Chapter 3
THE ETHICS OF AGGRESSION:
Funny Games
Michael Haneke's critical aesthetic is strongly grounded in political modernist thought and counter-cinematic practice, his early films in particular drawing on modernist models of distanciation and reflexivity in order to forestall the pleasure drive and thereby allow the spectator to engage rationally with the filmic text. These modernist structures allow the spectator an enhanced position of knowledge about the cinematic medium, but they remain concerned with the medium itself, and do not force the spectator to consider their own position in relation to the image. That is, the spectator becomes aware of the film as a product, but they are not necessarily aware of themself as a consumer.
Funny Games extends Haneke's modernist project of alienation, for the most part characterised by a 'benign' form of first-generation reflexivity, to a more direct and 'aggressive' approach towards the spectator, which Haneke expresses as a drive to 'rape the viewer into autonomy' by confronting them directly with their complicity in the cinematic production of desire and illusion.1 While the film adheres to many of the precepts of the alternative counter-cinema as defined by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, it also involves the production of 'cinematic unpleasure': a term which signifies not only the frustration of the pleasure drive, but also the mobilisation of a range of 'negative' emotions on the spectator's part, among them discomfort, embarrassment, anger and guilt. As unpleasure calls attention to itself in a way that pleasure does not, it prompts the viewer to question what it is in the film that causes this feeling, and hence forces them to engage rationally with the image on screen. The film thereby employs spectatorial 'unpleasure' as a device for mobilising a tension between reason and emotion, creating a moment of 'impact' for the viewer. This notion of impact looks back to an Eisensteinian moment in film theory, in which a dialectical relationship between emotion and reason was used to create a shock effect on the spectator. However, as we will discuss, Haneke's use of impact differs from Eisenstein's in its solicitation of an individuated spectator response. In Haneke's films, impact is not the point at which content is produced but the point at which the spectator is invited to engage morally with the film. Funny Games can therefore be considered a 'breakthrough' not only in terms of its propulsion of Haneke from a national to an international film forum, but also in terms of the radicalisation of the response it prompts.
A Generic Structure
Funny Games opens with an overhead tracking shot (taken from a helicopter) of a family saloon driving along a country road, set to classical music. A series of close-ups taken from within the car introduces us to a middle-class family of three - who we will later learn are Anna and George Schober and their son Georgie - playing a game in which they have to name the classical pieces and their composers. Quite abruptly the diegetic classical music is replaced by the roars of a John Zorn thrash punk score and the film's title superimposes itself on the screen in blood-red letters. Just as suddenly Zorn's music cuts out, and we return to the diegetic soundtrack. This opening sequence nicely encapsulates Haneke's modus operandi within Funny Games. Here, what initially appears as unthreatening and knowable soon transforms into something strange and unsettling. So it is that Funny Games sees Haneke draw heavily on the generic conventions of the suspense thriller, introducing a new paradigm into his critical aesthetic.
Before we examine Haneke's use of the generic structure in Funny Games, some background on genre theory is useful. There is an ongoing debate, led by Judith Hess and Jean-Loup Bourget, regarding the ideological implications for any film-maker working within a genre format. On the one hand, the Hess school of thought believes that genre films are, in their nature, conservative propositions grounded in the predictability of convention (it is for precisely this reason that counter- cinema has, for the main part, avoided genre films).2 Bourget and his supporters, on the other hand, argue that, for this very reason, a genre film can gain the power to become a subversive statement.3 The Hess/Bourget debate centres on the ability (or lack thereof) of individual directors to undermine the ideology embodied in a genre format; what both critics agree on is the fact that the Hollywood genre system is based on a fundamentally conservative, capitalist ideology, which to some extent inflects all of the films produced under it. But it is difficult to say whether - in the Hess model in particular - it is the genre forms themselves that are ideologically conservative, or the fact that all the genre films analysed are the products of the Hollywood studio system.
One seemingly obvious way in which to approach this problem would be to consider the European appropriation of genre. And yet this remains an area of genre production that is frequently overlooked in critical studies of the topic. For example, whilst they acknowledge that the genre film is not the exclusive territory of Hollywood directors, genre theorists such as Rick Altman, Steve Neale and Thomas Schatz focus almost exclusively on the question of whether it is possible to consider genre specialists - such as Howard Hawks, Douglas Sirk or Vincente Minnelli - to be outeurs if they are working within the Hollywood system. In doing so, they overlook the question of what happens when an established auteur makes a genre film outside the Hollywood system. Only Robin Wood, in his seminal article 'Ideology, Genre, Auteur', in which he examines a number of genres in terms of ideological oppositions, has pointed, albeit briefly, to the ability of the European director to trouble dominant capitalist ideology through the transgression of genre conventions, citing Rainer Werner Fassbinder's melodramas and Wim Wenders' film noirs as examples of this practice.4 Yet, after Funny Games, the majority of Haneke's films draw on generic conventions to highly subversive effect (Code inconnu being the only exception in Haneke's body of French-language films). Haneke's genre- based films, like those of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders before them, ironise generic conventions, but at the same time they use these conventions to place the spectator in a more immediately responsive position than the counter-cinematic principles of pure negation of mainstream convention allow, as we will see.
Although Funny Games announces a clearly resolved concern with generic strategies, a concern that will come to play a part in the later films, it is not in fact Haneke's first experiment with generic convention. A generic framework is also present, in a mitigated form, within Benny's Video, in which the film's narrative produces an engagement with the film based on its use of a 'paradigm scenario'. As Thomas Schatz underlines in his 1981 book, Hollywood Genres, the genre film is essentially predicated on the familiar: at its most basic, he writes, 'a genre film involves essentially one dimensional characters acting out a predictable story pattern within a familiar setting'.5 Both Funny Games and Benny's Video make use of our familiarity with similar generic conventions in order to prompt certain responses. In the case of Benny's Video, response primarily takes the form of an engagement with the narrative based on our desire to know 'what will happen next'. As we mentioned in Chapter Two, the film has plot similarities with Max Ophiils's The Reckless Moment (1949) amongst other films: a murder is committed, a cover-up is instigated, the audience waits to find out whether or not the conspirators will be caught.6 The spectator's essential empathy with the protagonists - based on the fact that it is their point of view that the narrative aligns itself to - thus encourages occasional moments of suspense. This is why, when we watch Benny's Video, our dawning awareness that Benny has framed his parents for the murder causes a vague sense of discomfort. However, as we saw in the previous chapter, the generic narrative is undermined by the film's extreme counter-cinematic style, which distances us from the film as a narrative-led genre piece and precludes a strong emotional engagement with the film's characters or events.
In Funny Games, Haneke draws on another paradigm scenario familiar from the suspense thriller. Arriving at their lakeside house, the Schobers are besieged by two young men calling themselves Peter and Paul, who challenge them to a bet which the family will win if they can survive the next twelve hours. The basic narrative premise - the family under threat from an outside force - is a standard trope within Hollywood cinema, associated as much with the melodrama (in which the threatening other takes the shape of the tempting seductress or seductor) as it is with suspense thrillers such as The Hand that Rocks The Cradle (1992), Fatal Attraction (1987) and both the 1962 and 1991 versions of Cape Fear.7
Funny Games, however, extends its use of generic convention to encompass not only familiar plots and settings, but also the formal conventions associated with the suspense thriller. Here, the narrative scenario combines with the film's formal structure to situate the film as a suspense thriller, and to encourage the expectation that its narrative structure and form will conform to the conventions of the genre. For the majority of the film's running time the director employs classical suspense strategies that echo Hitchcockian technique.8 Although these suspense strategies are not based, as in Hitchcock's Vertigo for example, upon an epistemic disjunction which places the spectator in a privileged position of knowledge exceeding that of the characters,9 the film is instantly recognisable as part of the suspense thriller genre: cutting is moderately paced, speeding up at points of high tension; shot/reverse-shots, point-of-view shots and lingering close-ups of various objects (a knife left on a boat, a set of golf clubs, the family dog, all of which will play an important role later in the narrative) function as generic signposts.10
The way in which Haneke presupposes the audience here is key. As we have seen, film theory up to the 1970s tended to place emphasis on what happens inside the movie theatre between spectator and screen, and to analyse the components of cinematic signification without fully considering how that situation arose in the first place. It therefore overlooks one crucial aspect of the spectator's agency. For the spectator may indeed collude by deferring to the requirements of the text, but apparatus theory falls short of completing the other half of this equation: the film may bend the viewer to expect certain qualities, but it exists first and foremost to fulfil a desire on the viewer's part. As Steve Neale points out, genre does not just refer to film type but to spectator expectation and hypothesis (speculation as to how the film will end).11 It also refers to the roles of specific extra-cinematic discourses that feed into and form generic structures. In other words, genre must also be seen as part of a tripartite process of production, marketing (including distribution and exhibition), and consumption. In relation to marketing, publicity also contributes to the exercise of situating the film as part of a genre. The promotion of Funny Games sets up generic expectations, through marketing and distribution right down to the fact that when the film premiered at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, advance information about the film was kept to an absolute minimum, tickets to the film were issued with a red warning sticker (a measure previously only taken with one film - Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, of which more later), and the film was billed in the catalogue as a 'thriller', priming audiences to expect, as Jonathan Romney puts it, 'a blood-soaked nail-biter'.12
In the opening thirty minutes of the film, Haneke deliberately heightens these expectations. He establishes Funny Games as part of the suspense thriller genre in order to lull the spectator into a false feeling of security, stating that: 'Elements from the history of the suspense thriller appear as quotes - the classical opening, the scene when the boy escapes to the villa - very classical, like Hitchcock. And the audience only engages with the film when they don't know what's going to happen, when they allow themselves hope'.13 This statement underlines a key motivation for drawing on generic conventions, both narrative and formal. For while the use of generic conventions within a film indicates to the audience the course that they can expect its narrative to take, it also serves as a guideline for what emotional response the spectator will take to that film.14 By establishing Anna, George and Georgie as a family group who are under threat from two outsiders, Haneke places us 'on their side'. We may draw a sadistic pleasure in watching their struggle, but we are positioned in such a way that we want them to triumph over their captors, at the time and in the manner that conforms to the spectator's expectations of the suspense thriller's narrative trajectory.15
There is a dual shift here from Benny's Video: firstly, from a narrative that aligns our point of view with the 'villain' of the piece to one which aligns us with the 'victims'; and secondly, from one in which this alignment is based purely on plot structures to one in which the formal construction of the film deliberately encourages emotional engagement. This engagement is not attached to characterisation, for 'characterisation' here is nothing more than schematic. Both protagonists and antagonists retain the one-dimensionality that Schatz sees as the basic situation of
The Ethics of Aggression 83
Figure 3.1 The opening scenes of Funny Games (1997)
see the Schöber family (Stefan Clapczynski, Ulrich Mühe, Susanne Lothar) come
under threat from
two anonymous intruders (Frank Giering and Arno Frisch). Courtesy of the BFI stills department. Permission graciously supplied by WEGAfilm.
generic characters. From the film's opening shots, the family are recognisable as the identikit family of fable and fairytale (father bear, mummy bear, baby bear) and are initially framed as such through the car windshield, with Georgie between and to the rear of his parents. After this initial shot we very rarely see the three of them in the frame together, and even as individuals they are reduced to discrete body parts; it is very difficult to judge their relationships, both psychological and geographical, to one another.16 Likewise, the spectator is never given a psychological explanation for the actions of the film's antagonists. The characters are deliberately reduced to the status of ciphers: they function as generic markers, in much the same way as certain shots or editing techniques do.
This one-dimensionality of characterisation is a pronounced feature of most suspense thrillers. Suspense maximises audience involvement with the narrative's characters, not on the basis of emotional exploration but rather on that of situational positioning. Writing about Hitchcock, Susan Smith elaborates upon this, stating that when watching a suspense thriller, we are more likely to 'associate' our emotions with the character(s) than to 'identify' with their ordeal.17 Or,
as V.F. Perkins puts it: 'We become involved in the action of a picture in a way which precludes a specific loyalty, a direct emotional commitment to particular characters ... The spectator's involvement is a hopeful dread, both wishing and fearing to be brought face to face with the worst thing in the world'.18 For evidence of this, we might consider the concept of consequence in the suspense thriller: so often the genre ends with the defeat of the villain, with no indication of how the surviving protagonist will be affected by the events they have endured, which may include losing loved ones and committing murder, albeit a murder (or murders) justified by narrative events. Moments such as the end of Shadow of a Doubt (1943), in which Teresa Wright finds herself so suddenly a melancholy adult whose naïveté is but a distant memory, are all too rare.
The suspense thriller is nonetheless a genre that depends heavily on emotional response, albeit a response circumscribed by the film's narrative and formal structures. Like horror and comedy, its label refers to a particular audience response that it provokes: one of feeling, of experiencing a 'thrill', a word that the Oxford English Dictionary defines as 'a wave or nervous tremor of emotion or sensation', with a 'suspense thriller' being 'an exciting or sensational story'.19 Such definitions reveal something about the nature of our emotional responses to the genre.20 Spectatorial emotions such as fear and frustration, which echo those of the protagonists, are emotions that we have come to associate with a film that markets itself as a suspense thriller, and we may indeed feel 'cheated' or 'disappointed' if such a film did not provoke these sentiments. These feelings, which might be considered 'negative' emotions in any other context, are part of the pleasurable trajectory of the suspense thriller. They must be established and enhanced to such a point that we can better enjoy the suspense thriller's cathartic climax.21
In Caché, a film which also draws on the generic conventions of the suspense thriller in order to subvert it, the director presents us with an intra-diegetic model of how the genre affects us emotionally. At a dinner party, one of the guests, Yvon, holds the assembled guests - and the cinematic audience - spellbound with a tale of an eerie encounter with an elderly lady, who believes him to be the reincarnation of her pet dog. As hostess Anne leans over to touch the scar that he offers as proof of his story, Yvon barks, causing her and the other guests to jump, and then to burst into laughter. The scene illustrates how the cathartic moment in the suspense thriller generally provides relief and amusement.
In this respect, the thriller is a particularly apposite genre for Haneke to use in order to examine the tension between reason and emotion. One of the ways in which Funny Games provokes an alternative emotional response to that arising from the use of generic conventions is by subverting the pleasure of thrill, by frustrating the moment of catharsis and replacing it with an aesthetic of consequence and a concomitant experience of unpleasure, making the spectator aware of the suffering that results from the violence that the suspense thriller inevitably displays.
Unpleasure
In order to fully understand the experience of unpleasure that Funny Games provides for the spectator, it is worth briefly surveying some key points in thinking about cinematic pleasure and 'unpleasure'. Let us begin by looking to Psychoanalysis and Cinema, in which Metz discusses the film as a 'bad object': 'The good object relation is more basic from the standpoint of a socio-historical critique of the cinema, for it is this relation and not the opposite one that constitutes the aim of the cinematic institution and that the latter is constantly attempting to maintain or to re-establish'.22 Yet, he states, certain films and spectator combinations induce reactions in which effective irritation or fantasmic allergy appear. These films provoke hostile reactions: they either frustrate the spectator by disappointing them or alternatively repulse them by overwhelming them. The classic response to the negative set of emotions that the films produce is then aggression, and this aggression is directed towards the frustrating agent: the film.
Using a psychoanalytic model, Metz states that filmic unpleasure can arise from one or both of two distinct sources. It can arise on the side of the id when the id is insufficiently nourished by the diegesis of the film. Instinctual satisfaction is stingily dealt out, and then we have a case of frustration in the proper sense: films that seem to us dull, empty and so forth. It can also result from an intervention of the superego and the defences of the ego, which are frightened and which counter-attack when the satisfaction of the id has, on the contrary, been too intense, as sometimes happens with films in 'bad taste', or films that go too far, or are childish, or sentimental, or sometimes pornographic; that is, films against which we defend ourselves by smiling or laughing, by an allegation of stupidity, grotesqueness or lack of verisimilitude. Film must apparently please conscious and unconscious fantasies enough to permit instinctual satisfaction, within a certain limit. Metz explains: 'In short, every time a fiction film has not been liked, it is because it has been liked too much, or not enough, or both ... One goes to the cinema because one wants to and not because one has to force oneself, in the hope that the film will please and not that it will displease'.23 Thus for Metz filmic pleasure and filmic unpleasure are not arranged in a position of antithetic symmetry, since he believes that the institution as a whole has filmic pleasure alone as its aim.
The discourse of political modernism provides an alternative to the Metzian view of pleasure as the sole aim of the cinematic institution, and attempts to reinstate the antithetical symmetry that Metz dismisses, by calling for a cinema based on unpleasure. In her seminal essay on visual pleasure, Laura Mulvey pointed to pleasure-production as mainstream cinema's most effective mode of interpellating the subject, and called for the 'destruction of pleasure as a radical weapon'.24 Likewise, in his tabulation of Hollywood's deadly sins and the cardinal virtues that counter-cinema must offer as a response, Peter Wollen opposes 'Pleasure' to 'Un-pleasure' (entertainment, aiming to satisfy the spectator, versus provocation, aiming to dissatisfy, and hence change, the spectator).25 This concern with the unpleasurable was reflected in counter-cinema which, in its social and political concerns with the how and the why of film-making, was very formalist and materialist and therefore very difficult to watch. Feminist film-makers such as Chantal Akerman, for example, responded to Mulvey's call to arms by making some determinedly unpleasurable films that operated, as film-maker Eric de Kuyper puts it, on a principle of 'boredom'.26
But while it allows for a critical relationship to the film, this principle of pleasure-negation has two crucial flaws. Firstly, as we have seen, counter-cinematic films seek to determine the spectator's responses: in creating a cinema that works on a purely rational level, they set out to place the spectator in a fixed relationship to the spectacle. Secondly, it sees that it is the responsibility of the director to 'liberate' the spectator from the grip of Hollywood illusionism by providing an alternative cinema that does not draw on the former's interpellate structures. Such a position overlooks the spectator's own role as a consumer of mainstream cinema. As a result, counter-cinema was addressed to a relatively limited audience, who believed in its principles and aspirations, concurring with counter-cinema's premises and actively seeking out an 'alternative cinema' which would be 'radical in both a political and an aesthetic sense', challenging 'the basic assumptions of the mainstream film'.27 The movement's film-makers, then, can be seen to an extent to be preaching to the converted: Akerman's film was doubtless seen mainly by the intellectual, feminist demographic for whom it was intended, who found a cerebral satisfaction in the film's 'difficult' form and content.
Haneke's films, on the other hand, attract wider audiences. In fact, we have seen that he goes so far as to claim that the spectators that he has in mind for his films are 'the willing consumers of movies that operate with an aesthetics of distraction'.28 Funny Games was marketed to emphasise the film's generic qualities and thus lure in these spectators. The director can then go on to trouble these conventions to varying extents, to reveal their inherent flaws. The film uses the tools of the industry, namely its genre models, in order to deconstruct the system (including its promotional aspects) and, by creating distinctly unpleasurable films, it is able to confront spectators with their own participation in the scopic act, rather than to simply negate the scopophilic situation.
In addition to relating to issues of emotion and rational awareness, Haneke's use of unpleasure also relates to the opposition of realism to constructedness, as exemplified by the conflict between Bazinian and Eisenteinian theory. For we discover something about film's relationship to reality by watching Funny Games, and inasmuch Haneke's film stands within a 'realist' tradition. But what we discover is not reality in the sense of spatial relations and bodily gestures revealing the movement of life as in Bazin's spectatorship theory. Rather, it lies with the reality addressed within the construction of the film, a construction that draws on both classical narrative editing and Eisensteinian montage. Unlike Eisenstein, however, Haneke does not mobilise montage techniques with the sole aim of manipulation: their significance instead lies in Haneke's exposure of them as devices for manipulation. This revelation of the mechanics of manipulation is a critical strategy born out of a long tradition of modernist film.
There is clearly an analogy to be made between a film-maker like Jean-Luc Godard's project of counter-cinema and Funny Games, a work that demonstrates a continuing preoccupation with film thought, with the language of cinema, and with the circulation of images in society, much like many of Godard's films. Haneke, like the makers of counter- cinema, uses film as a tool to reveal the medium's inherent falsity; his films are aimed at bringing about a confrontation with the dominant mainstream image system in order to challenge the system of representation and perception that it perpetuates, and which he sees as pernicious. He brings about the confrontation with dominant forms of perception and representation through the denial of pleasure. But Haneke employs this tool in service of a different cause to that which preoccupied his modernist predecessors. While Godard, for example, started from the assertion that the illusionist conventions of mainstream cinema function to obscure the real conditions of film production, Haneke takes as his basis the belief that its pleasure-driven conventions obscure the ethical void at the heart of its narrative structures and forms. There is a purism in the work of Godard and his contemporaries relating to the creation of an experience which aims to radicalise the medium. This purism is absent from Haneke's critical aesthetic: while Haneke builds upon modernist techniques in order to take film in a different direction, he is clearly not an anti-narrative film-maker in the sense that Akerman and Godard were.
For rather than eschew what we might call 'Hollywood technique' entirely, Haneke's films enter into dialogue with and draw upon existing narrative forms and genre conventions in order to generate a new spectatorial experience which focuses on the spectator's ethical position in relation to the film. Instead of simply undermining the generic mechanisms for involving the spectator, he situates them within a larger framework of representation within the film. In contrast with counter- cinema, Haneke's cinema does not eschew plot in order to create an atmosphere of extreme detachment; indeed plotting is mobilised in the service of providing a response to the film that is both somatic and rational. Haneke extends counter-cinema's denial of pleasure to a distinct confrontation with the inverse of pleasure - unpleasure - by drawing on structures that put pleasure into motion, and then blocking them with structures that suddenly rupture the pleasure drive.
Unpleasure is experienced differently in Haneke to how it is experienced in Godard's Le Vent d'est, for example, or indeed to how it is experienced in counter-cinema more widely. That 'unpleasure' can refer to a number of different spectatorial experiences points to a confusion in the semantics of counter-cinema. The 'destruction of pleasure' has been equated, variously, with the negation of pleasure, the frustration of pleasure (or dissatisfaction), and/or the production of 'unpleasure'. But there are distinctive differences between these three phenomena. Mulvey's oversight - reiterating Wollen's - is to conflate 'not enjoying' a film, which is in effect the negation of emotion, with blocking an emotion already operating (the frustration of pleasure) and actively experiencing an unpleasant negative emotion (unpleasure). The difference is that between a film that we assess on a purely intellectual level, since it simply refuses us the pleasures of scopophilia; a film that disappoints or bores us, because we had previously been enjoying it, or had at least been expecting to enjoy it; and a film which causes us such discomfort as to make us tangibly unhappy or sickened. For example, Der Siebente Kontinent negated cinematic pleasure through the use of Wollen's cardinal virtues, thereby engaging the spectator on a purely intellectual level. The opening scene of Benny's Video on the other hand creates an active sensation of unpleasure through a very visceral attack on the spectator's senses. Here, unpleasure is experienced as discomfort (resulting from the loud squeals of the pig), revulsion (at the graphic depiction of slaughter), and shock (at the brutality of these opening scenes). Both of these techniques come into play in Funny Games. But we shall now see how the generic structure within which the film operates radicalises them.
The 'Modernist Episode'
To recount, Haneke uses genre forms and classical narrative conventions - as well as stylistic techniques such as classical editing and Eisensteinian montage - in order to mobilise the spectator's desire for a familiar form of cinematic pleasure. The unpleasure we often experience whilst watching Haneke's films arises from the blocking or mitigating of this pleasure. It is therefore not only linked to the way in which the film mobilises desire, but also to the way in which it constructs a scenario that operates directly on the emotions, in a manner very similar to how Hitchcock's suspense operates directly on certain, minimal emotions. Unpleasure is then intensified, as we will see, by Haneke's ability to draw out these emotions, and allow us time to reflect on their sources. In this space for reflection on their own emotional experience of the film, the viewer must consider not only the film itself but also their relationship to it. They can thereby gain insights into their own engagement in the act of film spectatorship.
In Funny Games, unpleasure arises from two distinct sources, both of which work in tension with the film's generic framework. The first of these I shall refer to as the 'modernist episode', as it draws on the 'benign' modernist structure demonstrated in the cinema of Bresson, for example. This 'episode' forms a coda to one of the film's central sequences, which sees Georgie escape from his captors and flee to a neighbouring villa - with Paul in pursuit - before being recaptured and killed. Involving a long shot, taken with an almost static camera (movement is severely restricted) and held for approximately ten minutes, it provides a stark contrast to the ten minutes of rapid editing and close-ups that lead up to it. Viewed in conjunction with the preceding sequence, the 'modernist episode' thus highlights a juxtaposition of stylistic modes that Haneke operates within the film: the 'modernist episode' throws the classic generic conventions of the chase and murder sequences which precede it into relief.
We can divide this twenty-minute section of Funny Games into three acts, or segments: the chase, the murder, and the aftermath.
1. The chase: Rapid cuts show Georgie and Paul alternately crossing the bayou that divides the Schobers house from that of their neighbours and entering the latter. The (anti)climatic moment, in which Georgie confronts Paul with a gun, is thrown into sudden light as the latter flicks a switch. A medium-long shot showing Paul approaching Georgie establishes the set-up; then there is a graphic match between a close-up of Paul and a close-up of Georgie. An extreme close-up of the trigger as it snaps (but the gun fails to go off) closes the sequence.
2. The murder: A medium-distance shot of the living room in Anna and George's house (re)establishes the cinematic space: Anna and George sit on a couch at the right-hand edge of the frame; Peter is at the left- hand edge. The television, showing a motor race, is in the centre of the frame. The camera cuts to Georgie running back into the frame and joining his mother on the couch, then to Paul entering the room carrying the gun. A sequence of medium-paced cuts ensues, central to which is a matched pair of close-ups of Paul and Peter each loading one bullet into the gun. A shot/reverse-shot of the two facing couches introduces a counting game in which the person counted out will be shot. As Peter begins to count, the camera follows Paul through the hallway and into the kitchen. The camera remains on Paul, and we hear a gunshot and the noise of sobbing on the soundtrack. 3. The aftermath: The sequence opens with a close-up of the television. As the camera lingers, blood spattered over its screen becomes perceptible. On the soundtrack, the killers' conversation makes it clear that they have killed Georgie and that they are leaving. Cut to a medium distance shot of the room: there is no movement, the soundtrack is dominated by the sound of car engines coming from the television. The room is darkened, lit only by the flickering television, a lamp in the corner illuminating Anna, and the hall light which spills into the room. The shot lasts for ten minutes in total, two of which pass before any movement of camera or character occurs, four before anyone speaks. Some eight minutes into the scene George starts to sob. After he calms himself there is another minute's silence before Anna announces 'We've got to get out of here', reintroducing the narrative drive for action. Following Anna's excruciating efforts to lift her husband, the action (and cutting) recommences.
The first segment, the chase, constitutes the most obviously Hitchcockian sequence of Funny Games. A long shot of the house's darkened exterior held for several moments lends it the sinister aspect of the Bates Motel. The chase is punctuated by rapid cuts that match Georgie (the pursued) with Paul (the pursuer). In the house, the suspense is heightened by the mise-en-scene: darkened rooms prevent Georgie and the audience from seeing Paul. The soundtrack emphasises every heavy breath and creaking door until Zorn's score comes in (from a diegetic source), creating a sense of irritation and excess: the screams on the tape pre-echoing the potential screams we expect to hear.29 The scene thus builds in tension to the anticlimactic moment, with cuts increasing in frequency and close-ups tightening the viewer's focus on to the characters' faces and the gun's trigger. Cutting away at this point to the family living room, Haneke leaves his spectators in a position of suspended tension, anxious as to whether Paul will kill Georgie.
Throughout the chase segment, the action is cross-cut with another scene in the living room, where Anna and George remain with Peter (parallel action being one of the classic formal tropes of the suspense thriller). The second segment, the murder, begins with a cut back to the living room, in which the television is central within the frame, the characters relegated to the sidelines. The noise of motor racing on¬screen provides a backdrop to the dialogue throughout the scene, steadily increasing in volume as the scene progresses, echoing the Zorn soundtrack in its irritating, tuneless noise. As Paul and Georgie enter the frame the latter announces to his mother, They've killed Sissi'. This signals, in case we had any doubt, that their captors are capable of murder (and more significantly, the murder of a child: it is established in an earlier conversation between Georgie and his father that Sissi is a little girl of around Georgie's age). The close-ups of Peter and Paul loading the gun bestow an ominous significance on their actions, and the gun's presence in the frame (cutting into and across the screen both vertically and horizontally at different moments) contributes to the build-up of tension. As Paul leaves the room and the camera follows him into the kitchen, his footsteps, which are paced in time with Peter's counting, encourage the spectator to keep marking time mentally as we wait for Haneke to cut back to the living room. Once more, tension is built up to an anticlimactic moment, but in this case it is not an anticlimax of narrative, but one of form: we do not see the killing, but hear the gun go off and the screams that follow, while the camera remains in the kitchen with Paul.
The anticlimactic moment that marks the end of the chase is one familiar from the suspense genre: the director builds up to a climactic moment, creating a false hope of catharsis, and then frustrates this hope in order to reignite the viewer's sense of tension. In this case, the climactic moment is literally suspended. The end of the second segment, on the other hand, creates an opposite effect. Here, the climactic moment that the spectator has been waiting for (a gun to be shot, a murder to take place) does indeed occur, but the spectator is denied the pleasure of catharsis by the anticlimactic manner in which it is presented. This moment of anticlimax leads us into the following segment, the aftermath, which functions as an extended enactment of the same principle. In the run up to the modernist episode, Haneke is uninterested in showing the assault itself: sound conveys the fact that it is occurring. He concentrates, instead, on the consequences of this bloodshed. The spectator, both seduced by the classical suspense structure that Haneke employs and suddenly removed from the safety of the familiar, is confronted with a close-up of the television. It is only as Haneke holds the shot that the blood splattered across the screen becomes visible. For the first time in the film, the spectator is forced to examine the image before them, rather than passively accept it.30
As Paul and Peter's dialogue is layered over the sound of the television, we learn that Georgie is dead and that the villains are now leaving. Not only does the villains' departure remove the sense of threat, but the death of Georgie unsettles the viewer, as it breaks one of the suspense thriller's unwritten rules: as Hitchcock's Sabotage (1936) established, the murder of a child is generally too emotionally unsettling for an audience to absorb within the limits of the pleasure drive. The 'rules' of the suspense thriller are thus simultaneously ruptured on a narrative and a formal level: with the driving force of the film's narrative gone, the spectator is confronted with a void, the pleasure drive suddenly forestalled. Unpleasure arises as a result of the obstruction of the pleasure drive which, having been mobilised, is suddenly thwarted. It also arises from the spectator's emotional reorientation. With the selfish emotional drive for pleasure blocked, the spectator engages with the events on screen in a different manner: discomfort comes from being forced to witness the aftermath of Georgie's death and engage with a set of emotions unfamiliar to the genre. For the presentation of consequence does not mobilise an epistemic concern with what will happen, but rather it forces the spectator to consider the implications of what has happened. At this moment in the narrative there is no immediate imperative for the characters to act, and so we are put into contact with how they react. As Haneke explains (in a somewhat biased, but nonetheless persuasive, example):
In general, a stationary picture shows the result of an action, whereas a film shows the action itself. A stationary picture mostly appeals to an observer's empathy with the victim, whereas generally in film the viewer is placed in the role of the perpetrator. When looking at Picasso's Guernica, for instance, we see the victims' pain for the eternity of viewing: solidarity with the victims, without moral stumbling blocks. But in the massacre in Coppola's Apocalypse Now (with Wagner's 'Ride of the Valkyries' playing in the background) we are in the helicopter, firing at the stampeding Vietnamese below us, and we do this all without a bad conscience, because - at least in the moment of action - we are not aware that we are adopting this role.31
So while this 'modernist episode' in the film adheres to many of the precepts of the alternative cinema as defined by Mulvey and Wollen, its juxtaposition with a classical cinematic narrative gives rise to the production of cinematic unpleasure; a term which here signifies not only the frustration of the pleasure drive, but also the mobilisation of a range of 'negative' emotions on the spectator's part. Apparatus theory states that the spectator is positioned by classical-realist structures to believe that they have control over the cinematic image. This illusion of control is troubled as the spectator gradually becomes aware of the image frame, and hence of the fact that the fictional space is, after all, narrowly circumscribed. The realisation stimulates the desire to see and find out more, and the former illusion of the image as offering a 'window on the world' yields to an unpleasant perception of the film as artefact, a system of signs and codes that lie outside the spectator's control. The unpleasure that springs from this recognition is only overcome by the advent of the next shot, which apparently restores the previous condition of the spectator's imaginary unity with the images and starts the cycle off again.32
Haneke operates in accordance with this principle throughout the film's generic framework, editing the film at a rapid pace so that the spectator's imaginary unity with the image is secured. But in the 'modernist episode' he delays the advent of the next shot, which would maintain the spectator's illusion of control, and extends the moment of realisation of the film as construct that Baudry sees as characteristic of the apparatus effect. In this way he extends the spectator's awareness of the film as artifice. For when the image does not abruptly change (when, in fact, it lingers on the screen for many minutes at a time, with only minor variations in framing and/or movement within the frame) the spectator is forced to do that which they do when confronted with a painting in a museum or a gallery: they must scrutinise the image, deconstruct it, consider the margins and borders of the frame, and 'contemplate' the structure of representational strategies that informed the creation of this image.
The formal reflexivity of Haneke's Funny Games is thus distinguished by its context: its combination with other stylistic modes is what separates it from similar scenes in Der Siebente Kontinent and 77 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls. So, in its juxtaposition with the generic suspense structures that Haneke operates, the 'modernist episode' allows for a binary reorientation of spectatorial reflection. On a primary level this relates to how the spectator perceives the image itself: the practically static ten-minute take leads the spectator to examine the image visually on an aesthetic and intellectual level, rather than to 'scan' the image mentally in order to place it within the context of the narrative. But on a secondary level, the extended duration of the image, coupled with the lack of narrative drive, creates an awareness in the spectator of themself as a spectator. As the director puts it, 'the reduction of montage to a minimum tends to shift responsibility back to the viewer in that more contemplation is required'.33 He elaborates:
As soon as time becomes manifest in a film, it disturbs the spectators who are used to a fast pace, especially if the pictures concern matters which they have learned to suppress. At first they react with irritation, then they are bored and finally annoyed - the classic sequence of a defensive reaction. If one has the courage to put them through this ordeal, they will in the end come to face the condition with which they are confronted in picture and in sound. As a result, the contents once again will become felt, instead of being merely registered as information to be checked off.34
While the 'modernist episode' allows the spectator time to become rationally aware of the cinematic image as construct, it also gives rise to an emotional or 'felt' reaction. This reaction stems from two sources: the awareness that Baudry links to the spectator's awareness of the film as a construct, and the extended exposure to the depiction of Anna and George's grief (the consequence of their son's death), which brings these one-dimensional ciphers into focus as more psychologically- rounded characters for whom we feel empathy. Both are experienced as unpleasurable.
'Aggressive' Reflexivity
The 'modernist episode' thus develops what Susan Smith terms the feeling of 'discomfort' which the spectator of Hitchcock's suspense thrillers often experiences as a result of 'tension between conflicting responses' as we are made aware of 'our own involvement in desires and emotions that are the reverse of admirable'. Smith states that this 'is one of the means whereby we participate in Hitchcock's films rather than merely watch them' so that we come to sense 'the complex moral implications of the experiences we share or which are communicated to us'.35 By the film's end, this discomfort is subordinated to the pleasure drive as a result of the intensity of Hitchcock's suspense strategies: the ludic tone that returns the spectator to an experience of the film as pleasurable, and the narrative closure that he offers. Haneke, however, reinforces the unpleasurable effect of the 'modernist episode' through the introduction of a second mode of reflexivity that contrasts with the film's generic conventions as well as with the 'modernist episode'. This second mode of reflexivity is used to confront directly the cathartic effect of the generic suspense thriller in order to expose these features as parts of its conventional construction, thus heightening the unpleasurable experience.
Because they operate in different manners, it is important to distinguish clearly between the two predominant modes of reflexivity that operate within Funny Games. In order to do so, we shall have recourse to the concepts of first-generation and second-generation modernism, as introduced in Chapter Three. To recap, the 'modernist episode' demonstrates a first generation reflexivity, which shares common ground with the self-conscious style of Robert Bresson or Chantal Akerman, for example, and which we saw characterised Der Siebente Kontinent. This is a 'benign' form of reflexivity, which allows the spectator time to reflect on the image and thus distances them from the action on-screen. The second mode of reflexivity is not postmodernist, but meditates on first-generation reflexivity, and is demonstrated by the later films of Jean-Luc Godard, for example, which, retaining first- generation techniques, extend them into a more direct, 'aggressive' approach to the spectator, which is explicitly metatextual. While both modes of reflexivity have been associated with the political-modernist agenda of placing the spectator in a position where they are rationally aware of the film as a construct, they operate in very different ways. For the second set of techniques, 'aggressively' reflexive, are not concerned with distancing the spectator from the cinematic action, but with emphasising their proximity to it. That is, where first-generation modernism only calls the spectator's attention to the film, second- generation modernism calls their attention to themselves, as a consumer of that film. If first-generation modernism attempts to place the spectator in a more objective relationship to the image, then second- generation modernism emphasises the subjectivity of the spectator, and makes it count for something.
Haneke thus installs a third aesthetic frame around and within his work, hinted at but far from actualised in his earlier works. This is composed of a second-generation reflexivity used to control and contexualise the messages viewers should extract from his work, making them directly relevant to their own situation as complicit in the cinematic spectacle. In the case of Funny Games, Haneke employs 'aggressive' reflexivity in order to call attention to the spectator's consumption of the (violent) spectacle as commodity and his emotional investment in the generic structures of the suspense thriller. The film's antagonists, who hold the family members hostage (proceeding to torture and kill them), acknowledge the audience's presence directly at various moments in the film's narrative (or at least one of them does). Beginning some twenty minutes into the film with a wink to the camera, Paul addresses the audience at a number of points over the course of the film.36 When George pleads with his torturers to put an end to his family's suffering, Paul replies, 'We are still under feature length.' Turning to address the audience directly, he continues: 'Is it enough already? You want a proper ending with plausible development, don't you?'
Such moments occur at regular intervals throughout the film. However, they are not frequent (occurring only five times throughout the film's 108 minutes) and they do not constitute a sustained overture to the spectator as is the case in Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel and Benoît Poelvoorde's C'est arrivé près de chez vous/Man Bites Dog (1992), in which the killer is the subject of a documentary, constantly commenting on his actions to the camera; or Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971), in which protagonist Alex's asides harmonise with the film's surreal aesthetic and stylised mise-en-scène. There is apparently no narrative grounding within the generic structure of Funny Games for the characters to break with the film's diegetic universe.
Moreover Paul is the only character who acknowledges the presence of the camera/audience, a fact which leads Mark Kermode, in his review of the film for Sight & Sound, to claim that the killers and their victims 'seem to be in different movies, with [Arno] Frisch [playing Paul] nipping merrily back and forth between the film's world and ours, while [Suzanne] Lothar [as Anna] remains resolutely locked ... within Haneke's narrative'.37 Kermode's comment implies a tacit understanding of Haneke's use of two - or three, if we consider the 'modernist episode' as separate from this 'aggressive' reflexivity - different stylistic modes which operate within Funny Games: and in effect, Paul and Anna are in different films. In Benny's Video, Haneke switches between various filmic realities, between Benny's Video and Benny's video, troubling the divide between 'real' and 'virtual'. In much the same way, the generic framework of Funny Games reveals itself to be a façade of sorts for the 'real' film that Haneke is making, although the distinction between the two is heavily blurred.
The use of aggressively reflexive devices such as audience address is by no means an original technique, and Haneke has acknowledged his debt to films such as Richardson's Tom Jones (1963), in which the eponymous hero, a third of the way through the film, turns to the camera and comments on the difficulty of his predicament.38 However, Haneke's deployment of a similar device in Funny Games differs from Richardson's in two aspects: firstly, it is the antagonist, rather than the protagonist, who addresses the audience; and secondly, the address to the audience constantly refers to the fact that the antagonists are 'performing' for the audience as part of a film. Paul does not merely acknowledge the audience as spectators, but he also accuses them of being his very raison d'être: the cinematic violence in Funny Games exists only because the audience expects it.
This technique of 'aggressive', second-generation reflexivity finds its culmination towards the end of Haneke's film, in a scene in which Anna shoots one of her captors, Peter, only for his accomplice, Paul, to seize a diegetic remote control and rewind the film's action from within the diegetic universe and then 'replay' events to his advantage. Not only does Anna's murder of Peter occur at the climactic point of another Hitchcockian build-up of tension, but it also includes the only instance in the film of violence occurring on screen. As Anna seizes the gun, the camera rapidly follows her lunge for the weapon and then cuts to her swinging it around to point at Peter. A cut to a reverse shot of Peter follows, as his stomach bursts open and he is thrown back by the force of the blast, and then a medium shot of Paul's reaction, which features the film's only verbal obscenity ('Where's the fucking remote?'/'Wo ist die Scheiß-Fernbedienung?')39
The sequence is cliched in the extreme, mimicking the 'guts and gore' sequences of numerous Hollywood actions films. Indeed, it may be construed as representing a fourth stylistic mode: the Hitchcockian suspense thriller becomes the all-action 'shoot 'em up', a cinematic tradition that we can say starts with 'New Hollywood' film-making, a term that is used to refer to the cinema of Dennis Hopper, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, amongst others. This cinema, Pam Cook points out, 'plays' with stylised violence,40 producing a violent spectacle that is perhaps best exemplified by Sam Peckinpah's 'ultraviolent movies',41 from The Wild Bunch (1969) to Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974),42 in which a combination of slow motion footage of violent encounters, detonating squibs and exploding blood bags is used to portray violent death, much to the delight of many spectators.43 Several directors of violent films have been heavily influenced by Peckinpah's visual signature. But while upon their release Peckinpah's films reinscribed the cultural depiction of violence and lent it a new power to shock - and thus connected it to a set of moral concerns - in its contemporary incarnations, what seems like excess has, Linda Williams claims, become a routine element.44 Directors such as Quentin Tarantino use explicit portrayals of violence for both aesthetic and dramatic effect, but the critical response to their techniques is ambivalent: some critics decry their works as too realistic and graphic, while others dismiss the violence as unrealistic and cartoonish.45 Like many of his peers (such as Kathryn Bigelow, Oliver Stone and Tony Scott), Tarantino's rendition of screen violence is thoroughly postmodern.46 This might extend to his entire aesthetic: Tarantino's images are pastiches, inflected by the movie and TV culture he imbibed in his youth, and their emotional and moral content is second-hand, derived from, and mediated by, the pop- cultural material that is their immediate referent. As Stephen Prince puts it, 'the style itself is the subject and form of [Tarantino's] work'.47 What films such as Natural Born Killers (1994), Strange Days (1995) and Reservoir Dogs (1992) are mainly concerned with, in their postmodern style, is the imagery of violence, violence as pop-culture iconography. The films are preoccupied with a derivative, second-order movie and media-based iconography. In this postmodern style, the film-maker's images comment on other images, other films, or television shows because the possibility of the image having a referentially real relationship with a representable world is mistrusted by the film-maker (Tarantino) or else she or he is simply uninterested in that relationship (Stone with Natural Born Killers). When Oliver Stone, therefore, attempts to put a high moral gloss on Natural Born Killers by recycling the terms by which a director such as Sam Peckinpah spoke of his work on violence, the attempt seems not merely hollow and imitative, but strangely anti-historical, as if the intervening decades of movie violence had not demonstrated the limitations of that effort.
Haneke's attack is aimed not at the stylised violence that Peckinpah's films demonstrate: clichéd as it has now become, it was at the time both well meant and effective. However, Peckinpah's praxis - using montage style to give a new degree of realism to cinematic violence, which had the power to shock the audience - became the practico-inert of these techniques' frequent adoption, first by film and then by television, so that they have now become commonplace, and the montage style actually complements the violence represented and presents it largely in a positive light. Haneke's attack, then, is directed against the postmodern films that mimic Peckinpah's style, without attempting to restore it to its original power to horrify. Haneke makes his targets clear, explaining the film as a 'counterprogram' [sic] to Stone's Natural Born Killers, and introducing it at Cannes as an 'anti-Tarantino film'.48 These directors, he states, 'make the violent image alluring while allowing no space for the viewer'.49 His counter-project aims to accord the spectator this space, and to prompt them to use it to consider their own part in the production and consumption of these violent images.
By drawing on another set of 'generic' clichés - in this instance those associated with the 'ultraviolent' movie - Haneke again deliberately aims to provoke a suspension of critical awareness by using cinematic signposts associated with the pursuit of cinematic pleasure. In this short sequence, the spectator experiences not the tension associated with a building up of suspense but a cathartic release provided by the moment of the victim's revenge. The switch in generic convention points can perhaps be attributed to Haneke's desire to draw on the most extreme instance of violence functioning as catharsis: the more satisfying the release of tension, the more powerful the effect of its rescindment. The spectator, caught up in the violent fantasy of retribution and escape, is at their most vulnerable for the ensuing rewind sequence.50
To frame it once more in terms of apparatus theory, Haneke creates for the spectator a secure, imaginary relationship to the film. He encourages the desire for catharsis and narrative closure and satisfies it so that the spectator might maintain the illusion of privileged control over, and unmediated access to, the fictional world. The effect of the rewind is to shatter this illusion, seizing control from the spectator and situating it firmly in the hands of the director. Once again, the impact of this technique is intensified by the contrast with the preceding scenes, and heightened by the bathos of George's ensuing death: in an elliptical montage, Haneke shows Paul aiming the gun at the position we know George to be in, then cuts to the killers leaving the house as the sound of a gunshot extends across the cut between the two scenes. The spectator, divested of the illusion of themself as the omnipotent subject - somehow in control of the narrative - by the preceding rewind, is left with the quick and unseen death of a character whose salvation they had witnessed only minutes before.
The rewind scene thus provides us with an alternative, but no less effective, example of how Haneke mobilises emotion and judgement simultaneously within his films. Let us use an analogy here. If we think of the pleasure drive as a train, travelling with a forward (e)motion, then we might say that when the pleasure drive is very strong, the train is travelling very fast, so fast that we can't see anything out of the windows and are oblivious to everything but the hermetically sealed world in front of us. The effect of benign reflexivity that distances the audience from the image is to slow down the pleasure drive so that we can see more clearly. A modernist film that does not mobilise the pleasure drive at all can be said to be driving slowly or not driving at all, whereas the 'modernist episode' in Funny Games puts the brakes on a train that had previously been driving at very high speed. The effect of 'aggressive' reflexivity, on the other hand, when coupled with an operating pleasure drive, is to place an object directly in the train's path, causing a sudden and jarring shock. The size of the object determines the effect that it will have on the train's forward momentum. If the object is too small, the train will push it out of its way and continue en route. On the other hand, if it is too large, the object will derail the train altogether (and it may be that this is precisely Haneke's aim if, as he claims, the correct response for a spectator of Funny Games is to leave the cinema - ceasing altogether the forward momentum of the pleasure drive).51 But it is possible that the train may continue en route, if the object is of a certain size, its effect not too overwhelming, only now it will be somewhat less stable than before.
In the case of both the 'modernist episode' in Funny Games, which has the effect of slamming the brakes on the pleasure drive, and the film's 'aggressive' reflexivity, which causes a collision, an impact occurs. The point of impact is the moment at which the spectatorial pleasure drive (attached to the narrative) and the spectator's conscious reflexivity about the status of the film as a film coincide. It is the result of reason and feeling conflicting. The spectator's comfortable position as the unseen viewer, caught up in the narrative developments on¬screen, is very abruptly destabilised.
Eisensteinian Impact
This notion of impact as a collision between reason and emotion looks back to an Eisensteinian moment in film theory. Eisenstein emphasised the spectator's status as a real person (rather than a theoretical or
100 Michael Haneke's Cinema
Figure 3.2 Paul (Arno Frisch) holds Georgie (Stefan
Clapczynski) hostage on the sofa in Funny Games. Courtesy of the BFI stills
department. Permission graciously supplied by WEGAfilm.
commercial concept), establishing a model of the cinematic experience as a transaction between the screen image (and soundtrack) and the spectator in the cinema. According to Eisenstein, meaning in the cinema was not inherent in any filmed object, but was created by the collision of two signifying elements, one coming after the other, their juxtaposition producing 'specific emotional shocks in the spectator in their proper order within the whole'.52 There is here a clear convergence with the way in which impact works in Haneke's films.
However, a key difference between the two models of spectatorship centres upon their approach to emotion. Like many film theorists (including, as we have discussed, the proponents of political modernism), Eisenstein displays a clear mistrust of emotional manipulation, perceiving a danger in what he called 'psychological retrogression', in which cinema becomes subordinated to the automaton of sensual, prelogical thinking.51 This sensual thought can suddenly become dominant, even in the most complex of social constructions, because the margins between the higher phases of intellectual order and the primitive and baser instincts are extremely mobile and volatile, and they often undergo sudden shifts at each stage of development. Eisenstein writes that:
This continual sliding from level to level, forwards and backwards, now to
the higher forms of an intellectual order, now to the earlier forms of sensual
thinking, occurs at each ... phase in development. ... The margin between the types is mobile and it suffices a not even extraordinarily sharp affective impulse to cause an extremely, it may be, logically deliberate person suddenly to react in obedience to the never dormant inner armory of sensual thinking [sic] and the norms of behavior [sic] deriving thence.54
Nonetheless, rather than recoiling in fear and thereby avoiding further research into the use of emotional manipulation, Eisenstein perceived in the cinema the potential for a dialectical progression that would maintain the pursuit of highly complex intellectual forms and processes and, at the same time, the 'analysis' of the early forms of sensual thinking. He makes what Gregg Lambert, in his article 'Cinema and the Outside', terms 'Eisenstein's wager': to invent not a merely rhetorical cinema, but an analytic cinema, a cinematographic science of thinking.55 By means of technical montage, cinema has to achieve neither a purely emotional engagement with the image nor an aesthetic-intellectual engagement which negates the former and is now exemplified by 1970s counter-cinema, but rather a 'dynamic perception of phenomena', which dialectically absorbs the first two. Eisenstein's theory of cinema, like Haneke's, is thus founded on a dynamic principle of interaction between these two manners of connecting with the cinematic image. Film, according to Eisenstein, had to avoid becoming too sensual on the one hand, and too formal and abstract on the other, always seeking as the principle of its development a certain balance, so that the total process achieves the figure of a dialectical 'spiral', following a dual unity in which the highest form of art has as its correlate the deepest form of subconscious: The effectiveness of a work of art is built upon the fact that there takes place within it a dual process: an impetuous progressive rise along the lines of the highest explicit steps of consciousness and a simultaneous penetration by means of the structure of the form into the layers of profoundest sensual thinking'.56
Emotion and Feeling
Haneke revisits the Eisensteinian model of impact as a visceral force upon the viewer, but there is a crucial difference between how Eisenstein conceived of and employed the tension between reason and instinct and how Haneke views and uses it. This difference needs some attention if we are to understand why impact in Funny Games is related to questions of ethics.
To distinguish Eisensteinian impact from the impact that arises from Haneke's films, there is a need for some clarification here about how we understand one of the key terms of the spectatorship debate; that is, how we understand the term 'emotion'. Up until this point in the book, the word 'emotion' has been used as the prototypical term within a broader category of phenomena including feelings, affects and drives. We need now to be more specific in how we deploy each of these terms. This is no easy task: efforts to make strict definitions of emotion words have as yet failed. Sometimes the distinction between the terms is one of intensity: emotions are stronger than feelings. Sometimes the terms are used to distinguish between object-directed and non-object-directed qualities. Following for the most part psychologist C.E. Izard's definitions as a guideline, we will say here that feelings are often non- object directed (I feel sad, I feel happy and so on), whereas emotions often have an object-directed quality; strong emotions like love, hate or jealousy are often object-directed, but romantic feelings are often non- object-directed. When we love, we love someone; when we feel romantic, these romantic feelings might be directed towards someone, but they are equally likely to be the result of a general ambience, unattached to any one person in particular.57
We can now use these revised definitions of emotion and feeling to clarify our understanding of impact in Eisenstein and in Haneke, beginning with the former. In his 1935 lecture 'Film Form: New Problems', Eisenstein discusses the concept of 'inner speech', which occurs 'at the stage of the inner-sensual structure, not yet having attained that logical formulation with which speech clothes itself before stepping out into the open'.58 The example that he gives is the pince-nez of the drowned surgeon in Battleship Potemkin (1925), which not only transcends the simple pars pro toto, but also supplants the necessity of representing the bloated corpse of the surgeon himself, and 'does so with a sensual-emotional increase in the intensity of the impression'.59 The spectator's somatic response to the image sequence of which the pince-nez is part might be one of dread, sorrow or fear, but this response arises from a general synthesis of the whole sequence. It is not attached to a particular character within the film, since the principle of inner speech in montage privileges images over narrative and characterisation. Indeed, these images often remain meaningless until the mind creates the links between them through its metaphoric capability. What inner speech offers the spectator then, in terms of somatic response, is a response of feeling: a generalised experience rather than an object-directed emotion. The somatic experience thus has its place within Eisensteinian impact. But for Eisenstein, the experience is one of physiological sensations (expressed by Eisenstein as 'I feel'). Art requires conflict, and conflict produces vibrations.
Now, the sensual effect of montage leads, according to Eisenstein, to thought, by bringing body and mind together. The effect of impact produces an intelligence of the senses. The fact that the spectator experiences a generalised feeling rather than an object-directed emotion is pivotal to how Eisenstein conveys meaning within his films. As a director he was not interested in depicting the unfolding of events or in clarifying a narrative action, believing that such elucidations 'dilute the impact that metaphor and fragmentation can have'.60 A first interpretation of this notion of dilution might lead us to believe that the term simply implies the weakening of a metaphor's impact, which seems to conflict with Izard's explanation of emotion as a much stronger sensation than feeling. But 'dilution' takes on new connotations when we view it in the light of Eisenstein's belief in cinema as an 'art of the masses'. His desire to make the masses a 'true subject' necessarily involves the treatment of the masses as a united subject: in a sense, the spectator of Eisenstein's films is not an individual but a collective consciousness. The spectator, by sensual thinking, becomes identical with every other spectator, a proxy for this collective consciousness, deprived of the capacity for individual response. Impact occurs at a prelogical level, but is expressed as thought, tied to a concatenation of meanings. It is thus linked to a desire to control the spectator's response: as such, the coercive aspect of Eisenstein's film gives rise to propaganda and the impact of film is effectively the bearer of the content or 'meaning' of Eisenstein's films.
Whereas Eisenstein saw felt response as being vibratory with, that is to say harmonious with, intellectual response, Haneke sees them as directly opposed. This is not to say that one should be sacrificed at the expense of the other (as we see happening in counter-cinema and in Hollywood cinema), but that this opposition should be used productively. Haneke's film, unlike Eisenstein's, is not a film of purely mental leaps, but a cinema of emotion and reason arising out of narrative concerns. But more importantly, it is also a cinema of emotion and reason occurring in tension. The spectator is prompted to respond both emotionally and intellectually to the film, and when these two different forms of response occur simultaneously, a productive conflict results: a conflict which forces the spectator to reflect rationally upon their own emotional response. Haneke mobilises emotion in the form of the pleasure drive by using narrative structures that we associate with Hollywood films. The difference, then, between his notion of impact and Eisenstein's is the difference between an impact that is immediate and which may be associated with an idea independent of narrative development - for this is one of the premises for Eisensteinian montage - and a much more complex cognitive involvement with a temporal development of narrative. Thus, while we can refer to the sentiments arising from Eisensteinian impact as 'feelings', the sentiments that are part of this involvement in Haneke's films we must call - by Izard's definition - 'emotions', in order to indicate that these affective states are oriented towards individual characters in narrative. They are concrete, externally directed and have clear sources, which Haneke intentionally puts before us.
The Individuated Spectator
So, while Haneke, like Eisenstein and like the political modernists, is somewhat mistrustful of emotion, seeing it as the enemy of reason, it is nonetheless the emotions that Haneke manipulates in Funny Games. Of course, as Amos Vogel has underlined, cinema is to some extent always a manipulative medium. Hollywood cinema, montage cinema and counter-cinema all position the spectator as passive in their various ways - the receptacle of a set of fixed conclusions - but they also rely on a prior contract by which the spectator accepts this passive positioning. To some extent, the audiences for a film by Eisenstein, Capra or Akerman all know what to expect of the film they have paid to see, and they are rarely disappointed. The question of expectation, however, becomes problematic when applied to Funny Games: both those spectators expecting a genre film and those expecting a counter- cinematic work of 'art' cinema have their expectations troubled by the overlapping frameworks within which the film operates.
The setting up of certain expectations is, then, the first step for Funny Games in manipulating its spectator by various means. Through its generic structures, Funny Games enacts the 'hidden' manipulation of suturing the spectator into the cinematic spectacle, constructing them as the all-knowing, all-powerful subject. Suspense is a minimal way of engaging emotion, while the genre of melodrama connects emotion with moral character properties. On this spectrum between suspense and melodrama (and we will discuss melodrama in more detail in the following chapter), the central technical element is the concentration of mise-en-scene and cinematography around individual characters and their place in a plot. This framework is aimed foremost at drawing the spectator into the film.
However, Haneke's film also reveals this process of manipulation via the impact of its 'aggressive' reflexivity. This reflexivity enacts another mode of emotional manipulation, but the unpleasurable experience to which Funny Games subjects the spectator calls immediate attention to itself in a way that the pleasurable experience does not. For as Izard points out, unpleasurable emotions are object-directed: they have a source or a focal point. The spectator's desire to regain the narrative momentum which stimulates the pleasure drive and to avoid the unpleasure that arises from these moments of juxtaposition prompts them to look for the source of this unpleasure, to find the object to which this emotional reaction is attached. In order to do this they must engage rationally with the film as a construct, they must analyse and unpick it. Emotion thus gives rise to rational awareness. This is an awareness of our emotional state (unpleasure), and its relatedness to the cinematic spectacle (the thing we are watching that is causing us unpleasure). But it is also an awareness of the act of spectatorship that the viewer is engaging in (the fact that by watching the film we are experiencing unpleasure; if we should walk out, the unpleasurable experience would cease).
Only by creating a close relationship between film and film-viewer can Haneke prompt the spectator to think about that relationship, to assess it and to wonder why and how they came to form an attachment to the cinematic spectacle. The impact on the spectator that occurs at the junctions between the differing stylistic and narrative modes results in an emotional experience of unpleasure, the source of which the spectator seeks within the film. It occurs at the point when emotion (in the form of unpleasure) and reason (in the form of self-awareness) are both operating: it takes place beyond the sensual, prelogical moment that Eisenstein discusses but before the position of total rational awareness that counter-cinema argues for. The spectator is engaged emotionally with the film, so that when this engagement is ruptured it becomes the focus of the spectator's reflections.
Haneke thus controls the spectator's response to the film. But he does not control the nature of this response; rather, he causes the spectator to reflect on their relationship to the film. And Haneke does not determine what the outcome of this reflection will be. The spectator's thought process is not programmed in the same definite way as it is when watching Potemkin, for example. So although within Haneke's cinema the spectator is manipulated, they nonetheless remain active in a way that does not have a determinate content or context. Whereas in the case of Eisenstein, the relationship of emotion to reason is not causal and does not create a fixed position of judgement, here the spectator forms an individuated response.
This is why Funny Games, although polemical, is not propagandist. Eisenstein's cinema is aimed at leading the spectator to the 'right' response to his films. Haneke, however, might seek to preclude the 'wrong' responses, but that does not equate to a desire to instil the 'right' response. 'I am not a forger of "opinions'", Haneke states, explaining that 'the film should not come to an end on the screen, but engage the spectators and find its place in their cognitive and emotive framework'.61 This is where Haneke diverges not only from Eisenstein, but also from political film-makers whose formal concerns are dominated by a desire to convey a predetermined content, the endgame of the film-viewing process. Reflexivity in political modernism is aimed at causing the spectator to reflect on the film's content and to reach a conclusion desired by the film-maker. For Haneke, the goal is moral reflection in and of itself, not reflection upon a set of political themes. His films ask the spectator to consider certain moral questions but do not lead to any answers. As the director states: 'Art is the only thing which can console us. But every spectator must seek his own responses to it. It is pointless for him to find responses which aren't his own. That cannot lead to a clear conscience'.62
The Invitation to Moral Engagement
Haneke's technique of moving between engagement and reflexivity is then opposed not only to Eisenstein's fixed positioning of the spectator, but also to the more radical 'modernism' that we find in the films of the counter-cinema movement, where the filmic language objectifies the character and creates such a distance between the character and viewer that the spectator is denied all emotional involvement with the film. Haneke's films create an emotional impact as well as allowing the spectator time to reflect. And in the conflict between the two, they invite the spectator to enter a thought space.
The space for reflection, arising from the conflict between emotional engagement and rational awareness, becomes concerned with morality when a moral problem is presented to the spectator for consideration. In Funny Games the moral problem centres on the spectator's realisation of themself as a scopophilic subject. Again, this realisation involves both an intellectual response and an emotional response. The 'modernist episode' in Funny Games forces the character to consider a scenario unfamiliar to the suspense thriller genre: parental grief not as a motivation for revenge, but as a pure state of being.63 The ten-minute scene, during which camera movement is minimised to only slight pans, functions as a gruelling exposé of consequence. The abrupt change in style from stylised montage techniques to what we might term 'hyperrealism' is jarring, but coupled with the content of the scene it becomes an almost unbearable experience for the viewer. Haneke's camera refuses to cut away from the immediate physical and emotional aftermath of Georgie's death, forcing us into a position of empathy with characters that had previously been psychologically one-dimensional. Exposure to such suffering gives rise to the desire to avert our eyes, but short of leaving the cinema this is not an option. The spectator might, if they were so inclined, shut their eyes, but the scene is perfectly harmonised on the level of image and sound, such that the effects of viewing and hearing the scene would not differ. The lack of movement forces our eyes to wander across the screen, picking out such details as Georgie's corpse lying on the floor and the hunched silhouette of
George, whilst Anna's laborious attempt to shut off the television and free herself are exposed as painful and grotesque.64 This visual stillness corresponds to the droning roar of cars, and then to a resounding silence in which every noise becomes magnified: Anna's effort is expressed in her grunts and the rustling of duct tape, George's grief begins as a series of small snorts before developing into racking sobs.
The effectiveness of the scene in moral terms becomes clearer when we compare it to a much-commented-upon scene in 72 Fragmente, in which the mechanically emitted ping-pong balls of a practice device are repeatedly smashed by the player from the deep space of the shot towards the screen, and towards the cinematic spectator. The repetitive, cacophonous sound that dominates the scene is intensified by its duration - it lasts a full three minutes - thus creating a painful sense of 'real time' that heightens the spectator's awareness of the cinematic viewing situation and, within that, of themself. Repetition and duration are both involved in this sequence which functions as a precursor to the 'modernist episode' in Funny Games; the spectator becomes uncomfortable and may seek out the source of this discomfort. However, since the scene from 71 Fragmente lacks any moral content (we do not engage with a character's suffering, for example), it does not place the spectator in a moral position: the source of my discomfort is the image on-screen, I am aware of that, but I do not consider my own relationship to that image, I am not implicated in it. And so I do not recognise myself as a voyeur, a consumer of the cinematic spectacle, since the scopic urge was never really operating: no scenario or spectacle is presented to my attention. The onscreen image fails to engage me emotionally, and reflexive devices have nothing with which to conflict. There is no point at which impact occurs, and a moral thought space fails to open itself up.
Elsewhere in Funny Games, the 'aggressive' reflexivity which Haneke employs calls the spectator's rational attention to themself both as a spectator, that is, as someone who is watching events; and as a voyeur, that is, someone who takes pleasure from watching. In doing so, it effectively short-circuits any voyeuristic pleasure that comes from the spectator's belief that they are 'unseen' by the diegetic characters. But by having only one character acknowledge the audience's presence, Haneke ensures that the victims of Peter and Paul's 'games' remain the victims of the spectator's gaze. Paul's question - 'Is it enough already? You want a proper ending with plausible plot development, don't you?' - prompts us to ask what it is we really want from the film, what exactly the nature of the spectator's relationship to the screen is. Haneke reveals the spectator's appetite for on-screen violence to them, intensifying their unpleasurable emotional response to being 'caught out'. Each of Paul's asides functions as an accusation of moral guilt, from which the spectator must defend themself; they are like the Sartrean 'footsteps in the hallway', which induce the emotion of shame, an emotion which we shall analyse at greater length in Chapter Five.
As we have seen, the Kantian model of morality depends on the subject's assertion of their reason over their desire to seek pleasure and their instinct to avoid pain. It is through stimulating the desire for pleasure that Haneke can then bring the reason into conflict with it. But it is only by making the spectator aware of this desire, and of its moral implications, that Haneke can invite them to assert their own power of rational awareness over this desire, and engage with the cinematic image in a radically different way.
To recount, unpleasure in Funny Games arises from the rupturing of the pleasure drive and from the spectator's ensuing realisation that they are not in control of the cinematic image. The instinctive discomfort this produces might be overridden by the pleasure drive should it be strong enough - as is the case in Hitchcock's films - but use of first- and second-generation modernist reflexivity prevents the pleasure drive from becoming sufficiently stable as to re-establish itself over the feeling of discomfort. So the spectator becomes aware of their discomfort and, in a second moment, they become aware of the reason for this discomfort as their instinct to avoid pain leads them to seek its source in order that they might best diffuse it. In this second moment, unpleasure arises again, this time from the spectator's sense of shame at their realisation of themself as voyeur. By calling attention to the spectator's expectations through devices such as the diegetic rewind, Haneke prompts the spectator to question the morality of such desires. One of the questions that dominates ethical inquiry, and particularly Kantian ethics, is 'What ought I to do?' In Funny Games the spectator finds themself watching scenes that prompt the question, 'Ought I to be watching this?' In considering this problem, the spectator finds themself engaged in a process of moral deliberation.
Notes
1. Morrow (2001), p. 11.
2. See, for example, Judith Hess, 'Genre Film and the Status Quo', in Film Genre: Theory and Criticism, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Metchuen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1977).
3. See Jean-Loup Bourget, 'Social Implications in Hollywood Genres', in Film Genre: Theory aiui Criticism, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Metchuen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1977).
4. Robin Wood, 'Ideology, Genre, Auteur', in Film Theory and Criticism, eds Leo Braudy, Marshall Cohen and Gerald Mast (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
5. Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), p. 5.
6. In which a mother (Lucia Harper, played by Joan Bennett), after discovering the dead body of her daughter's lover, hides the body under the assumption that it was her daughter who killed the man.
The shock of recognition of this moment was in every way equal to the terror of my childhood movie experiences. Naturally I had long since grasped that movies were not real, naturally I had long since distanced myself physically and probably mentally by ironic observations from the unnerving immediacy of a suspense thriller, but never before this shocking discovery of my constant complicity with film protagonists had 1 experienced the dizzying immediacy that separates fiction and reality; never before had I physically experienced to what extent I and my fellow humans - that is, the audience - were largely victims and not partners of those whom we paid to "entertain" us.' Haneke (1998), p. 552.
39. While the prefix 'Scheiß-' is merely coarse rather than obscene, in English-language translation it becomes the much stronger 'fucking'. Considering Haneke's film is a comment on American cinema's predilection for sex, violence and obscenity there is some irony in the fact that the subtitler has 'Americanised' this phrasing.
40. Pam Cook and Mieke Berninck, The Cinema Book (London: BFI, 1999), p. 100.
41. Prince (1998).
42. I am aware that Peckinpah has made films - and violent films, at that - outside this period. However, the period between these two films is arguably the definitive portion of Peckinpah's output. Before 1968, the director was constrained by the MPAA Production Codes and could not explore (or exploit!) the violence issue as he did in the years that followed, and after 1974 his work becomes quite chequered.
43. In some ways, Peckinpah's use of slow motion foreshadows Haneke's use of the long take: they are two different ways of turning time into excess, slowing down the forward progression of action in order to encourage a more detailed perception of the onscreen image, and a concomitant reflection about the on-screen event. Where they diverge is in their subject matter: Peckinpah tends to use slow motion in his depictions of the violent event, forcing us to recognise what violence is; Haneke uses the long take in depicting the consequences of violence, forcing us to recognise what it does, what it means. A corresponding use of ellipsis frequently occurs, so that while Peckinpah elides consequence, Haneke elides the violent event itself.
44. Linda Williams, 'Sex and Sensation', in The Oxford History of World Cinema, ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 194.
45. Sylvia Chong, 'From "Blood Auteurism" to the Violence of Pornography: Sam Peckinpah and Oliver Stone', in New Hollywood Violence, ed. Steven Jay Schneider (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).
46. Prince (1998), p. 240.
47. Prince (1998), p. 241.
48. See Jonathan Romney's 1998 interview with the director in the Guardian. The director continues: 'it's totally exploitative, playing with the cheapest of emotions. It's this way of working on two levels that makes it revolting ... It's not a question of high art and popular culture'. Quoted in Romney (1998), p. 6.
49. Sharrett (2003), p. 29.
50. At some screenings that I have attended, I have witnessed spectators clap and cheer at the point where Anna shoots Peter, indicating the extent to which Haneke is successful in operating these structures of classical emotional manipulation.
51. See Falcon (1998).
52. Sergei Eisenstein, 'The Montage of Attractions', in The Eisenstein Reader, ed. and trans. Richard Taylor (London: BFI, 1998), p. 30.
53. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form, and The Film Sense, trans. Jay Leyda (London: Meridian Books, 1957), p. 142.
54. Eisenstein (1957(1949]), p. 143.
55. Gregg Lambert, 'Cinema and the Outside', in Deleuze and The Philosophy of Cinema, ed. Gregory Flaxman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 261.
56. Eisenstein (1957). pp. 144-5.