Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Torture Porn, 2008

What's going on? It seems as if everywhere I go online today there's a discussion - or least a mention - of that nefarious genre-label Torture Porn to be seen... dissected... offended by. What is this, 2005?

Firstly, and most innocuously, this morning I was browsing Stale Popcorn's ongoing 100 Greatest Movie Posters countdown; Glenn's reached #9 and, in praising the exploitative nature of the horror film whose poster sits at #9 he takes a swipe at Eli Roth which... well I've come to terms with the fact that Glenn will take the opportunity to take a swipe at Eli Roth if such a moment presents itself. And possibly arrange for such moments to present themselves in order to take such a swipe. That's fine. We've reached an amicable "agree to disagree" place over Roth (... and Michael Haneke and Park Chan-wook and Takashi Miike, I think...). No love lost.

Secondly, I'm checking out what my pal Sean is up to, and it's a real Torture-Porn-A-Palooza! Apparently there's a massive discussion about the so-called genre (I'm still not really keen on that phrase, Torture Porn, if my hemming and hawing when now forced to use it wasn't clear enough on that) going on right this very second, and Sean's all up in it. Click here for his part of the discussion, with links to what he's responding to included. This is all fascinating stuff, so I implore y'all to check it out.

And lastly, also via Sean, I find this review at The Vault of Horror for Inside, the French horror film I spoke of a few weeks ago, which includes yet another Torture Porn shout-out:

"Inside is the kind of movie that makes you question why you wanted to see it in the first place. It would be easy to dismiss it as just another depressing and sadistic piece of torture porn, but that's not really what it is. I wouldn't categorize it with garbage like Hostel and Saw III, which truly earn their pornography tag by making titillation through explicit violence their primary goal."

Grumble. I really enjoyed Inside, if "enjoyed" is the right word - it isn't - let's say that I found it to be a brutally effective monster movie that ruthlessly exploited cultural soft spots. I mean, the pregnant woman! You don't get more symbolically loaded, so to speak, a figure than that.

But sometimes, as they say, an enormous pair of scissors slicing through a hand is just an enormous pair of scissors slicing through a hand, ya know? What I mean is, I think Hostel, with its Ugly American Stereotypes smoking and fucking their way through the depressed regions of Europe, has just as much on its mind as Inside does (I'm not touching Saw III because we agree there). The complicated sexual combativeness of Hostel's characters is to me as - if not more - fascinating as, say, Inside's sloppy handling of a sudden interjection of Muslims-in-France politics interjected towards the end with the literal lobotomy of a hastily introduced character.

What I'm saying is this: just because Inside dresses some of its messages up in Important Meaning - The Pregnant Woman In Danger; The Muslim Kid In Handcuffs - doesn't make it instantly more important or worthwhile a film than one that strips an awful lot of the fat off and basically smashes our faces straight into some awfulness like Hostel. It's the same argument that attached itself to a film like The Host and angered me - just because you put on airs of importance by throwing a bone to some random social or political message (in The Host's case, "American Military interference is bad!"), it doesn't instantly make your film more worthwhile. Sometimes a stab is just a stab, and sometimes just a stab is just what we need.
.

4 comments:

B-Sol said...

I get where you're coming from here, and I've often had to defend my complete aversion to the movie Hostel. I'm not the squeamish type, but what I found problematic about the film is that any message it may have had was totally drowned out by the orgiastic violence. I don't think that was the case with Inside, which always "kept its eye on the ball", so to speak. My problem with Hostel is that, much like a hardcore porn film, the "plot" will just randomly come to a grinding halt so that a long, protracted and highly detailed graphic display can take place. Then it picks up again, then stops, etc. That's why to me, it earns the "porn" label. It's the definition of gratuitous.

Jason Adams said...

See, I don't think Hostel is as guilty of that charge as it's been saddled with. I rewatched it a few months ago (for the first time since the theater) and what struck me was how banal the torture scenes were. It's nothing like the Saw franchise, which exists solely to show New! Fabulous! Exciting! ways of ripping people's bodies apart; in the first Hostel, the violence we see on-screen is nothing any good horror aficionado hasn't seen a thousand times before. We see some fingers chopped off, some achilles tendons sliced, an eyeball plucked out. The violence in Hostel is - to use a phrase I find disturbing in this context but nonetheless what I am basically getting at - boring. And ugly. I don't think the film tries to revel in it; the violence is gratuitous in the Saw movies in my opinion because it has no point beyond itself (besides the bullshit moralizing they cram into Jigsaw's speeches). In the first Hostel, however, I never feel as if Roth is trying to top himself with the wackiness (I'm purposefully leaving the 2nd film out of this conversation because that's a whole different beast); in reality, the torture scenes don't even show up until well into the film, and when they do there's no big spectacular pay-off to them, and then the film turns into a revenge thriller. It's a weird flick with a whole lot going on besides the maybe ten to fifteen minutes spent down in the dungeons, and I think it's got an unfair rep for being solely about the viewer getting his jollies watching somebody be torn to shreds for our viewing pleasure.

scroggins said...

I almost defenestrated a good friend over a disagreement concerning Arno Frisch.

Glenn said...

I only brought it up because the marketing was involved and I was making the point that the TCM poster did the same thing the Hostel and Saw posters did but instead did it with words.

That and I hate Eli Roth and it bares repeating :)