Angry in the Great White North

Warren Kinsella is concerned with "torture porn":

When writing about a type of film that calls itself "Torture porn," even disapprovingly, it is difficult to do so without also plumbing the depths of sadism and depravity. That's an irony that attends the genre, one supposes. As one of its purveyors remarked last year: "We're like pigs in slop." True enough.

Except that not even pigs --and not any other animal, probably -- treats each other as do the alleged humans in movies bearing titles such as Hostel or Wolf Creek or Grindhouse or The Devil's Rejects. Up-close mutilation, gang rapes, utter degradation, salacious filth, unimaginable cruelty: blood-soaked and spattered with viscera does not begin to describe any of it. Torture porn movies are a very profitable form of entertainment, often debuting atop the box office, and routinely earning several times their budgets. But why?

In photographs shot for the billboard campaign for the upcoming Captivity, a bloody Elisha Cuthbert is seen struggling to escape a cage. In the next photograph-- titled "torture," in case anyone missed the point -- Cuthbert is seen wrapped in a mask, tubes shoved up her nostrils, draining blood.

One of the many who campaigned (successfully) against Captivity's billboard ads was Josh Whedon, creator of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series, who said torture porn "is not only a literal sign of the collapse of humanity ? [it] is part of a cycle of violence and misogyny that takes something away from the people who have seen it."

But what of the rest of us? If this kind of dehumanizing violence is so horrific, and it is, then why do so many flock, in increasing numbers, to watch it?

Kinsella considers advertising and misogyny and such. I've thought about it too. It's not the violence itself that disturbs me as much as that it is without meaning or purpose.

With regards to why we have such a recent surge in torture movies...well, if you think about it, they started with Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1974 (at least in the mainstream). Of course, there were horror movies well before this, but the bad guys were motivated by evil. Christopher Lee as Dracula in all the Hammer movies, for example. With TCM, the villains weren't motivated by evil as something intrinsic and goal-oriented, but by base desires unrestrained by social conditioning. The TCM family were cannibals. Essentially they were hungry. Nothing evil about hunger, as such. Not like Dracula raising an army of undead followers to take over the world.

As evil became a social construct that is measured against the relative morals of the day, horror movies became horrific because of the sheer violence, and not because the villains needed to be stopped because they were evil. They weren't evil, after all, and so all that was left was the violence. And so the violence has ratcheted steadily upwards since the 70s, since over that same time the notion of evil became diluted and a subject of ridicule.

No sophisticated and intelligent person believes in true evil anymore. Just a short step to religion from there, and we can't have that. Better to think of bad people as just misunderstood.

But without evil, you don't have good either. That's why these slasher pics have such weak heroes, or no heroes at all. Just victims.

Back in the day, you had war flicks. John Wayne in The Longest Day. The Allies were the good guys, the Nazis were the bad guys. The good guys actually represented something good, and the bad guys something bad, and so the violence was morally grounded. And yes, soldiers depicted in those movies were blown to bits or gruesomely bayoneted or what have you, and they weren't thinking about democracy but of just surviving for a few more minutes, but in the greater scheme of things the violence was purposeful. As we watched the movie, we knew that. We knew the violence was essential to the plot, being a fight to define what sort of world (good or bad) it was going to be.

Today you couldn't make a war movie, or at least not that kind of war movie. People are taught that no good can come of war...ever...no matter what the enemy. Elizabeth May of the Green Party thinks abandoning appeasement in 1939 in favour of fighting Hitler was a mistake. Better not to have fought World War II since the result instead is having Stephen Harper as prime minister today.

Like all pornography, there is no plot in TCM and Hostel and Saw and all their ilk. A proper plot is driven by conflict, and there is no meaningful conflict in these stories, because the characters have no meaningful beliefs in their existence that stand in contrast with each other. In an old war movie, the forces of democracy and freedom stood against dictatorship. Today kids are taught (in large part by the entertainment industry) to think any belief system, personal or social, is equally meaningless and valueless (assigning value might offend someone). No values means no fundamental contrast. The only contrast apparent in these movies is that one character has a knife and the other doesn't.

I don't think that people are watching more violent movies than before. I think the nature of the violence depicted in most movies has dramatically changed, so people, especially young people, are offered "torture porn" and little else. Some in the industry, like Joss Whedon, recognize the problem. Other, like Eli Roth, don't -- either because they choose not to, or maybe because they are blind to the problem because of their own atrophied sense of morality.

Shorn of the uniquely human quality of morality, the violence in these movies, like the sex in traditional pornography, is animalistic. Like Kinsella says, the violence is dehumanizing, but if he wonders why people are going to watch these movies, I would suggest that people are being raised to think that humans are no better than animals. Some people think humans are worse than animals. These movies are tailored to their tastes.