Hee Haw Redux
Friday, March 14, 2008
1) Europe's middle class thinks that America's middle class are a lot of anesthetized, germophobic clean freaks. How much better it must be to be the most hated thing of the modern area when you can point to a worse example, to kill brown people for something poetic like terroir instead of oil. American tourists demand clean, history-free hotels when they travel to the old country, so the claim goes--as if bourgeois European tourists were coming to New York and demanding to stay in the Bronx--and refuse to bend to common realities. So it's not surprising that Michael Haneke thought that Americans were likely to "identify" with the air-brushed, ineffectual, doomed German couple at the heart of his 1997 Funny Games. This did not work out. So he remade the film shot by shot this year and made the couple American. But the sort of Americans who might have gone to see Funny Games--not, generally, the sort of Americans with the means to travel-- were too busy listening to death metal to care. Not that I would expect Micheal Haneke to know that, as he seems to display the cultural instincts of a waterfowl.
2) Micheal Haneke is to European Art Cinema as Hee Haw was to American Country Music. Sure, The Piano Teacher was saved by Isabelle Huppert's performance, the closest an actor in one of Haneke's films has come to actually talking back to him through the means of her performance. And in Cache the marionettes at least had articulation points. The rest of it is Junior Samples popping up in a live-studio cornfield.
3) Micheal Haneke works pretty much exclusively with long-and-medium "objective" shots paired with pore-revealing close-ups. This is especially true of Funny Games. This makes it, at base, a Kubrick movie. The difference with Haneke is that he thinks he's working from the outside. I bet he finds horror movies distasteful.
4) I don't mind a dilettante. No matter your ideological outlook, it's dilettantes that make the world go. It's the dilettantes with pretentions toward icy, cold formality who come across as dimwits. If you took a book at random from Haneke's no-doubt portentious home library, I'll bet you ten euros its spine would make the faintest little snap when you opened it. That's what his movies sound like.
5) Don't go see this fucking movie.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 2:11 PM,
