the horror of playing god

The Horror of (a) Playing God: Job’sNightmare and Michael Haneke’sFunny GamesBradley HerlingMarymount Manhattan College

Abstract: Michael Haneke’s film Funny Games (1997; American remake 2007) offers apotent critique of violence as entertainment, but on a deeper level, in its depiction of the dia-bolical games that can produce horrific suffering, the film reasserts the philosophical/theo-logical “problem of evil.” Placing Funny Games in dialogue with the Book of Job, this articleargues that Haneke’s film poses a radical challenge to standard narratives of redemptionand exposes the experiential core of the often abstracted “problem” of seemingly unwar-ranted suffering.

Keywords: Michael Haneke, Funny Games, Book of Job, Problem of evil, Theodicy, Vio-lence in film, Violence in the media, the Bible and film

Director Michael Haneke has affirmed that he made Funny Games (1997; American remake,2010) to irritate, disturb, and manipulate his viewers into reconsidering their consumptionof violence as entertainment. When absorbing “acceptable,” “consumable” media violence,Haneke (2007) has declared that the spectator “always becomes the killer’s accomplice”because he or she wants the violence to happen. Under other circumstances, this desire forbloodshed would be unacceptable, but in mainstream entertainment media, the typical audi-ence receives a pardon: safe, moral resolutions and happy endings justify the mayhem thathas been witnessed and enjoyed. Film in particular allows this strange form of voyeurism tothrive. According to Haneke, film tends to “a narcotized, that is, an anti-reflexive reception”(Haneke 2010, 576), and the result is numbness to real victimization and suffering in theworld around us.

If this were the only implication of Funny Games, we would have to wonder why it caughtso many viewers off-guard. As many commentators on the film have noted, the implicatingthe viewer in consumption violence was not new, even when the original, Austrian version ofthe film came out in the late 1990s. A Clockwork Orange (1971), Blue Velvet (1986), NaturalBorn Killers (1994), Pulp Fiction (1994), and, later, Fight Club (1999) and American Psycho(2000) all provoke along these lines. Halloween (1978) put the viewer inside the slasher’smask, both enacting repressed desire and bringing this desire to awareness. The Scream series(1996, 1997, 2000, and 2011) is very popular and also very self-conscious about the conven-tions of gory horror-film entertainment. Even the Saw (2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009,and 2010) and Hostel (2005, 2007, and 2011) films offer meta-commentary on the sickeningtortures they portray and their audiences’ desire to watch.1 This saturation of ironic self-awareness, among other factors,2 explains the tepid response to the 2007 American FunnyGames remake, both at the box office and among critics. As much as the auteur/director

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thought that American audiences needed to experience his film, almost exactly in its same1997 form, many of us had seen this movie before.3

So, I would argue that this is not the issue that continues to make Funny Games so potent.Instead, Haneke has communicated its deeper provocation in a constant refrain that we hearin his interviews and meta-commentary: in order to invite his audience to engage in activeinterpretation and response, he refuses to let his films offer obvious explanations for the vio-lence that they portray. Sometimes the very identity of the perpetrators is obscure, as in Caché(2005) and Haneke’s Oscar-nominated tour de force, The White Ribbon (2009). But evenwhen we know who is doing what—a family commits suicide in The Seventh Continent(1989); a teenager kills a young girl and films the murder in Benny’s Video (1992); Peterand Paul torture the family in Funny Games; musician descends into sadomasochism in ThePiano Teacher (2001); a father is shot dead in Time of the Wolf (2003); and despite the mys-tery, much brutality occurs out in the open in The White Ribbon—these films never comeright out and tell us why the perpetrators act as they do. As viewers, we are left to draw ourown conclusions.

Thuswaldner (2010) has proposed that this disruption of “psychological interpretations of[Haneke’s] characters’ actions” “offer[s] the potential for a certain liberation of thought,” andin particular, “the importation of questions of spirituality in the gaps between characters’ ac-tions and their unclear motivations” (190). Understood in this light, Funny Games is strikingbecause of its depiction of raw suffering and the seemingly pointless games that can produce it.Funny Games is a disruptive anti-fable that offers a glimpse into the potential for arbitrary,sadistic malevolence to break in, unabated, and for it then to torment, torture, and kill. Assuch, the film forces a reconsideration of the problem of unwarranted suffering—the “problemof evil”—and leaves its audience in the grip of a rather dismal picture: if God exists then perhapshe is a playing God, and, as a result, we have to share the world with—and perhaps encounter—victimizers who partake in malevolent games that God condones.

While “evil” is a term that commentators often employ in discussing the content ofHaneke’s films, there have been no treatments of the significance of his work for theological/philosophical exploration of the “problem of evil,” except where it is touched upon in by Mittl(2010). Drawing on Ricoeur, Mittl makes two key points, which this essay will affirm and elab-orate on. First, according to Ricoeur, “Theology and philosophy have always tried to explainthe existence of evil, but . . . classical theodicy does not go deep enough because it tends to for-get the suffering of the individual (Why do I suffer?)” (316). Second, Mittl emphasizes theimportance of narratives—old and new—as “means of interpreting oneself,” and in particular,for insisting on fundamental questions such as, “Who am I?” and “How should I live?” (317).

In the spirit of these principles, I propose to place Funny Games in dialogue with theBook of Job, which in many ways is the ur-narrative for reflection on these issues within theWestern tradition, with the purpose of substantiating my reading of the film—but also, in a re-cursive movement, in an effort to discern interpretive angles on the biblical text as well.4

Funny Games and Job share elements that intersect with and interrogate each other in produc-tive ways, leading to a prescriptive clarification—that is to say, exploration of something thatmust be effectively described for inquiry to proceed—of the genuinely problematic core of the“problem of evil”: the raw suffering that generates the “problem” in the first place. While thetwo texts perhaps part ways on the question of redemptive suffering and a happy ending (Joballows for these possibilities; Haneke does not), neither permits easy answers. Their value, Iwould argue, resides precisely in disruption of airtight solutions to the problem of seeminglyunwarranted suffering, whether these responses come from philosophers, theologians, devoutlaypeople—or from Hollywood.

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The FenceLet us first contemplate Job’s original position. We will recall that he is a righteous man fromUz upon whom God looks favourably, blessing him in what he does because of his righteous-ness. Job is affluent and happy, with many children and many possessions. Satan, who is the“adversary” or “accuser”—a troublemaker—visits God’s heavenly court. God questions him,wondering what he has been up to, and Satan replies that he has been “going to and fro on theearth” (NRSV, 1:6), looking to stir things up. “Have you considered my servant Job?” God in-quires, seemingly unprompted. “There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and uprightman who fears God and turns away from evil” (1:8).

Instigated, Satan issues a challenge. God has protected Job, he claims, kept trouble away,so of course Job is devoted and happy. But if everything were taken from him, Job would curseGod to his face (1:11). God agrees to allow Satan to do his worst, and Job loses all of his pos-sessions, and his ten children are killed. Yet Job remains steadfast. Now Satan claims that Jobremains faithful because he still has his health. So Satan torments Job with “loathsome sores”all over his body (2:7). Job is left with his wife, who urges him to “curse God, and die” (2.9),and three friends who sit with him in silence for seven days and nights and then subject himto thoroughgoing interrogation.

In the midst of his initial negotiations with God, Satan makes an important accusation:“Does Job fear God for nothing? Have you not put a fence around him and his house and allthat he has, on every side?” (1:10). Job is insulated by his good fortune: it is all he knows, andit leads him to believe that his world is stable and secure. Perhaps this is because of the “fence”or “hedge”5 that allows Job to go through life with blinders on. Here, on one reading, the textruns the risk of solving its own problem before it has even been laid out. Are Job’s tormentssimply a function of his comfort and wealth? The text is clear that affluence and insularityinvite trouble: “[The rich] build their houses like nests,” Job himself pronounces. “They go tobed with wealth, but will do so no more; they open their eyes, and it is gone. Terrors overtakethem like a flood; in the night a whirlwind carries them off” (27:18–20). It is possible that Jobneeds to be levelled, reminded about the ephemeral nature of material things, and shown whatsuffering and devotion are really about.

The text does not give up the game so easily, however, for this “fence,” as Satan’s objectionimplies, has been bestowed (like all blessings) by God. God imposes Job’s insularity in the formof religious conventions and corresponding rewards, all of which lead to Job’s concern withothers’ perception of him (see chapter twenty-nine) and no small hint of self-righteousness(29:14–17). Job seems to be aware of this problem and later puts a fine point on it: “Why is lightgiven to one who cannot see the way, whom God has fenced in?” (3:23). So the game cannot beas simple as God wishing to teach a lesson by breaking down the barriers of material wealth andrelated spiritual self-satisfaction—or if it is, we must acknowledge that God is responsible forerecting these barriers in the first place, only to set up those he has blessed for a fall.

Turning now to the fences, gates, and hedges of Funny Games, we begin once again with asense of the protagonists’ prosperity. A family of three rides along in a Range Rover that istowing a sailboat to their lake house, and they play a guessing game about classical music. Theopening sequence begins with wide shots, including shots from high above the car, conveyinga sense of higher protection. This kind of aerial shot, the filmic equivalent of the fairy taleopening of the Book of Job (“There once was a man . . .”), is a rare move for Haneke; it is care-fully designed to transmit a message: it communicates majesty and oversight, but also theanonymous sense that this is just another car on another road on another journey.6 As view-ers, we are keeping an eye on this family, like the higher power with which we are identified.

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But why them? This focus is random; from the beginning, we have the sense that FunnyGames could be a movie about any family driving along the highway, if we but shifted ourgaze—or the director shifted it for us.7

Soon the Jobian “fence” manifests itself as the family nears its destination: the neighbour-hood’s tall hedges give way to a white security fence, with a large gate guarding the entry.Soon after the gate closes behind the car, and a bit later, but before the action of the film be-gins in earnest, Haneke performs one of his trademark inventories of things: shots of the trap-pings of the good life (comfortable furniture, golf clubs, nice shoes, a very full refrigerator,etc.), and bodies interacting with these things, with faces left out of shots. The suggestion isthat this materialist, middle-class existence is vapid,8 and it shields the people who live withintheir fenced-in world from the deprivations that the majority of humankind must endure.This sense of security is soon shattered, of course. Just after the family arrives, Haneke gives usa shot of Paul, one of the tormentors, and a coerced neighbour standing outside of the gate;Georg (the father) lets the two into his sanctum. Later, Paul’s partner-in-crime, Peter, reportsthat he has gotten into the homestead through a hole in the fence.

As Lykidis has observed (2010), it is often the case that “Haneke’s authorship . . . manifestsitself as an antagonist to the interests of his bourgeois protagonists” (469), and here, in FunnyGames, maybe Haneke is asserting that the comfortable middle-class existence of the familyprovides an explanation for the torture they later endure. Just like Job, the family members aretoo comfortable, and they need to be shaken up, provoked, and tested—as does the audience inthe typical art-house cinema, those viewing the 1997 version, and in the American multiplex,the supposedly larger crowd viewing the 2007 version. This interpretation seems plausible,especially later in the film, when the little boy, Schorschi, manages to escape his captors. He at-tempts to scale the security gate to get away. But he can’t: it’s too high. Little Schorschi doeseventually escape through an opening in the fence (probably the same one that let the villainPeter in), but the boy is soon cornered in the neighbour’s lovely home, so the suggestion of thetrap is doubly reinforced. This bourgeois prison, the one that his parents, his class, and his cul-ture have created for him, is too formidable to overcome, and he later pays the ultimate pricefor his family’s success and self-satisfaction. The victimizers themselves figure as one possiblediabolical, unrealized future for this child of the elite—he could very well grow up to becomesomeone like them—for they “are two charming, well-spoken young men, dressed for sport,who assault and destroy [the family] with the appurtenances of their own leisure class, whichthey wield expertly [e.g., a golf club, a shotgun, and the sailboat]” (Monk 2010, 421).

As my earlier reflections on Job indicate, however, this reading is too simple. If, as Hanekeinsists later in the film, a troubled background cannot constitute a sufficient condition for theperpetrator’s actions (i.e., bad childhood, societal failure, poverty, addiction, etc.), then howcan a comfortable life be a rationale for getting brutalized? Even if Haneke takes care to pointout the foibles of consumer capitalism, which he does quite often (much to the perverse gleeof his elite audience and interpreters), the film cannot be reduced to a morality play about theself-satisfaction of the economically privileged, for this would be a simple explanation—and abland justification—for violence and suffering. Like the Book of Job, Haneke is in search ofmore demanding lessons.

The WagerThe action in the Book of Job begins with a wager: Satan bets God that Job will crack underthe pressure if his fence is broken down. God accepts and allows Satan to do what he will,short of killing Job, gambling that Job will in fact remain steadfast. It is impossible to ignore


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the tough questions that arise from this opening premise. Why does God point out Job in thefirst place? Why Job and not some other righteous servant (or someone not so righteous)?Why is God willing to take the bet, to play the game with Satan, a mere minion? Why wouldhe need to prove any kind of point to this lowly figure? Indeed, what is at stake in the bet?What wager would be worth enough to put his “servant Job” through Satan’s torments, just sohe could win?

Low-stakes wagering with significant consequences is also a theme in the 1983 comedyTrading Places (directed by John Landis), which provides a useful counterpoint to the biblicaltext. Two rich brothers, Mortimer and Randolph Duke, own a stock brokerage and decide tomake a bet about their newest, slickest, WASPiest partner (Dan Aykroyd): for all his greatbreeding and education, if everything were taken away from him, would he turn to a life ofvice, depravity, and crime? At the same time, they bet that a homeless man, played by EddieMurphy, could just as easily do the new partner’s job, if provided with wealth and advantages.Predictably, the Aykroyd character is destroyed, the Murphy character elevated (but then theplan is to discard him, once the experiment is over). And what are the stakes that drove thesemanipulations? One dollar.

At first glance, the stakes in the Book of Job are not even that high, so the great enticementis to try to find a deeper rationale for God’s actions. There have been innumerable attempts toreconstruct this rationale, and of course the most popular interpretation is that God indeedwants to test Job; the wager with Satan is simply a pretence. However, the same problems thathover over the akedah/Binding of Isaac episode in Genesis 23 afflict this reading of the Bookof Job. Why does God need to test anyone? If he is the aloof God speaking from the whirlwind,then why would he bother? And if he is the awesome presence known to Job and his brethren,why doesn’t he know the results of any tests he might give in advance? Why doesn’t he knowthe souls of his chosen people, and especially those who speak with him and live according tohis message? A spiritual test that involves not only the deprivation of material things, but alsothe annihilation of innocent people, and finally the destruction of the examinee, for the sake ofa result that the examiner knows in advance, is very strange.

An even more disturbing possibility in the search for God’s motive in entering into hisdeal with Satan, now reading Job avec Haneke, is that God had no plan at all. At best, every-thing that happens to Job is the product of contingency, flippancy, and play. This dim prospectcomes through in what God himself admits, while trying to shift the blame onto Satan: “Hestill persists in his integrity, although you incited me against him, to destroy him for no reason”(2:3, my emphasis).9

The text makes things worse by its lack of clarity about who wins the bet. Job never“curses” God, but his lengthy speeches do accuse and indict. Unfortunately, Satan disappearsafter the narrative opening, returning either to his rambling ways or to the bosom of thedivine, so we never have any definitive answer about the resolution of this wager. If Job were acomedy, like Trading Places (and, more importantly, in the classical sense of the term), thoseresponsible for a pointless, no-stakes bet that affects so many people would get their comeup-pance for being so callous and manipulative—that is indeed what happens to the Duke broth-ers in the Landis film. But the Book of Job is no comedy, despite its seemingly happy ending:God and Satan get away scot-free.

And so do Peter and Paul in Funny Games, after playing out their own sadistic gambit.The two young men begin their incursion into the lives of the family with games that tormentthe victims and raise the ire of the viewer. In one scene, Paul leads Anna, the wife, on a searchfor the family’s dog, Rolfi, whom he has murdered with a golf club and stashed in the backof the car. As she hunts, he calls out, “Kalt! Kalt! Wärmer! [Cold! Cold! Warmer!]” until she


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finds the poor beast; then she is “Heiß! [Hot!].” In the midst of this grim manipulation,Haneke plays his own game: at one point, Paul looks into the camera and winks at the viewerin complicity.

This issue of complicity—God’s complicity with Satan’s acts in Job and our complicitywith the perpetrators in Funny Games, not to mention Haneke’s complicity with the perpetra-tors as well—looms large as the film progresses. Haneke breaks down the “fence” of the film,its frame, and as viewers, we get the sense that we are not psychologically and morally safe.The big wager is the one that Paul makes with Anna and Georg, his victims: he bets that thewhole family will be dead in twelve hours. In fact, the bet is not with the family at all; it is withthe audience. As he discusses the issue with Georg and Anna, Paul turns to the camera againand asks, “What do you think? Do you think they have a chance of winning? You’re on theirside, aren’t you? So, who will you bet on?”

Mapping Job’s narrative into the film, we find that in this moment Haneke asks his view-ers to take on a rather disturbing role: the Satanic tormentor (Paul) turns us into Job’s God.We are offered a choice. Do we accept the gambit? Are we willing to let the suffering unfold,and to witness it, because we hope that things will work out in the end, making the violence“consumable”? Or will we walk out of the theatre or hit “stop” on the remote control, as Ha-neke himself has often recommended, if we are not in fact in need of the lesson that the filmimparts? In the Book of Job, God seems to give into the same temptation that has led most ofus to watch Funny Games to the end: he wants to see what will happen.

The LamentIn its third chapter, the Book of Job moves into a stylized poetic cycle, with Job and the threefriends exchanging perspectives on his circumstances. Job laments, calls God to account, de-cries the injustices that he perceives, and demands a response. The friends, in the meantime,insist again and again that there is a logic to the situation, that Job, for example, must havedone something wrong to deserve this punishment.

This middle section of the text allows its main character to offer testimony about the raw-ness and magnitude of the cruelty that has been unleashed on him. This lament begins with aforceful desire for decreation, a desire not to have existed at all, such that the very premise forany kind of suffering might be removed. This anti-hope comes from pure misery: “He hastorn me in his wrath, and hated me,” Job says. “I was at ease, and he broke me in two; heseized me by the neck and dashed me to pieces; he set me up as his target . . . He slashes openmy kidneys, and shows no mercy; he pours out my gall on the ground . . . My face is red withweeping, and deep darkness is on my eyelids” (16.9, 12–13, 16). Meanwhile, God stands by,psychopathically indifferent: “I cry to you and you do not answer me; I stand, and you merelylook at me . . . with the might of your hand you persecute me . . . I know that you will bringme to death” (30.20–21, 23).

Job’s tortured lamentation has been an emblem of the problem of evil for centuries. Whydo bad things happen to good or even innocent people, and why are the wicked blessed withgood fortune? There are many places in the text where these questions are raised with pro-found eloquence (e.g., 21.7–34, 24), and yet the classic formulation of the problem does notcapture the precise nature of the dilemma Job faces. The seeming arbitrariness of divine justicedoes present a massive challenge. Part of Job’s lament is indeed that any rationale or justifica-tion for God’s governance dissolves into “empty nothings” (21.34) given the terrifying ran-domness of human suffering. Indeed, the object of Job’s protest is the hybridity of thisrandomness and God’s focus and attention. The premise of the story is the radical contingency


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of God’s pointing to Job and Satan’s ensuing bet, which places Job in the crosshairs. Whymention him? Why pay attention to us in general? “What are human beings, that you make somuch of them,” Job says, “that you set your mind on them, visit them every morning, testthem every moment? . . . Why have you made me your target?” (6.17–18, 20). Why are wemade in such a way as to suffer in the first place? No wonder Job wishes not only for the tor-ment to end (in death), but also that he had never been born at all, so these difficult questionswould never have been prompted.10

Despite his vigorous protests, one of the most remarkable things about Job, of course, ishis steadfastness and hope. As Eliphaz the comforter says, “[God] wounds, but he binds up”(5.18). Job continues to hope for this healing, redeeming side of God to show itself: “I knowthat my Redeemer lives,” he affirms, “and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in myflesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side” (19.25–27). Depending on our reading thetext’s conclusion, which will be discussed below, perhaps his faith was warranted.

Many of the themes in Job’s lament also make an appearance in Funny Games—with thenotable exception of redemption. It is worth recalling just how ravaged this family is. First, thedog is killed with Georg’s golf club. Georg then has his knee smashed with the same instru-ment. The wife is made to find the dead dog, and later she is forced to remove her clothes forthe amusement of Peter and Paul. Then the little boy is shot dead in front of his parents, whilewe watch Paul make a sandwich in the kitchen.11 Later, Georg is tortured with Anna in theroom; then he is killed. Finally, Anna, with her hands and legs tied, is dumped into the lakeand left to drown.

In the midst of the horror, the victims voice their dissent, but protest quickly becomespleading. Georg eventually requests a quick death, but the tormentors do not wish to be de-prived of the entertainment value of watching him suffer. Especially after the boy is killed, thevictims are confined to a horrible state of shock, because they have been crushed like the eggsfrom the beginning of the film, 12 in a group of four (we can include the dog as part of the fam-ily at the beginning), and then in a remaining group of three. The victims are cowed by thesheer power of their tormentors and the poison of suffering; they are left in “dust and ashes.”

The most remarkable scene in Funny Games follows the murder of the little boy, and itis the heart of the film’s lament. Peter and Paul abruptly decide to leave the house as we takein a shot that frames the television that they have left on, with an auto race blaring out of itsspeakers—and it is covered in the boy’s blood. This image on its own would be far too di-dactic, even for Haneke. The blood is on the television that emits meaningless noise. We get it:media and violence.

Then our director composes a long take that puts this visual lesson in perspective. Theshot takes in most of the room. Georg is lying on the floor, obscured by a piece of his nice fur-niture, Anna is sitting in a chair, the television is on the far right side of the frame, and theboy’s corpse is crumpled behind it. Anna rises and takes great pains to turn off the TV (she isbound hand and foot), and then the camera follows her, slowly, panning with her movement,keeping her at the near-centre of the frame, as she hops into the kitchen (to the left). She dis-appears, leaving Georg in the centre of the shot. Now his demolished psyche cries out inanguish; his scream is preternatural, conveying his shock, shame, rage, and sorrow, all at once.Anna reenters with a knife to cut their bonds and comforts him. He becomes quiet, but thenhe and Anna attempt to move together into the kitchen, to exit the room that contains theirdead son’s corpse, and the hurt gets even worse as she lifts him, carrying much of his weightin a slow, awkward, almost penitential walk. In this take, which lasts for about ten minutes,suffering is not a game. Haneke conveys the difficulty victims have getting from one singlemoment to the next.


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This same kind of pain led Job to wish for his own decreation, and it is conveyed rathereffectively to the film’s audience through effective use of technique. As Wheatley (2009) hasnoted, Haneke offers a vivid contrast, in this remarkable long take, with the more conventionalsuspense composition that has led up to it: the chase after Schorschi, who has escaped into theneighbours’ house, and then the run-up to the little boy’s murder are composed with moreconventional (and rapid) cutting and editing. The murder itself and the “aftermath,” however,occur off-screen and at an excruciatingly slow pace (respectively), disrupting the genre expec-tations that Haneke himself has built up. Then there is the bare fact that the film has portrayedthe murder of a child, which is considered out of bounds for even the most violent avatars ofdiversionary entertainment. The result: “The ‘rules’ of the suspense thriller are thus rupturedon a narrative and formal level: with the driving force of the film’s narrative gone, the specta-tor is confronted with a void, the pleasure drive suddenly forestalled. Unpleasure arises as aresult of the obstruction of the pleasure drive, which having been mobilized, is suddenlythwarted” (92).13

As we found in Job, Haneke gives us a combination of the randomness of these acts andthe intense focus put into the torture once the targets have been chosen, and this makes itextremely difficult to find compensation for the discomfort that the film provokes. Why thisfamily? Why this house? Because they were neighbours with another family that was slaugh-tered, and they arrived at just the right time. And at the end of the film, friends of Anna andGeorg’s are going to be the next victims because they happened to drop by the previous day.Why did the little boy get killed first? Because of a game of eeny-meeny-miny-mo, and eventhat is botched by Peter, who counts the boy “in” at the end, when he was supposed to becounted “out.” It’s all just that random.

Following the pattern that we are tempted to discern in Job, one that pervades so manytraditional and contemporary theodicies, it is natural to search for a counterbalance to this cin-ematic lament in Funny Games, namely hope for redemption. The hope for rescue, as a simplematter of suspenseful plotting, dwindles to nothing, so there must be some higher avenue ofescape. It might be proposed, for example, that redemption has to be self-generating in thisgodless theatre of cruelty, that it can only come from the characters themselves, in the lovethat the couple shares, for example, which is especially manifest after the boy has been killed.The broken, lame Georg apologizes to his wife before she slips out a kitchen window andlaunches a misbegotten attempt to get help, and she in turn tells him that she loves him, with apowerful, tearful kiss; they have “become a couple,” a real couple, as a response to their darkesthour (Monk 2010, 422). As Brunette (2010) has argued, “It is as though they have becomeawakened, through this ordeal, to the most basic forms, and meanings, of human life” (64).

Of course, the tormentors present their own rejoinder to this loving moment (and tothese rather banal readings of it), for love, as the supposed transcendence of pain and cruelty,is precisely what facilitates the games that Peter and Paul play. The parents are forced to dowhat their victimizers want, for example, because the victimizers threaten the little boy. Then,in a game called “The Loving Wife,” Anna is forced to do what they want because otherwisePeter and Paul will torture her husband. The sentimental bond becomes venomous in thehands of a sadist. With these moves, Haneke dismantles the platitude of redemption that oftenplagues the melodramatic Hollywood narration of suffering: “Through all this, Anna andGeorg learned what love really means.” Indeed they did.

What about redemption in the sense that many discern in Job, that is, as a specifically reli-gious hope? As Peter tortures Georg, Paul does insist that Anna pray: “Oh Lord and Father,make me kind, So I in heaven, my place may find.” An optimist (or religious apologist) mighttake Anna’s prayer as a sincere moment of transcendence, qua faith, even in the midst of—or


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perhaps as a product of—absolute misery. Elsaesser (2010) has argued that this is somethingof a dark night of the soul for Anna, and in fact “God is nearest when all exits are blocked,when the trap is sprung and shut tight, and only a Pascalian wager or leap of faith can rescuethe fallen soul” (66). Echoing this reading, Zordan (2010) has proposed that Anna’s ignoranceabout the form of prayer and her deep despair “point to a deeper and deeply religious con-sciousness: it is the awareness that the force we turn to in our prayers cannot enter into rela-tionship with us as the recipient of our requests, but has to remain undetermined beyond thedetermined horizon of our daily life and suffering” (140).

This line of interpretation is also fairly naïve, however. The prayer in Funny Games fits inline with all of the silly little rhymes that Paul comes up with to characterize his torturousgames. This entreaty to God turns out to be nothing but a tool of discipline and punishment.Anna must repeat it precisely, with no errors, with fervency, to prevent the torture of her hus-band and ultimately, if she does it right, to choose the manner of her death. Moreover, Annais not praying to some undetermined God here, or if she is, this is more of a byproduct oreffect of a cruel game than an unadulterated manifestation of deep religious conviction, forshe is praying to the ones who are playing God, the tormentors who hold her fate in theirwhite-gloved hands.

In the aftermath of the prayer scene, the optimist might in fact find some vindication—fora moment. Just before Anna begins her final rehearsal of the prayer, it appears that her gesturehas won her a reprieve. She reaches out for the shotgun that rests on the living room table andkills Peter, to our satisfaction as an audience looking for vengeance and satisfaction. So herprayer worked! This would not be the first time that a resourceful and spirited, but desperatefemale victim/heroine has invoked a bit of divine intervention so she could serve justice on thevillains.14 Haneke plays on our genre expectations, however, and then once again disruptsthem; in its most famous (or infamous) sequence, his film dispels the illusory satisfactions thataccompany Anna’s actions. After his partner-in-crime is killed, Paul snatches the shotgunaway, jabs Anna in the head with it, and engages, inexplicably at first, in a frantic search forthe remote control. He finds it, hits rewind, scans Funny Games back to the place right beforeAnna grabbed the shotgun, and then hits play once again. This time around, moving forwardagain, he prevents Anna from killing Peter. The old Jobian mantra leaps to mind: “The Lordgave, and the Lord has taken away” (1.20). And so has Haneke.

The Answers of the ComfortersTowards the end of the Book of Job, God takes Job’s friends to task. In the poetic midsectionof the text, Bildad, Eliphaz, and Zophar present responses to Job’s protests that are right inline with the biblical vernacular, but it seems that these answers are wrong. The familiar con-cept of retributive justice, for example, apparently does not apply in this case. Bad things arehappening to Job not because he has done something wrong, not because one of his familymembers has done something wrong, not because he has failed to give enough charity, notbecause he is arrogant and blasphemous, and so on. Are the affirmations of God’s mysteriousways, his inscrutable power, and unremitting justice also wrong answers, such that Godwould, in the end, desire to strike down the comforters who articulated them?

The problem here, as a reading of Job avec Haneke suggests, is not that the answers are“wrong.” The mistake of the comforters is presuming to have answers in the first place. Wehave already noted that the arbitrariness of suffering is the driving force behind the laments inJob, and in Funny Games. Can answers be found that will assuage us, that will offer explana-tions and a sense of order, making life “consumable” again?


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According to Haneke, the answer is no. Peter and Paul play God for no ascertainable rea-son; their games are not traceable to some cause. Their extended parody of the typical talkshow blame-it-on-society response to evil is intense and provocative. Georg inquires, Why arethey doing this? Well, Peter’s mother molested him, he’s poor, he has five siblings who are alldrug addicts, and his father is an alcoholic. So, in other words, he’s screwed up, and that ex-plains why Peter does things like this. But that’s not actually true, Paul then reveals. Actually,Peter is rich and spoiled, and it is his decadent “ennui,” his “world-weariness,” and the “voidof existence” that leads him to do these terrible things. In other words, he is a home invaderand sadist because he’s read too much Schopenhauer. Or maybe the two of them are drug ad-dicts, who rob rich people’s houses to support their habit, and sometimes things get a little outof hand. Or is there another version of the story that Georg—or we as viewers—would like tohear? The fact is, there is no reason. When we come up with one, Haneke suggests, we paperover the reality of the victimization and become complicit with those who perform it. Thesame might be said of even the most elaborate and heartfelt theodicy.

But there’s another, deeper form of complicity that Funny Games thematizes, one that re-sonates with the words of the comforters in the Book of Job, and recalls the earlier discussionof the fence: our relentless, often unspoken propensity to blame the victim, even when he orshe is essentially faultless. This propensity emerges in particular to viewers’ typical responsesto the mainstream films that Haneke intends to interrogate, particularly in the horror/suspense/thriller genre, but it is also a dangerous feature of many of our everyday theodicies:those who suffer must have done something wrong to deserve what they have gotten. In thefilm, Anna lets Paul stick around a bit too long as he attempts to borrow eggs, for example.And she provokes the two miscreants by telling them to leave. Georg fails to throw them outforcefully, from the beginning, before they get the upper hand. Schorschi corners himself inthe neighbour’s house. Having escaped, Anna hides from a first car on the road, but then flagsdown the second one—which contains the psychopaths who have decided to return to thescene of the crime—and so on. Why do these victims keep failing to do the right thing? Whydon’t they see what’s going on? What is wrong with them? Are they that naïve, or that weak,or just plain stupid? Haneke catches us in our secret indictments,15 but, to use Job’s words,why would we make these characters’ humiliation into an argument against them (19.5)?

Happy Ending?The greatest challenge to my experiment in correlation may be the endings of the text andthe film. In the biblical text, God answers Job, Job repents, and everyone lives happily everafter. Job has all of his possession replaced, his reputation is restored, and he even gets newchildren—and the daughters are particularly notable for their charm and beauty (42.10–17).Nothing corresponds to these eventualities in the film.

We might recall a category I employed at the beginning of this article to render the com-parison more intelligible. Funny Games is an anti-fable precisely because it is missing the kindof resolution that we find in the biblical text. But what if we were to begin to pare away Job’sresolution through a process of text-critical elimination? Most commentators accept, forexample, that the redactor of Job took a fairy tale shell and intervened on it. Thus the begin-ning and end of the text constitute a simple fairy tale, and its midsection tells its own poeticstory of angst, protest, and struggle. The arbitrariness of the fairy tale premise, as I have sug-gested, only heightens the dilemma that is so eloquently articulated in the poetic dialogue, re-sulting in an indictment of the happy conclusion. After reading the first forty-one chapters ofthe Book of Job, is it possible to read the last one straightforwardly?


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This approach may sequester the very end of the story, the return to the fairy tale narra-tive, but what about God’s speech, which at first glance presents itself as a font of knowledgefor Job? Despite its beauty, we should recall that there is no moral justification presented inGod’s speech from the whirlwind, nor is there an explanation: it is all majesty, power, andbluster—plus, surprisingly, a certain level of playfulness. God engages in a monologue, with lit-tle interruption along the way. He presents question after question to Job, which Job is in noposition to answer. God’s queries are often sweeping and profound. Does Job know, for exam-ple, why a raindrop falls in the most abandoned, empty space in the world, a place where nohuman has ever been, or will ever go? (38.26). Other questions are somewhat obscure: “Doyou know when the mountain goats give birth?” (39.1), God says. “Who has let the wild ass gofree?” (39.5). Do you know why the ostrich behaves as it does, flapping its flightless wings,burying its eggs, “deal[ing] cruelly with its young” (39.13–16); “[w]hen it spreads its plumesaloft, it laughs at the horse and its rider” (39.18). Mysterious phenomena indeed, and certainlypart of a grand design—but are they helpful to the victim of seemingly unwarranted suffering?

The subtext of these rather esoteric examples can be quite intriguing, and perhaps theseodd questions indict the speaker in his rhetorical attempt to overpower Job, who we mightimagine is somewhat befuddled at this point. At 39.17, for example, the ostrich’s odd beha-viour is attributed a divine decision: “God has made it forget wisdom, and given it no share inunderstanding.” This formulation, forgetting wisdom and lacking understanding, is a regularrefrain in the text (cf. 28.28), and in his speech of repentance, Job repeats it, suggesting that hehas behaved like an ostrich, as he inadvertently admits in 30.29: as a result of his sorry state,he says, “I am a brother of jackals, and a companion of ostriches.” At the same time, the onlyone in the text who seems to “deal cruelly” with his children (humanity) in the text is God, sothe bombast and absurdity of this example turn around. God is in fact the ostrich, full of blus-ter, acting “cruelly” without apparent reason.

More formidable than the ostrich, of course, is the beastly Leviathan, the emblem of pri-mordial chaos. Here the absurdity makes the all too easy shift back into cruelty. God can tamethe beast easily, after hooking it like a fish; he has the capacity to quell even the most powerfulforms of disorder and destruction. Then God taunts Job with the ridiculous image of the beastwhispering sweet nothings in Job’s ear (41.3) and Job playing with it like a pet (41.5). If Job(or anyone else) were like God, the speech continues, then he could give it like a lap-dog to hisgirls . . . except Job has no girls anymore,16 because God has allowed them to be killed, at thebeginning of the story, chinnam, “for no reason.” After hearing God’s speech, of course, Job re-pents (42.1–6), suggesting that he has learned something that he did not know before. But itcould be that he now knows the true nature of his playing God, and in the end, he is beatendown by cruel divine games: “I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (42.6). Perhapsthe ending of Job is not as happy as it first seems.

Perhaps, in other words, it is a bit like Funny Games, which also revokes our anticipationsof a satisfying resolution. As I mentioned above, the most infamous instance of this anti-fabulistic result is the moment when Paul responds to his own trauma (watching his friend getshot) by searching for the remote. By way of contrast, it should be noted that in performingthis gesture, Paul acquires an embarrassing American cousin, Adam Sandler. In the 2006movie entitled Click, the Sandler character, a beleaguered architect named Michael Newman,acquires a truly universal remote from a mad scientist/angel of death (Christopher Walken)who resides in the “beyond” section of the local Bed, Bath, and Beyond home-goods store.This magical remote allows Newman to pause, fast-forward, rewind, mute, and so on theworld and his life. Of course he uses the device to great (and supposedly amusing) effect. Hefast forwards through the tedium of his life (which apparently includes conversing and having


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sex with his wife), skips major chapters (stages in his children’s development, parts of hiscareer, sickness), and blocks out general unpleasantness (people he doesn’t like). Soon enough,the programming on the remote takes over and makes choices for Sandler based on his previ-ous preferences, his life quickly flashes by, and he dies, only to return to the status quo ante atthe end, by means of the standard “it was all a dream” plot structure, having learned his lesson.The movie ends up as a hackneyed morality tale about appreciating the things that really mat-ter, even the difficult, challenging, and annoying things.

Of course in Hollywood, the narcissistic potential of the remote had to be chastised. Asan audience, we are caught fantasizing about the possible uses of such a device along withSandler—it functions like the Ring of Gyges in Plato’s Republic—but then we must be forcedto recall that it would not be right to mute certain people, fast-forward through boring orunpleasant parts of our lives, use the pause button to steal, stalk, and self-satisfy, or rewind togive ourselves second chances at bad decisions. Life is short, suffering is part of it, and wegrow stronger from overcoming challenges—or so the message goes. The suffering, tedium,and hard work make us appreciate the good parts of life, so it is necessary to experience them.This is of course a very typical Hollywood resolution, and while it is largely godless in Click(the Walken character notwithstanding), it is a Hollywood theodicy similar in structure to theedifying lesson that is often derived from the pages of the Book of Job.

Haneke’s use of the remote control device is obviously much more surgical and disruptive.The earlier film, Benny’s Video (which starred the same actor, Arno Frisch, who plays Paul inFunny Games) suggested that reality has become “playable,” to use Haneke’s term, and wehave the deceptive sense that nothing is irrevocable—anything can be rewound—and thereforeeverything is permitted because, as Rhodes (2010) has argued, this filmic gesture “destroys thediegetic world and our belief in it” (96). So the use of the remote in Funny Games is radicallydestabilizing because of a sudden identification between villainous character and author/auteur. At the same time, however, this episode gives us a final sense that the fate of the familyis sealed. In rewinding Funny Games, Paul takes back the satisfying reprisal by his victims,“endowing [him], within the diegetic frame, with a godlike power over [his] fictive universe(a power that should be exercised only ‘remotely,’ from outside)” (Durham 2010, 248), andleaving us with the unpleasant suspicion that God—or at least the director—is in fact on hisside, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. The narrative structure of the film is bothcontingent and inevitable, both arbitrary and focused in its torment, like a Kafka tale,17 or,according to a non-Hollywood interpretation, like the Book of Job.

Conclusion: Suffering, and Not Playing AroundHaneke is unique among contemporary directors not only in his handling of violence, butalso in his depiction of pain and suffering. As I have noted above, the scene that portrays thegrief-stricken parents in the middle of Funny Games is a perfect emblem of this artistry, as isHaneke’s decision to leave the murder of the boy outside of the frame; this latter (non)represen-tation of violence is commonplace in his films. On the one hand, Haneke gives us suffering inall of its irreducibility—its full, sublime presence—and on the other, he gives it to us by takingaway its depiction, indicating the impossibility of its representation (in a movie) (Price 2010).Curiously enough, the Book of Job engages in similar techniques. Job’s lament is raw, painful,and crystal clear; it is prelude and premise to all of the dialogic deliberations to which its givesrise. And also, the text leaves much suffering off of the screen, as it were. The death of Job’schildren, for example, comes by way of messengers, and the core of Job’s grief and sorrow is infact effaced by the narrative, as he pauses for seven days of “sitting shiva” without a word.


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So what, in the end, are these two remarkable texts saying to us about grappling withsuffering, which must be represented and recalled, but in the deepest sense cannot be? In TheElementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim (2001) provides us with a perspective that helpsto bring this question into focus:

Pain is the sign that certain ties that bind [one] to the profane world are broken; because it isproof that he has partially freed himself from this world, it is considered an instrument ofdeliverance. And the man who is delivered in this way is not the victim of pure illusion whenhe believes that he is endowed with a kind of mastery over things: he has truly risen abovethem merely by renouncing them. (234)

From a certain, standard perspective, the Book of Job substantiates Durkheim’s analysis:Job has persevered through a vicious assault, an assault carried out both at random and withintense focus. It is actively perpetrated by Satan, but passively so—shockingly so—by a waver-ing, out-of-touch God. In spite of all of this, Job guts everything through like a trooper, andperhaps he even outsmarts God by getting him to appear and reveal his bluster. In any event,he can feel “a kind of mastery over things,” and thus an identification with the sacred, thatwhich is set apart—himself, in this case—at the end of his struggle.

But many questions remain as the text comes to a close, and we are not assured that Godwill refuse to play the game again, in other places and times, over and over again. As readers,we are well aware of this fact, and we are again forced back into the text, hoping to find an-swers there. Any reflective interpreter who claims to have discerned an airtight theodicy in theBook of Job must have the lurking sense that the text refuses it—refuses closure, because itopts for questioning instead. Job, even with all his blasphemy and protest, is accepted by God;the comforters are not.

And what about Funny Games? As I have indicated, it is possible to argue that Haneke’scharacters experience moments of sacralised, redemptive mastery in the film, but in the end,this interpretation is difficult to sustain, because all of the escapes are thwarted—they turnout to be part of the game. Then Haneke presents a radically inconclusive conclusion.After dumping our bound heroine off of the sailboat at the end of the film, Peter and Paulfind their way to yet another lovely lakeside home, the home of friends of Anna and Georg.As the next unsuspecting bourgeois householder lets Paul in, he gives his audience one lastlook of complicity, and the game begins again in the film’s afterlife, in life outside of theboundaries of the film. As Haneke himself has affirmed, taking on the voice of his idealviewer, “The film doesn’t end on the screen, but rather in my head. Hopefully, sometimeseven in my heart. Then perhaps I’m able to take the film home where I might notice the si-milarities with my life and where the pockets of violence are to which I contribute” (Grabner2010, 18).

In relation to Funny Games, we as viewers are the ones who suffer through the film’s “pro-fane world” and come through, having gained Durkheim’s “mastery” and thus “deliverance.”The suffering is vicarious of course—we can only suffer along with the victims, and this is,after all, “only a movie” (Price 2010). Nevertheless, by imploding the Hollywood fantasy of aneasy theodicy (a happy ending, a “message of hope,” “truly becoming a couple,” etc.), Hanekerefuses to sanitize this experience or anaesthetize his audience. Funny Games is not telling usthat redemptive suffering is impossible—there may be such a thing, and to this extent, thefilm, especially when read alongside the Book of Job, clarifies and intensifies the challenge ofconceiving it and serves as powerful prolegomena to constructive analysis and argumentation.Understood precisely in this light, however, Haneke’s film is telling us that the intellectual


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frameworks and narrative structures that we devise in response to suffering should never befacile. The lamentable suffering, random yet focused, that gives rise to the rather clinicallytermed “problem of evil” is not a game—and should not be elided or forgotten.

Notes1. Haneke has singled out Natural Born Killers as a film that fails to achieve its own critical aims,

though his observations may well apply to some of the other examples I have just cited: “My goal[in Funny Games] was a kind of counter-programming to Natural Born Killers. In my view, OliverStone’s film . . . is the attempt to use a fascist aesthetic to achieve an anti-fascist goal, and thisdoesn’t work. What is accomplished is the opposite . . . It might be argued that Natural Born Killersmakes the violent image alluring while making no space for the viewer” (Sharrett 2010, 584). AsSpeck (2010) has noted, “Self-referentiality does not prevent the representation of violence as some-thing natural in the first place” (11).

2. For example, gaming culture, immersive virtual/on-line environments, the pervasiveness of videotechnology (and on-line sites for self-expression and ironic exhibition), new levels of artifice (specialeffects) in portraying violence, and so on. In the version of the film made for the 2007 audience, forexample, it seems strange that the two young men are not taping their escapades themselves—thoughof course it could be argued that Haneke already treated this form of mediated self-reflexivity inBenny’s Video and Caché (see Ornella 2009 and Wheatley 2009).

3. Haneke opted to do a remake that is almost a shot-by-shot replica of his original, except in Englishand with a cast of well-known actors (e.g., Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, and Michael Pitt). He hasoften said that he made the film because the original version, with its European art-house trappings(subtitles, unknown actors, etc.), did not reach its intended audience (mainstream American film-goers). My own analysis in this essay is based on the original version of the film, though it appliesequally to the re-make. For comparisons between the two versions, or episodes within them, seeMonk 2010; Ornella 2009; Price 2010; Speck 2010; and Zordan 2010.

4. My analysis of the Book of Job in this article will be home-spun, but it takes its guidance from Gu-tierrez 1987; Jung 1968; Kant 1998; Newsom 2003; Rubenstein 2000; and Wiesel 1976.

5. The Hebrew is sûk, which literally means “to hedge” or “to fence,” “espec. boughs and branches asa screen or to form a booth or hut.” “Since . . . booths or huts as well as hedges were built for theprotection and security of men and also of gardens and vineyards,” the metaphorical meaning ofthe term becomes “to shelter, to protect, to cover” (Gesenius 1836, 713).

6. We can juxtapose this opening with that in Haneke’s 2003 effort, Time of the Wolf. Once again afamily travels along in a nice car (a Peugeot) to their cabin in the woods, but there are no gameshere, just a mobile, medium-to-long shot of the front of the car as it drives towards its destination.The shot immediately puts us on the ground in this apocalyptic world, with no hint of a higherpower, malevolent or otherwise.

7. Price (2010) has examined this sense of randomness and disjunction in the opening sequence ofFunny Games. Haneke oscillates between long shots and tight shots of the family, even focusing onthe hands of the parents as they fiddle with the CD player in the midst of the guessing game. Themiddle term of exposition thus is removed, culminating in the sudden rupture of non-diagetichard/jazzcore music, which accompanies both the credits and a portrait of the happy family as theydrive along. As Price indicates, “Without the medium shot, the rhetorical quality of classical narra-tion begins to break down” (40). The Book of Job also interrupts the “classical narration” of itsfairy-tale framing, not with an absent middle term, but instead with the insertion of a long, non-narrative poetic cycle.

8. For further analysis of Haneke’s focus on the empty objects and exchanges of late capitalist life, seeSpeck 2010 and Lebeau 2009.

9. The Hebrew chinnam, “for no reason,” can also mean “gratuitously” or “in vain.” Apologists forGod’s behaviour usually link this adverb to Satan’s incitement, not God’s consumption of Job; thus


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Satan incites God “for no reason” or “to no effect.” This grammatical shift does not solve theproblem, however. Does it help to know that God is “incited” into destroying Job even thoughthe inciter has no reason for his actions? Regardless of the interpretation (God admits that he de-stroys Job “for no reason” or Satan incites God “for no reason”), Job seems to have a point later inthe text when he uses the same term, chinnam, to accuse God of afflicting him “without cause”(9.17).

10. This desire for decreation brings to mind a classic example from American cinema, in It’s a Won-derful Life (1946). After a series of setbacks, George Bailey wishes that he had never been born, butin contrast with Job, who wants to remove the premise of his own suffering, George is thinkingabout others in a common-sense, utilitarian manner: everyone else would be better off if he hadnever shown up in the world. He is proven wrong, joyously. Job’s wish is more radical because hislogic is unassailable: if he had never been born, he would never have suffered. To this there is noresponse—except, perhaps, to charge Job with blasphemy for wanting to give up what God has be-stowed, namely life.

11. For a brilliant reading of Haneke’s decision to leave this killing off-screen, see Price 2010.12. The pretence that allows Peter to gain entry to the house is a request for eggs, supposedly at the

behest of the neighbour. Anna provides the eggs (4), and Peter promptly drops and breaks them,and then requests that she replace them with however many she has left (3).

13. For general discussion of Haneke’s use of the long take, see Manon 2010; Rhodes 2010; and Wes-sely 2010.

14. Monk (2010) has demonstrated the degree to which the star-power of Naomi Watts (that is tosay—and this is impossible to resist—her “wattage”) enhances Haneke’s (re)construction of thisarchetypal female character in the American version of Funny Games. Haneke has said that he in-sisted on Watts for the role, citing her work in Mulholland Dr. (2001) and 21 Grams (2003). Moreinteresting from an intertextual standpoint is her close identification with the two Ring films (2002and 2005)—mainstream horror that centres on a videotape that kills those who view it. (It appearsthat Watts will not be appearing in The Ring 3D, which is in production.)

15. Haneke has engaged in meta-commentary on this issue in Funny Games. Always the provocateur,he notes that the lack of civility from the family (Anna stops being polite in the midst of the egggame and tries to push Peter out of the house; Georg slaps Paul) precipitates the actions of the tor-mentors; hence, these victims are not “completely innocent,” for “things in the world aren’t so sim-ple.” However, Haneke also affirms that the family members “were forced by the two young men toact that way,” and in sum, “there’s no connection between the guilt of these people and their finaldisappearance. It’s not some kind of punishment; that [sic] would be completely idiotic to thinkthat” (Cieutat 2010, 147).

16. The Hebrew word that is used here, na’arah, can refer to young female servants, or, more generi-cally, to a young woman or a “maiden.” The evocation of Job’s young daughters, who seem to beunmarried, is clear.

17. The allusion to Kafka is not arbitrary: when the original Funny Games was released in 1997,Haneke had just completed an adaptation of Kafka’s The Castle for television. K. and Frieda areplayed by the same actors who appear as Anna and Georg in Funny Games, and throughout thefilm, K. is tormented by two incompetent, game-playing assistants, pre-figuring Peter and Paul(one of them is in fact played by Frank Giering, who has the role of Peter in Funny Games). InKafka’s work, just as we find in Haneke, the traps and games are diabolical, the language is preciseand stylized, and the sporadic violence is shocking.

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