating this sense of morally-troubling voyeurism as it in fact does. Although it might not do that which its director seems to think it does, however, I would nevertheless argue that this empathy/alienation effect is still interesting and valuable for the way in which it forces us to continually navigate a viewing experience that exists somewhere between intense involvement and complete detachment. This is a position that few other horror films place us in, and one that it is continually fascinating to try to get to grips with.

This complex experience of the film as something that is simultaneously highly involving and coolly disconnected is only complicated further by the ‘shot by shot’ remake concept of Funny Games U.S. If (but only if) we have seen the original film, watching this version becomes a doubly challenging exercise in attempting to keep up our involvement with something that we are constantly reminded is staged and fake. For a viewer with a knowledge of the previous film, every single shot, every set, every line of dialogue, every plot point tells us that we have seen this before. If we keep this in mind - as it is difficult not to - then this has the potential to drain any narrative tension and sense of empathy from the drama entirely: for one thing, not only do we, after all, know exactly how the story will end, but also exactly what will happen along the way to get us to this ending.

This is a different experience to that created by a more conventional (read: less exact) remake because, while there is certainly always a familiarity present in watching a reworking, there are usually nevertheless many elements that make this particular retelling unique, and thus always a greater possibility that we will be able to lose ourselves in the world and story it presents us with. Watching Funny Games U.S. (or, to a lesser extent, Van Sant’s Psycho [1998]) is in a sense actually more like watching the original film again after already being familiar with it. The big difference, however, is that when we watch a film for the second or third or one hundredth time, although we are conscious of this fact, the film itself certainly isn’t - that is, it itself doesn’t openly proclaim its already-seen-ness to us in any way. Because of the lack of this kind of barrier, we are thus often able to become caught up in it anew despite being familiar with it - perhaps never to the extent that we were upon first viewing, but still certainly to some degree - since the film still offers itself to us unselfconsciously.

Although it will never be identical, a ‘shot by shot’ remake, on the other hand, has its already-seen-ness (apologies for the turgid turn of phrase) inscribed into its every frame, and its decision to replicate its original as closely as possible thus forms a bold challenge to our involvement in its action. Rather than having the innocence of a film merely being watched for the umpteenth time, the self-consciousness of a ‘shot by shot’ remake is endemic and inescapable, and the world, story and characters it depicts thus suddenly has the capability to be seen as entirely artificial, false, and unconvincing, since we know it all to be mere replica.

Psycho (1998)

Although many might argue that this then makes the film as a whole pointless, I would argue that while - yes - it can cause it to significantly lose its ability to work as narrative cinema (this happens, I would say, almost completely for Psycho ’98), it also means it gains a very interesting element too: something akin to the uncanny - the familiar made unfamiliar.

This process feels similar to me to a few different strategies of visual art, such as when an artist places a ‘readymade’ object in a gallery, or paints a painting of a photograph that is virtually indistinguishable from its original, or replicates everyday objects but makes them from (say) plastic. Though they all have different meanings and purposes, part of the effect of each of these practices is that we are forced to look again at something that we think we understand, only to realise that it has been transformed in some way - either through context, through medium, or through its very substance. This sense of the uncanny - of something being the same, and yet not - can essentially force us to question what exactly makes something something in the first place, and can thus create an almost philosophical affront to our ways of perceiving the world; in short, it can be a truly invigorating aesthetic experience, as the art world has acknowledged for a long time.

One of the main potential differences of this effect for cinema though, and one of the reasons why I think a ‘shot by shot’ remake is such a fascinating concept, is that the replicated object is one that is not just overtly making demands on our eyes and intellects, but also our emotions. What happens to the way we emotionally relate to events on screen when we are aware of their status as a copy - particularly when those events are of an extreme emotive nature? The answer can be that, for whatever reason, the characters’ plights become entirely emotionally uninvolving - as with Van Sant’s Psycho. With Funny Games U.S., however, I would argue that the ‘shot by shot’ remake has managed to at least partially side-step this outcome - a fact that makes it a particularly interesting example of the trend.

As I said earlier, the strength of execution of both versions of Funny Games is such that its emotional affect is able to withstand, for the most part, the assaults made on it by the initial alienation tactics. Though we are occasionally shocked out of our engagement, we are continually pulled back in. And the same is - amazingly - also largely true for Funny Games U.S., despite the added level of self-consciousness created by the uncanny ‘shot by shot’ strategy. Speaking personally, while I certainly know that I am being invited to be more detached from it than ever, and while this detachment occasionally comes to the fore, when watching the remake I am nevertheless often still drawn into an intense involvement with the family and their terrifying ordeal. This is a testament to the quality of the screenplay and the way it intelligently uses its horror tropes, and to the effective way the action is staged and shot, as well as to the performances of the lead actors - especially Watts and Roth.

At moments such as when Roth is trying fruitlessly to dry out the mobile phone and finds that he is too sick to eat the morsel of bread he tries to force down, or when Watts grabs him by his face and, sobbing uncontrollably, chokes out the words “I love you”, the sheer force of the characters’ situations hits home to me despite all the distancing tactics of the Brechtian asides and the ‘shot by shot’ concept. That this should happen is strange and wonderful, and the reasons for it are various and complicated, but the fact of this alone is enough to tell me that this is a highly complex film that manages to work both on the levels of its predecessor, and on a few of its own. It thus somehow manages to succeed as a horror film, as a meta-horror film, and even, as it were, as a meta-meta horror film.

Haneke has said that he remade his film in English purely so that he could educate more of us poor horror-watching fools than he was able to first time around. That may be. However, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: in my opinion he has now twice made a much better and more interesting film than he believes he has.

Read the short review for this film

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