Michael Haneke's Fun and Games

Michael Haneke’s Fun and Games

When I wrote my study of Hitchcock’s British films some 35 years ago I had to go to London (UK) and Washington (DC) and book private screenings at the British Film Institute and the Library of Congress. If I were to write it today I could stay at home. Having the films at hand for multiple viewings might prevent all those embarrassing mistakes. I say ‘might.’

The burgeoning DVD resource has created a virtual museum of both serious and fatuous film. So when the Austrian director Michael Haneke debuts in America with Funny Games (2008), starring Naomi Watts and Tim Roth, his DVDs enable us to read this apparently commercial thriller in the context of a significant career. In fact, the film is a shot by shot remake of his 1997 film of the same name. His ten feature films to date reveal Haneke’s recurring themes and strategies. I will not deal with the screenplay he wrote for director Paulus Manker, The Moor’s Head (1996), his dialogue credit for Manker’s Schmutz (1985), his contribution to the anthology, Lumiere (1996) and The Rebellion, Haneke’s 1993 adaptation of a Joseph Roth novel, because these works are not available on DVD – yet. Even the British Museum doesn’t have everything.

Overall Haneke combines Hitchcock’s sense of the savagery within our civilization with Brecht’s detachment devices (aka Verfremdungseffekt). A Haneke film has certain stylistic trademarks. He tends to episodic narratives, with -- to encourage contemplation -- lengthy shots and blackouts. His films abound with cultural signs, especially the devolution from classical music to the brutish mass media. His characters act out of visceral impulse rather than logic or clear motive. The fact that he usually names his central couple George and Anna – even in his script for The Moor’s Head -- suggests he is more interested in generic characters and relationships than in individual psychology. His most characteristic theme is the alienation and brutalization that feeds and grows out of our increasingly violent entertainments. He usually involves games that like the characters’ fictional diversions prove malicious. As his landscape turns increasingly political, the dangers tend to come from the outside world and the menace points to a psychopathology in Western society. Yet Haneke always leaves a final sense of uncertainty, some mystery unresolved, an enigma still in the air. He denies us the comfort of thinking we understand.

***

Beginning modestly, Haneke described the focus of his first three films as “the progressive emotional glaciation of Austria.” His first feature, The Seventh Continent (1989), was based on a news story. A successful materialistic couple, engineer George (Dieter Berner) and his optician wife Anna (Birgit Doll) systematically destroy all their possessions, then kill their young daughter Eva and themselves. As they cut up their clothing and flush down their savings the prolonged destruction recalls the climactic explosion in Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970). The parents’ resolve wavers only twice: when they consider sparing their child, and when Anna’s “Nein!” is too late to save the aquarium. The media have numbed these characters’ emotional lives, from the wake-up clock radio to the Australian tourist billboard that provides the film’s title and the characters’ cover to prepare their suicide. Having axed one TV set, Georg and Anna keep another they can die watching. The snowy screen catches their ultimate void.

Remarkably, the first shot in Haneke’s first feature encapsulates his canon. It is a rear view of George and Anna as they sit in a car wash, apart, darkened, unmoved and unmoving, while their collective shell is harshly buffeted – for cleansing. Each of the three acts – set a year apart -- has a car wash and a voice-over letter to George’s parents, two of which are Anna’s cheery reports of their successes and the last George’s suicide note. The rough cleansing foreshadows their purge of possessions and themselves. Moreover, they sit there watching the wash as if it were a film. We seem to be in the back seat watching them and watching with them. Characters who live as if they were in a film become a Haneke trademark. We have no explanation for the characters’ decision, only fugitive clues. Perhaps for all their success and however exhilarating their life/ride may seem they could no longer obey the “Do Not Brake” sign outside the car wash. 

In Benny’s Video (1992) the teenage Benny (Arno Frisch) is obsessed with violent videos. He shows his tape of a pig’s slaughter to a girl whom he then kills with his stolen stun gun. After his parents see the tape of the girl’s murder, the father protects his business image by dicing and disposing of the corpse while the mother takes Benny to Egypt. There they videotape their experiences and numbly watch the incomprehensible Egyptian TV. Their lives are wholly mediated. We even see the parents’ ultimate arrest on the apartment’s security screens. His video obsession has left Benny with no conscience, no emotion, an outsider bemused to wonder what he’ll do next, whether it’s abusing his best friend’s trust, killing a new friend, or betraying his parents for protecting him. He could be watching himself in a film. His mother’s weeping recalls the conscience and feeling lost in Benny’s world of desensitizing media. Some religious references at the end -- a cathedral on Egyptian TV, the boys choir’s holy recital, some organ music – recall a defunct remediation.   

Haneke opens 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994) with the report of a 19-year-old student shooting three people dead in a Vienna bank then killing himself. In the ensuing 71 vignettes we guess who will kill whom. The incident brings together a homeless Romanian boy scavenging through Vienna, a couple who take him up instead of the girl they have planned to adopt, another couple with a sick baby and a tense marriage, a cashier who impersonally treats her old father as a client, and youths variously engaged in games -- a puzzle, computers, ping pong. Especially the adoption story demonstrates Haneke’s refusal to sentimentalize. He weaves in TV news clips about wars in Somalia, Haiti, Ulster, Anatolia, Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia. The TV reports the bank shooting but doesn’t name the victims, preferring to expand upon Michael Jackson’s denial of child molestation charges. As the star ends the film Haneke moves from the family stories to social disintegration. Even the video shot to help the ping pong player is used cruelly. He is locked into mechanical repetition like the violent media around him. 

***

An outside destruction of a family drives Haneke’s two versions of Funny Games (1997, 2007).While there are subtle inflections in the tone, casting and context, both films share the plot exactly. The lakeside vacation home of an affluent couple, Georg (Ulrich Muhe in the original; Tim Roth in the remake) and Anna (Susanne Lothar; Naomi Watts), is invaded by two young strangers, Paul (Arno Frisch; Michael Pitt) and Peter (Frank Giering; Brady Corbet). Ostensibly coming from a neighbour’s to borrow eggs, they take over. They kill the family dog, cripple the husband, then play a series of sadistic games before murdering the family. They then proceed across the lake to their next complacent victims, who are even more affluent and house-proud. 

Haneke even keeps the original soundtrack which over the opening credits flies off the Handel down to John Zorn’s punk. In the opening scene the parents play at identifying operas. In the high-angle shot culture/civilization slices through the benign green Nature it controls. But in the clean-cut gentlemen with their sadistic games a radical savagery poses as civilized.

As the film details the middle of three home invasions, it is itself one of a type. The Attacked Home genre would include Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971), Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987), the remade The Desperate Hours (William Wyler, 1955; Michael Cimino, 1990) and Cape Fear (J. Lee Thompson, 1961; Martin Scorsese, 1991), along with such down-market kin as Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, 1968), The Crazies (Romero, 1973), and The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven, 1977). Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972) offers a reversal, as the innocents are terrorized when they enter the savages’ territory. 

By genre convention a Haneke close-up renders the most mundane domestic detail sinister. But he denies us the usual happy ending. His point is not a family’s trial and hard-won success but the modern taste for violence and its brutalizing effect, which allow no salutary conclusion. 

In both Funny Games a rhetorical fissure declares the audience complicitous in the torture, both physical and psychological, that characterizes the genre. As Anna searches for the family’s murdered dog, Paul winks to the camera (i.e., us). He later asks us about his bet on when the family will be dead. After the intruders teasingly depart, a lengthy shot of Anna turned from the TV could be a still; absent the killers, the film seems suspended. When Georg says he has been tortured enough Paul says “We’re not up to feature film length yet,” then asks the audience: “Is that enough? But you want a real ending with plausible plot development, don’t you?” “We want to offer the audience something and show what we can do, right?” 

After Anna grabs the shotgun and kills Peter, Paul takes the TV remote control and after a still shot of his hand on the button, rewinds the tape of his life, returning to the point where he now prevents Anna’s taking the gun. Later Peter glances at us before he keeps Anna from the knife on the boat. We have anticipated its bloody application since its emphatic drop earlier. Peter describes a film about the intersection of fiction and reality. In the last shot, in his next victims’ hallway, Paul smiles at us, to that Zorn metal shriek. 

The remake replaces Paul’s wink with a fugitive smirk and drops his reference to the film’s feature length. But it keeps the other examples. In the rewind scene, where the original shows the white-line sign of a video rewind, the remake updates to DVD.

Amid this self-referentiality Paul and Peter call each other after the sadistic cartoon characters Tom and Jerry and the apathetic contemporary update, Beavis and Butthead. Against this fictionality, however, Haneke stresses the reality especially of Georg’s pain, crippled and tortured, and Anna’s ultimate numbness.  

Given these devices, the film is less about a violent invasion than about films about violent invasion – and our appetite for them. Anna’s out of frame forced strip teases the viewer’s anticipation. When Georg is forced to say “Get undressed, my darling” he too is invisibly violated. We are again disappointed when son Georgie can’t shoot Paul, when Anna’s shooting Peter is rescinded, and when Georgie’s and his father’s killing and Georg’s knife torture are off camera. Here the killers break their promise “to show us what [they] can do.” Blink and you miss Anna’s drowning. In the discussion after the Cannes premiere Haneke declared that “Anyone who leaves the cinema doesn’t need the film. Anyone who stays, does.” This film condemns the audience it attracts. As it piles on the terror we abhor but crave, its horror is anti-horror.

The original film’s casting drew on Haneke’s personal vocabulary of actors. Georg is played by the actor who in Benny’s Video covered up for his son’s murder, only to be betrayed by him to the police. As Arno Frisch plays both roles, Benny seems to have grown into Paul. As the blank snowy TV screen that ends Haneke’s first feature, The Seventh Continent, opens the action in his second, Benny’s Video, the family casting makes Funny Games an extension of the latter. This time the family is destroyed by outsiders, anticipating the shift to societal tensions in Code Unknown and Cache.

For the US remake Haneke turned to more public personae. Both Watts and Roth are primarily known for milder narratives but they have also appeared in horror remakes. In another class tension these mainstream stars are assailed by Pitt and Corbet, who have worked with such Independents as Gregg Araki and Gus Van Sant. Watts’s star presence certainly heats up the forced strip. The short Roth makes Georg more immediately the emasculated American male. In a parallel cultural shift Haneke changed the family dog from German Shepherd to Golden Retriever and Frisch’s dark Paul to Michael Pitt’s Beach Boy All-American glow. 

***

In 1997 Haneke also made a two-hour TV film of Kafka’s The Castle with parallels to Funny Games. As K and his barmaid fiancee Frieda, Haneke cast the actors who played Georg and Anna, with the Peter actor as Jeremiah, the land surveyor’s incompetent assistant who exploits Freda’s sexual anxiety. The blonde Anna and Peter are dark-haired for the Prague nightmare. As a reminder that we are watching a fiction, the voice-over narrator parallels Haneke’s fissures, like the actor’s address to the camera and the rewind. As K is an innocent caught up in a series of perplexing, destructive games, with strained manners and menacing claims of insult, the adaptation confirms the Kafkaesque tone in Funny Games. 

Coherent with the Kafka fragment, Haneke turned to the enigmas around the empowered and the defeated in Code Unknown (2001), “Incomplete tales of several journeys,” where he also resumes the urban nexus of Chronology. A Paris street tussle connects a principled black Moslem teacher (Ona Lu Yenke), a begging Romanian grandmother who is deported, and the central story. There Anne (Juliette Binoche) is starring in a film remake of The Collector and a staging of Twelfth Night, but their respective horror and nervous hilarity pale beside the tensions in her real life. She has difficulty connecting to her photojournalist lover Georges (Thierry Neuvic). His feckless younger brother abandons their father, who in response slaughters his cow herd. In the metro an Arab flirts with Anne, then rails at her and spits on her face. 

The film is framed by a deaf child acting out an emotion for classmates to identify, but we hear their guesses only at the first. We are left to struggle with their unknown code. As the deaf children’s drum band pounds out a visceral rhythm across the closing montage, we wonder how the grandmother was driven away from her new post, why Anne has locked out Georges, and ultimately what awaits a city of such alienation and conflict. Along the film’s wide range of “performance” only the deaf children seem bonded to and by their expression.

In The Piano Teacher (2001) Erika (Isabelle Huppert) is a middle-aged classical piano teacher whose domineering mother (Annie Girardot) lives – of course -- in front of her TV. Erika fights with her mother and vents her frustrations on her students. She hectors them (“Are you sorry because you’re a pig?”) and ruins a fragile young pianist by putting broken glass shards in her right-hand coat pocket. Privately Erika visits porn film parlours, spies on lovers at a drive-in and cuts her inner loin before dinner. After disdaining Walter (Benoit Magimel), an engineering student passionate about his piano, she accepts his love in a violent lavatory encounter. As the engineer is studying “low voltage,” Erika repels Walter with her insistence upon sado-masochism, then is repelled when he obeys. In another variation on Funny Games Walter violently invades the women’s home. This is Haneke’s fullest treatment of the collision between culture and savagery. In a brief scene hulking hockey players drive two delicate young figure-skaters off the ice. But in her relationship with the hockey playing engineer the esteemed pianist proves the more brutal. As Erika warns Walter, “I have no feelings. Get that into your head.” Enraged, she can turn her violence only upon herself. 

Time of the Wolf (2003) advances the situation of Funny Games. After an apocalypse Anne Laurent (Isabelle Huppert) brings her family to their rural vacation home only to find it occupied by strangers, who kill the patriarch and steal their supplies. Anne, Eva (Anais Demoustier) and the fragile young Ben (Lucas Biscombe) scramble to survive. 

In Cache (2005) Haneke returns to the video focus of Benny’s Video. Some mysterious videos force cultural critic Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil) to confront his guilt over betraying a childhood Arab friend. While his wife Anne (Juliette Binoche) grows remote, their son seems complicitous in his father’s destruction. For a fuller discussion see my “Cache and the Public/Private Secret” (Queens Quarterly, Summer, 2006, pp. 225-233).

Remaking one’s own film as closely as Haneke did Funny Games is an extreme proof of Renoir’s observation that a director really makes only one, aggregate film. The emotionless and malicious game-players, killers and self-destroyers who harden before their TV sets in Haneke’s dream world confirm him a major and compelling auteur.

Bibliography

Michael Atkinson, “Family in peril,” Sight and Sound, April 2008, p. 23.

Catherine Wheatley, “Unkind rewind,” Ibid pp. 18-22.

Robin Wood, “Michael Haneke: Beyond Compromise,” CineAction, Issue 73/74, pp. 44-55.

A 7-DVD set The Films of Michael Haneke is available from Kino. Cache has been published by Columbia/Tristar and Time of the Wolf by Palm Pictures. Since I wrote this paper in 2008, of course, Haneke has again extended and distinguished himself with The White Ribbon and Amour.