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"The Last 15 Minutes... Will Mess You Up For Life."
-- tagline for "Paranormal Activity 3" (2011)

"Anyone who leaves the cinema doesn't need the film, and anybody who stays does."

-- Michael Haneke on his first version of "Funny Games"

In 1982, I took my 21-year-old sister to see "Poltergeist." When it was over, she turned to me with tears in her eyes and said, "You have ruined my life." It was traumatic for her. I showed John Carpenter's "Halloween" in college and the experience so deeply shook a good friend of mine that she spent several sessions in therapy talking to "The Shape" (as he was billed).

So, we don't always know what we can handle. The question sometimes arises: Do you have an obligation to yourself, your friends and family, your fellow cinephiles/cinephiliacs, readers or viewers to expose yourself to films that challenge you, that push you out of your comfort zone? Sure you do. Everybody needs to test their limits, if only to find out what they are. Does that include shock cinema, so-called "torture porn," or movies that otherwise present themselves as a schoolyard dare ("Bet you can't watch this without puking!") -- the feature film equivalents of "2 Girls 1 Cup"? I think not.

This entered my mind while watching the second-season premiere of AMC's "The Walking Dead" last Sunday night (the zombies are metaphors for zombies) -- the monotonously gruesome series that featured a squishy backwoods autopsy scene in which two humans decide to cut open the stomach of a head-shot "walker" to find out if he'd recently eaten the little girl they're looking for. The obvious analogue is to the shark-belly autopsy from "Jaws," but this one was just an excuse to make the audience squirm on the way to a dumb punch line (How much woodchuck could a zombie chew up before it makes you upchuck, Chuck?).

Part of the thrill of watching a horror movie is the sense of triumph and relief you have at the end: "See? I made it through that -- and I survived!" Some movies are conceived and sold that way. It isn't so far from the William Castle-like gimmicks of having ambulances outside the theater or nurses in the lobby or barf bags at the concessions stand, to the hysteria of "The Exorcist" in 1973 (considered a rite-of-passage test of courage for teens and college students everywhere) to more recent phenomena like the "Saw" and "Hostel" movies.

1) A letter from Kate Johnson, published at RogerEbert.com:

Too late I read your review [of "Funny Games"]. I was blindsided by this movie. Went with a friend and didn't know a THING about it beforehand. All I kept saying was, "Let's get out of here. It's a MOVIE. The director/ producer / whatever is trying to force-feed us with S--T. How can the actors even think of being in such a movie -- what about that little boy?"

Finally when it was over and my "friend" looked like a deer in the headlights -- I was physically sick. I demanded my money back from the box office only to have the girl laugh at me -- at first. I threw up on the floor right in front of her -- and it splattered. She gave me the money, helped me clean up and actually cried. My "friend" was embarrassed by my behavior -- and therefore has lost my friendship. This whole last scene (starring me, my friend, the cashier at the box office), seemed a sequel to the movie.

First, I applaud Kate Johnson's response to the movie, which I think was appropriate and creative (though it may not have been fun for her). Was she the target audience for "Funny Games"? Nobody's really saying.

2) In a story headlined "Haneke plays 'Games' with critics," Variety reports: "'We always expected it would have a polarized response,' says WIP topper Polly Cohen, who admits she was both repulsed and compelled by the film. 'It's for a very specific audience.'" (Barf or applaud: It's up to you! The critical reaction is split right down the middle at RottenTomatoes.)

That article includes a self-reflexive comment in the spirit of "Funny Games." Be sure to read through to the final sentence to see who gets the last laugh:

UPDATED (03/15/08)

Selected interviews: From Adam Nayman's interview/review with "Funny Games" director Michael Haneke in Toronto's eyeweekly:

“I’m trying to impart in my films what mainstream movies work to take away,” explains Haneke in an exclusive interview. “Namely: reality. I’m making movies that are inconsumable. And I can only do that by portraying the suffering of the victim, rather than the enjoyment of the perpetrator.” [...]

Haneke says that he had always conceived "Funny Games" as an assault on American films, and that the remake merely serves to place the action in its correct context. (It also creates severe cognitive dissonance; my eyes kept scanning the impeccable, palpably Euro-art-house compositions for subtitles.) Over the past decade, American genre flicks have only grown more sadistic.

“This makes my film even more up-to-date than it was before,” laughs Haneke. So what about the trailers, which make the film look like the very dreck it means to critique?

“If that kind of marketing brings in the audience that I want to reach, then that’s fine,” says Haneke. “The bigger the audience, the better… every filmmaker feels that way. The difference [between myself and other filmmakers] is that I am not willing to make any concessions within the films themselves.”

My review of "Funny Games" is in the Chicago Sun-Times and on RogerEbert.com. Here's an excerpt:

* * * *

"Anyone who leaves the cinema doesn't need the film, and anybody who stays does."
-- Michael Haneke on his previous version of "Funny Games"

The new Hollywood edition of "Funny Games," writer-director Michael Haneke's clinical reenactment of his Austrian torture-comedy experiment from 10 years ago, is an attempt to replicate the earlier study under English-language conditions.

You (the lab rat) are placed in a Skinner box (the movie theater) and subjected to random negative stimuli (filmed violence, as a substitute for painful electrical jolts). Haneke, whose academic background is in psychology, philosophy and theater, assumes the role of empirical taskmaster. He hypothesizes that his box will shock you into a knee-jerk ethical dilemma. To pass the test, you must reject the false premise of the experiment itself (if only on the grounds of insufferable smugness) and walk out.

An even better response, theoretically, would be to storm the booth and rip the film out of the projector, thus symbolically declaring your refusal to swallow the force-fed medicinal doses of synthesized abuse the film is administering. And if you really wanted to ace the challenge, you would just not see the movie.

But if you liked those pictures from Abu Ghraib, you'll love "Funny Games"! ...

Read full review here.

UPDATED (03/15/08)

(My review of "Funny Games" is here. See also Your User's Guide to Movie Violence, a discussion below.)

* * * *

"You Must Admit, You Brought This On Yourself"
-- advertising tagline, and line of dialog, from "Funny Games" (2008)

"Funny Games" (the 2008 Hollywood movie-star version of the virtually identical 1997 Euro-version) is a conceptual work, an aestheticized test. It's debatable whether the movie (already a replica) is necessary, except as an object that represents the larger concept -- like, say, an Andy Warhol Brillo box or Jeff Koons' vacuum cleaners in plexiglass cases.

You could say something similar about the high-concept "Snakes On a Plane," and you'd be right. The difference is that the marketing campaign behind the packaging of "Snakes On a Plane" was designed to sell exactly the entertainment experience that the title promised. With "Funny Games," there's a deliberate element of bait-and-switch involved. It's being sold as entertainment, but that's not at all what it intends to deliver. The experience of "Funny Games" exists in the tension between the pitch and the delivery -- which will largely determine the relationship between the viewer and the film he/she sees.

So, the promotional materials for "Funny Games" (poster art, trailers, online videos, etc.) are more than the usual extensions or enhancements of the movie. They frame the experience, but they're also essential elements of the movie itself. Why you decide to watch it (or not) is every bit as central to the movie's concerns as anything in the movie itself. That may be true of any movie, but "Funny Games" puts it right there in the foreground where you can't miss it.

If you go expecting entertainment and are entertained (or, at least, terrified -- held hostage by your own expectations), that will be one thing. If you go expecting a moral lesson about the appeal of violence in movies, and you feel chastened and sullied, that will be another. If you go expecting a thriller or a comedy and find nothing thrilling or funny about it, that will be something else. If you go expecting to be toyed with and, say, enjoy feeling that you're ahead of the movie (maybe because you've already seen the 1997 version), that will provide yet another experience. If you value writer-director Michael Haneke's other work and want to see why he's chosen to remake this one... well, I hope you get the idea.

So, the first part of the experiment involves your decision to participate or not. The movie is the second part.

UPDATED: Three more trailers (1997 & 2008) added below for comparison.

When Michael Haneke's movie-star remake of his own "Funny Games" opens Friday, he claims it will pose a direct challenge to American audiences. (In my review, which will appear that day, I call his bluff and propose a few counter-challenges in the same spirit. Two -- or more -- can play at this funny game!)

If you've seen the 1997 version, you've pretty much seen the English language one, because it's virtually a shot-for-shot recreation. Here, from the studio press kit, is what Haneke (whose "Code Unknown" and "Caché" I consider to be masterpieces) has to say about what he's trying to do with "Funny Games":

"I’m trying to find ways to show violence as it really is: it is not something that you can swallow. I want to show the reality of violence, the pain, the wounding of another human being....

"Recently a friend and critic who recently watched 'Funny Games' said to me 'now the film is where it belongs.' He is right. When I first envisioned 'Funny Games' in the middle of the 90s, it was my intention to have an American audience watch the movie. It is a reaction to a certain American Cinema, its violence, its naïveté, the way American Cinema toys with human beings. In many American films violence is made consumable....