What Gets To Be Satire?

When target audiences don't quite understand what's reflected back to them.

October 02, 2023

If these ideas are intriguing to you, maybe you wish to subscribe to my newsletter.

Other writing:

Putting the “Funny” Back in Funny Games

“I put on Startship Troopers in the background. Here’s my hot take: the bugs are really bad! Maybe they are, in fact, right when they say that the only good bug is a dead bug. These things suck out your brains and send pinpoint meteors from light years away.”

That was the message that arrived in our group chat on Thursday that set off an entire afternoon of debate. In fact, the entire debate was so heated we didn’t even call out the original poster for “Startship Troopers,” i.e. “this mfer said ‘startship troopers.’” Instead, we went down a rabbit hole about intentionality, portrayal, and interpretation as it relates to satire. Essentially, 26 years later, we were rehashing the same debates about Starship Troopers that plagued its release, when critics like Stephen Hunter at the Washington Post read every part of Verhoeven’s satire perfectly but took it at face value. Even Roger Ebert wasn’t so sure.

There have been countless reappraisals of Starship Troopers (something that seems to cycle every seven years or so), but it remains that the movie is hard to decipher if you’re not paying close attention. It’s just too good at portraying exactly the thing it wants you to second guess. But American audiences have a history of misinterpreting and absorbing satire into their daily lexicon. Just look at the whole Chappelle’s Show debacle.

The Internet struggles with satire on a regular basis. Post-irony posters are consistently met with satire scolds telling them that if their joke is taken literally, they did a bad job. Sure, some satire might be poorly written, but where do you draw the line? There’s an argument to be made that Starship Troopers is more subtle than people understood upon release, with the information about Earth striking first literally hidden background of other scenes. But Michael Haeneke’s Funny Games, also a 1997 release, essentially proves that audiences only see what they want to.

The story of the movie is simple: two young psychopaths terrorize a family at their lakeside vacation home. But around 30 minutes in, when the mother is looking for the family dog, the movie’s main aggressor, Paul, turns and winks at the camera. There’s no hiding the movie’s intent—Haeneke wants you to know that you, as the audience, are directly bearing witness. But while the dog is found dead in the car, the violence happened off screen, earlier in the movie. And we also don’t see when the intruders force the mother to strip to her underwear, or when they shoot the child point blank with a shotgun, or when the father is eventually shot and killed as well. This all happens just out of frame, hiding the brutal acts from the eyes of the viewer.

And yet, the movie was met with outrage. A third of the Cannes audience walked out during its screening, and to this day if you tell someone you’re going to watch Funny Games, they look at you as if you’re the most sadistic person they’ve ever met. Never mind that literal torture-porn horror movies like Hostel and the Saw franchise are mainstream movie going experiences—you can show as much dismemberment on screen as you want, just as long as you coddle the audience into believing that they’re just innocent spectators.

Haeneke does the opposite. Other writers have tackled this subject specifically, like this spectacular Bilge Ebiri piece on Criterion’s website. Throughout the movie, just before Paul enacts violence, he addresses the audience directly and breaks the fourth wall. Ebiri writes:

But as much as we may imagine that we’re aligned with the victims, Funny Games dares to suggest that the opposite is true. Even as Paul asks us if we are on the family’s side, through the very act of addressing us—not to mention his cheerfully conversational manner—he makes us his secret sharers. After all, we have come to watch a thriller, and the villains of Funny Games are our shock troops, there to do the audience’s bidding with just enough plausible deniability to let us continue with the fan­tasy that we have nothing to do with the horrors on-screen.

But there’s something that a lot of film writers never seem to touch on: as much as Funny Games is structured as a thriller, it’s also built like a joke. Funny Games is, well, funny. When the young boy escapes to a neighbor’s house, he finds a shotgun and aims it at an advancing Paul. Alas, the gun isn’t loaded. When the mother escapes and runs to get help, she’s recaptured by Paul and his accomplice because she flagged down the wrong car. And as much as those moments bring existential terror to the characters, the timing is nearly slapstick. A good joke and a good thriller are all about building tension and subverting expectation. Then of course, there’s the moment where Paul literally rewinds the movie to prevent the mother from shooting his partner in violence. Folks, I guffawed. Whatever agency the audience has in that moment to root for the (at least some of) the family escaping is ripped away. It’s the pinnacle of “ain’t that some shit.” It’s hearing a friend tell you about all the things that kept going wrong on their very bad, horrible trip to the auto repair shop when things just keep getting worse. “You just had to laugh,” your friend tells you. “Because otherwise it’ll ruin your whole week.”

The comedy of errors all culminates, of course, in the final scene of movie. Having bet the audience that the family wouldn’t survive past 9:00am, Paul, his friend, and the tied-up mother are all on a sailboat, heading towards the dock of the next victims, when he realizes the stated time is fast approaching. But there’s no big scene, no dramatic killing. Instead, the mother is unceremoniously dumped off the side of the boat. The lack of intentionality in this last murder completely betrays the elaborate set up of their earlier terror. Especially since there’s a sharp knife on the boat leftover from one of the earliest scenes in the movie—this is not Chekhov’s Knife, however. It’s tossed overboard as thoughtlessly as the mother. What did you think? That she’d be able to get the upper hand on two young men who have shown they can bend reality to their will?

Whether you laugh during that moment or not is less about what’s on screen and more about self awareness. Haeneke wanted to challenge American audience’s stomach for violence as entertainment, and throughout all of Funny Games he’s taunting us directly. That is to say, we’re not laughing at the characters or with the characters: the joke is on us. If there’s any amount of entertainment to pull out of watching this movie, it’s tired directly to whether or not you’re comfortable to laugh at yourself. Since the advent of the written word we’ve always loved a good comedy of misfortune. But the fact that we don’t canonize Funny Games next to Don Quixote in the great list of satires, well, for the audience, that’s what they call on the Internet a “skill issue.”

There’s a story told on Blank Check podcast about David Fincher being chastised at a party for showing Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in the box at the end of Se7en. Only, the audience never sees what’s in the box. And when Fincher confidently corrects his fellow partygoer, they fight him tooth and nail, absolutely sure they’ve seen it. The same thing happened with Psycho. Everyone was absolutely sure they saw the knife going into Janet Leigh. So if we can’t even be trusted to properly digest a straightforward slasher film, it shouldn’t be a surprise when satire is so often misread. Just, you know, maybe we need to pay a little more attention next time when the characters literally tell us to our faces.

Read

I was surprised at how much reporting Jason Diamond put into the first missive of his new column on garlic. He blends interview with personal experience and film analysis, all in service of a simple question: does slicing garlic with a razor blade (like Paulie does in Goodfellas) make it taste better? It’s easy to take a fun high-concept idea and phone it in, but Diamond really extrapolates the idea into some thoughtful examinations about cooking in general. I’m definitely looking forward to future missives.

Watch

Fuck we watch a lot of YouTube in this house. Ten years ago, that would have meant we were digging through weird videos from guys talking directly to the camera about the latest figurines they purchased. These days, it’s YouTube is the best aggregator of cool stuff that was aired somewhere at sometime and is now easier to find all in one place. Street League Skateboarding is a seasonal tour of skate competitions in a variety of cities, most with a pop-up skatepark built in an arena specifically for that day’s competition. The competition format is great for catching up on who’s ripping it up these days, and SLS is much less flashy than the X Games or the Olympics, putting more focus on the skateboarding itself. We’ve worked our way through most of the 2022 and 2021 tours, and and it’s great for putting on in the background.

Listen

Well this one’s a bit of a watch, since the music video is oddly captivating, but I’ve had this song stuck in my head for a week. As a DJ, Calvin Harris does a great job of blending catchy pop melodies with vintage house-inspired beats, and this collaboration with Haim takes the whole thing into the “Edge of Seventeen” coke disco territory. It’s not super deep, but hell, it’s a pop song. Let the melody get into your brain and then forget about it a week later. Or not. Maybe it’ll just hang around for longer than you wanted it to.

Consume

This last year has been the first time in my adult life that I haven’t worked for a coffee shop or coffee roaster. I had taken it for granted that coffee would always be around, and, well, now it’s not. Vignette was started by my friends Michael and Mandy, and I’ve really been into their profiles—their coffees highlight sweetness first, and I get their roaster’s choice and a bag of Rose Glass every two weeks. Rose Glass is typically a combo from Ethiopia and Colombia, and it’s bright, sweet, complex and balanced. It’s my go-to for my home espresso set up, but it’s a stellar drip, too.

Artwork by Ashley Elander Strandquist. You can view her illustration work here and check out her printing business here.