The power of images of terrible savagery is hard to shake from the mind. In
all the hand-wringing about the 15 British navy hostages, nobody seems to
have mentioned one possible reason why they capitulated so easily to their
Iranian captors. I’m willing to bet it was deeply ingrained terror inspired
by the jihadi execution videos and other horrific images of captivity they
and most other young people these days have seen on television, the internet
and at the cinema.
“A guard kept flicking my neck with his index finger and thumb,” Arthur
Batchelor — at 20, the youngest sailor — told the press. “I thought the
worst. We’ve all seen the videos.” But the worst that Batchelor claims
happened to him, in fact, was being kept in solitary confinement for a
couple of days, slapped a few times and called “Mr Bean” by his captors.
Which is not exactly waterboarding.
No, it was Batchelor’s own overheated imagination that helped scare the
bejesus out of him, fuelled by a melange of images he dredged up: those
execution videos, photos of degraded and abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib —
and, like many in his age group, probably Hollywood’s reimagining of this
modern terror in hit films such as Hostel and Saw, in which young people
like him and his comrades are held captive and sadistically tortured. “At
some points, I did have fears we would not survive, because my imagination
was running,” Batchelor admitted.
Faye Turney, meanwhile, the only female sailor, was terrified she might be
raped by her captors. Which would be a reasonable fear if she had seen any
of the recent crop of “torture porn” horror films, including Hostel, Saw,
Wolf Creek, The Devil’s Rejects and Turistas, in which kidnapped young women
have to contend with brutal sexual violence before being slaughtered for
kicks. Hostel, for example, which director Eli Roth explicitly claims was
inspired by images from Abu Ghraib and the war in Iraq, is about the truly
appalling things that happen to some young tourists when they fall into the
hands of wealthy men who pay for the pleasure of stripping and torturing
them for sadistic kicks. One young girl has her eye burnt out with a
blowtorch. Saw III features a young woman strung up naked in a meat locker
and sprayed with cold water that hardens to ice. That’s just for starters.
It was an interesting coincidence that the sailors’ revelations about the
disarming power of their deepest fears came the same weekend that Grindhouse
— the latest mayhem from Quentin Tarantino, the director who inaugurated the
current era of ultraviolent Hollywood “entertainment” — was released in the
United States. Grindhouse is actually a double bill: Death Proof from
Tarantino, and Planet Terror from Robert (Sin City) Rodriguez. Tarantino’s
half is a full-bore revenge fantasy, part sassy girl-talk, part souped-up
car chase with predictably bloody roadkill, fleshy limbs bouncing down the
highway, heads sawn off by flying muscle cars. Rodriguez’s Planet Terror is
a knowing zombie-movie spoof, dripping in gore’n’gloop, climaxing in Rose
McGowan’s character, a go-go dancer, swivelling on her bum as she mows down
zombies with the machine gun attached to her stump. In between the two films
are lurid spoof trailers promising sleaze of every sinful, grisly kind.
Although most American reviewers saw Grindhouse as good, old-fashioned dirty
fun, a spoof on the sleazy exploitation films of the 1970s, not everyone was
convinced. Armond White, one of the most respected film critics in the USA,
wrote in the New York Press: “Alas, Grindhouse is a watershed event: a
big-ticket capitulation to Hollywood’s constant chase after the youth
market, validating teens’ lack of discretion as the prevailing cultural
standard. And here RR and QT are right: Grindhouse’s frenzy of vengeance
indicts all of American pop culture. It’s an Abu Ghraib action extravaganza.”
Few critics dare attack Tarantino, Hollywood’s Shakespeare of ultraviolence;
his many acolytes revere him because he “brought back violent movies
unapologetically”, in Roth’s words. (Roth, whose Hostel was produced by
Tarantino, directed one of the spoof trailers in Grindhouse, in which a
knickerless cheerleader is seen bouncing on a trampoline until a knife
pierces through it and appears to impale her in a highly sensitive part of
her anatomy.) Roth is referring to 1992’s Reservoir Dogs and 1994’s Pulp
Fiction, whose brutal torture scenes opened the floodgates to the “torture
porn” we are currently suffering.
These gruesome films from Hollywood’s so-called Splat Pack are incredibly
popular with people in their teens and early twenties, and have been
astonishingly successful at the box office. The first Saw, for example, was
made for just over $1m; it and its two sequels have now taken about $400m at
the international box office and probably as much again in DVD sales. Saw IV
and Hostel: Part II, of course, will open later this year.
Although most of these films were made outside the studio system, their
violent lingua franca has migrated into mainstream Hollywood entertainment.
Casino Royale, the latest Bond movie, for example, featured a graphic scene
of torture, as did Mel Gibson’s most recent bloodfest, Apocalypto. The TV
series 24 invari-ably uses torture as an effective dramatic device.
Ultraviolence has become such a critical and accepted part of the mainstream
that nobody is surprised when a film like 300, which offers little more to
its audience than astonishingly bloody gougings, flying limbs, decapitations
and a body count that would not have been out of place in a Nazi
concentration camp, has taken $200m in its first month of release in America.
The United States, via the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the
industry body that runs the rating system, has historically been far more
tolerant of explicit violence than of explicit sex — in contrast to Europe,
where violence has always been seen as the greater danger. Even so, there
have been times when individual films — Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Straw Dogs
and A Clockwork Orange (both 1971), Natural Born Killers (1994) — have
tested the limits of society’s tolerance for violent entertainment.
Now there are signs that the current wave of “nasties” and the barrage of
ultraviolence in mainstream films is causing even liberals sleepless nights.
It’s not surprising to hear conservative commentators like Bill O’Reilly
call Saw III “a sickening spectacle that could have never happened in
America even 10 years ago”. But it is surprising when an academic, Thomas
Doherty, chairman of the film studies programme at Brandeis University, says
there has been an “utter collapse of censorship restrictions on matters of
violence . .. I wouldn’t censor films like Hostel and Saw, although they
really are pretty gnarly, but if I were on the classification and ratings
administration, I’d start giving them NC17s”.
An NC-17 rating would mean that, technically, nobody under 17 could see the
films in a cinema — which is why studios edit to avoid them and gain R
ratings.
These allow even young children to see them as long as they’re accompanied by
somebody over 21, ideally a parent. God help us. And, as every cool teenager
knows, these films can be sold as “unrated” on DVD, where they include
scenes that were censored to get the film a cinema release.
Some believe there is now a considerable body of scientific evidence
indicating that violent films and TV programmes can have harmful effects on
those who watch them, particularly young people. “A heavy diet of media
violence has a tendency to increase chronic levels of hostility and to lead
people to interpret the world around them as a more hostile and dangerous
place,” says Joanne Cantor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an
internationally recognised expert on children and the mass media, and the
author of Mommy, I’m Scared. “Much of this happens as emotional effects,
which occur even in people old enough to know that what they are watching is
not real.”
But even the normally complacent MPAA had to take action recently when
billboards went up in Los Angeles and New York for a new horror movie,
Captivity. “They showed a woman in four stages of degradation,” says Jill
Soloway, a Los Angeles film-maker who was disgusted by them, “with the words
Abduction, Confinement, Torture and Termination across four graphic images
of the actress Elisha Cuthbert gagged, caged, encased in a mask with tubes
draining blood from her nostrils and, finally, lying backwards, dead, her
breast highlighted for maximum effect.”
Joss Whedon, creator of the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, wrote a
furious letter to the MPAA saying “the ad campaign for Captivity is not only
a literal sign of the collapse of humanity, it’s an assault. I’ve watched
plenty of horror — in fact, I’ve made my share. But the advent of
torture-porn and the total dehumanising not just of women (though they
always come first) but of all human beings has made horror a largely
unpalatable genre. This ad campaign is part of something dangerous and
repulsive, and that act of aggression has to be answered”.
Roth shrugs off complaints about the effects of his films. “I want nudity,”
he says. “I want sex and violence mixed together. What’s wrong with that?
We’re in a really violent wave, and I hope it never ends.”
While the MPAA has so far refused to give Captivity a rating, blocking its
release, it appears unwilling to do more than excise a few seconds here and
there from any of the graphic horror or mainstream action films Hollywood is
churning out today. Splat Pack directors such as Roth and Rob Zombie — who
also directed a spoof trailer in Grindhouse, in which a naked young woman is
branded with a swastika — have learnt how to get their bloody terrors past
the MPAA ratings board. “Explain why the extreme violence is necessary to
tell the story in a way that’s more socially responsible,” Zombie tells
other film-makers. The MPAA buys such nonsense, obviously.
If we are honest, it’s hard not to see the ultraviolence of mainstream
entertainment as reflecting the violence — and the violent imagery — that is
so ubiquitous in the world around us. When the images of degradation from
Abu Ghraib or video footage of the jihadist beheading of journalist Daniel
Pearl can be called up on the internet in a couple of clicks by any teenager
on a dare, it’s not surprising who’s been cast as the perpetrators of terror
in today’s horror films. “It’s not the big scary monster any more,” says Sam
Quinones, who has a late-night radio show devoted to the genre. “Now, humans
are the worst monsters.”
As young Arthur Batchelor said: “We’ve all seen the videos.” One suspects the
Iranians have too.
Grindhouse opens in the UK on June 1
