“Why are you doing this?” asks George Farber (Tim Roth), after being violently struck in the leg with his golf club. The first blow of many. Paul (Michael Pitt), the young man dressed in all white who debilitated him with the golf club, answers, “why not?” From that point forward, Michael Haneke’s frame-by-frame remake of his German film, 1997 Funny Games, engages in a borderline sadistic game of horror that proves to induce both the family on screen and the spectator to it.
Traveling to their lake house, George Farber, his wife Ann Farber (Naomi Watts), and their young son head for a weekend getaway that would ultimately be their last. Unaware of the violent end they’re to face, Ann and George arrive at the house where soon, two unsuspecting young men, dressed in all white, by the names of Paul (Michael Pitt) and Peter (Brady Corbet) would inflict on this family terror beyond their worst nightmares.
To reiterate his stance on modern culture’s fascination with violence, Haneke remade his 1997 thriller in 2007 with a different cast and in English. The frame-by-frame recreation, quite literally, doubles down on Haneke’s observations on mediated violence in other films — and media as a means of “entertainment” he finds equally as cruel as the one his characters inflict on others.
Explicitly, Haneke’s Funny Games critically portrays the lengths of violence and the spectator’s relationship and accountability to it. From Michael Haneke’s essay “Violence and Media,” published in A Companion to Michael Haneke, he says, “debating whether violence in the media is necessary is a moot point in light of its existence. Concerning our topic – to debate the right kind of action, action, that is, which is both urgent and necessary on behalf of society – the question of the form of representation makes more sense, I think because it is not directed at institutions, where responsibility is notoriously hard to personalize, and accountability can rarely be demanded, but directly and demandingly at individuals – the editor, the journalist, the director.”
Haneke’s preoccupation with forms of violence, while valuable and up for debate considering the rather assaultive state of Funny Games, is one topic that grazes the first-gut instinct on first viewing. Instead, a much more subtle context to his film touches on the idea of the American middle class, and these arbitrary lines of space and distance cause more violence than the two young men in the movie do.
A much more implicit and undercurrent notion of the film’s ability to alter distance and proximity through its technical form seems to suggest a higher degree of critique. While it remains unclear whether Haneke’s intentions were such, it has long been part of his trademark to drive his films in the mode of time, distance, and space employment. Why set this theory on mediated violence in middle-class America? While violence and our engagement with it are primarily present in this film, a subtle trace of mediated distance, time, and space expresses what is unseen throughout the film’s detached mode of operation.
Funny Games manipulates time, distances, and space through its languid and long shots, slow pace, and bodily and shocking violence to aggressively highlight privileged anxieties of white, middle-class America. These anxieties express the destruction of the nuclear, heterosexual family, upper-middle-class status, and the privilege that distance and space provide both categories. Distances are negotiated and arbitrated through the visual imagery of gates, vast area, privilege and wealth, and the extended length of the narrative, relationships, and spectator participation through the form. What is known as “safe” is no longer so safe, ie. the monotony and repetitive nature of what American suburbia is built on.
What Georgetown Professor Caitlin Benson-Allot calls “zones of horror” in her piece “Dreadful Architecture,” Haneke utilizes known American imagery and turns them into zones of horror or intensity that end up becoming unrecognizable by the end of the film. Distance and its many physical and social privileges attribute to the nuclear family that is first heard but not seen as they drive up to their summer home. Privilege, in this scenario, is afforded to the lack of proximity and the ability to stand above what lies beneath. In this case, everything that comes with not having an advantage or being of the “abnormal” or undesirable (not white, not heterosexual, not wealthy) affords this family a sense of security from this threat. This threat becomes both a physical force through the material and sudden nature of the attacker’s actions and a theoretical one.
This is first tenuously felt when Paul begins to align Peter with these “threats” of social and economic structures through a tone of mockery; there is this sense of double implication in this scene. “The truth is… he’s white trash. He comes from a filthy, deprived family. Five siblings. All of them are on drugs. His father is an alcoholic. His mother. Well. I mean. You can imagine. Truth is… he’s fucking her. It’s sad. but it’s true.” Paul’s words express what is at stake, not so much physically, but theoretically what threatens the imagery of what lurks beneath the family’s exteriority. One that situates itself in his ability to mediate both the space they inhabit as he places the family now in front of him as spectators to their tortures, the family’s lavish summer home is becoming his playground and mediated space of terror and the renegotiation of white privilege sensibilities.
Violence and trauma create proximity throughout the film and force both the characters and the spectator to reconfigure basic assumptions about white middle-class heterosexual America and its role in social and economic structures. Those assumptions lie in mother/father roles reversed (George is first incapacitated and can no longer fulfill the role of “protector”), distance as a means of socially elevating the status quos (with their home being infiltrated as seamlessly as it did, despite the gates and the higher up grounds) just to name a few.
What happens when the forces set on nurturing the white male status quo become the very thing that destroys the structures that foster them? What happens when that violence is directed inwards? Paul and Peter became the mediators of the violence they’ve come to understand as that of their very nature.
Paul becomes the ultimate anchor and driving force of manipulated distance and proximity. He has the power to physically impede mobility by assaulting the family down to the ground, duck taping them in place, and cornering them in their family room. He also affords them the allusion of proximity. He allows them to gather on the same couch, often pushing them on top of each other, granting them closeness. Physical proximity as a means of comfort. That is soon, though rather slowly and excruciatingly so, rather horrific as he kills them off one by one. Where play begins to take a hand in collapsing these contradicting forms of distance and proximity is in the allotted “games” Paul and Peter start to impose on the family. Eagerly so, they set the rules and the boundaries with a clear intent: there is no way to win this game. They hold the upper hand in every way possible, going as far as acknowledging so. “You’re not allowed to break the rules” becomes almost the symbolic reminder of this family that no matter what, they will always “break the rules,” and the outcome will always result in them losing.
As much as the play exposes what is lurking just a little off-screen in this film, distance and proximity interject at various moments to further highlight these complications. After enduring the death of her son and husband, Anne manages to get her hands on the gun and shoot Peter; Paul rewinds the moment. This moment amalgamates play/effect and distance/proximity that ultimately heightens the stakes. The spectator is treated to an elevated fourth wall break when Paul digs from between the couch for the remote control and presses the rewind button.
“Where’s the fucking remote control,” utters Paul as he searches for it until he finds it. The screen, the very diegesis of the film, rewinds to Anne holding the gun, and Paul, ultimately redirecting the exact scene, intervenes and takes the gun away from her before she can shoot Peter. This is disruption. Disruption and direct access to distance and proximity afford Paul the ability to suggest a meeting of both. He both rewinds to a close-up shot of his face (proximity). He sits in a position of social (distance) or leverage, holding her hostage, before going back to stop her from performing her act of violence as retribution.
This scene, particularly compared to other violently jarring moments in the film, such as the young son’s death, seems to suggest that violence lies in the visceral reaction from spectators and their relationship to distance and proximity. It also seems to suggest an underlying structure that turns on itself to both this family and what they represent to the audience and their hand at being manipulated by distance and proximity through the effect of the film and the way the play warps all these concepts together.
To look beyond the acts of violence inflicted on this family is to look beyond this one-off family and into the grand structures that hold up their gates, their spacious homes, their normativity in place. What lies “off-screen” is that very notion of complication between distance and proximity that all at once aids them and keeps them social elevated in status, but in the end becomes the same instrument in their deaths, as Paul and Peter sail out into the vast lake that separates all these other large and beautiful homes from one another, and calmly push her off the boat to drown in that enormous open lake.
What is Haneke unearthing by manipulating distance, proximity, play, and the overall uncovering of the effect of the film? His approach to assertively reach beyond the screen involves spectators in this game of family/aggressors, distance/proximity, and ultimately cinema/spectator. Divorcing this direct dependency on merely spectator blame in Haneke’s film, though worth mentioning its importance throughout, is opening to other interpretations of how distance and proximity collapse in on themselves through this notion of play as expressed by Peter and Paul their roles in these collapses.
Form, taking its shape in long and often unbearable takes, suggests a direct mediation of proximity and distance. Time is felt as the film moves like molasses, especially post-intermediate violence. There is a link between how time passes, much like molasses, during the summer and the reckoning of post-traumatic events. After their son dies, you don’t get direct access to the aftermath of his body but rather the residue of what just happened. The camera is set in a deep focus shot that watches Anne (Naomi Watts), the mother, struggle her way around the room until she reaches her husband to help him move from the living room to the kitchen to free themselves. All of this is captured in one consecutive take. No breaks. Much like the suggestion of “breaks” in time. There is none.
Being on vacation, their time spent in the house, should things have not happened the way they did, would be spent the same as what this scene suggests it does with time. Time stops both in moments of leisure and post-trauma. However, time becomes sinister and cruel and demands a different outcome. What is challenged, along with normative structures, is the very dispensability of time. Time for leisure becomes time inverted in horror as the film takes its own time in displaying the various levels of trauma and its consequences. The ultimate destruction of the “American family” as it is subjected to the dredges of time in a not-so-fun way.
Ultimately, by the time the film draws close, basic assumptions of white, middle-class America become redrawn. They become dispensable, as the film ends with Paul entering the home of another unsuspecting family that was earlier introduced in the film as friends of Anne and George. It becomes cyclical yet poignant that these families can easily manipulate their mobility and utilize distance and proximity through their privileges. Perhaps, what makes this even more poignant and drives it home in doubling down, is that Paul and Peter move across the space of the lake in their boat. The boat becomes this beacon of mobility through which their two forces of chaos can navigate the spaces of white privilege and thwart their illusive distance against social and economic orders just below them.
Who is mediating these spaces, violence, and hierarchies at the end of the day? Well, those in power. Those who segregate others into clean and liminal little boxes that are “others” to the white, upper-middle-class threaten that. It’s also about who is more unnerved by these violent acts: those who inflect them or endure them daily? Viewers who don’t fit this specific visual representation of the “perfect” America are used to the violence. They see Peter and Paul as the result of upholding the cultural notions of a family like the Farber’s, while those who fit the Farber mold are most likely to flinch. There’s also an underlying level of satisfaction of watching family’s like the Farber’s endure the same violence “others” face at the hands of their own making.
