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Funny Games can be seen as a concentrate of Haneke's work. While other films also focus on the inexplicably gratuitous violence, films such as The Seventh Continent rely on a frame story that exists outside the film, in which the violence can take place.
Haneke thus subverts his own principles, in that the frame story already contains the violence.
The absolute helplessness of the viewer is also taken to extremes in Funny Games. The fourth wall is broken, one could almost say the fifth wall, as Haneke breaks with the principles and rules of linear time that we humans are familiar with and thus even the last hope of a "happy ending" is truly torn from the viewer.
However, when talking about Haneke, it is often overlooked that not only the viewer is powerlessly trapped in the cinematic world, but also the characters, one might almost say the actors.
Thus Haneke said in an interview about his film The Seventh Continent, "Maybe the characters are also trapped in my film and have to live through the same everyday life every day so on so on."
An obvious interpretation of Hanekes preference of depictioning middle class families, could be his own familiarity with. But when inspected deeper, these decisions are part of an absolute neutralisation of the justification, the film is highly precise, yet universally valid. When we see a family die for no reason, Haneke wants so little air between us and that family. A self-reference is absolutely desired and necessary.
Funny Games also draws on the aspects of genre and market economy. The embodiment of the attackers are aware of their existence in a film and thus want to provide us with the best possible pleasure, cross-references to media-capitalist opinion power of the audience, in a universal context emerge. Likewise, Haneke thus also opens up a dialectic about genre clichés.
Funny Games should not be talk to pieces. It is a film that can be analysed down to the smallest detail and yet the reader has not the slightest idea of the effect this film can have. With eyes and mouth open, you will have the best and worst time of your life.
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