Abstract images and Haneke

The other night I decided to watch Haneke's The 7th Continent again. Based on a true story, a typical middle-class Austrian family find life does not offer anything more than a series of an emotionally-empty, mundane events. They decide to destroy their lives and commit suicide (yep, not the most upbeat of stories). The 7th Continent refers to Australia, but in an abstract sense, a image of another world, perhaps where what is missing in their lives will be fulfilled? It is probably not that simple.
(In the film, when their bank asks them what they need all their money for they tell them they are emigrating to Australia.)
This image Haneke represents with an impossibly beautiful visual of a beach with waves crashing against the shore. The picture is so artificial it is almost becomes disturbing in its own right, and I would guess that if this image is what the family believes is missing in their lives then Haneke is saying this too is false.
Well, I had forgotten all about this picture when I was discussing my questions of the 'blackouts + sound' these past few weeks. Of course this picture acts in the way that I intend my blackouts to work, as an abstraction of a state, expressed at key points in the film. I can't remember if I had already said that JC, my DOP, thought these blackouts would act as an alienation effect, that the audience would suddenly be made aware of their presence in the cinema. This is not to say this is good or bad, just what would happen. But now, after seeing The 7th Continent again I have to think that this is not the case. Or perhaps in a conventional film this would be the case. In film structures like Haneke's, or what I am attempting to pull off in Tidal Barrier, these abstract images act in another way.