When I heard there was going to be an U.S. remake of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, I rolled my eyeballs and said “Here we go again.” When I heard Haneke was going to be in the director’s chair, it made me think twice. Haneke is probably my favorite living director, and his interviews are just as interesting as his movies. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t spend a few moments thinking about something he has said.
For fans of this German filmmaker’s oeuvre, it’s a logical decision to bring his most scathing commentary on society’s thirst for violence to the American audience, who pour millions of dollars into revenge fantasies in the box office year after year. After all, cruelty is perfectly acceptable as long as it’s directed towards the bad guys.
In the reiteration of the original Funny Games, the title has taken on richer, more complex dimensions where the movie viewer is being toyed with. Haneke is certainly no stranger to these games, as his “actual money flushed down the toilet” scene in The Seventh Continent (1989) had audiences screaming and fainting in the cinemas. The setting of a well-to-do American family in a vacationing home – though identical to the original “Funny Games” set, now looks like page after page of a luxury designer label catalog. Think Ralph Lauren and the whole Gossip Girl fetish for the Hamptons.
Given Haneke’s enlightening theory of the 19th century tradition of storytelling (audience are manipulated to align absolute good vs absolute evil) anachronistically being kept on life support by Hollywood and escaping Jewish intellectuals during WWII, there’s echos of the whole upper-crust, old guard mystique being constantly resusitated in the fashion world by the likes of Karan, Lauren, and Calvin Klein.
Haneke often cites the works of Leni Riefenstahl during the Nazi regime as a cause for an innate distrust of cinematic manipulation as propaganda. In the simplistic Hollywood order, fair, blonde, blue-eyed (remember, the eyes are the gateway to one’s soul) tend to be the noble hero, and the dark shadowy figure the villain. Here I can’t help thinking of Quentin Crisp’s observation of the perpetual fascination the Jewish male has for the Teutonic goddess.
Happily, Haneke smashes all these systems in both his original and the remake of Funny Games.
Now let us all pray Ron Howard can take a hint and box up his rights to a remake of Haneke’s Caché and tuck it in some dusty storeroom next to the arc of the covenant.
