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FUNNY GAMES

I pretty much agree with your last post, Matt, on the subject of genre. It's so fluid and hard to nail down that its usefulness is very limited. Not only are there many, many movies (and TV shows, books, songs, etc.) that contain elements "belonging" to more than one genre, but movies categorized within the same genre are often very different (I mean, the genre of "comedy" includes both Dr. Strangelove and Ace Ventura, for goodness sake). Genre isn't meaningful in itself, but only in terms of its effects on an audience through the expectations it raises.

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ABANDON ALL HOPE OF AVOIDING SPOILERS, YE WHO ENTER HERE!

Ahem.

Now, there are countless examples of films that toy with those audience expectations in order to get certain reactions. For example, Psycho (trailer) starts out as a fairly standard Hitchcockian thriller about a young woman on the run after stealing from her boss; then, forty minutes or so in, she's brutally stabbed to death in the shower by—we eventually find out—a psychotic wearing his dead mother's clothes. We think we know what kind of movie we're getting, but then the rug is pulled out from under us; we don't know what genre we're in, so we don't know what to expect, heightening the suspense all the more. Another good example is No Country for Old Men (trailer), where we think we're getting a straightfoward, though very well made, good-guy-running-from-the-bad-guy movie, until toward the end when the good guy's killed by some random other guys chasing him, his wife is murdered senselessly, and the bad guy just disappears. Only then do we realize that the whole time we've been watching a completely different movie, not one about Josh Brolin on the run from Javier Bardem, but one about Tommy Lee Jones coming to terms with a changing world.

A recent film that predicates itself on toying with its audience's expectations about genre is Funny Games (trailer). An upper-middle-class family—Mom, Dad, Junior, and Fido—arrive at their shoreside vacation home and soon meet two clean-cut, impeccably polite young men who, over the course of the movie's two-hour running time—it feels much longer—taunt, beat, humiliate, and finally murder them. The film comes on the heels of the recent spate of "torture porn" movies—a genre I'm glad to say I've for the most part been able to avoid—but is a virtual shot-for-shot remake of the 1997 Austrian original, by the same screenwriter and director, Michael Haneke. Many of the marks of torture porn are present—prolonged terror and suffering, the torturers' complete control over the situation, the victims' being utterly outmatched and helpless, and rules and "games" devised by the torturers.

However, Funny Games deviates from the genre as much as it adheres to it. One of the torturers directly speaks to the audience occasionally, noting their role as co-participants in what's happening on screen; at one point he even basically says, "What's the matter? This is what you came to see, isn't it?" The two young men give different, contradictory explanations for why they're doing this, mocking the audience's expectation for a motive or "origin"; they even jump back and forth between different names. Things we naturally interpret as foreshadowing turn out to be dead ends; we see a knife left on the family's sailboat early on, but when the mother tries to use it toward the end to cut the ropes around her wrists, one of the young men sees this and throws the knife overboard. (I guess it's like Chekhov's literary maxim that if a story features a gun it must eventually be fired, except the gun misfires and that's the end of it.) The torturers' control is taken to an absurd degree when the mother manages to shoot one of them dead; the other just uses a remote control to rewind the movie a couple minutes and stop her from getting the gun. Whereas the victims in such movies are often unsympathetic in some way—for instance, the "slut" and "druggie" cannon fodder of classic slasher movies—our family is uniformly loving and relatable, which heightens the audience's feelings of revulsion at what happens to them. And instead of some kind of payoff or resolution, the plucky young son is the first to die, the father remains crippled and impotent and is never given a chance for heroism, and the mother is finally tossed off the sailboat to drown, almost as an afterthought.

Funny Games departs from the horror/suspense beats as a way of pointing out the formulas according to which these genres operate. By doing so, it emphasizes our place in all this by forcing us to engage with and question what we're seeing and our taste, under different circumstances, for similar depictions of terror and violence. Though certainly not an enjoyable film, it's a very interesting one and one that well illustrates how the subversion of genre expectations can in fact be the most effective use of them.

An excellent look at some of these issues can be found at Alternate Takes, "Some Thoughts on Safety, Danger, Dreams and Genre-worlds."