Thursday, May 20, 2010

Home and Decor in Michael Haneke’s "Funny Games": The Domestication of Violence

Horror, at its most elemental, is predicated on a violence both visible and hidden. The consequences of dangers to the body are fetishised in the manner of a taboo. An unseen danger remains invisible to heighten suspense and is rendered visible at moments of narrative importance. Horror cinema presents an interesting point of entry into conceptions about visual representations of the body in relation to safety and violence. The existence of horror cinema traces to the dawn of the medium, perhaps as an ironic counterpoint to an ontology of cinema commonly defined by André Bazin as the ability to “reveal the hidden meaning in people and things without disturbing the unity natural to them”. And yet not without some trepidation do I wish to examine the pleasure experienced when bearing witness to the ritualisation and representation of horror. While I do not wish to suggest a causal relationship between representations and instances of violence, I do seek to interrogate elements of the dynamic by which violence is made aesthetic in order that it may be consumed. Seen within the boundaries of a consumer marketplace for entertainment media, violence, much like any other consumer product, is often domesticated when brought into the home. Mainstream cinema has embraced realistic and sensational renditions of violence, and audiences have responded by expecting that violent manipulations of the body in every film regardless of context be rendered with the same degree of (computer-generated) natural realism.

To this end, I intend for this essay to demonstrate how the visual aesthetic of the 2007 version of Funny Games serves to critique the consumption of violence as a visual spectacle. When the entertainment press reported that noted European director Michael Haneke was going to remake his controversial 1997 film Funny Games in Hollywood, most critics were perplexed at the decision. The original film had polarised art-house audiences and critics who were unsure how to address Haneke’s meditation on media violence. When combined with the filmmaker’s often noted antagonism with Hollywood films, the critical divide established by the first version of the film ensured a somewhat hostile reception for the second. Haneke has on numerous occasions mentioned that mainstream cinema, as defined and championed by Hollywood and the major transnational film companies, treats the consequences of violence in an immature and dangerous manner. Specifically in relation to Funny Games, Haneke told The Village Voice in 1998 that he intended for the film to critique “a certain American Cinema, its violence, its naivité, the way American Cinema toys with human beings”. Alternately, Haneke means to portray in his films “what mainstream movies work to take away. Namely: reality. I’m making movies that are inconsumable. And I can only do that by portraying the suffering of the victim, rather than the enjoyment of the perpetrator”. To address this last point, I will conclude this paper with a brief examination of what Haneke might mean by reality, given his conscious manipulation of the ontology of representation.

Funny Games can be seen to continue an analysis of the invasive nature of the motion camera as first explored in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, in which the killer films the murder of all of his victims, and Yoko Ono’s Rape, in which the camera silently and relentlessly stalks a random female pedestrian until she cowers in fear. In all of these films, the camera itself is the instrument by which horror is realised, at both the material and symbolic levels. In a very real sense, these films suggest the violence inherent to sight itself. The pleasure of horror-as-spectacle derives not from moral corruption, but rather from the ironic counterpoint of bodily safety assured through visibility.

Before analysing what an audience does not want to see, we must first outline the dynamic by which viewer desire is generated. Funny Games explores the desire for visibility, and why viewers often desire to witness representations of that which is rejected from daily life as horrific. In other words, if the sight of something is repulsive or causes fear, why are viewers often drawn to aesthetic events which ritualise and habitualise exposure? In this sense, it is possible to position the film as a project for peace countering the decades of media stories about violence in media begetting violence in reality and the increasing prevalence of violence in consumer entertainment products. How then might sight bring pleasure to a viewer? Most critics are in agreement that horror cinema involves social and moral transgression. Horror cinema was until recently not viewed as “proper”, by which I mean precisely the social decorum attached to the content of a film and how that film should be watched. Certainly, there is much to support the fact that for most of the twentieth century horror cinema was largely a counterculture phenomenon. However, any positioning of this argument as foundational to the ontology of horror is undermined by the fact that since the release of Psycho in 1960, horror cinema has been fully accepted into mainstream culture.

A more convincing theory elaborates the ontology of visibility as key to the self-realisation of identity. In The Practise of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau states that the ‘proper’ is “a mastery of places through sight. The division of space makes possible a panoptic practice proceeding from a place whence the eye can transform foreign forces into objects that can be observed and measured, and thus control and “include” them within its scope of vision. To be able to see is also to be able to predict, to run ahead of time by reading a space” (1984: 36). Fundamentally, sight ensures security through the acquisition of knowledge. Within the context of horror cinema, the spectator’s sense of bodily security is disrupted at moments when specific knowledge is lacking – the identity of the killer, the danger hidden in the darkness, an audio cue which suggests an immanence which cannot be seen. The affect produced by horror cinema can be seen therefore as a geography of play in which the sight of even the most abject grotesquerie satisfies the spectator’s need for an omniscient visibility. That the dissected or otherwise perversely manipulated body is often depicted as a repulsive object suggests that it is possible to agree with Linda Badley, who argues that “the body became the site for mythologies of self-creation” (1995: 68).

It must be noted that on a formal level, Funny Games can be seen as a postmodern genre exercise. As such, a brief overview of horror as a genre and as a cinematic device is illuminating. In an often-cited essay on horror in cinema, Noel Carroll convincingly described horror not simply as a means of categorising films into genres, but rather as a narrative trope deployed with the intention of producing a specific emotional response in a viewer (1987: 51-3). The affect produced in audiences by means of visual and aural sensations has been widely exploited by filmmakers to transfer anxieties produced by the film’s narrative to the viewer at the bodily level. More often than not, this process dictates that the audience sympathise with the victims of violence in horror cinema – namely, the audience is intended to feel scared at moments in the film in which onscreen characters are themselves scared. Here, we can witness the manifestation of genre conventions: the juxtaposition of a safe image with one suggesting danger; the use of mise-en-scène and editing to produce a targeted sense-perception response; and the use of dark lighting and confined set design to limit the information provided to the spectator, and by extension provide a degree of cohesion to the narrative, namely, the logic by which victims are diegetically “allowed” to be victimised. It is common for horror films to be set in isolated geographical locations: the cabin in the woods (The Evil Dead, Night of the Living Dead, I Spit on Your Grave), the house at the end of a deserted street (Psycho, The Last House on the Left), or an abandoned industrial or municipal area (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 28 Days Later). Similarly, low-light mise-en-scènes, often predicated on either malfunctioning lighting or a nighttime setting, further contribute to the sense of claustrophobia imparted by restricted vision. Certainly, in terms of its deployment of visual and auditory devices horror can be understood as operating wholly within Tom Gunning’s conception of the ‘cinema of attractions’, in which the novelty of affect and sense perception is favoured over narrative, thematic, or philosophical development.



By isolating the narrative to a lake house [Figure 1], Funny Games suggests that it is working within the common tropes of horror cinema. The film introduces a well-bred family whose wealth is visible by means of the conspicuous material possessions which surround them: the leather seats and high-end stereo system of a luxury SUV, a Tivoli radio for occasional use in the kitchen,

the meticulous hand-finished touches on a wooden boat used for recreational sailing in the afternoon, and most notably the summer lake home in the Hamptons which stands in for this film’s version of the deserted cabin. Haneke and cinematographer render these objects and the sets which contain them with stationary-camera, wide-aperture/deep-focus compositions which evoke the simple visual design common to interior decoration magazines and home decor product catalogues. In interior design magazines, these images often disturb the viewer as they are presented as virgin spaces devoid of human activity.

      Alternately, when humans are present in home decor magazines they often embody stereotypical functions such as housewife or the single young professional. The precise manner of how humans actually use these spaces is always elided in favour of an optimistic gesture to a future of possibility and self-actualisation (“This space could be yours!”). The capacity to see and interiorise these images of spaces imparts to the viewing subject a sense of bodily identity and safety, as the random clutter which constitutes the human condition is distilled to a singular controlled aesthetic. De Certeau can again be invoked in suggesting that the future has been predicted: the images of interiors are embodied precisely with the images of our future and controlled selves.

Such depictions of interiors do not allow the spectator to visualise their life occurring within these spaces as a history of material traces. Instead the body which represents the functions of life which occur within these spaces is rendered consumable precisely because of an absence in which the consumer inserts an idealised (consumable) version of themselves. Nothing is accomplished within such rooms, for traces of activity would preclude the understanding of the space as a messianic force authenticating and realising the desires of the consumer – and more specifically, interpellating the spectator of the image as a consumer of the space or the objects contained within. Thus, within a context of a consumer marketplace is the safety of the body of the consumer assured. For example, the image of a living room in Figure 3 does not represent even a trace of daily activity within its frame. Every visible surface is naked and immaculately (antiseptically) clean.

The kitchen in Figure 5, for example, which bears not a single trace of the organic materials which are processed into food on the surfaces depicted. These spaces are extracted from a temporality in which the viewing subject locates their material reality and becomes instead a space in which the spectator projects their desire for graceful living. In this capacity, it is interesting to notice that the meaning of the image is dependent on a spectator already made dependent on the image;  ontologically, the image is empty save for the spectator who fills it with an optimistic version of themselves. Instead of a randomly scattered assortment of accessories which one would expect to find in a livingroom – reading material on the table, movie cases by the DVD player, remote controls for the home theatre within easy reach of a viewing position – rather, such images represent an imagined space where the consumer of the image anticipates their future (self-)identity.



Haneke’s interiors are as equally orderly and antiseptic. The textures and orderly lines of the furniture design and layout [Figure 6], as well as that of the house itself [Figure 7], evoke a safe and inviting home. The white rustic of the interior design associates the house with a sense of nostalgia and tranquillity – another time in a better America, as it were [Figure 8].

This is not a space where violence would ever occur. And yet when it does, Funny Games presents the material consequences of violence with the same casually controlled manner. Unlike “a certain American cinema” – which often utilises rapid cross-cutting and the random, angular motions of a hand-held camera to intensify the affect produced by the action of the narrative by embodying the viewer within the “huddle” of the fight choreography – the editorial pacing and static camera are retained throughout the film, agnostic to the “momentum” of the narrative.

The material traces of violence, namely the blood and the corpse, are not rendered in a spectacular manner, but rather “normalised” by the clinical gaze of the camera which has rendered the violence without sensationalising the material traces it leaves on the domestic.



  Instead of serving as a meditation on the real consequences of horror, more often than not violence is deployed in contemporary cinema merely to engage the viewer in a ritualistic manner enslaved to the logic of sustaining a consumer market. While a metacritical examination of horror criticism in this regard is outside of the scope of this present review, numerous critics and sociologists warn against the social consequences of rendering violence into a spectacle. For example, in his updated edition of Dark Dreams, Charles Derry chastises contemporary cinema which has rendered the depiction of violence into an exciting spectacle dominated by the lack of consequences, including grief. As a consequence, mainstream cinema has produced “a generation of spectators who are empathy-deprived” and who enjoy being entertained by violence rather than being revolted that “humanity itself is being profaned” (2009: 5). And yet most critics of horror avoid moralising about spectator desires to witness representations of violence, especially in light of the numerous sociological studies which problematize any causal association between a spectator wanting to view media representations of violence and the commission of actual instances of violence. Instead of condemning as sadists those viewers who gain enjoyment through the affects produced by horror cinema, most critics understand the desire to witness the horrific within Freudian concepts of repression and the unconsciousness.



The desire for knowledge attained through visibility is not without consequences. Figure 11 depicts a scene in the film when the viewer’s blindness is transferred to the first of the killers’ victims. The killers play a game wherein the son is forced to wear a hood over his face while they pressure his mother to remove her clothes while they torture his father. Importantly, these two pleasures of sex and violence, which are so often linked to the most negatively influential among the influences of the media, are also invisible to the spectator. The fact that the mother’s nudity is hidden from the boy is a subtle condemnation of an American culture which allows children to consume bodies as violent images but bars them from seeing bodies in their actuality. Indeed, one of the killers makes explicit the importance of this game by stating that he is forcing the bag over the child’s face “to preserve moral decency”. Simultaneous to a concern for the well-being of his parents, the potential that the boy could die of asphyxiation produces the greatest anxieties for the spectator. The imagined violence toward the boy displaces the real violence experienced by the other two characters, and throughout this sequence it would be the horror of his death that would be most visible to them. The father is shot in a close-up compositional style which invokes the moment often visible in mainstream action and horror films when the potency of the male hero is restored after he bears with dignity the violence which has been caused to him by the evildoers in the film, while the female victim is saved at the moment of her weakness. Haneke’s cinema does not allow such a facile exit from violence.

As mentioned above, Haneke intended for Funny Games to be understood as an indictment of the representations of violence as consumable entertainments. It is precisely the need to see that is itself destructive for both the cinematic body and the body of the spectator. At several moments in the film, the killers break the fourth wall by directly addressing the audience, stating at different times that the spectator is on the side of the victims and demands believable narrative closure. As with other horror films, with each death their rhetoric suggests that they are presenting entertainment tableaus to the audience. And yet Haneke does not allow the violence in Funny Games to be pleasurable. Most importantly, except for one key moment none of the violence is visible onscreen. All of the bodily violence occurs out-of-frame.



For example, figure 12 is a frame taken from the moment when the first victim is killed. Nearly a minute passes as one of the victims is killed, in “real” time, in the non-diegetic space outside the frame. With playful irony, the killer not currently involved in the act of killing uses a knife to make a sandwich; this act is also not visible due to the framing of the scene. The antiseptic mise-en-scène emphasises the removal of the abject from the domestic. Indeed, the white outfit and gloves worn by the killer associate him with the peace and serenity of the house. The fact that the spectator can hear what is occurring in the room off-screen only increases a desire to understand what is happening. In fact, another five minutes pass before the identity of the victim is revealed, as the mise-en-scène shifts to portray the consequences of violence [Figure. 9]. The spectator’s desire for knowledge is left unsatisfied as, except for the killing of one of the murderers, the moments of violence done to the body are left off-screen in every instance. The exception is important, as it involves the viewer’s desire for vengeance to be exacted upon the characters who perpetrate the crimes onscreen.

Audiences consume entertainments which use the spectacle of violence in order to increase viewer sympathy with the victims of violence, who are thus rendered “good”, while allowing a formulaic narrative logic which suspends their initial moral abjection toward violence as a victim gets revenge against the initial perpetrators, who are thus rendered “evil”. Such is the standard narrative of violence offered in mainstream cinema. Arguably, this facile moral binary is allowed as logic within “a certain American cinema” precisely because the consequences of violence are excised from commercial products. Despite the ‘realistic’ depiction of acts of violence, as a phenomenon of the human condition violence is depicted as a readily contained and understandable phenomenon, rather than the incoherent and often uncontrollable outbreak of random impulses and necessities which characterise the reality of violence. Haneke subverts the narrative by once again addressing the spectator directly, as the remaining killer uses a home theatre remote control to ‘rewind’ the scene and play it back again to avoid the death of his fellow murderer.

While spectators may enjoy the convenience and marketability of formulaic narrative closure, in the interviews quoted above Haneke is explicit in condemning mainstream cinema for its depictions of the moment of violence in the manner of a spectacle while ignoring a realistic depiction of the consequences of violence. The elision of violence in Funny Games is a key aesthetic decision, and can ultimately be seen as commentary on the 21st-century viewing subject, who thanks to the proliferation of consumer video production equipment has seen and normalised almost everything. With an understated nod and a wink, Haneke is positioning the viewer to want simultaneously to inhabit the privileged lives on display and thus become the victims of the horrors experienced throughout the film.







Works Cited

Badley, Linda. Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic. London: Greenwood, 1995.

Carroll, Noel. The Nature of Horror. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 46:1, 1987. 51-59

Clover, Carol. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, USA: Princeton UP, 1992.

De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkely: University of California Press, 1984.

Derry, Charles. Dark Dreams 2.0: A Psychological History of the Modern Horror Film From the 1950s to the 21st Century. London: McFarland & Co, 2009.

Gunning, Tom. The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde. Film and Theory. Eds. Robert Stam & Toby Miller. NY: Blackwell, 2000. 229-235.

Hawkins, Joan. Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Nayman, Adam. Michael Haneke’s Funny Games. Eyeweekly. March 12, 2008

Pinedo, Isabel. Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing. NY: SUNY, 1997.

Rancière, Jacques. Film Fables. NY: Berg, 2006.

Sconce, Jeffrey. Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics. Durham: Duke UP, 2007.

Williams, Linda. Power, Pleasure, and Perversion: Sadomasochistic Film Pornography. Representations. 27, 1989. 37-65

Notes

1.   What Is Cinema, p. 38, as quoted in Jacques Rancière, Film Fables p. 107.

2.   As quoted in the press release for the 2007 version of the film.

3.   Interview with Adam Nayman published in the March 12, 2008 edition of Toronto’s Eyeweekly.

4.   Linda Williams explores this point in detail in “Power, Pleasure, and Perversion” (1989).

5.   For example, Joan Hawkins concludes Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde with       the suggestion that the horror genre functions primarily as a bodily experience related to                                 transgressive imagery and a concept of bodily “excess”. For Hawkins, film production and                             consumption exists as a circular continuum of cultural reinforcement and transgression. See also                     Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics, edited by Jeffrey Sconce.

6.  The best and most often-quoted example is the murder of Janet Leigh’s character in Psycho. At no                 point during the murder is a knife shown penetrating the skin. Rather, the act of murder of implied in               the viewer’s mind by means of rapid cross-cutting between the danger of the knife and the safety of the         body.

7.   Here we can think of the classic examples where a moment of suspense is broken by an audio-visual             event rendered spectacle, such as an animal startling a character onscreen, or when a previously                   hidden danger is suddenly and forcefully rendered visible.

8.  The ‘cinema of attractions’ functions akin to the games and experiences found at carnivals and fairs,              where spectators first encountered early cinema. For an elaboration of this concept, see Gunning, The           Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde (1986).

9.  See, for example, Isabel Pinado Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film;            Carol Cleaver, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film.

10. It should be here noted that such displays are no longer limited to horror cinema, as ‘tableaux of                   death’ are increasingly prevalent in Hollywood action and dramatic films.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Disaster is the New Normal



Earth Day came and went this year with little fanfare. Token stories about turning off the lights and cycling to work made their usual rounds in the news media. The 24-hour news networks sent camera crews to schools to watch children sing and make paper signs demonstrating the need for everyone to recycle things like paper. As always, nothing really changes for most people. Just the passing of another single day devoted to all things Earth-friendly – whatever that means – during which the penitent ritually cleanse their sins from the rest of the year. And then at some point in the late morning, news broke about a massive oil spill happening in the Gulf of Mexico.

British Petroleum, the company which “owns” the oil well, reports that 5,000 barrels of oil per day are spilling into the ocean, while independent experts have calculated a rate of flow as high as five to ten times that amount. For the past three weeks, we have all watched as the circus shitshow of BP’s improvised attempts to stop the flow of oil into the Gulf have failed. Their latest effort – a tube which has successfully diverted some of the oil to ships at the surface – is clearly intended to recover oil in order to bring it to market, rather than actually stop the flow of oil into the Gulf.

Meanwhile, efforts to mitigate the environmental disaster have centred upon not allowing the oil to reach the Louisiana and Florida shorelines. The logic in play revolves around the fact that the oil which stays underwater will not threaten anyone’s opinion on BP, offshore drilling, or oil use in general. Nevermind that the real environmental damage occurs under the surface of the water, as the marine ecosystem in the Gulf collapses due to contamination. Or that the Gulf of Mexico is connected to every other oceanic body, to which the oil could spread. In the age of the televisual out of sight is, of course, out of mind.

While many among the talking heads on television enjoyed their own hyperbole about this event having the potential to be the single worst environmental disaster in the history of the United States, the reality is that the Earth has been bleeding like this for decades. The BP oil spill is merely a singularity which makes visible a much larger field of gravity.



Certainly, there are many legitimate concerns about how the spill happened. It is true that the oil industry was able to lobby American lawmakers to the point where lax regulations and an “industry knows best” mentality removed some safety protocols which may have averted or mediated the spill. However, pointing fingers at the companies who successfully sell their products to consumers who want them is misguided. We North Americans are absurdly inefficient in our use of energy. It is our desire for an abundant supply of oil which convinced BP and other oil companies of the benefits of offshore drilling. We must now understand that the blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico are being discoloured by our inability to reduce oil use when alternatives to fossil fuels are increasingly presenting themselves.

In this capacity, it is we who are spilling the oil into the gulf, and we don’t stop there. As an aggregate dynamic, oil consumption is a process of continual spillage. We spill the remnants of oil into the atmosphere after it has been burned for energy, and we spill oil into the landfill after it has been transformed into plastics. The fact that such “spills” are relatively small in terms of each individual allows each of us to justify our mutual environmental disaster as the “normal way of doing things”.

As we get used to an increasing number of wide-scale environmental disasters, the rather ominous prospect arises that we have come to accept disaster as the new normal. In the wake of continual news about environmental damage around the globe, one might say that the BP spill is just another oil spill. Once the spill has been “contained” – an absurd impossibility – we will move on with our days, go for a drive, and buy another soda.

We must understand that humanity now functions as blind gods on Earth. Ours is the Anthropocene era. Our desires produce change which affects the entire planet, and we are engaging in this change without any idea of the consequences. The first conscious change we need to make is rhetorical. Whenever people talk about environmental issues, the phrase “saving the planet” comes up. The problem with this phrase is that it abdicates us from our responsibilities. Most people do not view themselves as heroes who “save” things, but as normal people living normal lives. They ask themselves How can one person make a difference? and so they don’t attempt to change their lifestyle much. Instead of “saving the planet”, we need to strive to “not wreck the planet”. Such a phrase might then allow a person who chooses to drive four blocks to the corner store to view this action in terms of wrecking the planet instead of not saving it.



There is one hope which must be retained, no matter how remote and complicated the scenario presents. Several years ago, BP adopted “Beyond Petroleum” as a new motto for the new millennium. Perhaps after a few more months of oil contaminating the waters which sustain life on this planet, human civilisation will finally understand the sublime and graceful logic of these two simple words.