Re: Steinem

If anyone has seen the Michael Haneke’s film, Funny Games, they would understand exactly what Gloria Steinem is talking about in “Supremacy Crimes”.  Funny Games takes place a the lake house of the Farber’s—a well off, white, loving family consisting of a mother, father, son, and dog.  One afternoon, the family is paid a visit by two young men who happen to be twins clad in the same white collared shirts and white gloves and who happen to be psychotic serial killers.  The family is forced to play the twins’ sadistic game of life, in which they are subjected to torture in their own house until they are all dead by 9:00AM the next morning.  The film really portrays Steinem’s notion of white supremacy crimes and its addiction.  When the film ends, the twins have not only exercised their patriarchal control over the family, but they have done so over a family with a background that is not that distant from their own.  Furthermore, because their crimes are committed on the secluded property of the lake house, it appears by the end that they are ready to move on to their next victim.  Ultimately, I think that Haneke is trying to suggest that our dominant white culture is inherently violent.  The structures within our society give way to some of these sick and twisted cases of supremacy crimes, even when we are least expecting it. 

A friend once told me that if a father has a daughter before a son, the father is more likely to be accepting of non-patriarchal attitudes.  I’m not sure how accurate this necessarily is, but it is interesting that Steinem says, “we must begin to raise our sons more like our daughters”.  Maybe part of the problem with violence in our society is that the blame is usually put on the individual rather than society at large.  While I think most would agree the twins in Funny Games have their own issues they need to work out, it might be helpful to think about the origins of white supremacy that is so embedded in their personas.  Perhaps if they were raised in a different way, they wouldn’t have grown up to be these psychotic sumprmacy junkies that they appear to be.  Another thing worth thinking about is whether or not media portrayals of these characters are self-fulfilling prophecies leading to their creation in reality.