Funny Games

Haneke’s films have frequently courted controversy over their apparent lack of morality and justice while the ethics of French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas remain somewhat of a quandary, due to the fact that they do not provide a specific set of rules for society to follow, and do not refer to empirical or corporeal events. Colin Davies has commented that in Levinas’s influential essay ‘Totality and Infinity’ the philosopher suggests it is important not to be able to recognise or relate to the Other, “to preserve the Other it must not become an object of knowledge or experience because knowledge is always my knowledge, experience always my experience, the object is encountered only in so far as it exists for me and immediately its alterity is diminished.” If you recognise characteristics, then you’re seeing similarities between the same and the Other thereby diminishing the Other’s alterity. One especially interesting aspect of Levinassian ethics is the idea that the demands of the Other are overbearing to the point of impossible. In ‘Funny Games’ this is clearly the case as we see the characters of Anna and her family placed in a horrific and untenable situation.

The ethics of Levinas suggest that it is the Other who dominates me. It is the Other who dominates my relationship with him. In ‘Funny Games’ the crux of the film revolves around Peter (Frank Giering) and Paul’s (Arno Frisch) relationship with Anna (Susanne Lothar) and her husband Georg (Ulrich Mühe), not the other way round. It is Peter and Paul who call the filmic shots. Anna and George are literally, figuratively, and physically dominated by the Other. Anna wants the two to leave. They do not leave because they have no wish to do so. They sexually humiliate Anna because they want to. They kill George because they can. Throughout the film her pleas and calls for mercy are entirely unheeded. Quite simply, if the events of the film conformed to the desires of Anna and George, the two ‘guests’ would have left, and the film would have ended within the first thirty minutes.

Levinas’s exploration of the self and Other leads to him deducing that there has to be an inability to truly comprehend the Other in order for the Other to retain its alterity. If the self were to recognise any mutual traits then the Other, would according to Levinas “dissolve into the same.” Hence, this relationship is one which the self can never truly grasp because the self cannot recognise the Other, let alone understand him and his actions. If we look at this in light of ‘Funny Games’, we can see that this clearly is the case. Anna and George cannot understand the behaviour of Peter and Paul. She quickly says, “I don’t know what game you’re playing but I won’t join in.” Yet that is exactly what she is later made to do, forced to join in a violent and emotionally draining game which she can neither understand nor win. Anna’s continual bewilderment is referred to throughout the film and at one point she implores, “You are still so young…you have your whole life ahead of you still.” Her thinking tells her they will be somehow punished and sent to prison thereby effectively ruining their lives. Her response is one of genuine terror but also perplexity.

The Other then has the ability to be supreme in its status. It is not hard to see the resonance of this comment to ‘Funny Games’ where Peter and Paul literally play God with the lives of Anna and her family and I think these ideas of irreducibility and infinity fit well with ideas of resistance to integration. One of the problems people have with Levinas’s ethics is that they do not seem like ethics at all to us; as stated earlier, they do not provide us with a proper code of behaviour or principles. It has been suggested by the writer Colin Davies that Levinasian ethics refuses the traditional Kantian move of establishing reason as the foundation of ethics because reason removes dialogue from the equation. Dialogue should in theory give us insight into the foundation of ethics. However, this does not ring true in the case of ‘Funny Games’. While there is plenty of dialogue within the film, the dialogue that emanates from the mouth of the Other does not help us to understand any of the circumstances that arise as the film goes on.

‘Funny Games’ also explores Levinasian ethics regarding the Other and responsibility. The Other is supposed to be welcomed with open arms and the self’s hospitality is supposed to be unwavering. Yet this is problematic by the way the Other is always demanding of the self and in this respect, the Other’s demands are never fulfilled. This is certainly the case in ‘Funny Games’, where from the offset demands are made on Anna. From the seemingly harmless request for eggs, to trying out the golf club, to her sexual degradation and eventually, being forced to play a game where she will help decide how she and her husband die; the requests are never ending and as the film goes on, prove to be harder and harder, both physically and mentally. Through her lack of physical power, she is forced to endure them and forced to be hospitable. The Other always wants more and more, much more than she can give and in ‘Funny Games’ the Other clearly does dominate, both physically and psychologically. Anna’s very existence depends upon the Other she has encountered, who she tries to persuade on numerous occasions to relent and let them go. In an essay entitled ‘Otherwise than Being’ Davies suggests that, “the dramatic quality of Levinas’s language (obsession, hostage, persecution,) foreshadows an uncompromising twist in his thinking.” All of these words are directly relevant to the events that occur during ‘Funny Games’, where the Peter-Paul’s dangerous and disturbing game eventually leads to the literal persecution of the family who do become hostages.

One of the more perplexing notions Levinas talks about is the substitution of the self for the Other which applies not only to the characters onscreen, but also, I think to the viewer at home. Davies paraphrases Levinas by saying, “although I am unique and irreplaceable, I am constituted by the Other, I can be called upon to replace the Other, to expiate the crimes of the Other.” I think this point has far greater resonance when looked at in response to spectatorship theories. When applying the quote to the characters within the film, it would mean that Anna has to expiate the crimes of the Other, perversely perhaps, through her own death. However, if we momentarily step away from the screen, the situation changes; by continuing to watch the screen events, we are effectively allowing the events to continue. If we turn the video off, then technically Anna and her family will not die. Yet we do not stop watching and unsettlingly then, we send them effectively, to their deaths. We then take the responsibility from the Other and it is our guilt and disgust at ourselves which expiates the Other of responsibility. Suddenly everything is our fault. Yet this idea does not stop here and can in fact be taken a step further, when you bring the presence of Haneke, as the filmmaker into the equation. When we recover from the shock of watching Paul rewind the tape, we can take cowardly comfort in the fact that Haneke is responsible for this. We may have unwittingly colluded with the Other up to now but here, Haneke takes full control. That is what I, as the viewer tell myself, except, unfortunately this is not so simple a case at all. Haneke is himself an Other, whose alterity means we are substituted once again, and once again the responsibility of the Other is shouldered by the self, that is, you and I. This also applies not just to Anna and her family, but once again to the audience. The audience are bound to take responsibility for Peter and Paul, their presence leaves us impotent and helpless to stop the events which unfold.

However, ‘Funny Games’ does at times contradict the ethics of Levinas which state that the self can, when necessary, claim justice for herself. Yet this is not what happens in Haneke’s films. The justice that Anna takes for herself and her family in ‘Funny Games’, the shooting of Peter, is taken away from her by the filmmaker allowing Paul to rewind the film and change the course of the filmic events. Her justice is taken away from her by another Other, the Other that is Haneke. Anne (Isabelle Huppert) in ‘Time of the Wolf’ (2003) is not even allowed any justice, even the fleeting kind that Anna of ‘Funny Games’ experiences. When Eva (Anaïs Demoustier) alerts Anne to the presence George’s killers at the camp, she is not allowed justice for herself, her family, or her dead husband. Irrespective of how much we vilify George’s killers, the filmic events do not satisfy this desire for revenge. In this respect, the film itself can be seen as an Other, creating within us a desire for justice for and punishment, yet it never gives us either.

Although the example above suggests there are exceptions, in many respects, ‘Funny Games’ does conform to Levinasian ethics regarding the self and the Other; it is clearly a very troubling and un-containable relationship. Anna’s relationship with Peter-Paul is dominated by them, it is the Other not the self who is in charge. The Other imposes upon her an exorbitant sense of responsibility and his demands will never be fulfilled. No matter what she does there is always more he asks of her. Anna is never truly able to comprehend the Other nor recognise him for what he really is (that would suggest a recognition which Levinas notes would reduce the alterity of the Other). Similarly, her freedom is completely limited by the Other and she is both figuratively and literally, persecuted and held hostage by that Other. Anna is forced to expiate the crimes of the Other and pay for that with her life. Levinas goes on to end ‘Metaphysics and Transcendence’ with the words, “when man truly approaches the Other, he is uprooted from history.” This is in effect a prophetic interpretation of ‘Funny Games’ and an apt point on which to end; the family are not only uprooted emotionally and physically through their being held prisoner, but in a far more profound manner with longer lasting effects; that is to say, through their eventual deaths.

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Country: Austria
Budget: £2,500,000
Length: 107mins

Bibliography:
Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Metaphysics and Transcendence’ in Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, TandI p42 (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969) Translated by Alphonso Lingis
Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Substitution’ in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981) pp99-129
Colin Davies, ‘Ethical Language: Otherwise than Being’ Ch 3 in Levinas, An Introduction by Colin Davies, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996) pp63-92
Colin Davies ‘Same and Other: Totality and Infinity’ Chapter 2 in Levinas, An Introduction by Colin Davies, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996) pp34-62
Simon Critchley, ‘What is the same? What is the Other?’ in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, An Introduction, ed. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) pp15-26
Adriaan Peperzak, ‘The One for the Other’ Ch 1 in The Other: An Introduction to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, (Indiana: Purdue University Press: 1993) pp 7-36
Andrea Sabbadini ‘Watching Voyeurs’ in Psychoanalysis and Film, ed. Glen O’Gabbard, (London: H,Karnac Books Ltd, 2001) Chapter 21

Filmography:
‘Time of the Wolf’, 2003, Michael Haneke, Bavaria Film

Pub/2009

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