Yes
Yet more evidence to me that I understand less and less of mainstream culture as I age. I thought I was supposed to get wiser.
Eh.
The first time I recall the term “torture porn” being used was in a review of The Passion of the Christ. The reviewer used it as if it were an existing idea and not something he had just invented.
The genre itself has been around for decades. Day of the Woman, which was released in 1978, was certainly torture porn. The main change is that in the last few years the genre has moved from the underground to the mainstream.
No, just crankier.
Well see, here we go again with the old subjectivity. I disagree strongly. The Day of the Woman/I Spit on Your Grave has a very real agenda: it’s a pretty powerful anti-rape movie. None of the violence in that movie is done for the sake of titillation. Again, each person who sees it will have to decide this for himself. But I (and others) feel pretty strongly that *I Spit on Your Grave *is a very serious movie. But then, it’s clearly one of the many films that inspired Showgirls, so there’s that . . .
None of it? It’s all organic to the plot?
Your opinion is as much of that “old subjectivity” as anyone’s. Sure, it’s possible now to wax profoundly about the deeper meaning in I Spit on Your Grave, just as one can pontificate on how Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was actually promoting industrial socialism, but the reviews when Spit came out had no problem lambasting it for its gratuitous violence.
Spit is no more anti-rape (or anti-whatever) than any of the hundreds of movies that proceeded it in which bad guys commit their crime on screen to excite the audience, then get splattered by the good guy, to mollify (and excite) the audience. There was even a term for it - the “square-up reel” - that goes back to pretty much the beginning of commercial films; show the audience something shocking and titillating and (by social standards) wicked, but then make everything okay by letting rough justice prevail.
Again, this is subject to debate and opinion, but there’s a pretty strong critical case to be made (and that has been made, by many serious critics) that I Spit is, indeed, a very serious anti-rape movie. There’s no question that its initial critical reception was overwhelmingly negative. But that’s irrelevant to such a subjective, um, subject.
(Here’s an even more interesting article on the subject. Understand, I’m not saying that this article is any more “right” than yours; only that these guys do a good job of elucidating the position that I’m too lazy to lay out for myself right now.)
As you wrote, there’s more than one way to see a film. The viewer brings his or her own context into the theatre with them. (Personally, I’d consider Ms. 45 an example of a rape revenge story but not Day of the Woman.) But you have to admit it’s plausible to see Day of the Woman as torture porn. Your linked article describes Roger Ebert’s experience viewing the movie in a theatre when it was released and it’s clear most of the audience watching it saw it as such.
Ms. 45 is very much a rape-revenge story, but the growing insanity of the protagonist muddies the waters, IMHO. Personally, I find *ISoYG *to be much more straightforward with its agenda. Much more so than other films of the genre. Showgirls, which starts out as a Hollywood Dream Factory type movie and then suddenly morphs into ISoYG, has so many various levels and competing tones that, while it certainly contains a rape-revenge story, it’s not as simple as ISoYG. But both films have met with almost identical criticism on that front: the rape is TOO graphic. Well, IMO, that’s exactly what distinguishes both movies as serious rape revenge movies: the rape scenes are so brutal that any chance for titillation has been completely excised from them: these movies rub your noses in the rape, and make you realize how brutal it really is. Titillation movies would tend to cut away when the discomfort begins to encroach on the titillation. Not so *ISoYG *or Showgirls; you WILL sit and watch this, and you WILL be made intensely uncomfortable by it.
History doesn’t support such a claim, in that brutal executions including public torture and disemboweling and such were once popular entertainments. Deflowering a virgin publicly before execution was also common enough. Besides, if this material was so shockingly unpleasant, surely a movie like Showgirls would never have anyone watching it more than once.
Personally, I had to force my way through it because I found large parts of it tedious and the main character such a twit that it was hard to care what happened to her. I was only uncomfortable in the sense that I got elbow pain from repeatedly looking at my watch.
Well, that’s true.
Cite?
Sorry, but I have read quite a bit about the Inquisition in its varied forms and the other types of “witch hunts” and it seems like you’re alluding to something like them, and I am not familiar with public deflowering of virgins as something common at all.
I was thinking more of ancient Rome, but cites that aren’t based on fictional works are hard to find at the moment, so I’ll look into it.
My point is there is nothing that WILL guarantee a particular reaction from an audience member. Certainly violence (even extremely graphic violence) can horrify some, but it will also excite some, bore some, titillate some… I’ve no objection to lissener stating his opinion. I just feel compelled to object when he states his opinion as fact. The cinematic slaughter we’ve been shown over the last few years is merely a simulation of the genuine slaughter humans have inflicted and suffered for centuries, while others watched, riveted.
Wow, imagine the balls it must have took to make an anti-rape movie. :dubious:
It’s been interesting watching the reputation of I Spit on Your Grave on discussion boards morph as the years have gone by. I remember when I first started reading message boards around a decade ago, I Spit was being praised as the first horror movie that seemed to revel in its violence and the talk was about how cool that was compared to current horror movies.
Now, I Spit seems to be getting some traction as a serious movie that’s more than just a revenge movie (which were all the rage in the 70s) and that it’s the basis for all of the derivitive torture porn that’s around now.
Basically, I’ve seen I Spit propped up as the forerunner to whatever current trend in horror is happening at every point in time.
I admit I scanned a little in this thread but I didn’t really see anyone bringing up the point I feel ‘torture porn’ comes from…The PG-13 rating. It’s weird I know but I remember how horror movies for a long time had simply run out of steam and the entire genre was semi dormant. Then suddenly Scream came along and tweaked many of the old horror movie conventions with characters talking about the ‘rules’ of survival and generally being aware of horror movies. Also while Scream was R it had no female nudity and the violence was actually quite tame for a slasher picture. What followed was more and more watered down horror movies seeming to shoot for that ever popular PG-13 rating. Also trying to attract females and young males the movies got more and more stylish and ‘hip’ then visceral and immediate. Horror for many people isn’t about people sitting around being ironic before being bumped off in most bloodless way possible.
It didn’t help that action movies seemed to be following the same trend.
I think ‘torture porn’ became the answer. People looking for something darker. Something with blood on the walls. It’s not a nice thing but frankly I think it was inevitable. If all we get is crappy PG-13 movies there’s going to be something that fills that vacuum.
It’s hard to imagine now in the wake of all the sequels, clones and parodies, but Scream earned every bit of it’s R rating. While it’s true there was no nudity, the gore was on par with the great slashers of the earlier decade.
I think that no matter how violent or focussed on human suffering torture porn gets, it will remain mainstream unless and until sex is directly linked to it: say, if the victims in Hostel were raped prior to (or while) being tortured to death. Americans do not regard ANY violence that I can see as being out of the mainstream. Sex is the thing that really bothers them.
I think the scene where Heather Mazanarro is strung upside down, gagged and most of all, NAKED comes close to pushing the movie out of the mainstream, but as there was no directly sexual treatment of her, it didn’t make it all the way out.
What bugs me most about the Hostel movies is the blatant hypocrisy: OBVIOUSLY the subtext is entirely sexual, but Roth doesn’t have the nerve to “go there.” Let me see, you have an American businessman paying untold thousands of dollars to go to Eastern Europe and torture a teenage girl . . . in a school outfit. Riiiiiiight. Like she wouldn’t be naked. The way that sex is just blatantly excised from those movies is just retarded.
Not sure what your point is; most portrayal of rape in entertainment media is ultimately for entertainment. It’s a given, of course, that whoever’s making the movie (or L&O:SVU) is “pro-rape,” which seems to be the false dichotomy you’re suggesting. But where most rape/slasher movies are strictly for thrills and titillation, movies like *ISoYG *and *Thriller *and, yes, Showgirls, which show the victim (or her friend, as in Showgirls) turning around and kicking some tough-broad ass, are movies that obviously take a different approach. It sends a different message when it’s the victim who wreaks the revenge herself.
It’s not retarded. It’s very smart. It gives mainstream fans the plausible deniability they need. The moment it widely becomes recognized as a sexual SM thing, it becomes a niche product and on one will go see it who doesn’t like SM. Acknowledging the sexual subtext of these films would be the kiss of death for them.