Dear Michael Haneke,

Are you well? I don’t ask frivolously. I inquire because I witness so much mental

and physical discord in the humans you craft on screen. To associate these with you

personally would be to fall prey to Wimsatt and Beardsleys’ Intentional Fallacy, yet as I

have your ear (or at the least your eyes) I thought I’d try to hear directly from the horse’s

mouth.

I feel as though I have digressed before I have even begun. I (re)turn to that which

I truly wish to discuss: the piquant dysfunctions and idiosyncrasies that motivated my

initial probe. Whether or not you answer my rather prying inquiry is of no consequence to

the ardor of my interest in your take on the flaws of the bourgeoisie, petty and otherwise.

The prevailing critics paints your work as a deconstruction and castigation of the

bourgeoisie. In an interview with Michel Cieutat “I am never

devoted to a single, specific aesthetic.”

Powerful useful, problematic, Annoying

Reports about my research

Float a proposal

Are these scholars off the mark? Ultimately, all scholarship is the imposition of

one’s own worldview onto the work of another.

Most strikingly in Funny Games, the film that is arguably your magnum opus “the

external threat to the bourgeois couple may be read as an exteriorization of the deep

internal strife of bourgeois married life, suggested first by their use of culture”1

In that earlier mentioned interview with “There is no victim in my films

who is completely innocent.”

Detailed example of my proposed phenomenon

To support my personal ideas about your work I point to specific examples in the

fabric of your

1Sharrett, Christopher. “Michael Haneke and the Discontents of European

Culture.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 47, no. 2 (November 27,
2006): 6–16. https://doi.org/10.1353/frm.2006.0020.