Violence in American cinema is about to get its butt kicked. It’s about to get tied up, shot, stabbed, hung from its feet and flayed alive.
Turnabout is fair play.
“Funny Games,” opening Friday, intends to revoke the free pass Hollywood has given cinematic violence for so many years by forcing the audience – numb to celluloid atrocities after so many viewings of “Rambo,” “Hostel” and other mainstream flicks – to absorb for the first time the impact of onscreen violence.
No one will walk out of this movie casually asking their friend if they liked it or not. “Liked it” doesn’t get within 1,000 miles of it.
The goal is to make viewers suffer by showing the reality of violence – that it has consequences to real people.
Or real enough people: In this case, married yuppies Naomi Watts and Tim Roth who, along with their young son, are taken hostage inside their vacation home by two preppy psychos (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet).
“I tried to put the reality back into violence and not use violence as a consumer article,” says German writer-
director Michael Haneke.
This “Funny Games” is actually a remake of Haneke’s 1997 original, and the director decided an English version was in order for one simple reason:
“It was because this film is against violence in movies, and violence in movies has its biggest audience in the English-speaking world,” Haneke says. “Because the original ‘Funny Games’ was in German, it didn’t reach that audience. The film will now reach the audience for which it was originally intended.”
And that audience is us, the American consumers who make “Saw 6” possible.
In fact, Haneke directly indicts the audience by having one of the killers speak a few asides to viewers at certain points during the film.
“By breaking this fourth wall, you make it clear to the audience how much the audience is an accomplice to the violence,” says Haneke, who also made 2005’s “Cache.” “For example, take ‘Apocalypse Now.’ You have that famous helicopter scene where we’re sitting in the helicopter and shooting the Vietnamese. And all this is accompanied by Wagner’s ‘Ride of Valkyries.’ In that, we’re removed. We don’t feel as though we are committing this violence against these people. My film is directed against this so-called innocent complicity. You cannot claim as the audience that you are not an accomplice to the violence. By consuming the violence, I am becoming an accomplice to the violence.”
“Funny Games” isn’t graphic – almost all the violence happens off-screen. Its impact is intended to be emotional. One quiet scene involving a golf ball will likely inspire more anxiety in viewers than watching Sylvester Stallone mow down an entire brigade.
And that’s just the way Haneke wants it.