Wizard’s First Rule by Terry Goodkind
Our hero is taken captive and turned into a slave. He is tortured day and night for months. He has apparently been broken by his Mistress so that at the climax of the story it is revealed that
He segmented his mind to get through the torture, and he isn’t affected by the Confessor’s Touch so he is able to lie about which of the boxes should be opened.
The torture of Mark Vorkosigan by Baron Ryoval, which breaks his mind into multiple personalities. When Ryoval decides to have some alone time with his victim, he gets an introduction to one of those personalities - the one named Killer.
The 2007 movie Rendition is about an innocent Egyptian American who is picked up by the CIA and shipped to an unnamed (I think) middle-Eastern country friendly to the US where he is interrogated by a local intelligence officer while a young CIA analyst observes. The analyst (Jake Gyllenhaal) comes to realize that the man really is innocent when he suddenly “cracks” and gives answers to Gyllenhaal’s questions that don’t hold water. So he helps to get him released.
What does that mean?
“The Secret of Santa Vittoria” where a number of townspeople are tortured by the Nazis and still refuse to admit that there is wine and where it is hidden.
“So you think you are strong because you can survive the soft cushions. Well, we shall see. Biggles! Put her in the Comfy Chair!”
I see your Spanish Inquisition and raise you one counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor.
RR
Are you sure you aren’t thinking of Orson Scott Card’s story “A Thousand Deaths,” where the protagonist Jerry Crove is tortured and executed over and over in an attempt to force him to confess in public that he was wrong to not betray his friends when he discovered their plot to assassinate a leader, and that the Soviet government of America is super awesome is the best thing that ever happened for the country, etc. … but they can’t ever get the test audiences to believe his confession is sincere, so they’re eventually forced to exile him to a planet which later becomes the infamous planet Capitol of the Worthing Saga universe?
It was just a wisecrack. I’'m a weisenheimer. There’s a memo and everything.
That’s “A Thousand Deaths” and it was written by Orson Scott Card.
I especially hated the part where they slowly lowered him into boiling oil (he died when it got up to his armpits), then they had his clone fish out the chunks of meat from the oil after it cooled.
They weren’t trying to get information from him, though. They just wanted a confession, they didn’t care about the truth. The thing was, they had technology to analyze how believable his confession was (it was to be broadcast as propaganda) and it was never believable enough for them, even long after he broke and desperately wanted it to end. At one point he goes on a rant against the state, and it turns out that time they figured he would have surely broken and he was broadcasting to a live audience, and he was very convincing that time.
Oops, missed the post two above mine.
I don’t know if it counts, but in Friday by RAH, the eponymous heroine is tortured by some amateurs, but she sings like a bird right from the start. They continue to torture her, convinced that she knows more or is lying to them. They continue to torture her, until she can escape/is rescued.
I thought of that. It’s sort of a double-failure. Friday actually gave a full account of everything she knew before the torture began (very little, as it was set up that way) not out of dastardy but because that was her employer’s doctrine. Since ANYONE will break under torture given time – and yes, Virginia, that inclues Chuck Norris – there was thought to be no point in wasting agent’s lives.
Well of course, one way torture can fail is if the person being tortured doesn’t actually have any valuable knowledge, but makes something up just to stop the torture.
This scenario is depicted in the movie Rendition.
(Hmm. I see commasense beat me to this one.)
There is a science fiction short story or novella the title and author of which I cannot remember that was about an Earth military officer sent to make a first contact with an alien government. As it turns out, the officer has an unusual resistance to torture, which is good because apparently the aliens’ diplomatic protocol consists of undergoing horrendous mutilations to determine an individual’s worth.
I have a vague nagging thought that it’s Piers Anthony’s “On The Uses of Torture” but I can’t verify online since I can’t find a plot synopsis for that story to compare my memory to.
I believe that’s it.
In Falcon and the Snowman, Sean Penn’s character is tortured by Mexican police until he signs a confession, in Spanish, a language which he does not read. I don’t know if that fits the OP, since the police really aren’t trying to get real information – they’re just trying to get him to sign the paper. So, it “works” in that sense, although the obvious conclusion is that Penn would have confessed to the Lincoln assassination if they’d wanted him to. (Also, it’s not complete fiction, but there you go.)
In the early Paul Newman movie The Rack, the (psychological) torture of Newman’s character is never shown, but in the course of his trial for collaboration with the enemy, it comes out that he signed/said whatever his captors wanted him to to make the torture stop. On the other hand, Lee Marvin’s character suffered physical torture and did not cave in. It also comes out that Newman’s attempt to ease the torture by collaborating was shortsighted – once his captors (North Koreans and Chinese) realized they could get to him, he got no repreive for the rest of his time in captivity.
There’s always the end of Brazil but your definition of “doesn’t work” may depend on your point of view.
Ooo! And A Clockwork Orange.
Yep. Out of his “Anthonology”, if I recall.
The twist was of course that by the end of the torture he had been given, he was given rulership over their people… but he himself had stopped being “human” as we know it.
Yeah, that’s it. Another SF story on the topic is Hayford Peirce’s “The Reluctant Torturer” - society decides that torture is allowable under certain extreme circumstances, and recruits people just barely willing to do it; as expected, the slope is pretty slippery, and it doesn’t help fight crime & terrorism very much.