The Art of Cruelty Read online

  After a public outcry, which Reuters said came in the form of “a flood of e-mails and phone calls from angry parents and offended women,” the confinement panel was the only one that remained. And remain it did, everywhere, for four months. Sometimes I’d find myself standing in front of a poster for the movie at a bus stop, then I’d look up and see a billboard on the western horizon, then I’d turn around and see one on the eastern horizon. On the street level, it often appeared alongside advertisements for two other movies to be released concurrently—Eli Roth’s Hostel: Part II, which featured a menacing man in a blood-spattered butcher’s apron, ready to perform the torture-killing of three female college students on vacation in Europe, and Gregory Hoblit’s Fracture, which featured a close-up of everyone’s favorite movie monster, Anthony Hopkins, with the bragging slogan “I SHOT MY WIFE” in huge red letters floating over his face. It was a real you’ve-come-a-long-way-baby trio.

  Or that’s at least how Courtney Solomon, CEO of After Dark, the marketer behind the Captivity billboard campaign, pretended to see it. “The movie is certainly a horror movie and it’s about abduction, but it’s also about female empowerment,” Solomon said. He was trying to explain that he, too, had been upset about the abduction-to-termination billboards—not because of their graphic nature or their glorification of sexualized torture, but because they were “misleading” about the arc of the film. He explained that after many test screenings and focus groups, they had reshot the ending “so the main character ends up in as much of a positive situation as the situation would allow.” This is, I suppose, one version of female empowerment—the kind you might see looking through a pinhole, angled toward hell.

  IT ISN’T much fun to analyze American pop culture anymore. In the 1980s and ’90s academics went to town on it—what scandalous fun to bring all the fierce powers of one’s mind to bear on Madonna or The Matrix or Spike Lee or The X-Files or, more recently, The L Word or 24. I’m not saying there’s no fun or value or necessity in this work anymore; maybe there’s more than ever. I’m just saying that for me, personally, it feels like a dead end. The cultural products now seem designed to analyze themselves, and to make a spectacle of their essentially consumable perversity. “They really let me showcase my creativity!” the writers say, while churning out more crap. And there, as Slavoj Žižek explains (in The Ticklish Subject), lies “the unbearable paradox of this postmodern ‘disalienation’: the tension is no longer between my innermost creative impulses and the Institution that does not appreciate them or wants to crush them in order to ‘normalize’ me.” Instead, according to Žižek, postmodern corporations (such as Microsoft) work in a more Foucauldian fashion: rather than be threatened by our idiosyncratic creativity, they depend on putting it into service on their own behalf. As Žižek puts it, one becomes useless for them the moment one starts losing one’s “imp of perversity.”

  This paradox makes commenting on the “kinda-hegemonic, kinda-subversive” operations (to use Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s wonderful phrase) of so much popular culture feel like a bore—like planting a flag on the moon after forty countries have landed there before you, or on a moon whose sole purpose it is to host flags. Lionsgate/After Dark puts up a round of billboards—unapproved by the Motion Picture Association of America—depicting sickening torture; you call to complain, disliking the sound of your Tipper-Gore-esque voice. You hang up and start worrying about the free-speech implications of your protest, so you turn to Noam Chomsky and ponder hard questions about manufactured consent and the meaning of free speech in an everything-is-owned-or-for-sale world, then to Jürgen Habermas, to ponder the meaning of public space in an everything-is-owned-or-for-sale world. “The world fashioned by the mass media is a public sphere in appearance only,” writes Habermas, and so it is. And (to paraphrase Theodor Adorno) it is crucial to remember that while this world may appear to emanate from society as a whole, it is, in fact, directed at society as a whole.

  So you wonder how to tell what emanates from where, and how you might balance your visceral outrage against the Captivity emanations with your deep veneration of writers from Sade to Jean Genet to Dennis Cooper to Heather Lewis to Pat Califia to Benjamin Weissman, and ask yourself if you can keep resting on some quasi-nostalgic and most certainly elitist (but not-wholly-without-significance) distinction between high and low art, or the value of the complex and essentially private written word versus that of the mass-marketed, in-your-face media image. Then you hear a voice saying, That’s the problem with liberals today, they think too much, they’re too interested in complexity to effect any real change, and you say back, So be it—a life devoted to complexity is the life I want to live. Then you rejoice when the Captivity ads are pulled and all the executives momentarily look like fools as they are forced to make all kinds of artificial apologies and excuses—like Peter Wilkes at Lionsgate, who swore that his company “had no involvement with the ads,” or Solomon, who said in one breath, “Personally, I wasn’t going to go with this campaign. I thought it was OTP (over the top),” and in another that the ads were an “accident,” that “the wrong files were sent to the printer.” But then the billboards come down and overnight are replaced with the scrawl “Captivity Was Here” and a new release date, and you realize it was all part of the plan, the plan to create controversy by pushing the envelope, the plan to make anyone who protested the first round out to be schoolmarms, scolds, “angry parents and offended women”—you know, those who go into the lifeboat first—and the movie gains in publicity because people hear about the controversy and wonder what other forms of torture they weren’t allowed to see, and more people get ready to pony up their ten dollars to see the pretty blonde lady get tortured to death, or if not to death, then into “as much of a positive situation as the situation would allow,” which I would imagine, in this case, means her stumbling naked out of a cellar with about a quarter of her internal organs intact. And then, when the movie finally comes out, Solomon throws a release party in West Hollywood at a club made over into a torture chamber, draped with the original “OTP” advertisements and serviced by the Suicide Girls, and calls the event “[his] little personal tribute to [the women’s groups],” and later tries to bait groups like the National Organization for Women into having “a town-hall style debate” about the film (which, for obvious reasons, NOW declines to do). And the wheel keeps on turning.

  BUT WHY am I spending so much time thinking about the movies, or, odder still, getting worked up over movie ratings or ad campaigns? Who cares about the movies anyway, especially about these kinds of movies? “For the audience [Captivity] is made for, it’s satisfying to that audience. I’m sure that’s not the same audience that’s complaining about the billboards,” Solomon asserted. In my case, he is most certainly right. (Though it must be said that this statement smears out the distinction between billboards, which are visible by everyone, without their consent, and films, which are not.) In any case, I know countless people who love these torture-porn movies—some of them shrewd feminist, Marxist, queer, anarchist, anti-globalist, you-name-it academics and writers who offer up such good-humored, campy, intelligent readings of these films (especially Eli Roth’s Hostel series, which has attracted a fair amount of laudatory academic attention) that I feel ashamed in their presence of my squeamishness, the shrillness of my moral compass, the obviousness of my critique.

  I suppose that one partial answer is that the face of the Captivity lady (which is that of actress Elisha Cuthbert, who has made a quick, miniature splash for herself by specializing in victimization; she played Jack Bauer’s daughter on 24) served, throughout some of the darkest days of the George W. Bush administration, as an outsized, daily reminder of the cultural and political forces working overtime to normalize—or in this case, make sexy—that which would have been unthinkable in (publicly acknowledged) American policy not so long ago: namely, torture, especially sexualized torture. (“Torture is hot, period,” an anonymous blogger wrote
in support of the Captivity ad campaign.) And so when I saw Cuthbert’s face I saw not just the airbrushed image of another blonde actress pretending to be held in captivity and tortured and potentially terminated, but the nameless bodies of all the real brown people being held in captivity and tortured and potentially terminated, and this huge, sexed-up, Aryan, crying face standing in the way, like some gigantic porno scrim.

  There was no billboard of Manadel al-Jamadi, for example, who was tortured in American custody at Abu Ghraib, and who died after being subjected to a form of torture known as a “Palestinian hanging.” (In a Palestinian hanging—one of the many “enhanced interrogation techniques” approved by the Bush administration—one has one’s arms shackled behind one’s back, then affixed far above the torso so that one’s body hangs down in a form of crucifixion. After being beaten, Jamadi was hung this way with a green plastic sandbag over his head. When CIA interrogators finally removed his hood and lowered his body to the ground, “blood came gushing out of his nose and mouth, as if a faucet had been turned on.”)

  One form of self-deception: to offer reversals that have rhetorical impact but crumble when pressed for meaning. So, to revise: I am not really convinced that a billboard of Jamadi would have “done” anything, even if it made us feel sadness or confusion or anger or shame or outrage. As Sontag has justly observed—and I think it bears repeating—focusing on the question of whether or not an image retains the capacity to produce a strong emotion sidesteps the problem that having a strong emotion is not the same thing as having an understanding, and neither is the same thing as taking an action. “You do not necessarily feel [compassion],” Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa once warned a student who was worrying about how to act compassionately without feeling it first. “You are it.”

  IN HIS creepily committed polemic, “The Media Violence Myth,” historian-turned-media-violence-defender Richard Rhodes makes the claim that ultraviolent media actually does the public a service by “taking the psychic garbage out.” How, exactly, this evacuation-via-proliferation works, however—not to mention whose psychic garbage a movie such as Captivity is (or on whom it gets dumped)—is never really explained. For there is no evidence that the torture portrayed in TV shows like 24 or in movies such as Captivity takes the garbage out, unless “catharsis” now means “tune in next week.”

  Indeed, the whole psychoanalytic notion of catharsis-as-cure has been somewhat put to the test by market-driven ventures that profit from egging on particular desires rather than freeing anyone from them. Freud himself eventually abandoned the idea of catharsis-as-cure, but the notion has stayed alive and kicking throughout twentieth-century psychology, present in everything from primal scream therapy to high colonics to rolfing. At present there remain profound differences of opinion about how one might best manage unmanageable, potentially destructive emotions, such as anger: many Western therapists encourage angry adults and children to “let it all out” by beating, say, a pillow; whereas Buddhists such as Thich Nhat Hanh—author of Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames—gently but firmly discourage such methods, believing that they only rehearse and reinscribe destructiveness, in their suggestion that pummeling something—even if that something be, for the moment, an insentient object—is a useful and appropriate response to anger.

  And, again, it all depends on what meaning of “catharsis” one is employing. Here is Rush Limbaugh’s, for example, in reference to the treatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib: “This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation, and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it, and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You [ever] heard of need to blow some steam off?”

  When Aristotle used the term “catharsis,” he was talking about Greek tragedies, which are, without a doubt, violent, often gruesomely so (although a tragedy, by one definition, has the most violent acts take place off-stage). What was at stake for Artistotle, vis-à-vis catharsis, were the emotions of “pity and terror” aroused by the play, not the ability to hold down one’s lunch while watching a woman being forced to drink internal organs that have been ground up in a blender (which is apparently one of the things that happens to the heroine of Captivity). For these reasons and more, this classical type of tragedy is not easily analogous to mass-marketed media spectacle that shoves images of torture porn down our throats, especially at a time when our country has slipped into makinguse of actual sexualized torture.

  There is, however, evidence to suggest that the advent of glorified torture in popular entertainment serves a political function, insofar as it creates a network of identifications through which people find themselves warming to torture and torturers at a time when our government has begun to permit and utilize torture. (Limbaugh knows this well, and clearly angles his remarks to provide this service.) During the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, for example, the nice woman who runs the cash register at my school cafeteria started wearing a button on her lapel that read “Jack Bauer for President” (Jack Bauer being the “whatever it takes” counterterrorist agent, played by Kiefer Sutherland, on 24, who tortures both the so-called innocent and guilty alike with regularity). She thought it was funny, and she was also completely serious. Her ideal candidate for president had become The Man Who Most Closely Resembles Jack Bauer, Torturer, which is probably why the field of Republican presidential candidates duked it out in the 2008 pre-primary debates to out-Bauer one another. Conservative talk-radio host Laura Ingraham summarized this ethos on September 13, 2006, when she told Bill O’Reilly on FOX News: “The average American out there loves the show 24. OK? They love Jack Bauer. They love 24. In my mind, that’s as close to a national referendum that it’s OK to use tough tactics against high-level Al Qaeda operatives as we’re going to get.”

  Such proclamations do not coexist easily with the refrain, also frequently made by Limbaugh and company, that 24 is “just a television show! Get a grip.” In the case of 24, the fact is that the popularity of the show (which aired its final episode in May 2010) created a great deal of on-the-ground trouble for the military—so much so that in November 2006, U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point, along with a team of military and FBI interrogators, flew to Los Angeles to meet with the show’s creators. The military delegation hoped to convey the severe, adverse effects they felt the show’s depiction of torture was having on American soldiers, who seemed to be increasingly seduced by Bauer’s “whatever it takes” motto, and decreasingly inclined to take seriously the importance of adhering to international and military law. In her February 19, 2007, New Yorker article on the subject, Jane Mayer reported that 24’s creative team was not particularly interested in hearing or responding to this news. As Gary Solis, a retired law professor who designed and taught the law of war for commanders at West Point, and who was one of the members of the military team at the meeting, later told Mayer, trying to get the producers to alter their tack was “like trying to stomp out an anthill.”

  EVERYTHING IS NICE

  “FOR THOSE who believe that violence in cinema consists either of harmless action spectacles or Martin Scorsese masterpieces, I might suggest heading down to the local multiplex and taking a look at some of the grotesque, morbid creations being projected on the walls,” filmmaker Mike White wrote in an Op-Ed that appeared shortly after the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech—a shooting that prompted new rounds of offensive and defensive posturing in regard to the role media violence plays or does not play in real-life killings. “To defend mindless exercises in sadism like ‘The Hills Have Eyes II’ by citing ‘Macbeth’ is almost like using ‘Romeo and Juliet’ to justify child pornography,” White wrote.

  I respected White’s Op-Ed, b
ecause it came from someone in the industry who wasn’t calling for censorship or increased legislation or shame or sanitization, but rather for filmmakers simply to pause, stop screaming that “movies don’t kill people, lunatics kill people,” ask a few mindful questions about the propensity to do anything for big money, and admit that movies have an enormous capacity to “shape our thinking and inform our choices,” which is why, White suggests, most people who work in the industry were drawn to do so in the first place.

  Beyond that, I respected White’s Op-Ed because the examples he used from his own life shed some light, whether intentionally or not, on the gendered nature of the problem. He remarked that as a kid, movies most certainly influenced the way he and his friends talked to their girlfriends, and that while no one got shot in the face in his backyard, there were plenty of acts of “male bravado,” which “ranged from stupid to cruel.”

  I wish I could have written, or that someone could have written, an Op-Ed that shed some light on how certain movies influence female behavior in the backyard, but as we still so often can see female behavior only in reaction to male behavior, it would be difficult to know where to start.

  One (local) place to start might be my bookshelf, from which I make a list of recent and contemporary female writers known for violent or cruel writing (there is a difference, I know). Here is my short list: Kathy Acker, Dorothy Allison, Octavia Butler, Angela Carter, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Virginie Despentes, Mary Gaitskill, Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, Elfriede Jelinek, Sarah Kane, Natsuo Kirino, Heather Lewis, Joyce Mansour, Susannah Moore, Joyce Carol Oates, Flannery O’Connor, Sylvia Plath, Pauline Réage, Sapphire, Valerie Solanas, and Christina Stead. Does it come as any surprise that most, if not all, of these writers are known for writing in relation to—and often explicit protest against—male violence, misogyny, or patriarchy? Is that one of the injustices of “phallocentrism” itself—that is, its suggestion that there’s nothing else imaginable under the sun—not even a form of female aggression or rage or darkness—not shaped by or tethered to the male? “Let woman find once more her cruelty and her violence that make her attack the vanquished because they are vanquished, to the point of mutilating them,” cries Valentine de Saint-Point in her 1914 “Manifesto of Futurist Woman,” in which she calls on women to act like the “Furies, Amazons, Semiramis, Joans of Arc, Jeanne Hachettes, Judith and Charlotte Cordays, Cleopatras, and Messalinas” that they essentially are or can be. “Woman, become sublimely injust once more, like all the forces of nature!”