Torture Porn, page 12
The sadistic gaze paradigm is founded on a paradox. Torture porn viewers are said to be cynically distanced from and desensitised to violent imagery, and yet simultaneously presumed to enjoy that violence. Engagement is a prerequisite for pleasure, and so the two cannot concurrently hold true. This muddle arises from misreading torture porn’s ambiguities as apathetic ambivalences. Morris (2010: 51) concurs that this misinterpretation has stunted critical engagement with torture porn. Morris construes ‘being [morally] conflicted’ itself as an indication that the viewer has confronted moral issues, since being conflicted is evidence of the ‘capacity to feel the pain or the joy of others’, be they torturers or tortured. For Morris, ‘someone without both of these emotional capabilities does not get torture-horror and is morally deficient’ (see also Ochoa, 2011: 206). The confusion between immoral sadistic pleasure and amoral apathy in some pundits’ assessments of torture porn certainly confirms that they might not have contemplated ethical issues with enough care, although this insufficiency may stem as much from failing to engage with the films themselves as it does from neglecting ethics.
Torture porn’s moral dynamics are not reducible to a dichotomous separation between torturers and tortured. Julie Hilden’s (2007) observation that torture porn is antithetical to ‘the endless, often bloodless and supposedly well-deserved violence of summer’ blockbusters hints that torture porn films eschew clearly defined moral coding. ‘Good’
does not necessarily or even typically win out over ‘evil’ in torture porn narratives. As Hilden’s comparison to ‘acceptable’ mainstream representations of violence implies, torture porn offers relatively realistic depictions of physiology and ethics: the two elements are intertwined because morality is played out via physical violence in these films.
Moral binarism (‘good’ versus ‘evil’) is refuted by torture porn narratives’ ethical complexities. Consequently, torture porn’s violent interactions are seldom simple affairs. As this chapter has illustrated, sufferers’
stances are habitually prioritised in torture porn narratives. However, torture porn’s protagonists typically move from apparent innocence to rather murkier, morally dubious positions as the narratives progress. The moral tensions that result from those shifting character positions will be explored in the next chapter.
5
‘Some are Victims. Some are
Predators. Some are Both’:1
Torturous Positions
The notion that torture porn fosters ‘sadistic’ responses results from a failure to probe how torture porn’s filmmakers use form – narrative structure, sound cues, camera position, and so forth – to convey sufferers’
emotions and perspectives. The sadistic gaze argument is also flawed because it implies that torture is an interaction between two dichotomous parties – torturer and victim – whereby torturers are entirely ‘evil’, and victims are wholly innocent. For instance, Hicks (2009) describes torture porn as being constituted by ‘graphic depictions of innocents imprisoned by sadists’. Alex Williams (2006) also separates ‘sadist’ and
‘victims’ when synopsising Saw II: Williams brushes over the violence protagonists do to each other in the film by attributing ‘sadism’ to John, Saw’s lead antagonist. The adjective ‘sadistic’ is often used to describe torture porn’s antagonists (see Williamson, 2007c; Wigley, 2007), the violence depicted (see Beckford, 2008), the subgenre’s audience (see Kenny in Johnson, 2007), filmmakers (Molitorisz, 2012), and the films themselves (see Gordon, 2006). Protagonists-turned-torturers, on the other hand, are not directly accused of sadism in any of the press articles consulted while compiling this book.
The assumption that torture is a dichotomous binary relationship is not exclusive to torture porn discourse. The same supposition is made in theoretical responses to torture itself. For example, in Scarry’s influential work on torture, she surmises that ‘torture happens between two people’ (1985: 139, Scarry’s emphasis). In this view, the ‘victim’ is subordinated to the torturer’s dominance, which is expressed as violence.
Torture porn’s objectors have typically adopted a similarly dichotomous stance, responding to torture porn narratives as if characters represent 82
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either ‘good’ or ‘evil’. Torture porn narratives rarely depict morality in such stark terms, and their failure to fit the ‘good versus evil’ moral dichotomy imposed upon them has resulted in the subgenre being
dismissed as amoral or even immoral (see Whedon in Utichi, 2012; Wise, 2011; Driscoll, 2007).
Oversimplifying torture in this way entails moral typecasting: the
‘general perceptual tendency to view others as either victims of pain (moral patients) or perpetrators of misdeeds (moral agents), but not both’
(Gray and Wegner, 2010: 233). Moral typecasting involves assessing whether individuals appear to deserve their fates rather than judging deeds. That is, roles are assigned by making estimations about virtue, and vice versa. Evaluations of fictional drama are often skewed in the same way. Protagonists may be morally typecast as innocent, heroic, or plainly ‘good’ based on narrative position alone. Thus, narrative conventions frequently prejudice how characters’ actions are interpreted. If lead protagonists’ intentions are presumed to be inherently ‘good’, one may overstate how unjustly a protagonist has been treated if they suffer, or overlook the immoral acts a protagonist perpetrates, for instance.
Another consequence of this supposition is that even where protagonists commit exactly the same wrongs as antagonists, those deeds may be deciphered differently. Adopting a deontic stance – focusing on the morality of acts rather than virtue – throws such partialities into relief.
Torture porn’s character interactions mostly involve blunt cruelty, but that does not mean they are simple. Scarry (1985: 36) contends that the gulf between torturer and tortured is unassailable because pain means ‘the distance between their physical realities is colossal’.
In torture porn, however, violence does not just occur between parties who occupy unwavering positions: torturers may be tortured, and those tortured often consequently become torturers. Although Morris (2010: 45) recognises that in ‘most torture-horror, one or more of the victims acquires at some point the intentions of a torturer’, he describes the shift as binary role-reversal. Characters are either torturers or victims in this view, which does not adequately address the moral complexities that arise from such transformations. Morris’s assertion, for example, risks advocating torture if it is brought about in return for suffering previously endured. The ethical implications resulting from characters’ moral inconsistencies need accounting for. Torture affects character relations, causing them to be reimagined. That transference underlines violence’s traumatic, disruptive effects. Protagonists move between tortured and torturer positions, demonstrating that these are not dichotomous poles, and rendering the lines between those roles indistinct.
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The notion that torture is a binary interaction is further debunked by a third prevailing character position. Torture porn’s torture is typically played out via torturer, tortured, and witness. These witnesses are harmed by the torture they observe, and/or augment the tortureds’ suffering by witnessing it. Scarry does not account for witnesses, despite drawing on torture in order to dissect agony’s incommunicability. In Scarry’s bilateral interpretation, the only witness to the tortureds’ suffering is the torturer (1985: 53). Pain then is stripped of emotional resonance because it only signifies the torturer’s success. Torture porn’s witnesses undercut that dichotomy, and torture’s significations require reconsideration on those grounds.
The aim of this chapter is to unpick the intersections between these character positions. The conceptual framework – morality – elucidates that these seemingly fixed positions are actually relational. The chapter begins by illustrating that torture porn’s protagonists are not innocent victims per se. This is clearly exemplified when tortured protagonists become torturers, and in films where the lead protagonist is also the narrative’s lead torturer. These latter cases raise doubts over the moral righteousness of retaliation. The chapter’s final stages will be devoted to examining how torture porn’s diegetic witnesses expose moral complications. Contra to detractors’ complaints that torture is foregrounded to provide one-dimensional, sadistic pleasures in torture porn, the violence depicted in these films complicates characterisation and stimulates ethical questioning.
‘Do you think I chose this?’:2 problems with
victims and virtue
Since torture is commonly envisaged as a dichotomous binary interaction, ‘torturer’ and ‘tortured’ carry opposing connotations in ‘torture porn’ discourse. Torture porn’s torturers are typically described as sadists and so, in contrast, torture porn’s sufferers are implied to be ‘victims’.
Although possibly intended as shorthand for ‘person on whom the
torture is inflicted’, ‘victim’ also intimates that the tortured party is a righteous, innocent sufferer. That divergence between ‘victim’ and
‘sadist’ creates an impression that the two positions are stable, balanced and fixed. Even when antagonists are tortured in retaliation for their immoral actions then, they are rarely described as victims. It is insufficient to presume that a character’s actions are morally homogeneous, since doing so implies that the character is inherently ‘good’ or ‘evil’.
Protagonists should not be perceived as morally righteous throughout a given narrative merely because they are initially or predominantly limned
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Figure 5.1 Playing the innocent: Tonya in the opening of Breathing Room (2008, USA, dirs John Suits and Gabriel Cowan)
as sufferers. Rather than using the overtly value-laden terms ‘victim’ and
‘sadist’ then, ‘protagonist’ and ‘antagonist’ will be utilised to refer to the role a character chiefly occupies in the narrative arc. ‘Tortured’ and
‘torturer’, along with ‘captive’/‘abductee’ and ‘captor’/‘abductor’, will be used to denote character positions in the moment being described, with the proviso that those positions may shift across the narrative.
The subgenre’s films themselves customarily undermine attempts to impose virtue – reading characters as inherently ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – based on their inceptive positions. Indeed, numerous torture porn films adopt narrative twists that redefine apparently stable roles. In Breathing Room, for instance, lead torturer Tonya is cast as the film’s lead protagonist. When Tonya is introduced, she seems to be one of the captives held in a laboratory. The film opens with Tonya’s fearful breathing in pitch blackness. As she falls into the laboratory setting, naked and cowering, the narrative assumes her perspective, sharing her (apparent) attempt to comprehend her surroundings. Tonya is thereby established as the film’s vulnerable, sympathetic centre from the first scene. This alignment continues until the climax. Once her final cellmate (Lee) is mortally wounded, Tonya’s expression switches from trepidation to angered disgust, then to a wry smile as she leaves him bleeding to death. In parallel to Tonya’s fraught, vulnerable entrance in the film’s opening shots, here she looks at Lee coldly, calmly turning out the lights as she leaves the laboratory. She washes the blood from her hands and starts the process again with an alternative group in another room. The revelation that Tonya was a lead abductor entirely inverts her character position and the moral meanings of her actions.3 The switch reframes her ‘innocent’ attempts to escape as
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facilitating other captives’ torment. Furthermore, the next room Tonya enters contains prisoners who resemble the previous cell’s occupants.
The abductees fall into types – the alpha-male hero, the aloof outsider, and so forth – accentuating that Breathing Room’s twist was contingent on Tonya herself being misinterpreted as a standard type: the helpless victim. As Breathing Room illustrates, performing and being a victim are entirely separate.
Narratives supply limited information from biased perspectives. These restrictions are clear where characters preliminarily presented as cruel torturers are revealed to have been previously wronged by tortured captives. Twist denouements again challenge the notion that ‘right’ and
‘wrong’ can be straightforwardly assigned to acts based on character positions and narrative perspective. Nine Dead’s abductor, known only as Shooter, is obscured at the film’s outset. He is portrayed from a distance, in silhouette, or by concentrating only on his hands. Shooter spends the majority of the film’s duration masked. Both his identity and motives are uncovered only in Nine Dead’s closing minutes. In contrast to their faceless captor, the captives are visible throughout, and their outrage is discernible from the outset. A binary is established, connoting that the captives have been unjustly wronged by their captor. By the climax however, Shooter is unveiled as a grieving father. Each captive played some role in the events leading to the death of his son (Wade). Lead protagonist and District Attorney Kelly, for instance, planted evidence that ensured Wade’s wrongful prison conviction. Shooter’s explanation for their abduction is accompanied by a sentimental string score, encoding his tale sympathetically despite his crimes and his introduction as a torturer. The opposite is true of Kelly, who is unremorseful for her part in Wade’s death. Once freed and no longer in danger, she cold-bloodedly kills Shooter and the two remaining captives – including her child’s father – in order to obscure her part in Wade’s death. This reversal exposes Kelly’s criminality, which is concretised in the final shot of Kelly fleeing from the police. Shooter may have been literally masked, but Kelly was also disguised. The twist exposes the extent to which inaugural semblances can impact on moral judgments. Conventional, empathetic protagonist-positions are established only to be undermined as the tortureds’ immorality unfurls.
These mechanisms demonstrate that torture porn’s morality cannot be grasped based on suppositions about character roles, since (a) narratives offer partial perspectives on events, (b) characters’ motives are often contingent on events that occur prior to the diegetic present, and (c) characters may shift away from the roles they preliminarily appear to occupy.
Virtue-based judgements do not offer a full-enough picture of torture porn’s ethical meanings. If virtue is to be assessed, it must be so by the complete
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sum of a character’s actions and intentions. Narrative drama’s snapshots do not permit this kind of adjudication. The positional and perspectival progressions found in torture porn resist such role-demarcation. For both reasons, it is more prudent to evaluate deeds rather than virtue.
‘Survival Can Be Murder’:4 from tortured to torturer
Unlike Breathing Room, which withholds then reveals information about the lead character’s role, films such as Captivity and Hostel depict protagonists who become torturers after undergoing torture themselves. Such position shifts raise different questions about how narrative effects moral judgment. Captivity is aligned with lead protagonist Jennifer’s confusion and suffering for the majority of the film. Seven torture sequences close with Jennifer losing consciousness, and these lapses are reified formally by fading to black.5 Her torturers remain faceless for the first 56 minutes of the film, while Jennifer occupies virtually every shot until that moment, underlining that she is the focal point. In contrast, the torturers’ blankness renders their pleasure hard to comprehend. The narrative clearly invests in Jennifer then, positioning her in the archetypal righteous hero-protagonist role. Yet, those connotations are problematised by the film’s epilogue.
After escaping her confinement, Jennifer becomes a torturer. In order to achieve ‘redemption’, she hunts untried criminals such as a ‘triple woman killer’ who ‘slip[ped] though [a] legal loophole’. Although she only targets allegedly ‘guilty’ parties, her vigilantism is nevertheless immoral. Justice is measured by Jennifer alone, and her willingness to torture and kill connotes that Jennifer is too unstable to make rational assessments. The ending is less assured than Jennifer’s final voice-over assertion – ‘they got what they deserved’ – proposes. Narratological allegiance with Jennifer’s perspective continues in the epilogue, but that sustained loyalty conflicts with the narrative’s predominant mode: fostering distrust for and distance from Jennifer’s torturers. That is, Jennifer’s slippage into the torturer position is particularly disquieting because a torturer/tortured dichotomy was so clearly established and maintained during her captivity. The disparity between Jennifer’s narrative position and her subsequent actions underscores how morally questionable her final deeds are.
Characters’ transpositions from sufferers to inflictors are more ethically problematic than has been accounted for in ‘torture porn’ discourse.
For example, in Middleton’s (2010: 22) reading of Hostel, Paxton is the hero, whom ‘the viewer can identify [with] and cheer on’. Middleton states that Paxton’s violent actions in Hostel’s climax are ‘cathartic’ and
‘justified by the brutality of his enemies’ (see also Thompson, 2007).
Middleton validates Paxton’s violence by creating a moral dichotomy
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between ‘hero/protagonist’ and ‘enemy/antagonist’, assuming that Paxton’s murders are justified by his role. Yet Paxton’s ‘hero’ status is not as clearly established as Middleton’s interpretation suggests. Paxton’s fellow traveller Josh is painted as the lead protagonist in the film’s early stages. Only when Josh dies is the focus displaced onto Paxton. Josh’s demise undermines the notion that character roles are fixed in Hostel.
Indeed, Paxton’s violence evinces his motion away from heroism.
Paxton’s slippage from tortured to torturer undercuts the supposition that morality can be assessed by role. The impression that Paxton is ‘good’
stems from his apparently selfless actions in Hostel’s climax; Paxton risks his own safety by returning to save another captive (Kana), and seemingly avenges his friend Josh’s death by killing Josh’s torturer (the Dutch Businessman). However, Paxton is initially characterised as obnoxious, making odious statements such as ‘I hope bestiality is legal in Amsterdam because that girl is a fucking hog!’, and using derogatory terms such as
