Violence Hates Games? Revolting (against) Violence in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games U.S.

Abstract

Among the various norms that contemporary mainstream cinema has been eagerly transgressing, the limits of violence - either justified or not - happen to be challenged more intensely than ever before. Perhaps no other artistic medium has managed to deploy so profoundly the dogma which psychoanalysis stubbornly refers to: a subject’s pursuit of excessive and Thanatic pleasure we know as jouissance. Yet, mainstream cinema rarely conspires with desires or the real and its traumatic experiences of emptiness; Hollywood, as a construct, cautiously trudges across the realms of fantasies instead. If violence is eagerly cherished and exercised there, then it is mostly because the films themselves refrain from inflicting violence on spectators, preserving their bloodthirsty images in impermeable bubbles [...].