io9
Welcome back to Horrorhead, a column all about the connections between horror and scifi. On Battlestar Galactica, there's an ongoing theme of torture: humans gang-rape an imprisoned Cylon; the Cylons beat a man so badly he loses his eye (not to mention all the humans they kill outright); and there's even a little human-on-Cylon washboarding early in the series. These are not scenes that take place entirely offscreen. We see beatings; we see the bloody, freaked-out face of Six the Cylon after she's been raped so many times she can't stand up and has lost the will to eat. The question is, do we need to see these scenes? Would this series be as powerful without them? And by extension, would any torture-laced scifi flick like The Hills Have Eyes or Cube be as enticing if it lost the mutilations or the razor net that falls from the ceiling and reduces living humans to little cubes of flesh? (Spoilers ahead.)
The answer is obviously complicated. For some people, torture puts any story beyond the pale: a couple of weeks ago, scifi writer Karen Joy Fowler told me in an interview that she refuses to watch Battlestar Galactica because there's too much torture in it. But millions of movie fans have turned near-future flick Hostel, about an imaginary Eastern European country that houses a torture-entertainment center for the rich, into a cult hit and franchise. And the TV series 24, which is also a near-future dystopia, also has millions of drooling fans who don't seem to mind that superspy Jack, our main character, is constantly torturing people with everything from ugly lamps to fists.
Enough has been said about torture porn that I don't need to repeat the arguments too much here. They all boil down to one question: Does watching torture make us more likely to tolerate it in real life?
I had a brilliant professor in college who always answered that question with a roll of her eyes. "Look," she would say, "If it were true that we always did what the media told us, then every single advertisement would work. We'd buy everything we see advertised." Because she's right about that, we know it's not the case that everything we see in the media leads to behaviors in real life. The question of torture then boils down to whether it's necessary for a given story.
Let's look at one of the most famous examples of torture in scifi. Canadian flick Cube, which came out in the late 1990s, was your classic, Saw-style "a bunch of strangers trapped in a weird place have to solve puzzles to escape horrible grody death" kind of flick. For people raised with videogames, a form of entertainment where you solve puzzles to avoid dying, the scenario was familiar. And the puzzle was even pretty cool: the characters have to figure out a sequence of prime numbers in order to escape from a giant cube building full of rooms that move around all the time. As they're figuring out the prime number sequence, they venture into rooms that stab them, poison them, chop them up into little cubes, and generally spew gore everywhere. Do we need the torture along with the cool math game? I'd say yes. The entire movie depends on the audience understanding the characters' urgency, but at the same time the scenario is surreal enough that bringing in the torture enhances our sense of bizarre otherworldliness.
But how about Wes "Scream" Craven's The Hills Have Eyes, a classic cult movie from the 1970s that was just remade into a less-than-amazing franchise? In the original, gritty-freakout movie, a family whose truck breaks down is waylaid by atomic cannibal mutants in the desert. The torture is campy and hideous at the same time. In fact, the entire point of the movie is really the torture, and the escape, of our normal American family. Like Hostel, The Hills Have Eyes is literally about torture and what it can do to you. So the movie couldn't exist without torture, and in fact the torture itself is the point. How will people be dismembered? Where will the blood splatter? Will they really DO that? Without torture, there would be no movie.
Let's return to Battlestar Galactica's torture with these two examples in mind. Unlike The Hills Have Eyes, BSG is not about torture. It's about a horrific dystopia where torture has become part of everyday life. Like Cube, BSG uses torture to explore the urgency of the situation its characters are in. So do we need the torture to feel that urgency?
One might ask the same question about a scene in Iain M. Banks' novel The Algebraist, where we are treated to an intense scene of torture in order to show how evil one particular character, Luseferous, really is:
[Luseferous] had decreed that the final punishment of the assassin should be his own teeth . . . Accordingly, his four canine teeth had been removed, bioengineered to become tusks which would grow without ceasing . . . These great finger-thick fangs had erupted out of the bones of his upper and lower jaw, puncturing the flesh of his lips, and had continued their remorseless growth. The lower set curved up and over his head, and after a few months worth of extension, came to touch his scalp near the top of his head, while the upper set grew in a scimitar-like paired sweep beneath his neck . . . Both sets of teeth then started to enter the assassin's body, one pair slowly forcing themselves through the bony plates of the man's skull, the other entering rather more easily into the soft tissues of the lower neck . . . The fangs burrowing through his skull and into his brain were the ones which would shortly, and agonizingly, kill him . . . This unfortunate, nameless assassin had been unable to do anything to prevent this because he was pinned helpless and immobile against the wall of the chamber . . . his nutrition and bodily functions catered for by various tubes and implants . . . The fellow's ears and mind still worked.Could we have learned that Luserferous was a twisted person, as well as a dictator, without that passage? Did it need to be so detailed and creative?
Perhaps it could have been less detailed, but I would not have remembered it so vividly if it had not. Similarly, I would not have felt the horror of the humans' and Cylons' situations without seeing Six tortured by humans, and Baltar tortured by Cylons. I am not sure if making something memorable is justification, but it is certainly emotional realism. And in a genre whose entire narrative substance is the unreal, the science fictional, a dose of emotional realism can be potent indeed.
Comments
I find torture disgusting and the concept in itself scares the ever living crap out of me.
But I think its necessary to add some realism to some stories. I mean in war stories of any kind its unreal to imagine that if you're captured by the opposing force then your going to be tortured if they think you contain any information they may need.
Not because they're necessarily sadistic but becuase you may have information that could save the lives of their soldiers.
When its just used as a guilty pleasure or the story is simply just torture for tortures sake then it just becomes shallow and pointless.
If its going to be all about torture then at least let it be about how it changes people or how people change to adapt. Its gotta still have SOME character development.
/gets off soapbox
thanks for the spoiler warning... :(
Nothing says 'this is some serious shit' like some serious torture with plenty of body damage. True in real life as well.
Not to be pedantic, but "waterboarding", not "washboarding". Washboarding is something that happens to dirt roads.
Hey, it's fiction. We wouldn't be talking about it if it weren't successful. If it's too much, we put down the book or change the channel. My mother walked out of "A Fish Called Wanda" when Kevin Kline smelled his own arm pit. To each his own.
no one adapts to torture, everyone breaks. some faster than others but eventually it all ends up the same, everyone breaks.
it's not pretty and the fact that it's romanticised, in gore-fest movies like hostel or the hills have eyes, or completely removed from any reference to reality, like the passage from the algebrist above, really just serves to insulates the viewer from what actual torture actually does to actual people.
@Marcus: And abs. So they tell me.
I remember when we got to Adiwaniyah, we entered a room that had clearly been used as a torture chamber. There was gore splattered all over the walls, ceiling, and floor, and there was quite an intimidating pile of feces in one corner.
I swear, I sleep damn good at night not knowing what kind of torture went on in that room; sometimes, it's better to not know.
@goldfarb: What spoilers? I'm pretty sure that the statute of limitation on anything in this article has already been exceeded.
As for the article itself, the only thing can really comment on is BSG - I haven't seen Hostel and have no actual plans to do so, as it seems like the kind of movie I'd be pretty squeamish about. Saw the original Hills Have Eyes and agree it's more about the horror of the situation and the fight to survive than the actual torture scenes...
But, yes, BSG walks that fine line between enough and too much. I think the style of the show lends an air of authenticity to what's going on, and never glorifies it or reviles in what's going on.
There is a typo in the article...
It says "the Cylons beat a man so badly he loses his eye"
It should be "...beat a cylon..."
Ha ha!
Interesting discussion..
We have become so jaded by movie/fiction evil that evil must rise to new levels... ie The villain who shoots one of his own is camp not evil...
I'm not sure what that implies is at all a very good statement about humanity...
I think that the torture in BSG is done not only to show the urgency in the situation, but also to blur the lines between the "good guys" and the "bad guys". Suicide bombings, torture, espionage, etc... are all used by both sides in an attempt to gain an upper hand. It shows that neither the humans nor the cylons are really that different. The moral gray areas thus providing a more thought provoking story.
Is the torture necessary to the plot, well not really. But does it make for more intense drama? Most definitely.
I believe that all violence is processed on a subconscious level in the same way, whether it is real, or simulated on a video screen. It is all going into our processor and being used to establish our baseline attitudes on what is acceptable, what is "normal".
As we witness more violence we begin to undergo a "Flattening of Affect", a diminished capacity to react emotionally to this stimulus.
Too much IS too much. As social creatures we need to maintain certain behavioral safeguards.
Personally, I choose to change channels when I see this stuff. I prefer to preserve my sense of revulsion...
There is a HUGE difference between realistic torture with painful and lasting consequences, as in BSG and torture porn like Hostel. One advances the story while the other is meant to be visceral fun.
So yeah, torture in BSG is part of the story and so it's OK. The torture in Hostel and Saw, etc. is nauseating, prurient and ultimately superfluous and so is wrong.
@Smeagol92055: Yea, I went on a prison tour once, I'm never gonna break the law.
Interesting discussion that suggests the short- and long-term psychological effects of extreme violence, explicit sex, and other potentially traumatizing (or mind-expanding as the case may be) emotional manipulation found in the mass media we consume constantly.
There is so much literature on how the emotional trauma in media can lead to different types of neurosis, de-sensitization, and loss of 'ethics boundary'. Hmm, I like that - "Jimmy stop watching that violence on Bugs Bunny, it is ruining your natural 'ethics boundary'."
I figure that each person knows (or should know) their 'emotional' limits including knowing when something (sex, torture, and violence) moves beyond being simply a plot enhancement device and starts to be something gratuitous and unreasonably overwhelming. So, I guess 'trauma' is in the eye of the beholder.
I think the most emotionally-mangling images of movie violence I ever witnessed was in this film where:
some skinhead guy took this african-american youth, forced him to open his mouth wide - placed the open jaw onto a the sharp edge of concrete street curb and then proceeded to kick violently downward on the youth's skull -- iggiieeeerrrrkkkkkk!!! This is the only act of violence that I can't even bear to re-imagine. I couldn't even digest the remainder of the movie. Anyone recognize it?
Anyhoo - certainly a personal decision that shrinks have been wrestling with (and encouraging movie certification schemes on) for generations.
@designguybrown: You're thinking about American History X.
I can't stand torture in movies or TV, except, for Jack Bauer torturing the bad guys. I think it alleviates the helplessness I feel to get back at those who attacked us on 9/11.
@designguybrown: that'll be American History X. it's called "curbing". happened on the Sopranos once, too, but with funnier consequences.
well, when the internet can give us beheadings, we naturally get afraid; we act out & revisit those fears and traumas in our popular entertainments. Horror films allow us to work towards mastering horror; scifi and anti-utopias are closely related to horror (in that they allow us to dramatize & work out anxiety), so the cross-polination is very natural. we don't "love" torture a la Hostel; we're terrified of it. repeated viewings of horror and scif films help us work towards mastering that fear in a controlled environment.
I am torn on this,
On one hand if the story needs torture to move it on, I have no problem with it. however, in films like Hostel it seems the point is just torture-porn. I have no stomach for that. I find it generally reprehensible to have films where there seems to be little narrative but tons of graphic torture scenes.
@designguybrown: here's one for fun:
+ Watch video
for even more disturbing fun, search youtube for "curb stomp."
@designguybrown: Yeah, I gotta admit, the curbing scene in American History X is pretty brutal. I think it is the sound of teeth moving on concrete that really puts it overboard.
yeah - i guess that media violence is just one of those things that you never know whether it'll emotionally melt-you-down until you have allowed yourself to go through it... and see if it melts you down. -- and those 'warnings' seldom convey the essence of the trauma to come...
hmmm.. i wonder what one does to recover from too much movie violence - i.e. a SAW series weekend marathon -- anyone seen that way-banned movie "Cannibal Holocaust"?
@designguybrown: American History X was a great movie, and it helped me truly understand the phrase "bite the curb."
Anyway, I think scenes of torture is useful in that is shows people what is happening. When government agencies defend the use of torture, they tend to make it sound harmless -- that it's just to make the bad guys scared, and they're bad anyway so they deserve it.
When you see characters pushed to the edge (Saul losing his eye, Starbuck imprisoned and the target of bizarre mindgames, Gina and Athena gang-raped), you begin to understand that torture does mess people up and is beyond the pale.
As BSG develops its characters and shows the emotional aftermath, it serves its audience well.
The thing with American History X is that you don't even see anything. It cuts at the last second. All you hear is the sound. Leaving it to your imagination is almost always worse.
@designguybrown: My wife wanted to buy "Cannibal Holocaust" but I refused to let her after watching 45 seconds of it.
There's nothing new under the sun, folks. If the Mass Media depictions of violence and torture are what degrades people's "natural ethics boundary", then why have these things gone on throughout recorded history?
I would submit that there's no such thing as a "natural ethics boundary", only artificial ethics boundaries imposed (often for very good reasons) by societies or individuals. I'm a strong subscriber to the "Lord of the Flies" model of human psychology for the vast majority of people.
I expect that some people can become more violent/inured to violence through exposure to it in the media, but I doubt that it's because what they see changes anything essential about them. More likely, they see something that they didn't realise they liked before, and learn something unwholesome about themself.
-Kle.
Personally I think as members of the audience, the more we get accustomed to the more we probably expect from the media or it seems stale. Bogart's "brutal beating" in "The Big Sleep" consisted of a couple punches in the stomach which left him reeling so badly he had to be helped back to his office, and it was believable. Compare it to the fight in "They Live" and Bogart looks like a wuss. But in real life, yeah, it does hurt a lot to get punched hard in the stomach. Just like most people realize that getting punched brutally in the face even once is going to hurt quite a bit. We know from experience that even tiny splinters can hurt like hell, and I think we can make that distinction when we're watching a movie or TV show, the distinction between reality and fiction. It's just that our film and television history has progressed (or some would say regressed) to a point where onscreen violence and torture are often exaggerated to seem no less consequential than what the viewer has become accustomed to. If Six hit Tigh with three punches in the stomach and he crawled off to whimper in the corner, there's a chance the reaction might be "wow, what a baby." The producers can't risk that when the point is he's getting a major beatdown.
@Klebert L. Hall:
Don't worry -- you can be broken - rent "Cannibal Holocaust" -- and get back to us...
@Dunny0: not the article itself - but the second sentence of the post, which appears on the front page...
@designguybrown: Is that the one that was investigated because the violence looked so real?
@designguybrown: For me, it's that scene in Pan's Labyrinth when the "bad guy" bashes that kid's face in until there's nothing left, while his father looks on. Horrifying.
I toured a Castle (Warwick) in Emgland and they let you go down in the dungeon. Small room, one window, you just knew some nasty $hit had gone down in there, but I still have no problem with torture if it furthers the story/seems plausable. I just don't get torture porn though, not bothered by it so much as I think it's kind of dumb...
I also don't think the curb scene in AHX was torture, it was more of an execution, and not an undeserved one at that.
You said, "the Cylons beat a man so badly he loses his eye" Point of clarification here: Tigh specifically says that they just plucked it out. In fact, it's really the ease with which they plucked it out that I think horrifies him and us.
They didn't, in other words, kick him in the head until it popped out. It's an important distinction, especially for your article, because, in one sense, Tigh is more freaked out by how easily he was maimed and, in another sense, it signals a level of comfort with torture that should make us all...well...uncomfortable. The spectacle of torture in Hostel, in this case, has been replaced by the everyday, domesticated torture of walking into a room and with a flick of the wrist and twitch of the fingers, permanently disabling another human being (or in this case, cylon) for life.
I fully agree that media can't make us do anything, and given that fact the only question is whether anything you show, torture or cute animals, furthers the story. With BSG, I think that torture serves a purpose, but its more than just exploring the distinction between "good guys" and "bad guys." The entire show is about humanity and who qualifies. So it forces you to examine whether torturing a cylon is even torture- if we have the same reaction to seeing cylon beaten as we do a human character, then we must be convinced on some level that the skinjobs are more than just robots. And I don't think they have a single torture scene that could be called successful, where the torturing party actually gets what it wants in an expedient manner. When the human resistance starts commiting suicide bombings, they justify it because they are striking out against non- humans- but we, as viewers, are accutely aware of the human lives that are lost in the process, and that humanity is just as destructive as the cylons are. The cylons fear death and pain because it isn't easy, even if you are going to be resurrected. This is also why I loved that much-maligned Helo episode from season 3 where he prevents the fleet from whiping out the cylons by resurrecting the diseased models- the writers moved beyond torture to genocide, and showed that its not a question of who we're acting upon so much as what our actions turn us into. So torture, in the context of this show, is vital- mostly because it proves how unjustifiable it really is.
@goldfarb: Didn't most of that happen early last season, or sooner, though? Maybe we just have a differing opinion of what a spoiler is...
The curb scene in AHX still makes me cringe and also causes my teeth to hurt. Which is amazing considering my front teeth, top and bottom, were reconstructed after a nasty fall about 14 years ago.
The writer of the Jane Austen Book Club is against torture in SF. There's a shocker.
Comment on Do We Need Graphic Torture in Our Dystopias? Honestly, this is all pretty academic to me. Considering our government is now an active participant in torture (or rather, perhaps theyre now letting us know) we should either register our disgust with it in real life or accept it as part of American society at this point. Meaning that arguing the notion as it pertains to fiction should be taking a back seat to arguing it as a reality. Anyway, Saw does it for salacious reasons. BSG has employed it as a necessary part of understanding the depth of the conflict between human and Cylon. I dont equate the two uses.
I'm actually for torture in SF, but that's only because I enjoy reading about how horrible humans can be. It's the dark side. But I do not want to see it up close and personal in HD. Reading is one thing, watching is another.
@Dr. Futurity: There is this feature we have called reply.. It makes it easier for us to figure out what the nonsense coming out your mouth is supposed to mean/who it is directed at..
Being mass-marketed torture and other forms of violence is a natural corollary to barrel-of-a-gun capitalism. You want it to stop? Then we have a lot of frakking work to do as a society.
Let's not forget that great science fiction, like great art, holds a mirror up to society and BSG is all that and a side of fries.
While we watch a fictional clash of cultures on BSG we are living a clash of cultures while at war in Iraq. BSG does a brilliant job of holding the up the mirror and showing us...well, us and what we are very capable of. And what "they" are capable of, because to an Iraqi or a member of the Taliban, "we" are, in fact "they."
Does this make us more prone to accept torture? It seems unlikely, once we understand that the Cylons are also doing what they think is god's will.
Maybe it just means that torture is on our minds. A lot.
It's become part of our collective consciousness because we're trying to decide whether it's OK and necessary, which is what our political leaders are telling us, or whether it's hideous and disgusting, which is how we feel when we learn some Austrian guy raped his daughter for 24 years.
So we poke at it, prod at it, look at in every situation we can think of. Is it OK if it's for national security? What about if someone else is making you do it in order to survive? What if just evil guys doing it? How about if nuclear mutants (people not like us) are doing it?
Eventually, we'll have to decide.
You know, just don't mess with Tigh. That's all I ask for.
Need to show violence is most of the time just combination of bad directing, scripting and acting. I've noted that many cop dramas manage to keep a lot of violence off screen by using viewer's imagination. With this technique they can handle far worse stories than they could ever visually show on TV.
We've had so much movie violence already that nothing really matters. And that is a bad sign considering that our brains do not make too much difference between what we see done and what we do (so called mirror neurons fire identically in both cases). Every beating you see in TV trains your muscle memory to do those same hits and kicks. The effect is minimal but it is there, and whether you ever use those subconsciously learned moves in real life depends on how much self control you have. In this perspective seeing torture will make you a little more likely to torture. Monkey see Bauer do, monkey do.
What we are not used to seeing is the effects of violence. I might remember wrong but didn't BSG show XO after he lost the eye and cylon Six just after her rape not during. I believe the XO's eye patch and behavior of Six function as continual reminders of what has happened to them. That should make us think of consequences and and connect with the victims. Since we didn't see the acts of torture our brains did not simulate being the torturer. However, we can imagine what happened and create memories for the tortured characters so that we can understand them.
Uhhh...yeah? What's a dystopia without horrific torture practices? A dystopia by definition is a human social nightmare made true, and one of the darkest elements of ANY human society is that it practices torture. There is not a single civilization in the entire history of the human species that has not resorted to torturing enemies for information, whether openly or secretly. In the worst dystopias, torture would be institutionalized and regardless of whether the torture is conducted in private or on a pedestal in the town square, the reader's face must be rubbed into it. The only way to educate people that torture is bad and, worst of all, a useless means of acquiring info from a recalcitrant subject, is by aversion therapy.
There is a distinct difference between BSG and 24. Only one portraits the current world; and the protagonist to be the agent of the country creating the series. Every American should be ashamed of Jack Bauer. Sure, it's still us humans in BSG and it is important to show what we are in the end capable of.
But my god(s), surely, the terrorists have already won if all we want to be is a Jack Bauer.
@Marcus: washboarding also happens in jug bands.
"And the TV series 24, which is also a near-future dystopia, also has millions of drooling fans who don't seem to mind that superspy Jack, our main character, is constantly torturing people with everything from ugly lamps to fists."
I've seen all of two seasons, but the torture on 24 never seems to actually be effective.
@DocGratis:
Whoa there, Doc. Calm down. In both cases I was replying to the original article. Pretty clear, iyam. Especially since it seems we quoted and commented on the exact same line from the original article.
@monkity: "violence is a natural corollary to barrel-of-a-gun capitalism."
WTF does that even mean? Capitalism is a "natural corollary" to freedom. Anything other