This theme of responsibility — or tone of moralism, if you will — informs the career of Michael Haneke as it does his first Hollywood feature, Funny Games (2008), a remake of his 1997 Austrian film of the same title. As in his previous films, Benny’s Video (1992) and Caché (2005), Funny Games plays with the effect of the media on viewers, in particular its desensitization of such faculties as those of compassion and conscience.
Two genial, clean-cut young men ingratiate themselves into a family’s gated household and in short order involve them in brutal and whimsical games. Apparently rendered sociopathic and nihilistic by a dehumanizing, all-pervading media culture, the villains descend like the demonic visitors in Poltergeist and devastate their victims’ bourgeois complacency.
That’s infuriating enough, but what really infuriates audiences is a scene that carries Being There’s remote-channel-selector scene to its illogical conclusion. Haneke intends to remind audiences of their complicity in the violence they vicariously enjoy on the screen. But the scene also points out that they do indeed have some say in the matter. The power doesn’t lie just with those who produce, select, and broadcast what we see, but also with those who hold the remote control.
This idea — that the audience is not as much a passive victim of the media as they have been lulled into believing — is implied in The Signal (2008), a recent triptych thriller co-directed by Dan Bush, Dan Bruckner, and Jacob Gentry. In this, a mysterious, amorphous signal has taken over all video and audio transmissions. It drives its victims into orgies of violence. In effect, it’s 28 Days Later, except the Rage Virus is the media.
Diabolically, the signal leaves those in its thrall with just enough rationality to wonder what’s going on. “Am I the only one who is still sane?” they ask themselves, as they butcher someone whom they suspect has the “crazy.” What’s causing this? What can be done? One character suggests they try to clear the noise out of their heads and “focus on the natural world, which was there long before us, and will be there long after we’re gone.” But, they ask, how can we do this when the signal is everywhere? Then they hammer someone with a baseball bat. The answer, he demonstrates, is right in front of their eyes. Just push the damn “off” button.
He who controls the remote controls the media. Don’t wait for John McClane to show up and kick someone’s ass. Take a tip from a better hero, Howard Beale, “the mad prophet of the airways,” in Sidney Lumet and writer Paddy Chayefsky’s brilliant 1976 satire Network. To paraphrase his advice: I want you to get away from your plasma TVs (or laptops, or Xboxes, or BlackBerries or iPod Touches — and be sure to detach the earbuds from your iPod), go to your windows, open them, stick your head out (taking in the real world of birds, sky, wind, people, light) and shout “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to watch this anymore!”
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Peter Keough's Outside the Frame: //www.thephoenix.com/outsidetheframe