Most horror movies consist of a group of individuals who are being
tortured and murdered by either monsters, aliens, vampires, serial killers, or even
members of their own families. One of the most interesting dynamics in horror
movies is that of the nuclear family. The reason horror movies involving the
family dynamic interests audience members like me is because we can relate it
to our own families. In "Bringing It All Back Home: Family Economy and
Generic Exchange” Vivian Sobchack explores the cultural meanings and
transformations of members of the nuclear family in horror and science fiction
films.
Sobchack explores the changes brought to the nuclear family
parallel to the crisis experienced by American bourgeois patriarchy. She claims
that the cellular construction and institutionalization of capitalist and
patriarchal relations and values such as, monogamy, heterosexuality, and
consumerism often are the underlying issues being attacked in horror films
(Sobchack, 144). Sobchack
argues that horror movies often explore a “grand-chaos” that will
threaten "the order of things", which in turn threatens the
harmony of the home.
In Funny Games we have a family, Georg, Anna and their son Georgie, whose normality is threatened when
they are held hostage in their vacation home and tortured to death with sadistic
games. In the movie Georg and Anna are introduced to two young men, Peter and
Paul, by one of their friends. Within hours of their introduction Paul
disables Georg by hitting him with a golf club and begins to torture the family
with sadistic “games”.
Although Funny Games is Austrian the movie can still be connected to Sobchack's theory
of American bourgeois patriarchy because the characters in the movie along
with the plot make it relate-able to middle class patriarchal family's everywhere.
Georg, Anna and Georgie signify the typical
white bourgeois family while Peter and Paul
would represent the attack on the nuclear family.
In the beginning of the movie you have the father and son setting
up the boat while the mother makes dinner a very normal set of events that
might occur in families everywhere. It is in that precise moment where everyone
is busy with their patriarchal duties that Paul and Peter intrude in their
home. The way Peter and Paul infiltrate and then torture and kill the family
members connects to Sobchack’s claim that a man’s home in bourgeois patriarchal
culture is no longer his castle and it is no longer possible to avoid
the horrific invasive presence of others (Sobchack, 144-153).
Horror movies often test the coherence, meaning, and limits of the
family as it has been constructed in patriarchal culture. In Funny Games,
every sadistic game that Peter and Paul played tested the limit of Georg's
family. For example his wife, Anna, was forced to strip naked in front of
strange men, his son was tortured to the point where he urinated in his pants
and then was shot to death, all while Georg sat helpless on the couch. The
games in the movie expose Georg’s paternal and patriarchal helplessness as well
as the repressed patriarchal hatred, fear and self-loathing that he was feeling
(Sobchack, 159).
In the movie we see many of Sobchack’s theory’s come to
play, the audience is able to experience the threat to the order of things, the
attack on bourgeois patriarchy as well as the dissection of family
dynamics. Sobchack's states that
contemporary horror films, such as Funny Games, dramatizes the terror
of a patriarchy without power and the
uneasy acceptance of patriarchy's decline (Sobchack, 159).
Work Cited
Sobchack, Vivian. "Bringing It All Back Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange." American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film. Urbana: U of Illinois, 1987. Print.
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