Haneke’s original Funny Games (1997) was laced with parody, but the U.S. remake fully commits to the bit, lampooning the established art house aesthetic while creating an unsparing film product that is patently synthetic
Does Michael Haneke seem like someone who would deliberately waste his own time? Funny Games — Haneke’s 1997 German-language original, that is — occupies a funny place in the Austrian director’s filmography. It just might be his defining work, at least as far as popular perception of his films is concerned. It’s really the one time that he worked decisively within a genre framework: home-invasion horror. Well, except for the other Funny Games, his more or less shot-for-shot remake/sequel, made a decade later in the United States. Funny Games U.S. plays an even stranger role in Haneke’s oeuvre. Together, the twin Funny Gameses find Haneke at, ironically, his most accessible and his most freewheeling, but also his most severe and sadistic. They both feel like a lark, but the second version — his least-loved and most divisive film in a walk, to its credit — really elevates this improbable franchise to a cosmic prank from film’s emeritus artist of postmodern alienation.
Looking back, it’s bizarre to consider the circumstances of Haneke’s remake of Funny Games in 2007. It’s relatively rare to see a filmmaker revisit their own film, for one. It’s especially surreal and uncomfortable to witness Haneke working in an American milieu, shooting fish in a barrel. And it’s undeniably perverse that Haneke chose to remake Funny Games — quite possibly his least subtle and most contradictory movie, a decisive if not clean break from the Glaciation Trilogy — as a near carbon copy of the embattled original, second guessing next to nothing. When Haneke doubled down, tantalizingly exposing his principles and his artistry, not to mention his bone-dry sense of humor, it was open season for detractors to take their licks.
Haneke gets off on a bit of sarcasm and Funny Games is a (sometimes literally) winking satire. Amour and Happy End would later continue his game of sardonic film titles. The Austrian Funny Games was laced with parody, but the U.S. Funny Games fully commits to the bit, lampooning the established art house aesthetic while creating a film product that is patently synthetic. Funny Games 2 is Haneke’s only feature film that didn’t premiere at Cannes. And it’s sandwiched in his epic run as the preeminent European art house auteur, consecrated in the French Riviera, with Haneke winning the Grand Prix for The Piano Teacher in 2001, Best Director for Caché in 2005, and back-to-back Palme d’Ors for the two films immediately after Funny Games U.S.: The White Ribbon in 2009 and Amour in 2012.
Often treated as an afterthought, or seen as a footnote to the genuine article, Funny Games U.S. has a false reputation as a redundancy, as the afterbirth. The perception is that, at best, it effectively mimics the first and, at worst, blunts the original Funny Games’ impact. The effect is something like: if you see one version, you get the gist, and seeing the other is unnecessary, because they are, for all intents and purposes, the same. This, of course, is nonsense. Sure, Funny Games 2 restates the core premise and the narrative beats of the original, creating a near-exact replica of Funny Games with ruthless efficiency. But it does alter the formula. Its DNA structure has crucial mutations.
Funny Games U.S. is still very much about the systematic torment of an idyllic nuclear family in their vacation home — a home away from home that is invaded. In this version, Ann (Naomi Watts), George (Tim Roth), and their son, Georgie (Devon Gearhart), are beset by two intruders, ringmaster “Paul” (Michael Pitt) and sidekick “Peter” (future hotshot director of The Brutalist, Brady Corbet). The two young men, Aryan specimens dressed in tennis whites and museum curator gloves, run the Farber family through a gauntlet of dehumanizing games. First, they insinuate themselves, testing the family’s hospitality and patience through the wholesome, neighborly act of asking for eggs. When they refuse to leave, the game is afoot: George becomes hostile and gets a golf club to the kneecap for his outburst. Then the family is taken hostage in the living room, where they endure a series of ritual humiliations — Ann forced to remove her clothes to inspect her “jelly rolls,” for one — and intensifying cruelty — e.g. “cat in the sack.” Georgie briefly escapes but is recaptured then shot and killed. Ann escapes but is brought back and forced to watch George be executed. Then Ann is tied, gagged, and thrown into the water as Peter and Paul sail to the next house and reset the game with new victims.
Returning to the scene of the crime, Funny Games U.S. is a brazen act of both affirmation and self-negation. It has the feeling of a failed crossover attempt from an artist with a complete disinterest in crossing over to the American market. It is an experiment in style and self-forgery without a clear explanation that seems out of step with Haneke’s unimpeachable artistic integrity. It’s a rare beast: an art house, auteur-driven piece of popular entertainment (of horror, no less) that rails against its own mode of production (i.e. the oxymoronic major-minor studio Warner Independent, which shuttered a year later). Haneke is working through a one-man rehearsal of Benjaminian mechanical reproduction, reproducing a facsimile that bears the unmistakable byproducts of the arduous process of its duplication. The aura of Funny Games is irrevocably altered and degraded in Funny Games U.S., a specter of the ’90s European art house haunting the aughts-era American culture industry.
Falling on the other side of the explosion of the Internet Age and the raging Wars on Terror — with state-sactioned torture reemerging in the popular consciousness — Funny Games plays like a resonant period piece the second time, a time capsule of pre-Y2K anxieties (and technology) pulled through the looking glass of turn-of-the-century globalization. In the new millennium, inexplicable violence is even more accessible and omnipresent; unconscious, free-floating fear has intensified; and cultural repression has grown much stronger and more desperate to counterbalance. The sociological conundrum at the core of Funny Games remains unaltered — it being a brutal thriller that abhors the “pornography of violence in the media,” as Haneke refers to it — but the cultural and geopolitical circumstances shifted radically around the axis of its glaciation writ horrific.
Funny Games U.S. returns Haneke to an earlier version of himself and his filmmaking, where he is able to reexamine his artistry from the vantage of the international art house vanguard. His tightening formal control, reaching a crescendo with the twin peaks of The Piano Teacher and Caché, gets a tongue-in-cheek workout that doubles as a piece of frustrating performance art. The shot-for-shot remake idea — Gus Van Sant’s fetishy Psycho being the clearest contemporary analog, if an entirely different vehicle — is brilliant because it begets a daring act of self-portraiture and self-appropriation. Haneke is cannibalizing his own most famous piece as yet another act of career transition, but also as a rebellious fuck you: if he’s going to make Funny Games again, it’s going to be uncompromising and entirely on his terms — artistically accomplished, gloriously confrontational, and deeply unsatisfying.
Haneke crafts a portrait of the artist as a stubborn and unyielding man. In this reflection of our most dyspeptic and cerebral filmmaker, the Haneke we see on the margins of Funny Games U.S. is almost relatable, even disarmingly vulnerable — Haneke fan art by Haneke himself — rendering his past triumph with care and meticulous attention to the details he orchestrated so purposefully the first time. The production crew used the blueprints from the 1997 original to remake the house of Georg(e) and Ann(a) to the exact same specifications and proportions, and Haneke updated his own production notes and storyboards with photographs from the first Funny Games. You could even see Funny Games U.S. as a curious admission about Haneke’s compulsions for control, precision, and austerity, pushing these hallmarks to the point of absurdity, to the realm of mathematics. His humanism remains at the core but takes a backseat to his proclivity for toying with the prototypical, tipping the fragile symmetry he achieved so expertly a decade earlier. He maintains a vice grip on his original vision, holding it tight to his cold, calculating heart. In fact, Susanne Haneke, Michael’s wife, even makes a cameo in this remake, an affectionate touch that marks it as a passion project with personal stakes.
Funny Games takes perverse pleasure in debasing its own art house credibility. The indictment of the comforts, complacency, and cultural currency of the upper class is all still very much present — with the victimized family effectively trapping themselves in their web of security measures and their privileged isolation, now rightfully relocated to the Hamptons — and extends this critique to the high art elitism of the European art house scene. Funny Games 2 is not unlike the stack of opera CDs we see in the all-important opening scene: plastic and commodified, mass-produced high art faithfully repackaged for convenience and passive consumption in a mid-size luxury sport utility vehicle. The distinctly artless aughts-era flavor — with cinematography from Darius Khondji that veers into the frictionless aesthetic of the moment before bathing it in blood, mucus, and darkness — is pointedly incongruous with Haneke’s sophisticated artistry. The juxtaposition is about as jarring as the berserk sledgehammer thrash-jazz stylings of John Zorn/Naked City (“Bonehead” and “Hellraiser,” from Grand Guignol) that piledrive Beniamino Gigli.
On a conceptual level, Haneke is playing a game of association, banking on the audience’s knowledge of the actors’ personas and their zeitgeist roles. Watts is the queen of the turn-of-the-century horror import, anchoring the quintessential movie that opened the floodgates, Gore Verbinski’s The Ring. And of course the duality of her acting that blossomed in Mulholland Drive — between the plucky go-getter and the tragic casualty — comes through in her transformation in Funny Games, from idyllic affluent wife to a woman robbed of her dignity and her life before the game presses on. And it’s no coincidence that Roth brings a strong association with Reservoir Dogs to the table, his gutshot Mr. Orange similarly immobilized dead-weight for the duration of that film. When Haneke originally introduced Funny Games at the Cannes premiere in 1997, he cheekily described it as an “anti-Tarantino film.” Pitt, too, brings to mind his turn in the Sandra Bullock pop-thriller Murder By Numbers, where he also played a killer inspired by Leopold and Loeb.
Haneke posits Funny Games as theater; just as different companies put on a play, Funny Games as a text is sacrosanct and worth upholding in its original form and intent. That extends beyond the staging and the scripting to the cinematic grammar: the precision of the camera angles, distance, and movements, and the rhythm of the editing, are just as essential to the diabolical effect. The mechanics and technical execution of the filmmaking are as powerful and primal as the dramaturgy. But Haneke is simultaneously bashing the craven commodification of cinematic imports — the international game of consuming violence. It’s not just that independent art house films from around the world are strip-mined, repackaged, leeched of their cultural specificity, and liquidated on the American market. It’s that turn-of-the-21st-century cinema fed an unquenchable hunger for extreme, sensationalized violence. These prefab imports are run through this grinder, sometimes sanitized, sometimes not, but almost always relishing lurid and graphic images as a means to an end.
Funny Games U.S. tries to fool you into thinking it has no purpose, that it is an empty exercise. That is the game it is playing, lulling you into a false sense of security where you feel you’ve gained the upper hand and the moral high ground. The fallacy of the “game” at the center of Funny Games — both in the fictional world and the real world — is that the competitors have a chance. But that is not the world Funny Games is reflecting; as it unfurls its schema, it teases you with the illusion of control while stacking the deck and underscoring your submission. Haneke’s indifference to his Sisyphean role as conjurer and arbiter of violence — one might even call it hypocritical — is a defining feature of the Funny Games project, and a self-indictment. If there is an explanation for the so-called “game” within Funny Games, it is simply that it is being enacted for our enjoyment, for the audience’s viewing pleasure. That is the quandary at the heart of this morality play: the logic of the scenario is that it exists solely to perpetuate itself.
By doing it again, Haneke attests that there is no way out of this rigid arrangement, that these events continue to happen and there is still no possibility to change the outcome. The fate of the neighbors at the bookends of both films confirms Haneke’s cyclical, cynical worldview and stretches this to infinity: they played, or will play, the same “game” under identical conditions against the same competitors and it always ends with their slaughter. Haneke is having a bit of bleak fun with the ruthless determinism of cinema, creating a daisy-chain of anesthetizing pop-art devoid of moral certainty. Funny Games is built on absence; its most effective gambit is the visceral power of off-screen ultraviolence — the killing of the dog, the optical illusion of the golf club striking George, Georgie’s death while Paul makes a sandwich, Ann pushed out of the frame and into the water. Haneke determinedly, tactfully sustains our voyeuristic momentum, keeping us watching as he lurches past the instant of violence then lingers on the pain. He gives voice to suffering and attunes us to what we do observe: shock, paralysis, and bottomless grief — all unbearably hard to witness, even with a fresh coat of paint.
With its twinning antagonists, interchangeable well-appointed seaside vacation homes, smorgasbord of WASPy families, stacks of classical-only CDs, and fixation on parallel universes (a schism opened up by the supernatural remote control rewind), Funny Games U.S. is full of redundancies. The son’s name was even changed from Schorschi to George — “just like daddy” — to drive the point home. The scenario we witness in full is in fact the sequel to the scenario that just played out for the family next door. And the cruel endgame is an alternate-dimension finish of the unacceptable outcome where Ann gets the upper hand and blows Peter away. Haneke, like Paul, got to try again, and the result remains, exactly as predicted. Repetition is a key component of Haneke’s extended universe — with its procession of Anns and Georges — and the Funny Games doppelgänger pulls you deeper into a no-win game of spot-the-difference. We are enticed to look even closer at a text that scolds us for looking in the first place. We’re goaded into studying the movies side by side, looking past the nastiness and scrutinizing the style on a microscopic level. Then we’re admonished for our tunnel vision.
If horror movies are generally engineered to make you feel shocked and thrilled in equal measure, the aesthetic morality of Funny Games is designed to throw off the balance completely, to make you feel ashamed and dispirited for thrill-seeking. On the surface, he’s indulging your appetite, force-feeding you empty calories. But the uncanny sensation of watching beautiful people playacting visceral Haneke theater never really subsides. Funny Games U.S. jolts our scopophilia with glamorous movie stars and crisper images, delivering the eye candy in order to kneecap you harder. It targets its addicted audience with ruthless precision for maximum punishment; its dreadful twist is that there’s no twist at all. The Funny Games experiments — the initial analysis and its replication study — converge to reveal the maladaptive nature of modern viewership. Haneke mimics the adrenalized rhythms of that stock car race blaring on the blood-drenched TV and the results are always consistent: We’re hypnotized by the circular monotony but we desperately crave the flaming wreckage.
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