Moot Point

Please note: the first two movies are just regular, but then after that we’re into “Weekly Movies: Torture Porn Edition.” There aren’t a lot of graphic descriptions, but there’s still generally discussion of how I enjoy movies where people get killed in ridiculous ways; also, that Captivity billboard that started so much fuss. Also, foul language, but you guys should be used to that by now.

1. Last Night (Don McKellar, 1998): Man, I love this movie. It’s a bit cheesy, and I’d forgotten how neatly (almost) all the characters fit together, but so Canadian! This is the artsy, talky movie about the end of the world set in North York that came out just after Armageddon and Deep Impact. The scene where Don McKellar and Callum Keith Rennie totally kiss and then get all homophobic so they can pretend they didn’t just contemplate having sex with each other? Homosocial hilarity! Also, it has David Cronenberg. My favourite little throwaway bit is when the TV news has hundreds of people learning “Taking Care of Business” from Randy Bachman. I’m really not sure how well it would play to a non-Canadian, though. It’s like a two-hour in-joke.
2. Tenderness of the Wolves (Ulli Lommel, 1973): This is the beginning of my kind of horroriffic week. This is basically what would have happened if Fassbinder made a horror movie. He produced and it uses a lot of the same personnel he did — he even appears in it. So it’s based on a real serial killer from the 1920s, but it’s set in the post-WWII period, when everything was equally shitty in Germany. There is pedophilia! References to M (based somewhat on the same guy) and The Third Man! Creepy neighbours! A really bleak view of humanity! Cannibalism! I really liked how quiet all the murders are up until the very end, when someone finally screams and you’re like, thank god.
3. Saw (James Wan, 2004): This was a real disappointment; I’d never actually gotten around to seeing it, but I honestly hoped that its success meant that it would at least be a decent movie. The exceedingly, unnecessarily complicated “mystery” about the killer plays like a 90-minute brain teaser more than a story. The movie’s as much of a game as the scenarios the “jigsaw killer” sets up, and that makes the whole thing less scary and less interesting. The whole thing just kind of feels like an exercise.
4. Captivity (Roland Joffe, 2007): I watched this out of curiosity and also for an essay I’m working on. For a movie that a bunch of progressive people were basically trying to censor (cf. Joss Whedon, Jill Soloway), it’s really not very exciting? That stuff with the cast and the tubes from the controversial poster? It’s over with in the first five minutes and the rest of it really isn’t that scary or even shocking/gross the way its detractors assumed (sight unseen) that it was. Just boring. I kind of agree with Rich of fourfour’s take.

I saw Captivity because I heard it was particularly tasteless and gruesome and I have a genuine curiosity in how far people can stretch the limits to what’s portrayed onscreen, and not because I want to chop people up. And so, [Dustin] Rowles [of Pajiba whose pearl-clutching review I have linked] offended me for being so arrogant as to suggest that the proper only way to experience cinema is the way that you experience it. But more than that: he offended me with his exaggerations, his labeling of the film as “repellant,” “horrid” and “thoroughly unpleasant.” It did not live up to his anti-hype, and I left the theater so disappointed, I wanted to kill.

Word. It was bad, but not that kind of bad. However, reading that review, and a couple others, it seems like I saw a less gory cut (possibly the Euro one?), because there was no disgusting organs in a blender scene, and that is mentioned in a couple of places. 5. Hostel (Eli Roth, 2006): This one was actually pretty good! It reminded me a lot of Audition, actually, which I think was a big influence on the whole “torture porn” genre. Roth is pretty aware of that though — Takashi Miike has an awesome self-aware cameo in it. After being disappointed in both Saw and Captivity, I was psyched to have something actually freak me out. Because you think you know what’s going on, and then you realize that the fucked up is way more profound. It also follows Miike’s technique of building anxiety by having nothing scary or gross happen for a really long time as you get to know the not-particularly likable or sympathetic protagonists, even though you know scary stuff is going to happen. Without giving too too much away, there is a pretty clear thematic link between the brothel scene (ugh) and the way the boys’ bodies are used later in the film. I don’t think it had like, a deep message, but I do think it was kind of clever and definitely pushed my “recoil in shock” buttons, which is what you want from (stealing Rich’s term) “extreme cinema.” That bit with the cut Achilles tendons? Holy shit. 6. I Know Who Killed Me (Chris Sivertson, 2007): Haha, it’s like a slutty violent Parent Trap*. Seriously, I… have no words. Okay, some words. I love the Lohan, but this movie was kind of a mess. It was advertised as this torture porn-y thing, but it wasn’t really scary, because you spend most of the movie post-kidnap thinking that the heroine is just delusional (this is when Lohan is Dakota, the stripper, as opposed to Aubrey the good student who’s apparently 19 and still in high school?). Then (spoiler) you find out that she magically actually just was suffering the exact same mutilations as the real heroine, who’s still in the villain’s hands. So much of the movie’s set up to make you think she’s lying/crazy that it’s kind of hard to accept that her crazy story is true. (The alternate is that it’s actually all in Aubrey’s head, and is just this delusion she made up to cope with her being all mutilated and tortured and shit; this would actually make it a better movie, but that was clearly not the version of the screenplay that got produced.) Anyway, what makes this movie stand out from the torture porn crowd was how it’s kind of like poor man’s David Lynch instead of poor man’s Tobe Hooper or poor man’s Takashi Miike. Really, really poor man’s Lynch: it’s like this dude watched Mulholland Drive and said to himself: “I should make a movie like that, only not so complicated or confusing, not to mention aesthetically daring. And it should have a stripper!” I don’t think this even counts as torture porn. 7. Captivity (again): So I rented the theatrical cut. FOR MY EDUCATION. Man, this movie blew. This version at least had some scary-gross moments, but they were wrapped in boringness and a lame backstory for the killers about an abusive mother. Oh, and you can totally tell the parts that were added in reshoots because of Elisha Cuthbert’s noticeably different haircut and the weird costume continuity, which was so bad I found it distracting. Seriously, it’s still not even particularly shocking and is just generally not good: I stand by what I said before — it didn’t make me angry, except because it was so terrible. Not the terrible that’s worth getting all up in a moral outrage about, just the regular kind, where you can safely ignore the movie and it will go away. Seriously: the killer(s) keep scrapbooks! Scrapbooks of death!

One thing that surprises me in my “torture porn review” thus far is — given how often it’s characterized as this outright misogynist trend — very little of the violence is actually against women. Saw and Hostel, which are probably two of the most successful examples, centre on male victims; I still have to look at some more examples, but the violence against women argument is pretty spurious. Anyway, like I said, I don’t think love of really violent cinema makes you a misogynist or a future serial killer or anything like that. I know a lot of feminists don’t like horror movies because of the misogyny on display, but I kind of see that as more reflective of society and previous work in the genre and less “woo, let’s fuck with chicks” (although I’m sure an element of the horror audience is “woo, let’s fuck with chicks,” the horror fan stuff you read is much more focused on special effects and creativity and whatnot — I am not suggesting that there isn’t ignored misogyny in horror movies and pretending that they are ideology-free is in any way a good idea though). Honestly, there is a lot of hate for women in a lot of horror movies (just as there is in a lot of movies in general, because you know, patriarchy), but I kind of feel that reading too much ideology into something whose end point is basically just to shock people is as big a problem as pretending that it has no ideology at all. Especially since the main examples people are emulating are Saw and Hostel, both of which deal more with anxious and guilty men who face torture; the failures are the ones that just put a hot blonde chick in a room and show her getting tortured. (Apparently Hostel II is worse for this stuff though, I am going to watch it soon and will report back.)

As much as I think the ways violence and sex are visualized in movies are problems, I don’t think pretending anyone who consumes these films is a closet serial killer is the way to solve them. Anytime I read reviews that make assumptions about the viewers of any movie or genre, my knee jerk reaction is that the reviewers are being really condescending. Especially when the movies we’re talking about are as irony-laden and non-traditional as these are. Seriously, they are replete with references to other films and totally revolve their stories not around character goals, but around sequences of intense visceral violence. Also, they generally abandon any pretense that we are supposed to find the main characters sympathetic. I can’t imagine treating this like I would a traditional Hollywood melodrama in terms of emotional reactions; I really think people who watch either are grossed out and don’t enjoy it, or are grossed out and impressed by the ingenuity of the filmmakers. Not to get too grand and social context-y on you — an approach that I think totally fails when talking about films this extreme — but the world is a really fucked and violent place, so seeing things in a kind of controlled atmosphere of torturously violent shit being perpetrated by lone crazies in a space that obviously has nothing to do with reality is (if nothing else) a way to allow yourself to be unsettled in a controlled environment. It’s not supposed to be happy, but there is a way that it’s kind of fun. (I realize that this makes me sound creepy.)

Seeing the way the mainstream critics and mainstream liberals react to the gorno, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that even though Saw and Hostel were pretty successful, torture porn is a pretty marginal (and probably disappearing) cinema. I think that everyone getting all up in arms about Captivity (a movie that grossed less than $3 million domestically after all the extra publicity the “controversy” gave it) proves just how well society doesn’t tolerate explicit misogyny: it failed both with the critics and at the box office. No one liked it. Even actual horror fans. To pretend that a movie that no one liked and was almost unanimously decried as terrible points to a social ill doesn’t make a lot of sense to me: it’s much more interesting if you look at how people responded to it.

I don’t know, I’d rather movies be gross than dull.

*I probably stole that line from Defamer or somewhere: sorry mysterious internet writer!