The American Spectator

It’s the ultimate bobo nightmare — our sons have discovered that arbitrary power of the most sordid sort really is fun! Egad, what if it’s true? Can we endure a whole film dedicated to that proposition (admittedly with reassuringly cheeky disclaimers that it’s all a film, folks) and still come out secure in our normality?

This is the ordeal our culture feels the need to put itself through — the result of a gripping fear imposed by the recognition that, in a world low on the Christian ethos and the warrior ethos alike, we have few resources to see ourselves through the spontaneous traumas that pepper a society devoted to successfully ridding life of its agonies. Just because we’ve been so successful, unexpected suffering has become the great problem of modern living, the thing for which we’re least able to cope. And our movie entertainment is dutifully supportive. We have to be able to train ourselves to stare the possibility of total meaninglessness in the face. And with its unique ability to combine profit, sex appeal, and the safety of vicarious experience, the cinema delivers.

It’s only karma, then, that the hapless dad targeted in Funny Games is none other than Mr. Orange himself, Tim Roth, star of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. What a difference a decade makes: yesterday’s “Everybody stay cool, this is a robbery!” becomes today’s “Why don’t you just kill us and get it over with?”