Of course, the Woody Allen version was a parody with little relevance to the book, but I think even in the 60’s they wouldn’t have filmed the testicle torture incident. It’s become possible to show it to audiences now for the same reason that torture in general has become so much more mainstream in movies, I speculate. Just as critics find much Cold War anxiety in the horror and sci-fi flims of the 50’s, I think in the future this torture porn will be seen as a manifestation of something brewing in our psyches ever since we found out that the torture of prisoners was being ordered and approved at the highest levels of American government.
We’re not talking about just another genre where a couple hours of your time might bore or annoy you. You can joke that an Adam Sandler film can’t be unwatched. But for the films you’re talking about, can’t be unwatched is not a joke. I myself stopped visiting TheSpill.com movie reviews, because that’s where I first read about The Human Centipede. I’m coming around to forgiving the popular culture for continuing to mention this damn movie, but that half of a movie review I read before realizing what the story was about can’t be unread, to my cost.
I did watch Cube. I didn’t know it was going to be about people getting mutilated, but once I became aware I gave it a fair viewing. I summed up what I though afterward in Abridged Script style:
[spoiler]I saw a movie called The Cube recently. It’s the kind of film that sucks so hard you can’t get it off of you. It’s a lamprey of a film. I keep going over my mind how they tried to rationalize the fact that they had no intention of explaining why the film’s premise should make sense. Here’s my Abridged Script:
Cop: Hey, we’re all in this structure full of cubes, some of which are trapped with gruesome special effects, and a worrysome rumbling noise that nobody is going to suspect is the sound of these modular units moving until very late in the film. Let’s get our shit together and try to get out.
Doctor: We’ll all be dead in three days from hunger and thirst.
Mike from RedGreen: Not me, I’m sucking on the button from my shirt.
Cop: Hey, I know who you are!
Audience: No shit, it’s the lovable rogue Mike from Redgreen.
Cop: No, it’s The Wren, expert escapologist who has busted out of many sophisticated prisons.
Mike from RedGreen: That’s right, assholes. I’m letting you tag along so I can use your boots to set off traps.
Mike from RedGreen goes off on technobabble about molecular sensors. He gets killed horribly in the next cube.
Cop: Nevermind. I guess that was Mike from RedGreen.
Mathematician: I’ve figured it out. This series of meaningless three-digit numbers tell us which rooms are safe, as long as you have somebody along who can recognize a prime number at a glance. Good thing only one lense of my glasses was broken when the Cop saved me.
Cop: Well, I’ll provide rational leadership here and hopefully our team-work will get us to safety.
Architect: Yeah, sure. This will be a thinking-man’s thriller, and nobody will have to go psycho. Whatever.
Doctor: Dammit, this is all a big government conspiracy of the patriarchal hegemony of the jews controlling the world bank of the millitary industrial complex of the Illuminati under the command of Martians.
Architect: Your paranoia is actually very naive, because, just as a case in point, I designed the outer shell of this place with no idea what it would be used for, because an architect doesn’t need to know that kind of thing. So, you see, it’s just a big thing that nobody in particular is responsible for, especially not me.
Doctor: You mean that nobody in particular kidnapped us, anesthetized us, stripped us of all belongings except The Mathematician’s glasses and put us in these uniforms with our names on them?
Architect: You’re still not getting the point.
Mathematician: You mean it’s a big metaphor for the emergent phenomena of society in which overall structural is indifferent to human suffering, in spite of its apparent cruelty and dehumanization of each person individually?
Architect: Sort of, probably. Yeah. Think how deep that is, not what epistemological and phenomenological problems – or God forbid practical issues – arise, and you’ve got the jist of it.
Cop: Bullshit. Metaphors don’t get reified to the extent that we end up standing in them literally crawling around, fearing for our lives.
Architect: You still don’t get it, do you?
The party finds a retard.
Cop: This retard is probably not going to turn out to have any special insights to add. Let’s ditch him.
Doctor: No, the compassion that I represent can’t allow that. Let’s bring him along no matter how much of a burden he represents, because humans don’t let obnoxious and uncontrollable people die just because they might get the rest of us killed.
Cop: Aha! By your liberal stance I can tell you are part of the problem that results in crack addicts gang raping crack babies.
Doctor: Aha! By your conservative stance I can tell that you beat and rape your children.
Cop: gurgle Mmmmm… raping and beating children… Sorry, did you say something?
Cop “accidentally” lets Doctor get killed. He kidnapps Mathematician and carries her to another cube.
Cop: We don’t need those other shitheads. They are only getting in the way of me beating and raping you, as an example of what’s wrong with society.
Mathematician: Wait, I thought the problem with society was the way its overly regemented and increasingly obfuscated rules crushed individuality and left us squirted with acid like Mike from RedGreen.
Cop: Dumbass, the problem with socitey is that these liberal freaks are so busy trying to prevent me from raping and beating children that I don’t have time to keep crack addicts and other liberals from raping and beating children.
Architect: Aha! I have shown up, and dragged the retard with me, for whatever good that will do me!
Mathematician: It might get you laid if we survive, and no government agents we have not bothered to wonder about bother to put bullets in our brains so we don’t tell anybody about this pointless and horrific public works project. Wait, as it turns out, the rule wasn’t that rooms with no prime numbers weren’t safe or are safe, whatever. It was the rooms that were factors or factorials of primes, what’s the difference?, of prime numbers. I figured that out with just my amazing mathematical memory, although now all the sudden I can’t figure out the factorial nature of any future chamber. Only a computer or a retard somebody bothered to train in lugubrious mathematical caluculations could do it before we starved.
Retard: I’m autistic and happen to have been trained how to do lugubrious calculations.
Architect: I’ve outsmarted the Cop, who went psycho completely out of the understanding we had of him at the beginning. Now we’ve taken a safe path he can’t follow to the exit.
Cop: I’ve gotten through anyway just in time to kill everyone but the retard with an instrumet of mysterious origin.
Architect: Just for that, I’ll get you ironically killed by the exit.
Cop: splutch gurgle
Retard: I alone live to walk into a mysterious etherial white light that the audience is left to speculate about.
Writers: Fuck you. You’re not deep enough to get it. Go watch 2001: A Space Oddesy, you lightweights![/spoiler]
Also, here on the SMDB, in limerick form:
The film made me angry, because withholding from viewers an explanation of what’s going on isn’t clever, and it reveals the thinness of the premise that gave them an excuse to show people suffering. But I did give it a second shot by watching Cube 2: Hypercube. It was even dumber and more pointless – in fact the pointlessness was raised to a new level of abstraction.
Now of course I am aware that there is a genre of films, called ‘torture porn’ for audiences that enjoy lurid inhumanity. And you ask people to watch these films before they judge whether or not they’re the kinds of films they will balefully wish they hadn’t watched?