In Defense of "Torture Porn"

So today at the pork plant, Dr. Rotwang sent a pigeon over to me with a note that said something along of the lines of, "So what do you think of torture porn movies like Saw and The Hills Have Eyes remake?" I immediately flew into a frothy rage, ripped the head off the pig carcass I was gutting, and hurled it clear across the room. "Dang blast it!!!" I exclaimed as I proceeded into the men's room to write my response...

***

Torture Porn. Wow that sounds horrible. There are few more pejorative terms in the realm of art and entertainment these days. I love the Saw movies. Every Halloween, the girlfriend and I go see the latest Saw movie. We saw Hostel in theaters and loved it, but skipped Hostel 2. And, as I mentioned in the Halloween post below, I hated Wes Craven's original Hills Have Eyes, but loved the latest remake. So what do I think of movies like Saw and The Hills Have Eyes remake and Hostel and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning? I fuckin' love them. They're grrrrr-eat!

1) Torture porn - what kind of propagandistic "focus on the family" bullshit term is this? First, what is pornography? People have struggled with this question for far too long in this country, and I'd like to say, once and for all, that pornography = people being photographed or videotaped actually having sexual intercourse. Blow jobs, hand jobs, anal, masturbation, missionary, foot jobs, boob jobs, blah blah blah. Naked people? Not pornography. So-called softcore porno, where actors and actresses simulate having sex? Not pornography. A Photograph of a penis penetrating a vagina, but hung in an art gallery? Pornography. Does that mean that pornography should not be seen? should not exist? or should not be hung in an art gallery? Of course not. Pornography will always exist as long as human beings have the means to photograph and videotape themselves and each other. There is some innate human desire for some to photograph and videotape themselves in sexual acts and for others to view said photographs and videos.

One of the essential "problems" our society has had in defining pornography is that, in terms of human history, the ability to literally photograph, literally capture a moment, is relatively new. It used to be drawings, sculptures, woodcarvings, paintings, etc. were the only way one could perceive such acts without actually being there in the room with the... fornicators? (I don't like that word much, but I'm at a loss for a better one.) I put forth the argument that, in today's modern world, only actual recordings of people engaged in sex acts qualifies as pornography, and all drawings, representations and simulations of such acts can not compete against the actual act. And while there are moralists with authoritarian agendas cropping up every week to convince us that this idea or that is "pornographic" and "obscene," we as a society must learn to ignore the bait of those who would seek to gain power over us by turning us against things that we already don't like.

Following the definition of pornography I've laid out above, it is my intent to argue that literal torture porn would be photographs or video of actual people being actually tortured - therefore, the only widely disseminated "torture porn" of the modern era would be the Abu Gharib photographs. Does that mean they should not have been aired on the evening news? Absolutely not! Pornography in and of itself does not intrinsically harm anyone, it is how individuals react to it that is harmful, and that ultimately depends on the individual themselves and not the record.
But this is all beside the point of my argument, which is this: Movies that portray actors and actresses simulating being victims or perpetrators of extreme and/or graphic violence do not fit the criteria of pornography in our modern era of reality TV, cell phone cams, web cams, etc. etc. etc...

2) The level of so-called graphic violence in today's R-rated horror movies is a reaction to two things.
a) Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ made it okay for studios and major theater chains to show extreme, graphic violence and prolonged sequences of torture. (Chew on that, moralists!)
b) A new generation of filmmakers reacting to previous restrictions put upon the entire horror genre in the 80's and 90's. Rob Zombie, Alexandre Aja, Eli Roth, etc. etc. etc...

In the 70's you had the "Grindhouse" era of horror movies, where a decentralized system of theaters and drive-ins could show low budget movies depicting extreme situations, although the special effects weren't really that realistic... movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Don't Look in the Basement, I Spit on Your Grave, and Last House on the Left. When these movies went from being occasionally shown for short periods of time at certain theaters to being readily available on home video, the UK threw a shit fit known as the "Video Nasty" era, where movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Evil Dead and The Exorcist (the latter of course being an acclaimed, Oscar winning, major Hollywood motion picture) were banned outright, and other movies had offending scenes edited out by a government office. Meanwhile, in the United States, horror movies released by the major movie studios suddenly went from "scary" to "slapstick." For example, compare Friday the 13th Part 4 with Friday the 13th Part 6, or Return of the Living Dead with Day of the Dead. Not to say that humor has no place in the horror genre, see: Evil Dead 2 and Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, but there was, in the major Hollywood studios of the 1980's, a concentrated effort to neuter the horror genre. However, extreme cinematic violence did not go away - foreign directors, especially from Italy (like Argento and Fulci), continued right on making "splatter" movies. Meanwhile, in the 90's, with the greater availability of camcorders, amateur filmmakers began making and distributing their own low budget horror movies - with violence as graphic as the special effects they could afford and devise.

So in my view, the extreme violence of today's mainstream, major studio horror movies is simply an inevitable reaction of about two decades of the repression, censorship (whether governmental or commercial) and "ghetto-ization" of the genre. Today, it seems like every movie is available on DVD and easily obtainable from Amazon.com. (A month ago, I ordered the first DVD release of a movie I have sought after for years, Stuart Gordon's From Beyond.) Meanwhile, one can obtain the major works of Italian horror directors like Fucli and Argento, as well as the films of many other foreign directors from all over the world that you won't find at Blockbuster or on HBO. Horror fans of my generation are rediscovering a whole era of films that were seemingly kept hidden from us in our youth, films that our authoritarian moralist "overseers" surely intended to be forgotten.

***

Why extreme violence? Because it's there. Because it exists in our world. Because everything that *is* will be portrayed, will have a story written around it, and will be used as an allegory to demonstrate some larger point. And whenever a lid is put on anything, whenever anything is repressed or hidden away "for our own good," it will fester, it will rot, and it will become corrosive and eat its way out of its prison. Everything that is denied and everything deprived, will be fetishized.

And when a level of violence and a grimness of subject matter becomes taboo for two decades, that existed before and was repressed after, it is eventually bound to return in full force. And for every Hostel or Devil's Rejects, there will be a Turistas or Captivity, and audiences will learn to recognize the difference between purely shocking crap and a decent violent movie. In response, the movie studios won't erroneously assume that graphic violence = money, and the prevalence of it will once again recede a bit.

***

"...and finally, my dear Dr. Rotwang," I scrawled on the toilet paper with my shit-covered fingertip, "I'd like to remind you that your beloved Robocop was held hostage by the MPAA, and threatened with the same X rating given to lesbian, incestuous, fisting porno - and over what? 30 seconds worth of violence!!! You who would stand upon your mountain of smugness and look down upon me!!! According to some, your desire to see a man pulverized by a never ceasing shower of bullets form a giant robot makes you no better than me!!!"
And with that I rolled up the toilet paper, walked past the sink and went back to my pig carcass and the pigeon waiting there for my response. When I got back there, however, I found a second pigeon, this one with a note from Rotwang that read, "...because I really like Day of the Dead."