On Torture Porn

Brandon, good to be interacting on the blogs again.  It's funny how often we have discussions over violence, torture, and "crossing the line" in film.  But these are discussions that have been going on throughout the history of horror cinema.  You and Jason described what makes the horror genre fascinating and rich to discuss so beautifully.  The genre, by its very nature, consistently transgresses the line of good taste and acceptability, pushing us and standards in the process.  I think, in that way, I don't hate torture porn because by being excessive and pushing boundaries, it at least elicits strong reactions from us and gives us something to discuss.  Torture porn or extreme cinema is just the horror genre being taken to its limits.  Some would say that there are no limits to what you can show on a screen (and to a degree, I would concur), but I think Jason did a wonderful job explaining that there actually is a limit and once you transgress it you have disrespected the line between horror and reality and audience and representation.  It's a strong argument to make and one I'll get into further below.
 
"As far as the content is concerned I feel the need to point out that I don’t think any film should feel the need to hold back, as long as nothing (animal or human, but especially animal or child) is hurt physically or emotionally in the process."  Amen.  I'm with you completely here.  I don't think films should feel compelled to censor themselves, to be acceptable, or even to be respectable.  Like you said, as long as no creature is being hurt in the process, depict away.  Eli Roth can make all the HOSTEL films he wants; Tom Six can make all the HUMAN CENTIPEDE films he wants.  They have an audience, and if they ever don't, then they'll stop making them.  Like you said, we are a consumer culture, so I can reserve the right not to see them if I don't want to, or to turn them off if I find them offensive.  You'll never hear me say that you absolutely shouldn't depict torture on film, but if I watch a film with it and I think it's gratuitously or excessively done, you'll absolutely hear me criticize it.  I reserve that right as well.

I'm with you, Jason, and Gentile.  I like my horror at a distance from reality.  I vastly prefer something like CABIN FEVER to MARTYRS.  If only because it gets under my skin less and doesn't make me want to kill myself.  I'd also prefer something like FUNNY GAMES or something like DAWN OF THE DEAD to it because of the distancing effect they have through Brechtian alienation or outright humor.  I didn't enjoy watching MARTYRS in the least bit, but I respect its decision to condemn itself.  It's purposefully vile, gritty, and emotionally taxing like the worst kind of torture porn, but thankfully, it knew the importance of refuting itself.  I'm glad it ended the way it did.  Otherwise it would have just been an exercise in excess.  I'm with you.  I didn't like the penultimate twist.  I thought the film was good (a little too non-stop brutal for my taste, but good) up until the torture turn.  I just didn't see the point of depicting something in detail that had been previously implied.  To me, it seemed no different than showing a pregnant person early on in a film and then towards the end showing a 20 minute sex scene to confirm to us that, yes, this is way babies are made.  We already understand the depth of torture that this secret society has undergone throughout its history.  Seeing the remains of the women that have been tortured will forever be scarier than any of the scenes where we actually see torture take place.  And this is a big problem I have with torture porn.  To me, a good horror film that is trying to scare us knows when to depict violence and when not to.  And I think the best horror directors would tell you that the most horrifying thing they can do is put an idea into the viewer's head.  What is implied and what we imagine from it will always scare us more than what we see because it is unknown and unverifiable.  Torture porn doesn't understand this quality, which I think is bad craft.

But bad craft isn't the worst thing about torture porn.  On a purely emotional level, it completely manipulates our relationship with representation in a cruel way.  Like you and Jason were saying, we watch people being tortured on screen and we cannot help but empathize with them because at that moment they are reduced to their most vulnerable and helpless states.  Anything we don't like about them as characters is wiped away at that moment, and all we can see is a terrified creature that can feel pain being extensively damaged.  The line between fiction and reality is crossed and we feel emotionally violated.  Maurice Blanchot, in his book THE INFINITE CONVERSATION (where this blog's title comes from) ruminates on a form of communication that can go beyond the linguistic or the symbolic (cannot be subsumed by power).  In doing this, he arrives at the concept of the "cry" or the "murmur" as a form of communication that doesn't have to be processed symbolically (when we hear it we know what it means without having to think on it).  I think torture porn plays on the concept of the "cry."  It reaches us on a purely emotional and human level where we don't have to think about what we're seeing, we can just feel the emotional pain it's eliciting in us.  To me, this is the worst thing about torture porn: it purposefully wounds the heart.

MARTYRS wounds us very deliberately.  And I didn't like that about it.  But what I did like is that it realized that if it was going to wound us this way, it needed to refute itself and emphatically condemn torture.  And it does.  At the end, it says that there will be no silver lining out of anything that has been depicted within it.  Torture is the worst kind of nihilism, and it destroys souls.  Being so extreme, this is the message it needed to have, and I'm glad it did.

I think one of my big problems with the HOSTEL films was that they tried to be as disgusting and disturbed as they possibly could without having a distancing effect and without having a finale that condemned torture.  Roth's answer to torture in those films is to inflict it back without any thought on it, other than that revenge is sweet and it's fun to make people squirm (the audience, that is).  I won't deny that the torturers in HOSTEL deserve everything they get in the end (they do), nor will deny that the woman at the end of MARTYRS deserves far worse than she gets (she does).  But to me, vengeance at the end of a torture film is just a quick answer that doesn't force us to reflect but gives us more violence and pain to hold onto.  What MARTYRS does is then more complex and thoughtful because it gives us a philosophy to reflect on.  To me, its statement on nothingness is more satisfying than vengeance because it's an ontological argument for why torture is the most cruel and meaningless action imaginable.  It's not just an easy fix but an idea for us to connect to.  In this way, it respects us and our response to torture, even as it has already disrespected us by crossing the line.  Do you know what I'm saying?

There's a deeper meaning to all we see in MARTYRS even if it's ultimately just as disgusting as something like HOSTEL.  HOSTEL is a fucked up cycle, content to repeat itself, but MARTYRS is fucked up with a punctuation.  It knows it must take a stand.  This I appreciate.

Now with that all being said, I'm not trying to argue that all films with violence need to condemn themselves or make sweeping intellectual statements on the nature of violence.  I just think if you are going to cross the line that Jason suggested, or if you are going to purposefully violate us emotionally with torture, you'd better have reason for doing it, and you'd better have something to say.  If not, you absolutely deserve the epithet "torture porn."