Speed Racer, by the way, is one of those movies that I didn't much enjoy while I was watching it -- although I didn't hate it and can think of a few would-be blockbusters from this year alone that are far worse -- but I'm surprised by how much it has given me to write and think about afterward.

Thanks for heightening my awareness of the Carriage Trade screening with this post, Rob. It was really something. It overall looked and felt like a cross between a James Benning film, Looking For Mushrooms, a collection of National Geographic magazines, a Vertov film, the home movies of some great Beat poet with a cinematic eye, and Fata Morgana.

I love the possibility of the Wachowskis alluding to Muybridge. A couple of years ago I wrote in the pages of Paste about an ah-ha moment in a documentary about Muybridge that brings to mind another of the Wachowskis' films, The Matrix.

About the ending: Walter does seem to have a certain kind of determination as he walks through that station, but it's a mixed bag, which mirrors the opening. At the start, Walter is trying to play the piano, and we gradually learn that he's a widower, that his wife was a pianist, so it's not entirely clear if he's seeking something new or trying to hold onto something he's lost. He may not know himself. And the same is true at the end, where he once again finds himself estranged from loved ones, and although he has learned the drum better than he learned the piano, and although his new friends are alive, somewhere on earth, it's a lonely kind of comfort. He learned about himself, but the fruits of his discovery -- new relationships, new friends -- have been lost. As you wonder, how will he use what he's learned?

I don't think McCarthy sees Walter's moment in the station as anything but a faint echo of what was and what could have been, despite the change in Walter himself. It's interesting that your audience cheered. I don't believe mine did (a small press screening at Sundance, for what that's worth), but I can see how someone might prefer to squeeze the movie into that kind of pattern. I think it's more complicated than that, which I guess helps me accept some of the areas that are, admittedly, too simple.

BTW, J. Robert Parks and I revisit the film (with his fresh thoughts, and a brief conversation with the McCarthy) on the next episode of our podcast.

I was bothered by the ending when I saw it in the theater... well no, not by the ending, but by the fact that the audience cheered. They received that scene in the station (what is it with McCarthy and "station agents"?) as if it were some kind of uplift.

I didn't cheer. I was disheartened. Sure, Walter has grown in his understanding, but it's like that verse in Ecclesiastes: With increasing wisdom comes increasing pain.

How will Walter go on with what he's learned? He's caught a vision of the decline of his nation, and become aware of his own near-impotence. The powers that be are sealed away behind impenetrable walls. Families are torn apart. In the name of fear, people who are guilty of the crime of hope are punished as if they were terrorists. It was the perfect place to end the film, but it is also being misunderstood, I think, as audiences see what they want to see, but not what's really there.

FWIW, I liked this film much, much more than About Schmidt. Payne's sarcasm and condescension to his characters seemed unfair to me; it felt like a very mean-spirited Coen Brothers film. (And speaking of misunderstood endings, some found that conclusion uplifting, but it seemed deeply cynical to me.) McCarthy's lens is more compassionate. He doesn't exaggerate his character's flaws. If anything, he idealizes them too much. My gripe with The Visitor is the way that Tarek and his mother just glow, a little too appealing and perfect. But I'd rather see characters who are too attractive than characters who are distorted and scorned for their flaws.

And I'm glad to see that you've written some thoughts at Screenville.

What I see in this American family is stock characters who react in concordance with what we expect them to do, albeit in a less heroic, more realistic, fashion than in this genre of thriller. So the fact they are wasted is not really a statement on American society (like Lars von Trier would do) but it's just playing around with disposable characters just like in teen horror movies.
That American critics read a "deserved death" in this movies tells more about their Freudian slip : a paranoid guilt to be examined by "anti-Americanism". And I don't think it was Haneke's point at all.

I wish I had a more comprehensive knowledge of teen movies, because I don't watch many of these. But I don't think Funny Games is entirely incompatible with the teen "senseless killing" movie format.

I agree that it's not Haneke's top priority to seek "entertainment". And he denies it many times, which is part of the fun that teens may enjoy too. Not the average multiplex audience, but some adventurous horror fans who are not bored by a psychological thriller with a few twists. We are still in mainstream waters (even if it's a grey area as you say) that could be bankable, even if obviously it will never be a consensual blockbuster (which was not Haneke's goal).

Un Chien Andalou and Wavelength are in a whole different league. Elephant's narration is way more understated than Funny Games (which is criticized for being too self-conscious of its own narrative drive!) I continue to see Funny Games as an "indie" teen flick more than a theoretical lecture.

I don't know how Man Bites Dog fared in the USA, but it was quite a cult movie in France, and it's anything but morally correct, consensual and satisfying. The Blair Witch Project (although a different genre) also denies explanations and cheats the audience, definitely in the margin of the genre codes, and it worked as a cult teen movie. So why critics are shocked by something that teens embrace even when it's unconventional.
I'm not a naive teen, but I don't think the moral police should judge the stock situations and the violence used in Funny Games any more severely than a (good) teen horror movie wasting disposable characters from beginning to end (without character development and/or Hitchcockian twists).

I thought the bookend finish was a cool ending for a thriller (again I wish I could cite other teen movies with such device but I'm sure there are many). This is not Zodiac, it's not a real story. The drama is almost as artificial as in a comic book. The movie doesn't make the apology of serial-killer rampage on bourgeois helpless families... its premise is as absurd as a Stephen King movie, or Halloween. The Scream series was as much a post-modern self-referential caricature of the genre as Funny Games is, in the low-brow range though.

Haneke tells us something about genre storytelling. Part of the statement is to question our irrational empathy with certain onscreen characters (those identified as "goodies", but the life of "villains" is worthless of course and killing becomes OK!). For obscure reasons, critics never wonder if the stock characters deserved to be slaughtered by serial killers in regular teen flicks. But in a Haneke film suddenly it matters...

Like you I take AO Scott's remark as sarcasm, but his cleverness misses the point in so many ways.

Has the cinema screen ever bled a more
Perfectly constructed metaphor?
Since George Bush was a boy
Just like Daniel Autiel
He knows what the kid cut the cock's head off for.

I don't think Haneke necessarily wants the film to be conventionally entertaining, necessarily, and that's the complaint of most detractors. Let's take these people one at a time:

I think one requirement for a film to be popular with teens is to have a "rousing" conclusion, i.e. to go over the top with a certain momentum, shock, adrenaline, emotion, surprise, etc. It doesn't have to be morally correct, in fact maybe it's better if it isn't (e.g. There's Something About Mary). You can sense sometimes when an audience that's expecting/wanting a conclusion like this feels cheated when a film doesn't deliver. (I remember seeing Eyes Wide Shut with a multiplex audience on opening weekend, and they were clearly not expecting a weird art film.) These are gray areas of course, but I think Funny Games is not rousing enough to work as a teen cult film like you describe, but I could be wrong. (Similarly, some people who enjoyed Caché as a Hithcockian thriller were disappointed in the inconclusive -- or at least muted -- ending.)

Like those teens, Jim Emerson expects the film to be conventionally entertaining even though he recognizes it as an essay. Hoberman does too, but he more fairly compares the film to "those aggressive modern works designed to affront the audience" such as Un Chien Andalou, and he concedes that the film "is not without a certain artistry," but he wants it to be "pithy, inventive, and comic." I'm not sure the multiplex audience would take to Un Chien Andalou any better than Funny Games, but Hoberman does.

I actually agree with him to a degree. I like Caché and even Benny's Video more than Funny Games for the very reason that they seem to give me more to think about as I'm watching. But I do find the existence of the remake fascinating anyway. (And my first experience with Funny Games was in a world where both versions exist, so that helps me by giving me more to think about -- the loop, the repetition, the audacity. I'm not sure what I'd have thought if I'd seen the first one when it came out.) As I said in the podcast, I like the creation of this chain more than I like any of the individual links.

I think AO Scott's remark about a sequel might be sarcasm; he might be making fun of the American market's love of sequels. If that's not what he's doing, then I don't understand his remark and don't know why he's giving advice on how to make money in America.

Lee seems to be misreading the film by demanding that Haneke explain the source of the violence. That's exactly what Haneke is saying is wrong with what we expect from movies. The two young men disingenuously give several reasons for their behavior, and Lee believes this is Haneke saying the reasons don't matter. But of course the film is not about violence, it's about the depiction of violence in film. More specifically, it's about the kinds of violence that we accept and even enjoy in film. If the violent acts can be explained simply, we're more comfortable with them, even if such explanations are reductive in the extreme. We require very little, he seems to point out, to rationalize the violence in film. He denies us that explanation the way he denies us the violence through clever editing.

Similarly, the logic of the perpetrators is perversely precise: you hit us first, you wouldn't let my brother take a look at your leg, your dog made me drop the eggs, etc. Explanations that seem to align with the feeble moral code that we expect from violent movies. Or, it's OK for the mother to shoot the perpetrator with a shotgun -- we get a rush from the sudden action, finally the film is moving, yeah! woo hoo! We don't need much persuasion to accept it. (In Hollywood, if someone's kid is abducted, we fully expect the father to go on a rampage to get his family back. His moral outrage is justified in the world of the film. Perhaps I should see The Searchers.)

Even Hitchcock followed the rules of entertainment: why does Norman Bates do what he does? The guy's a psycho. Done.

Haneke's denial of simple explanations -- while supplying logic that seems to follow the letter of the Hollywood law -- is similar to what Van Sant does in Elephant, refusing simple explanations for school shootings, almost teasing us by showing the factors that are bandied about in the press (video games, absent parents, bullies) but committing to none of them.

Some of the critics you're linking to are just bristling at being lectured to instead of being entertained. This provokes a certain kind of anger that a merely boring movie doesn't. It makes Scott call Haneke a "fraud." Funny Games is not necessarily a fun time, but it's no less watchable than Michael Snow's Wavelength, another film that works on a theoretical level, as an idea, arguably better than it does as an experience in a theater.

Well maybe I assumed too much from what critics didn't spell out clearly. But when they suggest that the victims "deserved" their fate, I understand the happy ending denouement (the punishment of criminals by death) is missing in the film to wash out the guilt of enjoying the horror. Aren't they overanalyzing in assuming that Haneke meant that this helpless family deserved to die??? It's a treatise on MOVIE genre viewership, rather than on the evilness of the actual American bourgeoisie...

AO Scott would have prefered a "sequel" to a remake! Doesn't he need a new ending after the ending?

Hiram Lee (WSWS): "Viewers looking towards either version of the work for insight into violence in entertainment will be left very much in the dark."

Jim Emerson : "Haneke's essay fails because he hasn't a clue about what makes American movies tick. "Funny Games" doesn't seduce you with conventional storytelling and character development and then turn them around on you -- like, say, Alfred Hitchcock's 'Rear Window' and 'Psycho.'"

Jim Hoberman: "But for all the laughs it pretends to laugh, Haneke's movie is essentially founded on the programmatic denial of catharsis. (...) As a strict exponent of unpleasure, however, Haneke will permit none of the narrative thrills the Coens provide in their funny games. (...) Are you getting bored? Isn't it about time for something to happen? Do you want to see the worm turn? Or simply wish the movie would end? Professional obligations required that I endure it, but there's no reason why you should."

Isn't Funny Games typically the format to appeal to teens? Its intellectual subtext and the social criticism is subtle enough not to rebuke the populist audience. This kind of thriller could become a cult movie just like Cube, Identity, Phone Booth or Ringu... The only down side for horror movies lovers is the absence of onscreen graphic violence and sexy nudity.

I agree with you about the inherent absurdity of Haneke "needing" to do an entire remake of the film just to get it to a slightly larger portion of the American audience. That's what I was getting at by saying that it was a cynical comment on the industry.

Sometimes the problem seems to be the low expectations of the studios and distributors. Caché, for example, grossed quite a bit more in the US than the Funny Games remake has so far, and it's in French. (Of course, box office receipts don't prove much, but that's what the studios are after.)

Another radio podcast (for French lovers only) when Jean-Marc Lalanne (Inrocks), who has an interesting theory on this film: Hanake has borrowed Michael Pitt (Last Days), the prayer (Elephant?) and the self-remake (Psycho) to Gus Van Sant because Elephant outplayed what Benny's video originally did with teen violence and video.

I think that the key difference is that Haneke operates as a scientist, not as a humanist (although one is not mutually exclusive of the other) when he makes a film.... Another one in this filmmaking vein is Shohei Imamura; they both have a very clinical view of society as an organism, and their approach is a variation of scientific method: introduce a catalyst -> observe the organism’s behavior to the catalyst -> record results.

In this sense, their humanity can be seen indirectly in their choices of catalysts, but intrinsically, their modus operandi would be completely different if they were operating from a humanist framework where the exposure of the injustice would be the “point” of the film, rather than a social anthropologist where showing the reaction to the injustice is the point.

It would be interesting to compare the reactions of audiences for whom both German and English are unfamiliar. The screenings in France probably don't count since so many people understand English.

I'll have to see what I can pick up from that interview. Thanks for the link. His films always seem confident, but I'm surprised how confident Benny's Video, his first theatrical feature, is. I didn't have a chance to mention the "pyramid scheme" motif in that movie; the violent acts are spread across people (the family members) like the monetary losses in a pyramid scheme, making them more palatable. It's also like Serge Daney's comments about authorship being shared across multiple image makers (I got Daney's sports arena analogy from Serge Daney: Journey of a Cine-Son -- although my memory could be hazy on the details).

For posterity, here's that final bit:

... In Funny Games, Haneke seems content to ram his thumbs into our eyes and then ask us why we were foolish enough to get within arm's length of his gray, grizzled visage.

Fool us once, Mr. Haneke.

But adding to the perverse effect of a film that's already structured as a loop is this: Funny Games is a remake of Haneke's own film from 1997. And although I've yet to subject myself to the original, by all accounts the two films are so similar that the remake is nearly a duplicate, with the minor variation of new actors speaking a different language. In that sense, Haneke has let his keen sense of negative space expand beyond the bounds of the film. With an impish streak worthy of Yves Klein, he has resold a ten-year old film to America by simply deleting the distracting subtitles and putting faces we recognize into his diorama of malevolence. You could read that act alone as a cynical comment on the industry, but more broadly he provokes the question of why the film remains relevant, or why it is perhaps America's turn for these funny games, which should be obvious. It's important to note that all but one of the violent acts in the film take place off-screen, just barely, and I suspect he made that decision not to cater to the dictates of good taste but to seal off that particular corridor of base enjoyment. Haneke the scientist is often Haneke the visiting lecturer.

And above all, if any and every reaction or justification is already built in, and to go anywhere near Funny Games is to throw oneself into a kind of critical deadlock, well, there you go.

He concludes that the film "may well be a fine piece of conceptual art, but one that works just as well or even better in theory."

Indeed. He also mentions reservations with the acting, which is an approach that I can't really take, having seen them in reverse, that is, having seen the second one with knowledge of but no experience with the first one. As I mentioned in the podcast, though, I love the use, in the original, of actors from Benny's Video.

After my discussions with J. Robert, I found the interview (link above) in which Haneke raises the topic of using actors from Benny's Video and says that viewers can take that as they wish. And he smiles.

In fact he smiles a lot more than I expected him to. I figured he'd be scowling and punching his finger into the interviewer's sternum.

Also in the interview, he points out that the family in Funny Games is thwarted more than once by their own security systems.

Deception, on the other hand, assumes that all we care about is a plot that Kubrick preferred to leave murky, filtered through the psychology of his character. Deception's characters have no psychology.

And this analogy is probably too hard on 2010, against which Deception pales.