Some Light Entertainment

In the July 9 issue of National Review, Ross Douthat had a great article on the Hostel movie genre. The conclusion:

. . . What's wrong with Hostel II isn't that Roth depicts torture; it's that depicting torture, and being "creative" about it, is this smug, sickening, pleased-with-itself movie's principal reason for existing. The audience isn't paying to watch a movie that contains a torture scene, any more than a guy renting an "adult" movie at the local video store is renting a film that happens to contain a sex scene; it's paying to watch torture, with the movie--including all these Important Themes--as window dressing to the money shots.

And whereas "normal" pornography is a debasement of the sexual act, a degradation of an essentially positive human experience, torture-porn of this sort is something else entirely. It's a radical experiment in evil-as-entertainment, one that places an artist's gifts in the service of the impulses that animated Torquemada, or Saddam's inquisitors. No, it's worse than that, because the tortures Roth has invented for Hostel II don't pretend to be designed to extract information, or even to terrorize a population and preserve a regime. They exist only to exist, in the same way that what began as coercive interrogations at Abu Ghraib ended as self-conscious spectacle: Torture as a way to while away the boredom of guard duty, torture for the sake of torture.

Abu Ghraib was real, of course, and Roth's Slovakian meat-grinder is fictional; no actors were harmed, physically, at least, in the making of the his project. And every censorship regime fails to make necessary distinctions: You start by going after the Roths of the world, and end up banning Lolita. Yet even so, if you offered me the chance to play censor for a day and send Roth to a jail cell alongside Lynndie England, I'm not sure I'd refuse.

Failing that, I'd like the opportunity to punch him in the face. It would make for an interesting commentary on the violence that's implicit in the relationship between the critic and the entertainer in our globalized age; also, the sick bastard had it coming.

That's about right. I think Douthat touches on something important when he draws the distinction between pornography and torture-porn. Pornography is the corruption of a positive good. At it's very best torture-porn is a corruption of our need for adventure. At it's very best. Douthat is off a bit in his especial condemnation of Roth since the torture is not even for a purpose. In the real world, yes, that of course matters; however, if the plot is just window dressing, then a sadistic torture movie starring Nazi prison guards wouldn't be any better. Never seen the movies, never want to. If that last paragraph is a shade opaque, it's a mockery of Roth's alleged motive in making the movies addressed earlier in the column.