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Any references to moral principles in the following chapters are made
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with this proviso in mind. A second shortcoming is flagged by those who consider Kantian absolutism to be too devoted to principle to be practicable (see Ross, 2002: 28), especially under extraordinary circumstances (see Ginbar, 2008). Kant’s (2003: 105) declaration that it is
‘[b]etter the whole people should perish’ than it is to do injustice certainly feels powerfully counter-intuitive. However, the reactive stance is just as imperfect: abandoning moral principles in favour of self-interested instinct is not an ethically informed response to peril.
The latter tension demonstrates that in practice, it is seldom easy to do what one believes to be morally right. That discord is crucial to understanding torture porn’s ethical struggles. When endangered, protagonists’
moral principles are pitted against the immediate pressures of survival instinct. The Saw franchise’s games incarnate this kind of dilemma, for example, by forcing captives to make choices about who will ‘live or die’. Saw’s games epitomise a broader commonality among torture porn films: placing characters in exceptional, life-threatening circumstances, and embedding those moral quandaries in the narrative structure.
Non-absolutists may accept that in perilous circumstances it is better to forsake principle than to give up one’s own life, yet the resultant harm should be evaluated. Torture porn films do precisely that, dramatizing the costs of making hard ethical decisions. Choice-making is recurrently associated with suffering, underscoring how difficult those choices are.
The subgenre is replete with morally precarious situations, which test not only the characters, but the limits of moral duty. Although many of torture porn’s characters commit immoral acts, that does not mean torture porn is an unethical subgenre. Such characterisation appraises the nature and usefulness of ethics. Zinoman’s (2011) supposition that
‘audiences don’t see horror movies for moral improvement’ is only correct inasmuch as it is not torture porn’s place to preach. Zinoman overlooks how paramount moral dilemmas are to torture porn narratives, and how ethical meaning is intertwined with torture porn’s empathic mechanisms. Jason Middleton (2010: 24) displays a similar attitude towards torture porn and its audience. Middleton asks whether torture porn’s emphasis on human cruelty ‘makes these films more or less scary (from a fan’s perspective), or more or less ethically fraught (from a critic’s perspective)’, implying that fan enjoyment is primarily visceral (‘scary’), while critical views are inherently more cerebral (‘ethically fraught’). As Chapters 1–3 evinced, reviewers’ responses to torture porn are often informed by gut-instinct rather than logical reasoning.
Furthermore, separating ‘scary’ and ‘ethically fraught’ is problematic because, as the following chapters will elucidate, drama emotionally
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involves audiences in protagonists’ circumstances. Watching torture porn entails not merely thinking about morality, but experiencing characters’ moral dilemmas, then.
Torture porn narratives are, in these senses, comparable to the hypothetical thought-experiments moral philosophers customarily employ to test principles (such as Yuval Ginbar’s (2008: 42–3) ‘sadists torturing babies’ example). In fact, numerous moral philosophers use fictional narratives to probe moral theory (see, for example, Govier, 2002: 6; MacAllister, 2003: 87). Torture porn’s drama organically involves audiences in moral contemplation. The subgenre’s narratives provoke such cogitation because the characters face emotionally challenging situations in which their intuitive responses clash with moral reasoning.
Kant is devoted to non-negotiable principles, yet his insistence that one should adhere to categorical imperatives despite one’s instincts to the contrary implies that there is a potential gap between emotional sway and moral duty. Kant resolves this breach by always opting for the imperative. Torture porn’s drama instead explores that gap, routinely offering complex situations in which justice, innocence, guilt, blame, and retribution are brought into question via characters’ experiences.
Torture porn narratives illustrate how and why moral standards are violated or maintained under a set of hypothetical conditions. Those conditions are portrayed as ordeals undergone by torture porn’s protagonists. The lead characters’ emotional arcs shape the narrative perspective, impacting on its moral coding. Contra to allegations that torture porn usually presents violence in a titillating manner and depicts narrative events from torturers’ perspectives, Chapter 4 will establish that both in their uses of form – camera movement, sound, and so forth – and narrative structure, torture porn films chiefly engage with those characters who suffer rather than those who inflict pain.
This discussion will be developed in Chapter 5 via an exploration of character positions. While torture porn narratives are mainly aligned with sufferers’ perspectives rather than torturers’, those initial positions are regularly disputed as the narratives progress. Torture porn’s moral dynamic is seldom a ‘good’ versus ‘evil’ dichotomy. In order to grasp torture porn’s complexities, the notion that torture is a binary interaction must be revised. In torture porn, torture usually involves torturers, tortured, and witnesses. These relative positions are mutable rather than fixed. Characters shift between roles, meaning protagonists who initially seem to be tortured victims often themselves become torturers before the narrative closes, and so forth. Narrative alignment with sufferers means lead protagonists are typically encoded as ‘heroes’. In cases where
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protagonists forsake their own moral principles, that conventional alignment is placed under pressure, creating moral tensions.
Additional factors that complicate those moral dynamics will be
considered in Chapter 6. Torture porn’s characters negotiate their power relations by struggling to attain control over their immediate surroundings. In torture porn, torture tends to occur in spaces – ranging from cells and derelict warehouses, to ‘foreign lands’ and sparsely populated rural areas3 – that are separated from the protagonists’ everyday experiences. Since (a) protagonists face exceptional circumstances (torture), (b) those pressures occur in delimited locations, (c) those spaces and circumstances are outside of the protagonists’ usual spheres of experience, and (d) the spaces are fashioned after the antagonists’ cruel impulses, it may appear as if torture porn’s action occurs in moral-vacuum situations, where ethical rules no longer apply. However, as Chapter 6 will demonstrate, torture porn narratives habitually support the deontic proposition that because moral agents are authors of their own principles, ethical decisions are not just made in reference to context.
Although deontology is utilised to illuminate these textual meanings, it is not the theoretical paradigm that makes the films interesting.
Theory is just a means of elucidating the subgenre’s already present rich-ness. Moral philosophy highlights the social, powered aspects of torture, rather than torture’s political resonances. Numerous academics have placed emphasis on torture as a political issue in their approaches to torture porn, interpreting the subgenre as an allegory for the ‘War on Terror’. The allegory defence negates torture porn itself by intimating that the films are validated by contemporaneous political circumstances. Torture porn’s lasting appeal lies in torture’s provocative socio-moral aspects, rather than particular instances of torture issuing from the Bush Administration’s interventions in the Middle East. This topic will be addressed in detail in the next chapter.
4
‘Your Story’s Real, and People Feel
That’:1 Contextualising Torture
Tallying filmic representations with national events is an established critical mode, one that is particularly popular in horror studies. Scholars have variously deciphered 1950s horror as analogising radiation fears (Skal, 1993: 247–8), and construed Dracula as a commentary on the plight of Victorian women (Kline, 1992), for instance. More recently, monographs by Kevin Wetmore (2012), Linnie Blake (2008), Adam Lowenstein (2005), and Kendall Philips (2005) have offered political-allegorical readings of horror cinema. The allegorical trend has been particularly propagated by torture porn’s ‘directors, experts, and fans’ (Riegler, 2010: 27) when defending the subgenre.2 The consensus is that torture porn comments on the War on Terror: encompassing 21st century terrorism, 9/11, the Abu Ghraib scandal, and the Bush Administration’s torture sanctions. Critically invested readings of torture porn’s significance have developed from such linkages, and so the allegory interpretation constitutes an important branch of ‘torture porn’ discourse.
However, although the allegorical reading is not inappropriate per se, its proliferation impedes debate. The cumulative effect of this interpretation’s reiteration is that allegory becomes the rationalisation for torture porn’s significance rather than an answer. The allegorical reading has thereby become a stopping point that has inadvertently hindered discussion. The interpretation explains the Anglo-American press’s and public’s interest in torture porn at a particular moment, but pins torture porn down to that epoch, thereby invalidating the subgenre’s lasting relevance. While this chapter begins with a discussion of the allegorical reading and its limitations then, that dissection aims to repudiate the prevailing connotation that torture porn’s violent representations primarily refer to concurrent political circumstances, and American politics particularly. Concentrating on immediate political events 63
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means overlooking that violence and cruelty are not only contemporary politico-historical concerns. Indeed, as Chapter 1 established, violence and cruelty are among horror’s staple themes.
Torture porn films are not just the products of reactionary impulses, as the repeated allegory-reading implies. Political torture itself points towards broader ethical conundrums. Torture porn reflects those moral issues, not just the War on Terror. In Chapters 5 and 6, that concept-led understanding will be developed by making a case for torture porn’s lasting appeal and inspecting the subgenre’s narrative content. As a first step towards such rumination, this chapter’s second half will challenge the prevalent allegation that torture porn portrays events primarily from a sadistic point-of-view (see Cumming et al., 2010; Robey, 2007a). As this chapter will verify, the notion that torture porn’s viewers are encouraged to identify with torturers is flawed, since the films are more commonly encoded in favour of sufferers’ perspectives.
The sadistic gaze argument has been prejudicially applied to torture porn, but derives from established critical narratives used to vilify earlier horror subgenres.3 However, the sadistic gaze theory also descends from the associations made between torture porn and events at Abu Ghraib since the scandal was rooted in photographs taken by torturers within the prison facility: that is, from a sadistic point-of-view. The sadistic gaze argument intertwines two established discursive narratives. Its proponents apply the resultant amalgam to torture porn films without adequately testing the validity of those propositions. The subgenre’s depictions of torture are contextualised by torture porn’s fictional mode, formal traits, and narrative structures, all of which should be accounted for. Thus, this chapter founds Part II’s overarching contention that torture porn’s particularities do not match its objectors’ pejorative suppositions.
‘[S]omething terribly contemporary’:4
the war on terror alle[-]gory
The War on Terror reading dominates scholarly responses to torture porn. Douglas Kellner’s (2010: 6–8) direct comparison between ‘violent films of the era’ and ‘the second Bush-Cheney Administration’ – which culminates in Kellner’s declaration that Saw’s lead antagonist John Kramer/Jigsaw physically resembles Dick Cheney – epitomises how
cursory such correlations can be. Other scholars make similarly blunt parallels. Middleton insists that torture porn directly ‘aligns with the post-9/11 years’ (2010: 3), while Beth Kattelman (2010: 3) proclaims
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that the subgenre arose as a ‘ result of the 11 September 2001 attacks’
(emphasis added), for example.5
The discursive trend towards allegory is not only cultivated by scholars however. Directors too have made this connection. Roth has been
particularly vocal in supporting the allegory-interpretation of Hostel (in Hill, 2007; Lockwood, 2008: 42; Murray, 2008: 1), possibly because such readings provide some defence against the scapegoating he has suffered in the press. Directors Joe Lynch and Zombie foster allegorical readings, insofar as they compare their aesthetic approaches to Al Qaeda beheading videos. Berman has also stated that he wanted Borderland to evoke US soldiers filming real war-atrocities.6 In fact, numerous torture porn films – including Territories, Basement, The Killing Room, Scar, Torture Room, and The Torturer – contain dialogue perspicuously pertaining to the War on Terror.
The allegory reading clearly has some legitimacy in this sense. Specific motifs within the films appear to draw on contemporary, publically contested aspects of torture, thus facilitating the allegorical interpretation. Subjects are tortured based on their personal fears in Are You Scared? , Dread, and The Task, a method included among Rumsfeld’s advocated interrogation techniques (see Paust, 2007: 14–17). Other movies incorporate war motifs that could be construed as making the correspondence plain. These include gasmasks ( Callback; The Final; The Task), hazmat suits ( Spiderhole; The Unforgiving), the orange prison jumpsuits that became synonymous with Guantanamo Bay imagery ( Breathing Room; Territories; The Tortured), and black hoods over abductees heads, which were iconographically associated with the Abu Ghraib photographs ( The Book of Revelation; Nine Dead; Sutures). However, although those emblems were prominent in imagery related to the War on Terror, none are exclusive to that context. Black hoods, for instance, may be associated with the images of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, but they were used in previous CIA and UK torture schemes (McCoy, 2006: 55). Even where such devices openly evoke present politics, their ‘obviousness’ negates the need for analysis. As such, the allegorical interpretation is one that does not necessarily require elucidation. To read contemporary horror as reflecting the current moment thereby risks corroborating critical accusations that torture porn films are one-dimensional and reactionary.
The allegory reading makes contextual linkages to the immediate
present that risk becoming myopic. For example, Boy Meets Girl is entirely centred on torture. Its run-time is dominated by depictions of a bound man being physically assaulted by two female abductors. His captors explicitly discuss ‘serving [their] nation’ and ‘terrorism’. Had
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the film been made in 2004, it would fit torture porn’s alleged War on Terror analogy. However, Boy Meets Girl was made in 1994. It fits the allegory that has been applied to torture porn because Boy Meets Girl deals with the same concepts. The film is proto-torture porn inasmuch as it demonstrates that the post-2003 boom in torture-themed horror production organically evolved from existing genre facets. Politically contentious current affairs no doubt spurred public interest in morality and suffering in the early 2000s. That public interest may have fuelled torture porn’s box-office performance, leading to increased funding for other torture-themed horror films. Yet when it comes to understanding the narrative content, the issues – morality and suffering – should be the focus for interpretation, not the linkage between those issues and the historical moment.
As much as references to current affairs are offered in torture porn films, contemporary motifs are related to a network of other elements.
For instance, several torture porn narratives that are blatantly about war make reference to current affairs, but situate those discussions against a history of warfare. In Shadow, protagonist David finds a bunker deco-rated with war paraphernalia (gasmasks, medals), alongside film canis-ters labelled ‘Abu Ghraib’, ‘Pearl Harbour’, and ‘Saigon’. As such, Shadow contextualises contemporary conflicts alongside past skirmishes. No matter how urgent torture may be for Hostel’s characters (and decriers), the protagonists’ visit to the ‘Museum Tortury’ also verifies that, as David Luban (2006: 37) observes, ‘torture is as old as human history’.
Moreover, Territories’s torturers overtly create a neo-Guantanamo. Their actions do not simply mirror human rights violations occurring in Guantanamo Bay. Their deeds indicate that what the facility signified –
its conceptual legacy – will live on long after the prison itself has shut down. Underlining that point, footage of Guantanamo Bay’s closure is included in Territories, and spurs on the torturers. In each of these cases, contemporary events are connected to broader contexts, pointing towards the horrors that humans do to one another. Torture is not a lapse, nor is it exclusive to the early 21st Century. Torture is a sustained feature of human interaction. Torture porn reifies that fact by portraying the world as a place occupied only by torturers and captives, and concretising how distasteful human history is via ugly depictions of cruelty.
The press’s resistance to torture porn may be rooted in that unpleasantness, but repudiating these films means failing to address what those representations mean. However limited the political-allegory approach is, those readings at least acknowledge that torture porn films are in some sense significant. In contrast, press-based responses to the allegory
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paradigm often manifest as outright dismissals of potential meaning.
For example, George Romero – who has been critically lauded for his zombie-based metaphoric satires – has been called upon as an authoritative voice to discuss the legitimacy of torture porn’s allegorical messages (see Anderson, 2008). In Romero’s view (in Onstad, 2008), torture porn films are inadequate because ‘they’re lacking in metaphor’. This attitude implies that horror must have a candid allegorical agenda in order to be considered worthwhile. Other detractors evince torture porn’s cultural unfitness by mocking any political commentary they encounter in the subgenre, treating allegory as superficial rather than integral to torture porn’s meanings. Anderson (2007b) describes Frontier(s)’s political parallels as ‘cynical’ attempts ‘to bring gravitas to the abattoir’, for example.
