In the Cellar

I recently watched *Funny Games*, the 2008 Americanized shot-for-shot remake of a 1997 Austrian film by Michael Haneke (who directed both). I hated it — hated it more than any movie I’ve seen since *Crash* (2004). Sure, I saw and intensely disliked *Away We Go* for its willingness to stroke its precious hipster protagonists who were, like, just better than everyone else, in their own quiet-but-cool way. Gag. My disdain for *Crash* isn’t healthy, as some people do like it — for reasons that escape me — and I’m not usually able to be politic about it. But it’s been years, thankfully, since it robbed *Brokeback Mountain* for Best Picture, and I haven’t had to talk about it for a good long while. I don’t often hate movies (the three I’ve named here are the only ones I can think of in the last 5 years), but I definitely hated *Funny Games*.

I knew what I was getting myself into. It had a whirling evil merry-go-round of a trailer, which was a self-conscious nod to *A Clockwork Orange* and its sensationalist trailer. *Funny Games* will be violent and probably disturbing, and it seems to have a level of interaction with the viewing audience. Fine, check. I don’t mind art that gets up in my face; being made to feel uncomfortable can be productive element of art. Can be, yes, but not here.

Here’s the basic plot: the posh Farber family (Tim Roth, Naomi Watts, and their little son) drive their Range Rover and big sailboat/small yacht to their gated lake house in, say, Long Island or Connecticut. Soon after arriving for a summer sojourn, two young, preppy fellows, Peter and Paul, show up at their door. Nephews of nextdoor neighbors or some such. Upon entering, these two guys — who look and act like boarding school hellions, with Paul as the smart kind and Peter as the dumb kind — begin to mess with the Farber family. They came to borrow eggs and break them by accident and then knock a cell phone in a sinkful of soaking spinach and then ask to borrow MORE eggs. It’s basically a satire of a comedy of manners (how far will they go? how far will politeness stretch!? will someone speak up or let the unsaid rudeness rule?), until Paul gets fresh with Tim Roth (albeit in a very passive-aggressive way, “You’re acting so shamefully rude, Mr Roth!”) and Timmy slaps him. Bad mistake. Paul smashes Mr Farber’s knee with a golf club, and now Paul and Peter have the Farbers as victims in their own home. Creepy home invasion, some mannered rhetorical jousting, the feeling of something dark and awful lurking beneath these social misfirings — that’s all fine. This part of the movie was actually, to me, quite riveting — in the same way that the opening scene of *Inglourious Basterds* was riveting. A duel who’s outcome you already know, basically, but the path there is wordy and weird.

Once the setup happens, the movie begins to get progressive worse: first boring, then insulting, and finally just plain obnoxious. Peter and Paul, you see, mess with the Farbers. Will you be dead by morning? We bet you will, but the bet needs rules! Let’s hash out the terms while Naomi Watts looks tied up and sweatily vulnerable. Michael Pitt, who has the world’s most slappable face, turns to the camera, looks directly at us, and says things like “You’d like us to do that, wouldn’t you? Well wait to see what happens!” The “funny games” aren’t funny or even entertaining. Edward Albee’s brilliant play, *Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?* has a harrowing second act, called “Walpurgisnacht” in an ironic nod to an evening of released dark and supernatural forces in Goethe’s *Faust*, in which George and Martha, the super-duper dysfunctional married academic couple, play a “game with rules” with their dinner guests in which G and M take our all their anger and insecurities out on each other and their guests. It sounds boring but is a theatrical tour-de-force. And it’s the same sort of creepy “things are much more serious than they seem” vibe as *Funny Games* is going for, only for Albee it’s hugely successful (*Woolf* is a beautiful but devastating play) and in this film it’s an empty gesture — provocative things could have been done here, but instead the movie wanted to trot out dumb and crass ideas that masquerade as Provocative Ideas.

The movie mocks our need for violence. Been there, done that — ever read *Titus Andronicus* or *The Duchess of Malfi* or seen *Pulp Fiction* or even *Hot Fuzz*? Yes, American movies have become increasingly violent, as Alive! and I blog-chatted about months and months ago. Yes, “torture porn” is a sick and ridiculous genre; I have no interest in watching the *Saw* franchise, but I’m told it does quite well. What leads us to want to watch something like *Saw*? Sure it’s distasteful, but is it ethical — why or why not? Is every act of viewing — the inherent voyeurism of film — an act of violence, whether because of feminine sexuality and misogyny, or a presupposed violent-male POV, or the capitalist economy that fuels the film industry? Why do we like Bad Things, and why do so many narratives need them to work? These questions, which may or may not interest you, are not asked in this film — not at all. Perhaps the film thinks it is asking these questions, but I’d strongly disagree. Asking one or some of these questions would mean using the medium of film, and its implied relationship to the audience, to take up and work through the issue. What *Funny Games* settles for is Paul turning to the camera to deliver his occasional “Yea, you like this dontcha!” lines and a few other assorted glib tricks. At one point, P and P kills the little Farber boy — you knew that was coming — and seem to take off. Cut the Farbers, both battered and wounded (and Naomi Watts partially clothed), trying to gather themselves. What follows is a single-shot of AT LEAST 4-5 minutes of them just lying there, panting, whimpering, pulling themselves together. It’s awful. But it lacks any felt signification — there’s no attachment to these characters and their plight. We don’t see them lying themselves gathering together like Lear and Gloucester to take on a malevolent universe. Nope, just “panting porn.” It’s supposed to be excruciating, and I’m willing to bet that the director would be pleased to learn of my eventual boredom. This is just a cold formal exercise, nothing more, nothing less. Look, look! it says, see the suffering! You wanted it, sort of, by coming to this movie and not walking out when Paul involved you — NOW LOOK WHAT YOU’VE DONE. Versions of Brecht’s *Three Penny Opera* end with the lights being turned on the audience as a character accuses them of being whores, bawds, gamblers, and thieves. Brecht liked to mess with his audience, since he say theater as a way to raise political and social consciousness and thus a jostled viewer was a changed viewer, but that *Opera* exercise has significant thought behind it; it MEANS something. Timmy and Naomi panting in the semi-dark means nothing. Maybe the film wants that interpretation too, since the Farbers are just pawns in the games of P+P; if so, that’s both misanthropic and, well, outrageously insulting to the viewer. “You stupid shit,” it seems to say, “why but WHY are you still watching this. Your continued viewing only further condemns!”

Later on in the film, Naomi grabs a hunting rifle left too close to her and shoots Peter in the chest. SPLAT — lots of blood and he get thrown back against the wall. (I’ve never seen the original Austrian version, but I’m told that there’s almost no on-screen violence. In this, er, shot-for-shot remake, things have changed.) Paul curses and expresses self-pitying anger and stomps over to the TV table — “Goddamnit, this wasn’t supposed to happen!” — and grabs the remote and hits rewind (yes, poor reader, he actually hits rewind and actually rewinds the scene, as if he Zach Morris snapping his fingers to freeze *Saved By the Bell* actors and deliver a witty monologue) in order to have time to grab the gun before his comrade gets pelted. To go back to Brecht, in his theater he wanted the wires to show, so to speak, so that the audience was never fully taken in by the spectacle. Well, here we have a postmodern blackhole variant: “Yes! Let’s fuck with the audience! Ohhh! Gore! But, wait, that’d mean a typical plot where the captives win and there’s narrative closure with Lessons Learned and we are NOT doing that so let’s actually rewind the film IN THE FILM — have you forgotten that you’re watching a film? Well don’t, jerk! Because the director and actors, not you, are in charge and we just rubbed yer nose in it! — while the film’s chronology still lurches forward….dude, my head’s gonna explode with all these deep interpretive games.” Brecht opposed forms of realism because they’d trick an audience into sympathy and identification, and these, for him, shut down critical engagement. So he wrote weird scripts and demanded unusual acting styles to break that too-easy bond. But, see, Brecht’s plays use these techniques to try to make a point. *Funny Games* has the distinction of being decades ahead and two steps behind: it’s using similar tricks for vapid ends. Violence is bad and you, viewer, are bad for watching it. Now let me pocket your money while I tut-tut you for being stupid! Oh, and did I mention that my movie is purposefully vague (or, uh, lazy) so you can’t really, in the end, tell if we’re condemning violence or suggesting that we’re inescapably bound up with it? Hell, even Antonin Artaud’s famous “Theater of Cruelty” techniques are driven by strong philosophical stances. *Funny Games* grates the viewer for 2 hours to make a handful of facile points.

The movie ends by P+P dumping Naomi off the stolen boat/yacht (Paul kisses her forehead, says “Ciao Bella,” and tosses her overboard) — so much for her. And then they land on a neighbor’s pier and dock and roll up on a gray, misty morning and ask the woman if they can borrow some eggs. IT HAPPENED AGAIN! The cycle of violence continues! It’s like, uh, uh, uh *No Country For Old Men*, only without any grounding or relevance whatsoever! Like so many ideas in this film, it’s “pretend deep”: it’s superficial while also gesturing toward a bottomless pit of regressive irony. Thing is, if you sit and puzzle out what’s what, you quickly realize that it means jack-shit — there’s no play of ideas, no mutual undercutting, no interpenetration of interpretations, no undecidability, no nothing. Beckett’s plays and prose take us to the edge of a cliff and we see the abyss below, an abyss where the sort of stuff I mentioned DOES happen, where one can follow out interpretive threads but always get caught or jumbled. In other words, you can think through the ideas in Beckett; you can’t come to firm answers, but you can see that some pretty smart shit is going on there, and, while it might not be for all types, it has intellectual and literary worth. *Funny Games* is like staring at a blackhole painted on a wooden floor. It’s just there, a stupid blackhole painted on a stupid wooden floor. OHHH WHAT DOES IT MEAN?!

I didn’t need to watch this movie to learn that a piece of art can push back against me. I kinda-sorta knew what this movie was about, going in, but I figured I’d be both smarter and more problematic. The movie’s satirical and moral goals are so painfully obvious and, well, not all that interesting. I don’t even mind a film that treats me roughly (I am a big fan of both *Blue Velvet* — which basically accomplishes everything movie does, while also being smart and beautifully shot — and *Mulholland Drive*, both of which treat their audiences with something less than deference); what I mind is a film that tries to be intelligent, clever, and self-righteous while making points, repeatedly, that anyone with a pulse can figure out in moments.

The final insult is that this is a shot-for-shot remake of a film directed by the same guy. He felt the need to peddle this shit for two different markets, in two different languages. Better yet, a production team felt the need to bankroll this. (I imagine them like the nihilists in *Lebowski* — “Ja, Lebowski! Ve beleeve en not-ting!”) And the likes of Tim Roth and Naomi Watts and the oh-so-slappable Michael Pitt signed up. The budget was 15 million; the film made half of that in theater.

I wanted productive discomfort; what I got was boredom and some spit in my eye. But I gotta be honest: I still dislike *Crash* more than *Funny Games*.