Why we shouldn't listen to artists talk about their work--Funny Games

This movie has been getting bad reviews.

From A.O. Scott:
His is an especially pure and perverse kind of cinematic sadism, the kind that seeks to stop us from taking pleasure in our own masochism. We will endure the pain he inflicts for our own good, and feel bad about it in the bargain.

[Haneke's] ideas are often facile encapsulations of chic conventional wisdom.

[You, the viewer, are meant to] congratulate yourself for having purchased a dose of Mr. Haneke’s contempt

My favorite blurb comes from the NY Post:
Basically torture porn every bit as manipulative and reprehensible as Hostel, even if it's tricked out with intellectual pretension.

Now, Michael Haneke strikes me as the sort of asshole who would welcome bad reviews. "That's exactly the effect I was looking for!"-- and would delight in bad reviews from America, and would take a bubble bath in bad reviews from the NY Post. But, as one gets older, one gets tired of assholes of this particular species. But A.O. Scott has Haneke right on the money: he's not that smart. Nothing could be further from the truth than the NY Post, which could have been written as a parody of how to misunderstand this film. But equally off-mark is Haneke himself, with his spoutings about the viewer's "complicity" in the violence. This, of course, from someone who makes a shot by shot remake of his OWN movie...

The problem: this film is not WORTH misunderstanding or "intellectually" defending. A.O. Scott is right to conclude that Haneke has better movies than this, but I have to stick up for Funny Games on a movie-going level. We should bracket as inane the ethical questions of "desensitization to violence" that reviewers have focused on, and which Haneke childishly has participated in.

Evidently the new prequel to the Silence of the Lambs committed the ultimate blunder of explaining Hannibal Lector's evil, through some childhood trauma, Nazis, etc. Funny Games, though a remake of a 10-year-old film, is still ahead of the curve in this respect. Everyone will have remarked on this. What should also be noted, though, is that the bourgeois family is equally unpsychologized. A film like The Ref (yes, the Dennis Leary film) knows that, dramatically, an intruder into the family environment naturally brings out the divisions (Oedipal or otherwise) hidden under the placid surface. C.f. also Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and, evidently, the Japanese film Visitor Q.

Funny Games shows no interest in family dynamics. I hypothesize that Haneke threw away this immense dramatic possibility (characters turning against one another, relishing the punishment of their spouse, using the child against the other parent, etc) for a reason. He completely leaves aside the question of whether these people "deserve" their fate, and really is not that interested in how they (psychologically) "respond" to their situation. If Haneke's film earns the boring and cliched descriptor "clinical," it is unclear what kind of clinic it would be--i.e., what is the subject of our observation?

If the film were *truly* a test wherein the audience were "dared" to find sadism interesting, my response would be, it's a rigged game. The only funny and charming characters are the torturers. And without them, there would quite literally be no movie. The film is insufferably boring (read: brilliantly directed) when they are off-screen. To desire more torture is our only hope for a rescue from the non-dynamics of the Watt-Roth dialogue.

Oops, I said I wasn't going to intellectualize this. So, yes, on a movie-going level, the film delivers. It is well-known (from Paradise Lost) that we prefer "bad" characters to good, and Funny Games gives us great and inventive entertainment along these lines. Generically, it is interesting: is it a black comedy? And overall, fewer people die in this film than in The Ladykillers, and none of the violence is onscreen, so I don't see what the fuss is about. A smart movie? In a limited way, and as regards its limits, yes. "Torture porn?" Certainly not. Worth seeing for some great direction, snappy dialogue, and good acting? Well, that answers itself.