Contrasting expression and torture
Funny games, dressed in horror, naturally follows the narrative theme that is very common in movies of this type-slaughter. This type of film usually places the protagonist and a group of people related to the protagonist in a closed space isolated from the world. A tension performance of dodging and chasing, yielding and resisting. Such kind, normal, docile/ugly, perverse, and irritable dramatic binary expressions are all too commonplace. Routine expressions like this can be seen effortlessly in Hollywood films such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre, See No Evil, etc., although such expressions are often pulled by the power of the extreme style and make the torturer get more disgusting. External perception, but the resulting single-dimensional image causes the symbol of evil to lose its forward and open meaning space. In funny games, these two handsome white-clothed youths are far from the conventional structure of torturers. They are cruel and lovely, polite and rude, and even the reason for the killing is unclear. What I see is just a fickle death game with the protagonist, while the perverted licking and obsession with the competition process completely turn the killing into a highly entertaining ritual performance. Generally speaking, "terror" often includes a variety of violent acts and abnormal behaviors. These behaviors must subvert and trample on conventional understanding and predestined thinking at a certain level, while retaining the possibility and openness of the unpredictable future. sex. The prominent differentiation and fixation of this kind of terrifying rendering and impact in funny games is the ingenious use of contrasting display, through the switching between elegant and tranquil Handel and manic and unruly death metal music, as well as the transition of quiet and quiet wild scenery and pale and dead interior decoration , the emotional core is constantly falling into opposition and jumping back and forth. The indefinable anxiety and confusion reflect the unpredictable fate of the protagonist. At this time, the appearance of the same indefinable torturer increases the anxiety of the overall situation, and then the gradual progress of the plot breaks After the sad balance, the taste of fear quickly diffuses, and the protagonist is also dying in the context of the situation.
Plot twist and anxiety
When the restless rock music at the end of the film sang a requiem in advance for the next massacre, the frightened fans were still puzzled by the tragic death of the protagonist, and they believed that an external force would be activated in time to fight against this evil. Tide thus saves the protagonist from disaster. Audiences accustomed to Hollywood's narrative strategy are outraged and upset that the classic ending of good triumphs over evil has been subverted. In a sense, Hollywood's power in cultural expansion has made its narrative the narrative of the movies of our time, whether in horror or romance, the fantasy of a happy ending continues to give fans False satisfaction. The frog-turned-prince and Cinderella in the love fairy tale have been projected in reality again and again. The flowers in the mirror and the moon in the water greatly eliminate the cruelty and ruthlessness of the real world while satisfying the collective will and pleasure. Also in horror movies, the protagonist can always move God with his kindness and bravery and escape to heaven after going through untold hardships and suffering both physically and physiologically. Clearly, the Hollywood-style narrative principles present structural discontinuities and conflicts, and the constant reversals at the end of the story fit perfectly with the imaginative logic of putting psychology and emotions in safe haven. And the aesthetics of this narrative constantly give way to the fact that there is a great conflict with the real logic of life. Although the plot reversal in Funny games satisfies the purity and sincerity of life, it inevitably throws the viewer into the wasteland of withered civilization and makes it self-destruct. Generally speaking, the most direct impression that horror brings to people is anxiety and unease. For viewers of ordinary horror movies, the anxiety and panic in the process of watching the movie must be absorbed into the clarity and joy at the end of the story. Only In this way, the constantly stimulated psychology and emotions will return to a safer state. Just as the ascetic priest must have the call of the other side of the world to be at ease in this world, the viewer of a horror movie must ensure that there is a beautiful ending. Only then will I endure the pain and anxiety of watching the movie. But the paradox of Funny games is that when we routinely enjoy this penance that we think has a beautiful other side, we are suddenly told that there is no such utopia, and this inversion of meaning makes the accumulated anxiety And unease becomes senseless masochism. The humiliation of being mocked and teased followed. At this point, horror no longer becomes a cutscene in the cerebral consciousness in the form of symbolic flashes and disappearances in the Hollywood-style horror movie viewing experience, but survives as a real life experience.
Subject positioning and participation
Generally speaking, the subject of movie viewing is always the beneficiary of "all art is only an incomplete illusion of reality in the viewer's mind". For a movie, the formation and production of meaning must depend on the relationship between the viewer and the viewer. Continuous overall situational interaction and reasonable positioning to give the viewer a way of emotionally swaying. We know that the obvious feature of modernity is the "increasing externalization of life as the technical aspects of life gain advantages relative to their inner aspects and personal values", the objective culture presented by modern society The domination of subjective culture, the inexorable general trend of a highly rationalized socio-political future, and in the doomsday experience created by the piercing sounds and flesh-and-blood images of horror movies, the viewer is increasingly objectified and Weakened nerves were somewhat relieved in the process of being gradually awakened by the shocks of what Benjamin called the age of mechanical reproduction. Undoubtedly, this subjective perception of what Simmel called risk-taking derives to a large extent from the viewer's psychological identification with the experience of the battered in horror movies. Controlled by the power emanating from the film's structure, it becomes a bystander who witnesses the massacre, is always alert to the appearance of torturers, and at the same time emotionally sympathizes with and sympathizes with the protagonists. Different from the position, role and way of bearing of the audience in ordinary horror movies, funny In a grotesque and brutish way, games seeks to liberate the experiencer and the viewing experience from conventional cinematic narrative strategies. When the murderers winked playfully at the audience to create the basic principles followed in a series of reform experiments in the theatrical structure, stage structure and performance method advocated by "non-ristotelian drama", the audience In an instant, it was a surprising discovery that I had strayed from the psychological identity of the victim, alienated the emotional resonance for the film, and reduced to the same structure and psychological positioning as the perpetrator. Yet this tragic dilemma is exactly what the director wants, and by defining the viewer as an accomplice of the evil deed, Haneko defamiliarizes the experience and thinking of narrative strategy. As Brecht pointed out: "To defamiliarize an event or a character is, first of all, simply to strip the event or character of what is self-evident, familiar and obvious, to surprise and surprise them. Curiosity." This is also confirmed in Brecht's account of Shakespeare's play King Lear, "The actor may express his other reaction instead of King Lear's anger. In this way, King Lear's position will be To be defamiliarized, that is to say, his position is presented as unique, strange and remarkable, i.e. presented as a social phenomenon, it is not a phenomenon as it should be. This anger is human, but It is not common human nature, some people will not have this kind of anger. Not all people in all eras will have this kind of anger when they have the same experience as King Lear." Generally speaking, in most traditional dramas, In the realm of ordinary horror films based on the principle of "emotional resonance", "in order to stimulate certain feelings and certain experiences of people, art does not need to create an image that conforms to the real world and accurately reproduce various events between people. It is true that the citation of these principles can greatly increase the intensity of emotion in the tragic experience, but this strong dramatic effect and emotional rendering obscures the real picture of society and the scientific understanding of individual living conditions. In funny games, the application of the alienation effect makes the audience no longer shrouded in false tragic emotions, but strips away the self-evident, well-known and obvious dramatic imagery, and enters the field of rational grasp and calm thinking about the film itself , as Brecht pointed out: "The process of alienation is the process of artificial alienation from what is familiar. In this way, on the surface, these people or things suddenly become extraordinary and people Surprised and puzzling, it naturally leads to thought-provoking and ultimately new insights.”
Against incompetence and death
Similar to Michael Haneko's previous works, funny games always strives to form an effective critique and interpretation of the generation, shape and operation of violence. Violent production is always blamed on the objectification process of the subject under the cold and harsh order, from the transformation of Benny's videotape slaughtering/killing to the seventy-one fragments of the Chronicle of Opportunity's sudden burst of violence to the horror in funny games Games, cruel bloody events and an increasingly indifferent diseased society show the same face. Fromm's statement that "violent killing is not an instinct shared by human beings, it is just an evil result of civilization. With the development of civilization, people are becoming more and more The idea of killing each other is very effective in explaining the basis for the increasing incidence of violence and aggression in modern society. For Haneko, he has no intention of placing violent scenes in extreme conditions such as war and disaster for total and The grandiose analysis, on the contrary, routinely seeks to normalize acts of violence will also be more effective in expressing the validity of the view that violence is a consequence of civilization. Therefore, whether it is the glacier trilogy or the fanny games, the terrifying protagonist-violence is always lurking under the reasonable tension of daily life, once touched by some mysterious reason at an unknown moment, the crime and the blood related to it quickly Filled in the overall narrative space, such a peaceful treatment sacrifices the temptation brought by the charm of the plot, but the depth, complexity and ambiguity presented by the video text are enough to defeat the violence of placing violence in a single-dimensional scene. Comes vulgar and superficial. At the same time, similar to Haneko’s previous narrative structure, after violence pushes, shoves and maims people in the text space, death always follows like a ghost and carries out a ritualized judgment against the protagonist. After that, death became the only effective way to escape the control and devastation of violent mechanisms. Therefore, for the previous films of funny games, Haneko did not consider any strategy of struggle and resistance in hopes of completing the subversion against violence before the final death occurred, but in funny games Under the condition that the main frame of the narrative level of games has not been greatly adjusted and changed, there has been a slight change in the attitude towards violence. It is no longer the past to endure silently, succumbing to the iron hoof of violence and unscrupulousness without saying a word. At this time, resistance has been used as an effective struggle strategy and even achieved some superficial success. Being beaten to death just confirms that a kind of unyielding personality prevents the depravity of man when violence rushes to the end of death. But we should see more clearly that Haneko does not believe that this kind of struggle and resistance has any substantive hope for the salvation of individual destiny. The re-expressed thinking point, while providing an effective opportunity to resist violence and praise the will to life, Haneko’s long-term accumulation of personal image philosophy and ambition to transcend critical strategies have blocked any possibility of resisting violence and achieving redemption. The Bright Path of Sex.
self-referentiality and criticism
The most peculiar and most confusing point of the Funny games is obviously that after one thug is killed, another thug controls the remote control to make the plot rewind and the killing continues. For the poor sufferers, this bizarre narrative reversal ruined all their previous struggle strategies, and once again fell into the brutal plot set for them by the torturers. Of course, people who are inside the narrative thread cannot feel this, but for the audience outside the image space, this is a completely unconventional, anti-logic and anti-artistic viewing experience. Here, the remote control has become an important pivot switch for determining survival and death, separating control and escape, producing violence and destroying violence. At the same time, the many possibilities brought by the meaning nodes at the connection of the plot are also real outside the image. The world produces projections and ripples. When the remote control reverses the plot, the protagonist's fate is once again subdued by violence, and the killing game continues to produce new violent acts. The viewer also experiences an emotional ups and downs from fantasy to reality, from hope to despair. , the inevitability of violence has also achieved a sudden strengthening in the renovation of a narrative technique. At this time, this extreme alienation effect strengthens the effect of ordinary alienation in the film, while completely smashing any possibility of warmth and salvation, it throws the audience from the illusory space created by the film to the real society. Scenes. What's even more amazing is that the remote control in the viewer's hand performs the same mission as the remote control in the movie. When the torturer in the movie relies on the remote control to continue the violent mechanism, When the game continues, as long as the viewers do not stop watching, they will only be helpless and helpless to accept the constant transfer of violent information from the media to the brain's memory. This deeper and stronger conversion and identification with the position of the torturer in the narrative structure has completely turned into a helpless choice for the viewer. At this time, the viewer no longer simply submits to the force of the medium and becomes a passive recipient of violent information, but at the same time, he also transforms himself into a source of violence and continues to produce new violence. Such a situation is obviously something that Michael Haneko does not want to see but has no choice but to do. The critical mechanism of violence and the expression of images have produced such a paradox: to create a work of art with violent criticism as the main theme, it is inevitable to rely on Only certain art forms can play a role, and the most effective and powerful thing in this regard is to challenge the violence itself by means of violence. However, these means of violence, as potential sources, are also likely to be affected by new mechanisms of violence. Use to lose the power of criticism. Criticizing violence with violence thus becomes a strange self-denial. Therefore, how to grasp and adjust within a limited range has become the artist's personal dilemma, and this is also the dilemma of how to break through its own negation and create a new critical space for artistic expression.
View more about Funny Games reviews
