Funny Games (1998)

RATING:	80%
FORMAT:	DVD

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A crime that provides solace for one’s existential angst is a game that can only be played with others. This movie plays with its characters as much as with the audience. We are all required to play and implicated in a betting game: Can most of the characters survive until the following morning.

The survival chances of the White, middle-class characters - which we are supposed to side with - is limited because of a view of life that offers them meagre survival skills: They are seen as more spoilt and depraved than their tormentors. The Brechtian emotional distancing of this drama pokes fun at its own mise en scène as well as an audience that demands violence while claiming to be decent, law-abiding and condemnatory of violence.

Our belief that everyone should be like us is undermined when it becomes clear both that we are no better than others and that we do not wish to face the fact. The movie satirizes the White middle-class obsession with focusing one’s energies on self-control and assuming one’s destiny is within one’s own control. Yet, these can be in conflict - as shown here - because they produce inflexibility in the face of change. The film leaves too much to the imagination of the audience to be completely compelling or convincing.

It is hard to empathize with a couple too complacently unable and unwilling to do something as simple as protect hearth, home and life. Not playing the game would have solved this problem but the unwillingness to act preventively rather than curatively decreases ones survival chances. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure is a metaphor for practically everything, so that this film can only be a treatise on screen violence as well as on the value of high intelligence - the latter being the only tool that can hope to defeat those intellectuals who chose mental illness and crime.

Meaningless serial murders are a peculiar feature of White culture and reflect personal anomie and cultural alienation: The kind that sponsors a film like this and gives it credibility. To ask before the event the question "Why?" makes sense; but to ask it during and afterwards is a sign of personal impotence and is in no way a substitute for not asking before. It is akin to the crying over spilled milk that occurred after 9/11.

Copyright © 2011 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.