Every artist, author and film-maker wants to engage his audience. The purpose may be to enchant, impress, charm, flatter, persuade, amuse, uplift, upset, unhinge, shock or torture the audience.
Michael Haneke is an Austrian film-maker whose most recent film, The White Ribbon, last year won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and best-film and best-director prizes at European film festivals. Set in a village in rural northern Germany in 1913, with World War I looming on the horizon – to quote from a review in Salon – “it captures a mood of thickening tension and mounting violence as a series of brutal but apparently unrelated events – vandalism, fires, accidents and abductions – turn the people of the village against each other and shatter what remains of a fragile social consensus.”
The film was designed to examine the roots of fascism.
“The question that I’m asking,” Haneke explained in an interview, “is ‘what conditions have to be in place for people to seek to grasp such ideological responses? In a position of hopelessness, humiliation and despair, people clutch at any straw, and those straws usually take an ideological form, whether religious or political. Out of hopelessness, they turn to ideology – the model is always the same, although the external forms may be different.’”
It is evident that Haneke is a deeply serious thinker.
One wonders, therefore, what his purpose was in making the blood-curdling film Funny Games, first in German in 1998, then ten years later in English. A happy upper-class family – husband, wife and a son of ten – is imprisoned in their idyllic lakeside summer home by a couple of well-mannered killers. The audience is invited to watch as they slowly humiliate, force to play degrading “funny” games, torture and finally kill each of them. The film is so superbly made that the audience is mesmerized, totally absorbed, paralyzed by the excruciating horror. Hopes are raised and dashed. The German title is Alptraum – nightmare.
In his production notes, Haneke discusses the “dissolving line between real existence and representation” in movies and television, “the oscillation between the disconcerting feeling of taking part in a real happening and the emotional security of seeing only the depiction of an artificially created or even discovered reality.”
It is consistent that on at least two occasions one of the killers winks at the audience, addressing it directly, in a variation of a Brechtian technique.
The two killers are totally evil. They have no motive. They have no redeeming quality.
The inescapable question is whether audiences need to be tortured to be reminded of the existence of evil.
This is the conclusion of Stephen Nolden’s review in The New York Times of March 11, 1998: “Posing as a moralistic challenging work of art, the movie is really an act of cinematic sadism.”
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
“In a position of hopelessness, humiliation and despair, people clutch…” I guess humiliation is key — I’m not sure that people beaten down by despair and hopelessness are quite as likely to grasp at ideological straws. (I’m thinking, given this week’s events, of victims of natural disasters.)
No doubt Haneke was thinking of the conditions which made the Nazis possible.
I know that some people go in for this horror. I do not think that has any connection with fascism. But I am aware of a lot of sadism in our world. Let us not contribute to it.
And Goethe wrote about the Lisbon earthquake in Dichtung und Wahrheit.
Amazing that you should remember that. I did, too, of course, but after all I wrote a book about Goethe. He was only one year old at the time of the earthquake.
Sorry – I was wrong again. Goethe was six.