Funny Games (this is far over the limit)

By opening Funny Games (1997) with a classical music guessing game, director Michael Haneke points to a similar survey presented in Bourdieu’s Distinctions. Haneke’s films target an upper-middle class bourgeois audience that might be prompted to guess along with the family on screen. The flash of the title card and a jarring sound-burst of heavy metal quickly, and quite disturbingly, interrupts this enjoyable game. Incessant screams drown out the sound of laughter and classical music. The audience might be frightened or amused by this gesture, but in many ways they are in on Haneke’s game already. Those not ‘in on the game’, or excluded by the game, are presumed not to have the academic or cultural training required to understand Haneke’s condemnation.

Bourdieu explains that an encounter with art is not purely one of ‘love at first sight’ but rather one of empathy (3). The Haneke audience may empathize with Haneke for his trick. Most importantly, this audience empathizes with Haneke as a creative producer. The social and academic knowledge of the filmmaker is supported when Bourdieu states, “In identifying what is worthy of being seen and the right way to see it, they are aided by their whole social group (which guides and reminds them with its ‘Have you seen?’ and ‘You must see…’) and by the whole corporation of critics mandated by the group to produce legitimate classifications and the discourse necessarily accompanying any artistic enjoyment worthy of the name” (28).

I wondered at such a claim when Bourdieu highlighted the survey regarding varying groups’ knowledge of directors, specifically that, “Knowledge of directors is much more closely linked to cultural capital than is mere cinema-going” (27). Bourdieu’s next claim that, “indeed, these least-educated regular cinema-goers knew as many actors’ names as the most highly educated” seems to suggest that star knowledge of a film is less significant (or maybe more accurately for Bourdieu, less a product of cultural and academic capital) than knowledge of film directors. I wondered why this was valued as such considering that many people associate the greatness of a Frank Capra film with Jimmy Stewart, and not always with Capra. This too is a specialized discussion, one spurred by personal and academic capital in that realm.

Yet specialization of a certain type of culture (knowledge of composers, directors) is characterized in Bourdieu as a product of specific types of academic and social education. In fact, part of education is to align and label the two as whole:

“The official differences produced by academic classifications tend to produce (or reinforce) real differences by inducing in the classified individuals a collectively recognized and supported belief in the differences, thus producing behaviours that are intended to bring real being into line with official being.” (25).

He does not consider the same sort of social education of star culture as akin to knowledge of directors. Bourdieu claims that highbrow forms with obscuring qualities could be seen by ‘working class’ as a game that excludes them. This assumes that these types of highbrow culture need training and specialization in a way that working class culture does not, or to suggest that working class sporting culture or music cannot offer as much complexity. Yet anyone ignorant to those sports would also be socially and academically insufficient in knowing the key players, terms, movements, or tactics. They too might feel excluded from the game.

The key for me in all of this goes back to empathy. Why is it that I (as an admitted cinema viewer) identify a film as a Capra film or a Haneke film? Is it not merely of the same impulse as fandom or interest in stars? My empathy, and I posit the empathy of Bourdieu’s bourgeois class, is that of identification with creators of cultural objects (we see actors under directors, Hitchcock called them “cattle” which we chuckle unapologetically about). Their identification is that directors are presented as ‘in charge’ and can create a film or work in their ‘image and likeness’; to create a product that not only reflects them as humans but might also remain as theirs (they can enjoy profit and acclaim from this product). They like them because they think they are in on the game, while others are not. This is part of the distinction, that pleasure is derived from thinking that one is a player of creation and not a pawn.