We Need To Talk About Kevin rarely lets loose on your discomfort as it follows the traumatized, horrified, and guilt-ridden state of a broken woman who has lost everything and relives the disturbing memories of what brought her to this. The film jumps back and forth through time frames, giving cryptic clues and symbolism of the disturbing events that occurred and how it brings out the most stunted and traumatizing expressions through Tilda Swinton’s incredible performance as the broken mother Eva.
Throughout the film, symbolism of Eva’s broken self and the disturbed son Kevin that she raised powerlessly is shown through shades of red, from the paint defaced on her white house to the jelly her son smears on his sandwich. The opening scene is a dreamy sequence of Eva being carried joyfully through a crowd covered in tomato juice, as a symbolism of being bathed in blood without knowing it’s blood and foreshadows how her ignorance and incompetence as a mother had disturbing setbacks for her and her family. She was powerless and inexperienced as a mothering type to prevent would happen and raised her son with a stillness and an impatience from infancy to adolescence, receiving cold and resentful eyes from Kevin, which suits the comparison to her emotionless and stunted relationship with him. The optimistic and loving nature of her husband Franklyn (John C. Reilly) towards Kevin leaves her feeling out of place with her son’s development and makes the development of the boy a very eccentric and frightening experience on screen. The minimalist look of the pale white, red, and blue colors that fill Eva’s surroundings in her home and work environment shows how emotionally absent she is as a happy and responsible woman. Whenever the film cuts to the present time, we see just how equally cold the people around her behave, as they eye at her with judgment and silence and sometimes intimidate her with words and force. The scene where she drives home at night past the hordes of trick-or-treaters with their masks looking at her brings the sense of being terrorized by juvenile play on the basis of how frightening her son behaved and of living in hellish damnation for her own faults as a mother. The scenes of blackness and red lights shining through her windows as she lays in isolation shows what a lonely and nightmarish reality she has come to live in. She is already living in Hell and she even admits to two Jehovah’s Witnesses that she’s going to Hell in the afterlife. The close-ups of washing her hands of red paint and sticking her head in bathtub water symbolizes the need of washing herself of her sins, which is also juxtaposed with the horrible deeds that Kevin committed and made him into a demonic reflection on her.
The twisted and maniacal expressions in Kevin’s eyes that are frighteningly conveyed by Ezra Miller and the cold domineering manner in which he talks to his mother makes him altogether a devilish figure who is confronting her on her failings of motherhood and the prediction of the misery she will be forced to live with. The ultimate evil deed he committed to bring his disturbed personality to the extreme is never officially revealed through the constant juxtapositions between the past and the present, which is helpful in building on the broken mind-set of Eva as she dreads remembering what happened, especially when she visits Kevin in prison and we still see a communication gap between them as they sit in the visiting room with silence. She is confronting the boy who conveyed her failure at parenting through his extreme acts of violence and perversion, which is a way of confronting the Devil and trying to admit her sins. When it’s finally revealed as to what Kevin did in the end that put him in prison, it apparently lifts a burden off her shoulders and she wants to make a reconciliation that will somehow brings her to peace.
What the future holds in store for Eva and Kevin is not clear, but the honesty of the emptiness they have conveyed throughout their lives becomes a cry for redemption and we can only hope that the mind will be put to rest with the confession of past mistakes and regrets. The film remains subtle and thought-provoking throughout its time to leave a disturbing window open for emotional trauma and psychological discussion, with no clear answer in sight of how different things could have turned out by Eva’s making or Kevin’s making. When it’s called We Need To Talk About Kevin, there’s something that needs to be talked about.
Thursday, April 5, 2012
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
FUNNY GAMES (Michael Haneke, 1997)
This disturbing and bleak portrait of a bourgeois family at the mercy of sadism shows Michael Haneke’s attempt to put the audience in the position of an innocent family in peril and show the real evil of youthful pleasure in violence against the defenseless. The two young tormentors who force a family to play their sadistic games of torture throughout the night at an isolated lake house have no logical or reasonable purpose for tormenting and killing people they find around the lake area, they look at the violence as though they’re playing a video game or watching a violent film. That fits in with Haneke’s view on the dangers of letting an audience get too excited by the violent content that has been in the media, in the fear that their pleasures in witnessing violence on screen arouses their sadistic mind-sets. Because the two killers look at the screen and comment right to the audience of how they want this night of torture for the family to run at feature-length, rather than kill them straight away, they play with our expectations of how a horror thriller should play out in the end. We see the family making several vain attempts to escape the house and get help, but the killers continue to overpower them and rob them of any defense. By the end, when the woman Anna grabs a gun and shoots one of the killers, the other one grabs a remote and rewinds these events back so that he can take control and kill the husband George instead. This shows how the killer is in complete control of the action that takes place and robs us the pleasure of seeing justice served to the horrible sadists, as a way of Haneke implying that an audience is complicit with the villains on screen whenever they revel in the violence of most films. So when we watch the poor helpless family killed cold-bloodily for amusement, we are left with disgust and horror about the whole situation that I’m sure hardly anyone can get so easily aroused by violence after this.
The thing is that the violence rarely comes off as graphic or visible because we usually hear sounds of pain and see brief glimpses of blood, which makes the scenes all the more uncomfortable as opposed to looking at explicit violence that can easily look delicious to the perverted at heart. There are long takes used to show the pain the family expresses in their faces, especially when the son George Jr is killed and we see one 10-minute take of the mother and father alone after the killers have supposedly left and we hear no sounds except the television. Slowly, the camera moves towards George as he lies on the floor, injured in his legs and Anna embraces him as they both break out in loud painful cries of sorrow over their son’s death. This long attention to the pain they feel in regards to this little boy’s wrongful death shows the real evil in taking pleasure out of death and making a family suffer in grief over it. The many long takes and quiet moments are what help build the tension because the lack of suspenseful music makes the film unpredictable in what will happen next and the empty quiet house could be full of danger. The real horror doesn’t come out in blood and gore as most slasher films would provide, but in psychological and emotional pain that is endured upon throughout the night of torture.
Since the house is set practically in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by trees, water, and fences, it becomes a character and looks like a prison for the family in their dire circumstances. Even though they thought it would be a cozy area to spend for the summer, that’s just the advantage the killers have to catch any vacationers like flies and allows them to approach people at their doors like friendly locals then turn nosy and crude. It makes the comfortable looking scene for the safe middle class civilians more frightening; whenever we live in any domestic setting, a serial killer would likely strike there. That makes the film more intimidating about the places where we feel safe and makes it look real, especially since there are no elaborate sets, it’s all low budget and fitting to make it a place that we all know. That is where the horror of murderous evil hits home and shows the likelihood of being caught unawares by people who appear normal. The normality that the two killers bring out in their mannerisms and expressions makes them very intimidating, as opposed to Hannibal Lecter with his chattering teeth or the Joker with his hideous clown make-up and cackle. These two boys look like the nicest people to encounter in high school and look handsome enough for women to be seduced by. The smirks that the main killer Paul makes at the camera makes him look both slick and evil to look charismatic but with a dark secret beneath it. The smile he gives as the little boy Georges Jr aims a rifle at him makes him look fearless about being shot by this kid because he’s smarter than this kid and will give him severe punishment for his resourcefulness. Because the family doesn’t survive and we’re left with the killers as the only people standing, it makes the killers very triumphant out of their cold confidence and Paul is left standing in the last shot, smiling again because he knows that the next family he has met will be no luckier than the last one. The loud punk music that plays over the ending credits as they appear over Paul’s evil face brings out the animalistic feel of music for an ending of mayhem because it’s full of screams that sound painful, appropriate for the tone that this evil kid has set for the whole film. It means that there is more murder to come and Paul will always smile when he sees victory on the horizon. This is where Haneke slaps the audience in the face and shows how dangerous it is to let the thrill of violence arouse us as we observe it in other films when it will only make us think twice once the evil killer gets away with everything at the end of this film.
Funny Games can come off as meaningless in some way the more it offends and outrages the audience in showing the triumph of evil after an hour and a half of suffering for the poor family, but that is how pointless real-life violence is. This is what brings the news of serial killers and rampages we hear and read about home to us on screen, as Haneke’s intention to not provide resolutions to problems, but leave them hanging at the end so that we are aware of those problems and can prepare ourselves for them. However, nothing can prepare us for events like Columbine or 9/11, which makes Funny Games all the more uncomfortable but insightful about the unexpected arrival of evil in the safest of places at the hands of anybody, least of all the charming, smirking kid you would notice in high school, before he walks in with a gun and shoots everyone for his own amusement. Seeing that kind of evil on screen and having no resolution is what makes it real and unpredictable as we experience senseless and unexpected violence everywhere without defense.
Haneke’s main intention of doing this film was to make a critical statement about the consumption of violence in the media by the American film industry, even though the film is set in Austria, yet it’s filled with bluffs about audience’s expectations in watching violent films. Because violence is a widely used element of American films, such as in action, crime drama, and horror, it does become consumable to the point when people are aroused by the violence and find it entertaining. Of course, even though Haneke is making a terrifying moral judgment about the evils of violence and the fascination with it being depicted on screen, he may also be generalizing about the fascination that the Western society has with violence as it is depicted in films. True we may like violent movies and then be accused of having sadistic tendencies to perform that same violence in real life, but at the same time, we realize that it’s just a movie. For example, Kill Bill may be extremely violent and entertaining at the same time, yet it’s heavily stylized and less believable in that way, which is why we feel entertained by it. It doesn’t entirely mean we would enjoy seeing that same violence in real life or go out imitating that violence on innocent people. Certain people that grow up with a bad morale can be driven towards sadistic violence with some inspiration with media, but if we grow up with a good head on our shoulders and understand the difference between right and wrong, the witnessing of heavy violence on screen won’t turn us into killers because we know we’re just watching movies. Even though the movie is showing things that are uncomfortable to witness in life, they are exaggerated to a degree that people just accept them and pass them off as just part of the film’s style rather than trying to get us aroused by real-life violence witnessed on the news or documentaries. It doesn’t mean we aspire to become gangsters, serial killers, or rapists, which is why I think Haneke exaggerates with Funny Games when he assumes that the spectator would be on the killer’s side when they want to torture the family so that it will show off the violence. However, where he is correct is that horror films of the slasher subgenre rely heavily on violence against innocent people and are heavily consumable, which explains why fans of those types of movies may be guilty of being entertained by violence. In that way, it makes sense for this film to go against that amusement in horror and show the discomfort of putting a family through hell of torture, humiliation, and death, which justifies the message of violence the film is trying to make sense to the audience so that they will realize it’s not that amusing to watch people suffer as they would in real life. That’s realistic of the film to go in that direction and make people understand that real life violence is no different from the violence depicted on screen and that it’s sadistic to consume it. Even though we are aware we are watching fiction, we’re still observing things that happen in real life and feel aroused by violence depicted on screen, which puts us in the mind-frame of a sadist. We can assume the killers in Funny Games are inspired by violence in the media with how they keep talking about reality and fiction and break the fourth wall to question the audience as to what they are expecting to happen in the fiction. These killers are aware of what the audience would find consumable in film and they question to the camera about who we expect to win in the situation, which is a way of addressing the audience on what they find entertaining on screen and then robbing them of any satisfaction in the end to show that any violence is less than entertaining, even if it’s occurring in fiction.
It’s fitting to compare this film to a slasher film like Scream since they were released fairly close together and addressed the subject of horror being brought to life in the real world. Scream made both a horrifying and satirical depiction of the horror genre through the perspective of teenage horror fans and the psychotic Ghostface killer, as a way of showing that anyone in real life who is aware of the rules of the horror genre could end up living it at the mercy of a killer in a mask. It was excessive with bloody carnage and tense chase scenes, with a few laughs in between, to acknowledge the twisted reality of film fans and the danger they find themselves when they confront horror for real. In comparison, Funny Games also used a pair of killers who are aware of the conventions of a film and are forcing the defenseless family to live their dream of an actual movie by watching them suffer at their claws. The difference from Scream is that this film is trying to make the suffering of the victims emotionally disturbing as opposed to thrilling as a film fan would want to expect in a regular slasher, which is what Scream falls into the category of. Scream is meant to entertain audiences with the horror conventions as they watch teenage girls run for their lives and get butchered with a knife and Funny Games, as part of Haneke’s agenda, is meant to counter those kinds of violent pictures by keeping the killers entertained at the sight of a suffering family but keeping us disturbed at the idea of doing such a thing. Yet we would usually expect to watch people suffer in a horror film for our own amusement because whenever we watch Michael Myers, Freddy Kreuger, or Ghostface chasing their victims and murdering them, it puts us on the edge of our seats and excites us to the point of making it seem entertaining. Funny Games slaps us in the face by spending time with the same victims throughout the film and focusing heavily on their psychological torments, as opposed to watching them run and get hacked to ribbons for the fun of a roller coaster.
Of course, Haneke said in an interview that if you don’t need to see this film, then don’t see it, depending on what kind of a spectator you are. In other words, if people already now how cruel it is to indulge in the torments of innocent people on screen, then they shouldn’t feel any intention of seeing a film that elaborates on that notion. I refused to see this film when I saw the trailer of the 2008 remake and it looked too uncomfortable for me at the idea of a family being held hostage by a pair of sadists who spend their time laughing off the suffering. When I started watching films by Haneke like The Piano Teacher and Code Unknown, I could see that he was a visionary and that Funny Games would have to be seen for its landmark status in his career. Also, I wanted to rid myself of the fear of watching people suffer in hideous torture because I had seen plenty of films before in which sadistic violence is depicted and I’ve been able to stay emotionally stable since then, particularly because it’s a movie. Since Funny Games is not heavy on gore or visible on ruthless acts of violence, it focuses on the artistic approach of a director, as opposed to giving off violent eye candy that is found passionately used in typical slasher flicks. Haneke has advised in an interview that if people watch the end of the film and then complain about it, he finds it hypocritical because they could tell what the movie was aiming for, so they should have turned it off or left the theater. I knew what this movie was going to bring in store for me and I stayed patient with it throughout, remaining aware of both how uncomfortable I was and what approach he was trying to take in depicting the evils of pleasurable violence. I personally don’t feel that the film speaks to me about my consumption of films for the carnage candy because I never go to a movie to entertain myself with the picture of violence. I’m always nervous and afraid of how violent a film is going to be and once it’s over I’m relieved that I survived it. What stood out to me was the more disturbing it got, the less I could imagine any of these moments as becoming the iconic images of violence seen in mainstream films. The severed horse’s head in The Godfather and the famous scene of Samuel L. Jackson reading the Bible passage before shooting a defenseless man to death in Pulp Fiction stand out as moments of violence in cinema that have been remembered for and paid homage to ever since. When scenes of disturbing violence are made that iconic and get imitated, that is where Haneke was trying to differ with his film so that it wouldn’t be so iconic. He tells the interviewer about his fear that Funny Games would be a heavily consumable film on DVD if the consumers get very passionate about watching a movie that is trying to condemn violence. That’s probably why I wouldn’t want to watch this film again because it’s risky to get too aroused by the sick pleasure of violence depicted on film and to continue referencing it in your mind as though it’s pleasurable. Of course, the two killers are fairly iconic because of their white polo clothes and their normal human expressions because you realize the monster that comes knocking at your door could be the kind of the person you least likely would think of as a monstrous killer on the basis of his looks. That makes the film all the more disturbing and very memorable because it puts any audience member in a traumatizing state of mind in which their sense of safety is robbed and they are left a lot to think about what they just witnessed.
The thing is that the violence rarely comes off as graphic or visible because we usually hear sounds of pain and see brief glimpses of blood, which makes the scenes all the more uncomfortable as opposed to looking at explicit violence that can easily look delicious to the perverted at heart. There are long takes used to show the pain the family expresses in their faces, especially when the son George Jr is killed and we see one 10-minute take of the mother and father alone after the killers have supposedly left and we hear no sounds except the television. Slowly, the camera moves towards George as he lies on the floor, injured in his legs and Anna embraces him as they both break out in loud painful cries of sorrow over their son’s death. This long attention to the pain they feel in regards to this little boy’s wrongful death shows the real evil in taking pleasure out of death and making a family suffer in grief over it. The many long takes and quiet moments are what help build the tension because the lack of suspenseful music makes the film unpredictable in what will happen next and the empty quiet house could be full of danger. The real horror doesn’t come out in blood and gore as most slasher films would provide, but in psychological and emotional pain that is endured upon throughout the night of torture.
Since the house is set practically in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by trees, water, and fences, it becomes a character and looks like a prison for the family in their dire circumstances. Even though they thought it would be a cozy area to spend for the summer, that’s just the advantage the killers have to catch any vacationers like flies and allows them to approach people at their doors like friendly locals then turn nosy and crude. It makes the comfortable looking scene for the safe middle class civilians more frightening; whenever we live in any domestic setting, a serial killer would likely strike there. That makes the film more intimidating about the places where we feel safe and makes it look real, especially since there are no elaborate sets, it’s all low budget and fitting to make it a place that we all know. That is where the horror of murderous evil hits home and shows the likelihood of being caught unawares by people who appear normal. The normality that the two killers bring out in their mannerisms and expressions makes them very intimidating, as opposed to Hannibal Lecter with his chattering teeth or the Joker with his hideous clown make-up and cackle. These two boys look like the nicest people to encounter in high school and look handsome enough for women to be seduced by. The smirks that the main killer Paul makes at the camera makes him look both slick and evil to look charismatic but with a dark secret beneath it. The smile he gives as the little boy Georges Jr aims a rifle at him makes him look fearless about being shot by this kid because he’s smarter than this kid and will give him severe punishment for his resourcefulness. Because the family doesn’t survive and we’re left with the killers as the only people standing, it makes the killers very triumphant out of their cold confidence and Paul is left standing in the last shot, smiling again because he knows that the next family he has met will be no luckier than the last one. The loud punk music that plays over the ending credits as they appear over Paul’s evil face brings out the animalistic feel of music for an ending of mayhem because it’s full of screams that sound painful, appropriate for the tone that this evil kid has set for the whole film. It means that there is more murder to come and Paul will always smile when he sees victory on the horizon. This is where Haneke slaps the audience in the face and shows how dangerous it is to let the thrill of violence arouse us as we observe it in other films when it will only make us think twice once the evil killer gets away with everything at the end of this film.
Funny Games can come off as meaningless in some way the more it offends and outrages the audience in showing the triumph of evil after an hour and a half of suffering for the poor family, but that is how pointless real-life violence is. This is what brings the news of serial killers and rampages we hear and read about home to us on screen, as Haneke’s intention to not provide resolutions to problems, but leave them hanging at the end so that we are aware of those problems and can prepare ourselves for them. However, nothing can prepare us for events like Columbine or 9/11, which makes Funny Games all the more uncomfortable but insightful about the unexpected arrival of evil in the safest of places at the hands of anybody, least of all the charming, smirking kid you would notice in high school, before he walks in with a gun and shoots everyone for his own amusement. Seeing that kind of evil on screen and having no resolution is what makes it real and unpredictable as we experience senseless and unexpected violence everywhere without defense.
Haneke’s main intention of doing this film was to make a critical statement about the consumption of violence in the media by the American film industry, even though the film is set in Austria, yet it’s filled with bluffs about audience’s expectations in watching violent films. Because violence is a widely used element of American films, such as in action, crime drama, and horror, it does become consumable to the point when people are aroused by the violence and find it entertaining. Of course, even though Haneke is making a terrifying moral judgment about the evils of violence and the fascination with it being depicted on screen, he may also be generalizing about the fascination that the Western society has with violence as it is depicted in films. True we may like violent movies and then be accused of having sadistic tendencies to perform that same violence in real life, but at the same time, we realize that it’s just a movie. For example, Kill Bill may be extremely violent and entertaining at the same time, yet it’s heavily stylized and less believable in that way, which is why we feel entertained by it. It doesn’t entirely mean we would enjoy seeing that same violence in real life or go out imitating that violence on innocent people. Certain people that grow up with a bad morale can be driven towards sadistic violence with some inspiration with media, but if we grow up with a good head on our shoulders and understand the difference between right and wrong, the witnessing of heavy violence on screen won’t turn us into killers because we know we’re just watching movies. Even though the movie is showing things that are uncomfortable to witness in life, they are exaggerated to a degree that people just accept them and pass them off as just part of the film’s style rather than trying to get us aroused by real-life violence witnessed on the news or documentaries. It doesn’t mean we aspire to become gangsters, serial killers, or rapists, which is why I think Haneke exaggerates with Funny Games when he assumes that the spectator would be on the killer’s side when they want to torture the family so that it will show off the violence. However, where he is correct is that horror films of the slasher subgenre rely heavily on violence against innocent people and are heavily consumable, which explains why fans of those types of movies may be guilty of being entertained by violence. In that way, it makes sense for this film to go against that amusement in horror and show the discomfort of putting a family through hell of torture, humiliation, and death, which justifies the message of violence the film is trying to make sense to the audience so that they will realize it’s not that amusing to watch people suffer as they would in real life. That’s realistic of the film to go in that direction and make people understand that real life violence is no different from the violence depicted on screen and that it’s sadistic to consume it. Even though we are aware we are watching fiction, we’re still observing things that happen in real life and feel aroused by violence depicted on screen, which puts us in the mind-frame of a sadist. We can assume the killers in Funny Games are inspired by violence in the media with how they keep talking about reality and fiction and break the fourth wall to question the audience as to what they are expecting to happen in the fiction. These killers are aware of what the audience would find consumable in film and they question to the camera about who we expect to win in the situation, which is a way of addressing the audience on what they find entertaining on screen and then robbing them of any satisfaction in the end to show that any violence is less than entertaining, even if it’s occurring in fiction.
It’s fitting to compare this film to a slasher film like Scream since they were released fairly close together and addressed the subject of horror being brought to life in the real world. Scream made both a horrifying and satirical depiction of the horror genre through the perspective of teenage horror fans and the psychotic Ghostface killer, as a way of showing that anyone in real life who is aware of the rules of the horror genre could end up living it at the mercy of a killer in a mask. It was excessive with bloody carnage and tense chase scenes, with a few laughs in between, to acknowledge the twisted reality of film fans and the danger they find themselves when they confront horror for real. In comparison, Funny Games also used a pair of killers who are aware of the conventions of a film and are forcing the defenseless family to live their dream of an actual movie by watching them suffer at their claws. The difference from Scream is that this film is trying to make the suffering of the victims emotionally disturbing as opposed to thrilling as a film fan would want to expect in a regular slasher, which is what Scream falls into the category of. Scream is meant to entertain audiences with the horror conventions as they watch teenage girls run for their lives and get butchered with a knife and Funny Games, as part of Haneke’s agenda, is meant to counter those kinds of violent pictures by keeping the killers entertained at the sight of a suffering family but keeping us disturbed at the idea of doing such a thing. Yet we would usually expect to watch people suffer in a horror film for our own amusement because whenever we watch Michael Myers, Freddy Kreuger, or Ghostface chasing their victims and murdering them, it puts us on the edge of our seats and excites us to the point of making it seem entertaining. Funny Games slaps us in the face by spending time with the same victims throughout the film and focusing heavily on their psychological torments, as opposed to watching them run and get hacked to ribbons for the fun of a roller coaster.
Of course, Haneke said in an interview that if you don’t need to see this film, then don’t see it, depending on what kind of a spectator you are. In other words, if people already now how cruel it is to indulge in the torments of innocent people on screen, then they shouldn’t feel any intention of seeing a film that elaborates on that notion. I refused to see this film when I saw the trailer of the 2008 remake and it looked too uncomfortable for me at the idea of a family being held hostage by a pair of sadists who spend their time laughing off the suffering. When I started watching films by Haneke like The Piano Teacher and Code Unknown, I could see that he was a visionary and that Funny Games would have to be seen for its landmark status in his career. Also, I wanted to rid myself of the fear of watching people suffer in hideous torture because I had seen plenty of films before in which sadistic violence is depicted and I’ve been able to stay emotionally stable since then, particularly because it’s a movie. Since Funny Games is not heavy on gore or visible on ruthless acts of violence, it focuses on the artistic approach of a director, as opposed to giving off violent eye candy that is found passionately used in typical slasher flicks. Haneke has advised in an interview that if people watch the end of the film and then complain about it, he finds it hypocritical because they could tell what the movie was aiming for, so they should have turned it off or left the theater. I knew what this movie was going to bring in store for me and I stayed patient with it throughout, remaining aware of both how uncomfortable I was and what approach he was trying to take in depicting the evils of pleasurable violence. I personally don’t feel that the film speaks to me about my consumption of films for the carnage candy because I never go to a movie to entertain myself with the picture of violence. I’m always nervous and afraid of how violent a film is going to be and once it’s over I’m relieved that I survived it. What stood out to me was the more disturbing it got, the less I could imagine any of these moments as becoming the iconic images of violence seen in mainstream films. The severed horse’s head in The Godfather and the famous scene of Samuel L. Jackson reading the Bible passage before shooting a defenseless man to death in Pulp Fiction stand out as moments of violence in cinema that have been remembered for and paid homage to ever since. When scenes of disturbing violence are made that iconic and get imitated, that is where Haneke was trying to differ with his film so that it wouldn’t be so iconic. He tells the interviewer about his fear that Funny Games would be a heavily consumable film on DVD if the consumers get very passionate about watching a movie that is trying to condemn violence. That’s probably why I wouldn’t want to watch this film again because it’s risky to get too aroused by the sick pleasure of violence depicted on film and to continue referencing it in your mind as though it’s pleasurable. Of course, the two killers are fairly iconic because of their white polo clothes and their normal human expressions because you realize the monster that comes knocking at your door could be the kind of the person you least likely would think of as a monstrous killer on the basis of his looks. That makes the film all the more disturbing and very memorable because it puts any audience member in a traumatizing state of mind in which their sense of safety is robbed and they are left a lot to think about what they just witnessed.
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