Torture Porn

One day after Cannes reacted in shock, horror, and fascination to Brillante Mendoza's Kinatay, it reacted in shock, horror, and fascination to Lars ("I am the best film director in the world") von Trier's Antichrist. We all probably guessed that with that director and that title, this would be a fairly extreme piece of cinema, and so all reports indicate it turned out to be. (Speaking of those reports, fair is fair and I must admit that the most thoughtful overnight takes I read on both Kinatay and Antichrist were by none other than Mike D'Angelo.) Gut-wrenching is in style these days, both in pop cinema and in art cinema. On the art side, there have been a lot of children of Salo in the past decade or so: Gaspar Noe's Irreversible, Takashi Miike's Audition, Thomas Clay's The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, Lukas Moodysson's A Hole in My Heart, Kim Gok's Exhausted, Marina de Van's In My Skin, Steve McQueen's Hunger, to name just a few. I don't mean to be facile by lumping these varied films together (especially as I've only seen one of them) -- just to indicate that there is plenty of envelope-pushing going on. On the pop side, of course, there are the Saws and the Hostels and a whole sub-culture of underground "extreme gore" films, some of which have serious pretentions and drift back in the direction of art films (but then John Waters always insisted that art and exploitation films were really the same beast). An interesting bulletin board post on the "hardest films to watch" can be found here.

I can read the reviews of all these films, and I do; but I can't get myself past the theater entrance. The one film that is indisputably of this type that I've seen is Irreversible, and it took a considerable build-up of curiosity for me to rent the DVD and put myself through it. In the event, I thought the film was brilliant, amply justifying Roger Ebert's praise in his thoughtful review, one of his very best. The review ends memorably:

The fact is, the reverse chronology makes Irreversible a film that structurally argues against rape and violence, while ordinary chronology would lead us down a seductive narrative path toward a shocking, exploitative payoff. By placing the ugliness at the beginning, Gaspar Noe forces us to think seriously about the sexual violence involved. The movie does not end with rape as its climax and send us out of the theater as if something had been communicated. It starts with it, and asks us to sit there for another hour and process our thoughts. It is therefore moral - at a structural level.

As I said twice and will repeat again, most people will not want to see the film at all. It is so violent, it shows such cruelty, that it is a test most people will not want to endure. But it is unflinchingly honest about the crime of rape. It does not exploit. It does not pander. It has been said that no matter what it pretends, pornography argues for what it shows. Irreversible is not pornography.

A lesson I take from my viewing of Irreversible and from Ebert's analysis is that, although I may decide based on descriptions that I don't wish to see a film, I can't on that basis reject its merit out of hand. Irreversible sounded like a mere epater le bourgeois provocation (no wonder the French make so many of these things; they have the perfect phrase to describe them), but it turned out to be a profound experience that I would defend as passionately as Ebert, although not as skillfully.

Why haven't I made myself watch more such films, when I have no problem reading descriptions of them? I ascribe my reluctance to the power of images. A wise friend of mine once said that there were images he simply didn't want "renting space in his head," and the only way to prevent that was to avoid them. Words are an abstraction of experience, and I can always deal with abstraction; but images can be very literal. Sometimes I fear them, honestly.

As to why these sorts of cinematic experiences are proliferating at all levels: In the decade of waterboarding and Abu Ghraib, need we ask? Future sociological historians of film are going to be all over it. But there is also a long-standing tradition in film of pushing to the limits of the watchable (Un Chien Andalou, for example), and a prurient fascination with visualized sex and violence that, to support John Waters's theory of the fungibility of art and exploitation, is equally strong among directors in both arenas. Why aren't there (by and large) serious filmmakers who make quiet films about gentle souls who garden and make tea? There are novelists who work the quiet and gentle, but apart from the occasional Yasujiro Ozu or Eric Rohmer, film directors don't go there. Because it is not commercial, not even "art-house commercial"; because it is not career-advancing (while scandal usually is); because (I'll advance this thesis gingerly) film is not ultimately that subtle a medium. Less abstract than literature, it is also inherently more sensational (to use that word very precisely). The medium itself reaches for sensation rather than subtlety or abstraction.

Pauline Kael once pointed out that movies have featured rape since their inception, since rape, after all, combines sex and violence. It is unsurprising that the latest art house torture porn should zero in on rape and sexual mutilation. These had a heyday in the early Seventies, too: Pasolini, Peckinpah, Bergman's Cries and Whispers, Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses, Marco Ferreri's The Last Woman. The new extremity can well be viewed not merely as a response to the times, not as a shocking novelty, but as a tendency that film circles back to, albeit in a slightly freer visual climate each time.