Domestic Violence: The Narrative Architectures of Michael Haneke's Funny Games

Abstract

Domestic Violence:The Narrative Architectures of Michael Haneke's Funny Games Dale Pattison (bio) On November 8, 2001, President George W. Bush took the stage at the main ballroom of the Georgia World Conference Center to deliver what would become one of his most controversial public addresses on the newly created Office of Homeland Security. Positioning the President within a milieu of firefighters, police officers, and military personnel, the optics of the scene were designed to collapse boundaries between civilian and military worlds, and to use the President as a mediating point between these otherwise distinct realms of American life. The substance of the President's speech mirrored this spatial move, repeatedly emphasizing the ways in which the War on Terror would require Americans living within the country's national borders to "add [their] eyes and ears to [the state's] efforts to find and stop those who want to do us harm." The War on Terror, Bush argued, "must be fought not only overseas but also here at home." The President's speech implied that civilians—not alone the military—would be instrumental in combatting terror and protecting the American homeland. In closing his address, Bush relayed his first orders to the newly conscripted American people, announcing, "we have our marching orders. My fellow Americans, 'Let's roll'" ("Address to the Nation").1 Out of this speech emerged the Presidential Task Force on Citizen Preparedness in the War on Terrorism, a program designed to help Americans "prepare in their homes, neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and houses [End Page 197] of worship" for their new roles as protectors of the homeland (Allen A01). Fewer than three months later, in the President's State of the Union Address, Bush established the U.S.A. Freedom Corps, a coordinating council that would assist and train Americans who wished to volunteer themselves for the protection of the homeland. In his address, Bush asked "for every American to commit at least two years, four thousand hours over the rest of your lifetime, to the service of your neighbors and your Nation." Echoing earlier statements on the need for civic engagement in implementing homeland security, Bush went on to remark: Homeland security will make America not only stronger but, in many ways, better. Knowledge gained from bioterrorism research will improve public health. Stronger police and fire departments will mean safer neighborhoods. Stricter border enforcement will help combat illegal drugs. And as government works to better secure our homeland, America will continue to depend on the eyes and ears of alert citizens. ("The President's State of the Union Address") The administration's framing of homeland security as a positive force in shaping American civic life came to fruition in this address. In volunteering for the protection of the homeland, Americans could participate in the advancement of both military and civilian projects, making the country safer and more prosperous all at the same time. The observations above highlight the ways in which the administration mobilized civilians as instruments of state power in the wake of September 11th. As many critics have noted, establishing the rhetorical link between the home and the homeland was vital to the state's ability to advance the politics of homeland security. The deployment of the homeland as a rhetorical device plays upon individuals' attachment to "the home," a concept intimately connected to security, stability, and one's sense of self. The frequent use of the home as a site of political intervention in the two Presidential addresses above reveals the complex engagement with domesticity that undergirds the project of homeland security.2 While the rhetorical figuring of the homeland as a domestic space was critical to how the state shaped public opinion, representations of the home in popular media also [End Page 198] contributed significantly to advancing the politics of homeland security. This essay uses Michael Haneke's Funny Games (2007), a film that appears to have little to do with homeland security, domestic space, or the anxieties that emerged in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center, to examine the ways in which political violence—particularly as a product of the state's mobilization of domesticity—intrudes...