Like a prison warden decides to do an experiment where for prisoners who go to solitary confinement he finds bad mainstream Hollywood movies and plays them right outside the cell door bars at normal volume (I know solitary normally has those solid doors but riff with me for second). He doesn’t HAVE to watch it and it’s not loud enough to disrupt sleeping, but it’s always there and always playing for the entire time that person has been given as punishment in solitary confinement.
Would this count as cruel and unusual punishment or torture?
Wasn’t this what they did toManuel Noriega to get him out of the embassy he was holed up in? But IIRC they played rock music. ( Baby Shark wasn’t written back then)
I’m not looking to challenge your son but I also worked in prison. And in my experience, the thing that inmates experience the most each day is boredom. Prison is the most boring place in the world. It’s a place where you spend hours every day just sitting. You have a set routine that you follow every day, day after day, year after year. You see the same people every day.
That’s why I feel the OP’s plan wouldn’t work. Even a really bad movie is a form of entertainment. And inmates enjoy entertainment because it’s a relief from the tedium of their lives. I suppose it might be different if you showed them the same movie a hundred times in a row; at some point the movie would become just another aspect of the boring routine around them. But as I’ve noted, inmates already endure boredom. A new form of boredom wouldn’t be adding much.
I’m pretty sure I would prefer any audio distraction to the boredom of sitting in a silent cell. If it was the same thing on a continuous loop I think I could learn to ignore it like a train that passes every night. The predictability might even be soothing compared to the random sounds of violence, sobbing, and hysteria coming from other parts of the prison.
Not even if they had previous knowledge that the prisoner was a film snob. As “cruel” goes it is weak sauce, and bad films are liked by many so it wouldn’t be that unusual.
Yeah but in those cases it’s either excessively loud music or listening to music while being forced to stand for hours on end. It’s not the music that’s exactly hurting them it’s the pure volume/body stress.
I was in a lot of film study classes in college in the early 70s. One frequent guest lecturer used to challenge students to watch “bad” movies (usually on TV, of course) and discuss some aspect of the movies they found to be “good” or interesting. As I recall, the course instructor would give extra credit if you wrote a short critique of a “bad” movie with this in mind.
The guest lecturer opined that it is much more of a learning experience to find good aspects of (generally) poorly made movies than to simply be told what is good about a so-called classic movie. After many years, I’ve come to agree with him.
I’ve never watched a Stallone movie that was not terrible. And I say this as someone who has, in the past, chosen to watch Vin Diesel movies rather than attempting suicide using a blunt spoon.
The ability of my kids to watch the same old shit, over, and over, and over again knows no bounds. Hopefully they will grow out of it, else I’ll be issuing blunt spoons.
I was a tween when “Rocky” came out, and finally watched it in recent years. It was good, but all I could think about was how that movie ruined his life.
Brings to mind where John Stewart mentioned Norbit as being nominated for an Academy Award.
“I see that they’ve nominated Norbit for an academy award, which is good because so often the academy overlooks … bad … movies.”
After all, Guantanamo prisoners were tied in stress positions with their arms behind their back for long enough and often enough that they developed arthritis and no longer had full movement of their arms. The White House at the time assured us (legal opinion) that was not torture (except when the Viet Cong did it to John McCain). If so, then forcing someone to watch bad movies could not possibly be torture.