By Simon Abrams
I defy anyone who still thinks the term "torture porn" makes any sense to watch writer/director Pascal Laugier's Martyrs and reconsider their position. This isn't my way of chastising people with different opinions than myself but rather my way of saying: "This film is a good example of what's wrong with the term." Martyrs takes the underlying concept of torture porn—pleasure from excessive displays of pain—and thoroughly explodes it in 99 minutes of grueling, non-stop butchery. It is impossible for the viewer to go away feeling exhilarated or excited after witnessing so much carnage; instead, most viewer reactions I've read have made it seem as if you can't help but feel gutted and defeated, a sentiment I shared. This is the film Wes Craven's original, schlocky The Last House on the Left (1972) anticipated, one you cannot dismiss because of the cheap metaphor undergirding its copious displays of barbarism. It's about damn time. Lots of allusions ahead, but trust me, they're warranted.
Martyrs is the film Eli Roth's Hostel (2005) could have been, one that, for the most part, does not make the political subtext with which it depicts torture apparent. Where Roth essentially updated Narciso Ibáñez Serrador's Who Can Kill a Child? (1976) with an anti-American, post-9/11 slant, Martyrs makes no such explicit claims. Instead, it begins as a grisly inversion of Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls (1962), a film about survivor's guilt and the revenge of repressed guilt. Souls tormented its protagonist with mute, immaterial walking corpses; Martyrs focuses on ghosts that hack, slash and bash their way to visibility.
Lucie (Mylene Jampanoi) miraculously escapes from a subterranean torture chamber. Years later, she is haunted by the ghost of a woman she met but failed to free in her haste to flee her captors. With the help of fellow orphan Anna (Morjana Aloui), she tracks down the people that pitilessly eviscerated her and discovers that they are in fact not hicks that dice up city folk for kicks, but rather the heads of a middle-class suburban family. All the while, Lucie's ghost happily cuts away at her flesh using her hands, bluntly recreating the disassembled, self-disintegrating mindset of a torture victim. How Laugier knows what these victims go through is anyone's guess. Still, what sets his depiction of a split-personality, revanchist killing machine apart from his forebears is that he almost immediately reveals to the viewer that Lucie is the one still hurting herself. Lucie's manifested guilt is not entirely the driving mechanism behind the film: what eventually takes precedence is uncovering who the monsters are that created it and why they did it.
The fact that Laugier has a perfectly normal family act as the perpetrators of the film's gruesome activities serves firstly as a dig at Craven's Last House. The wily and utterly audacious Frenchman effectively shames the fittingly named American for stopping as short as he did in pointing the finger of blame at a small suburban couple who, having just lost their daughter to a gang of thugs, decide to creatively slaughter her executioners. Laugier upends that film's self-satisfied, pseudo-ambiguous conclusion by suggesting that perhaps these milquetoast, child-rearing folk had a reason for hurting other people that goes beyond their family tree, a reason that is infinitely more sinister because it serves a curiosity that has no ties to the domestic or even the mundane. These people torture others because they want to vicariously experience their "other"ness, to see what it's like to have a person cross over to "the other side" and come back to tell them how green the grass is. This is where I really start to go out on a limb, so bear with me.
Though the "other side" is immediately a reference to Heaven, Laugier uses it to not-so-subtly critique the way violence always tends to gravitate around a repressed or minority figure. The "other side" can only be reached, according to Lucie's captors, by victims of violence that is so extreme that they can no longer perceive the mundane world. They must be young and they must be female (so says the older woman organizing the experiment). These "martyrs" can no longer see people (let alone their race), but to reach that point of transcendence, they have to first undergo a process of "other"ing, which in this case involves non-stop beatings.
Though it may look obvious or intentional, during this process of bloodletting, the skin color of the only martyr left alive gets a little darker after a couple of beatings (there's no logical explanation for this as the martyr in question is never shown to be hurt with anything except her captors' fists and boots). The martyrs are beaten without a word from their jailers, as if to show that the act of beating another person cannot possibly be called an "advanced interrogation tactic." These girls must first be completely alienated and once they've been physically and emotionally broken down, they have their "other"ness and all other traces of their identity forcibly ripped away from them. This means literally losing their skin, the flesh ripped away to reveal glistening tendons and muscles. Any possible sign of their race or gender is thus completely removed, turning them into so much unidentifiable flesh. First the martyr becomes an "other," then they become nothing. There is no possibility of "getting off" here, just a hyper-real representation of the horror of physical suffering. This is the kind of movie that justifies its daunting provocation with scant but revealing dialogue like,"People no longer envisage suffering, young lady." Martyrs has an intelligence and a dogged determination to do and to say what its predecessors could or would not.
Simon Abrams writes about comics, books and movies for the Comics Journal, the L Magazine, the New York Press and Slant Magazine. Since last year, he's been obsessively keeping a film journal where he writes down something about every film he's seen.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Martyrs (2008)
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15 comments:
I don't know about anyone else, but I use the term torture porn less because I think anyone's "getting off" than because of the way such films are structured. It's all about the money shots, basically, and less to do with plot, character, or even building suspense. Who can be more inventively gory. Your review does nothing to convince me that I'm using the term incorrectly.
That's because that porn analogy is pretty inexact. Gore and violence in horror movies are rarely presented like a money shot in porn. A money shot is built up to in porn through the explicit visual presentation of the bodies that are about to climax. This is not the case in the horror films dubbed "torture porn." The bodies are hidden and only the sound of the violence can be heard until, voila, there is a mutilated body.
It's a very simplistic argument. Generic action movies have more in common with porn than "torture porn:" explicitly filmed build-up, mounting action, so to speak and, y'know, climax.
And if we're seriously talking about "who can be more inventively gory," you really need to look at some horror films before the "torture porn" films because frankly, that's nothing new to the genre (slasher films, in particular have been doing it in the mainstream for more than two decades now).
HOSTEL, THE DEVIL'S REJECTS and even the SAW movies are about their characters, build-up and plot. Some of them are more inept than others--SAW--but that doesn't mean that use their gore is all the directors care about.
It's good to see this one getting some attention outside of horror sites. I think it's a considerable (if, like Last House and some others, not exactly enjoyable or unproblematic) film, one worth grappling with if you have the constitution for it. I don't think it's particularly fruitful as social commentary. It's more resonant and provocative as a statement about our relationship to violence in contemporary horror movies, suggesting that the reason we submit ourselves to screen suffering is that on some level we want to get so close to death that we can transcend it. It might be pretentious, as some of its detractors allege, but it's much less half-assed than the Ugly American subtext of the Hostels. Less cowardly, too, in that it doesn't let you off the hook with some cheap reversal.
I remain one of the few non-horror geek defenders of the Hostel films. I am a horror film geek actually, but my appreciation for Hostel comes from my appreciation of satire. I really think that's the level those two films work on, and I do think that they really work. Eli Roth, of course, doesn't do himself any favors by coming across as a pretentious 13 year old whenever he gets interviewed . . but that's an argument for another day. . .
As someone who likes extreme horror films and who knows a little about their history, I'm tired, tired, tired, of hearing the "torture porn" label as though it is a genre and as though contemporary torture oriented horror films are doing anything new. Matyrs really is ABOUT torture. It's quite an experience.
I really liked "Inside" also. French horror produced some of the most disquieting films I've seen in a long time. It's produced generic crap too, but that's par for the course.
I think the real precedent for these films was "Irreversible," another very good film that got accused of being a geek show. It might be another film you coult put in the category of "correctively serious and comfortable corrective to Last House on the Left."
Or maybe I am just operating in geek mode.
Mr. Abrams I almost completely agree with everything you say. It's heartening to read such a good analysis of a film that's been largely ignored in the US and in the UK. While I'd have to argue that there is a Political subtext to the idea of the organisation's pretext for the torture, i.e neo-liberalism's constant but hollow justifications for horrific violence (what is "shock and Awe" if not the pretense to Divine Power after all). Your reading of it in terms of "Otherness" makes a great deal of sense. I fear though, that it's bound to be misunderstood like many classic cult films, I remember getting into a ridiculous argument at the AVClub about this film with oh so many seemingly culturally aware people decrying it as "sick torture porn for perverts". But Martyrs has so much on it's mind, as it were, that the idea of getting some thought of cathartic thrill from the material is patently ridiculous to anyone who's actually watched it.
Thanks, all. It's a shame that a lot of critics of these films rely on stock concepts w/o actually engaging with the films they're talking about. The whole "it's structurally just like porn" argument is a good example because, really, these films have very little in common with porn.
I also like INSIDE a great deal and most of HIGH TENSION. And, of course, ILS, mistranslated as THEM (should be THEY, honhonhon). Maybe the French really do do it better.
I don't care at all for the torture porn label, but I also don't see how this, or any, example "explodes it". If you're setting Martyrs in direct opposition to earlier displays of extreme violence, and claiming it transcends their cop-outs and hypocrisies, what is it in opposition to if not brutality for its own sake? Why wouldn't a film that fails to "justif[y] its daunting provocation" earn the title? The existence of The Man I Love doesn't free film noir from charges of misogyny, only makes the case more complex.
Your two comments in response to lizvelrene do a much better job of breaking down the problems with calling something "torture porn". "Action porn" and "gun porn" are, in fact, becoming pretty common terms among fans; maybe the trick is to just shrug off the pejorative associations and embrace the term.
As for Martyrs itself, I wasn't as impressed as you. Lucie's imprisonment and beatings were too rote to capture the queasy uncertainty at the heart of horror, and her final transformation was simplistically beatific. The bathtub scene was magnificent, however: an act of compassion that's excruciating, tenderness made pure terror. I did wonder why the girl's torture rig blocked her eyes, though.
Bruce: To answer both your questions, I'll say: that's because I'm not saying that other "torture porn" films are "cop-outs" but rather that MARTYRS more thoroughly explores the implications of torture. HOSTEL and THE DEVIL'S REJECTS are not "brutality for its own sake." They are the logical extensions of the fetishization of violence in the genre as appropriated by fans turned filmmakers and people that want to exploit gore, like their predecessors to explore the body as horror.
But yes, LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT is a cop-out. I will say that. But that's not "torture porn," just Wes Craven's canonical Anti-Vietnam flick (it means something to many but what beyond a very crude message is beyond me).
Your film noir example is not comparable because I would argue that the pejorative and ill-conceived parameters of what makes these films particularly pornographic in their depiction of violence is inherently questionable. The violence in MARTYRS isn't just pointed; its brutality is the message, constant mutilation of the body but again, never in such a way as to portray its destruction as a means of pleasure. If anything, this fetish has more in common with a sado-masochistic impulse than it does with a strictly sadistic impulse. And MARTYRS is all about that dialectical kind of impulse.
You're too hung up on the substance of torture films to understand what people mean when they compare it STRUCTURALLY (i.e. formally) to porn, Mr. Abrams. As I argued in another post, I also compare torture films (i.e. in form) to musicals and slapstick in that what people most want to see in these genres are the scenes that interrupt character and plot (i.e. dance numbers, songs, pratfalls, etc.) just as in torture films and porn what people want to see are the scenes that interrupt the flow of character development and plot. It is merely an observation, not an analysis of torture film stories. To engage with these films as you have done, though, is to bark up the wrong tree. You're in a minority if you think that what makes the films in these genres popular are the stories or characters. Few of their fans care about character motivation. They are, however, at times attracted by certain "stars". But that's as far as that type of interst goes.
Roberto: I respond to the questionable matter of "structural" similarities between "torture porn" and real porn earlier in this thread, too.
And as for the rote "fans don't go for character, plot, etc." I have to ask: what scientific data are you basing this on? Can you back this up with anything more than a vague generalization of what "horror fans" are like? If you can, lovely, let's see it.
And when it comes to "barking up the wrong tree:" um, no. If people can analyze symbols and structure of an art film, I don't see why the horror film should be off limits. So perhaps you should go read something else if you think that my writing is a waste of time.
Gee Simon, I thought this was a discussion forum, not a lecture, and certainly not one that you can disinvite people to. From? Lighten up dude, we all love movies here and enjoy discussing them. As for your request for scientific data to back up my claims...don't have any. Just an instinct, which is what many discussions are based on.
Forgive me if I take sentiments like this personally: "To engage with these films as you have done, though, is to bark up the wrong tree. You're in a minority if you think that what makes the films in these genres popular are the stories or characters." I would never ask you to stop discussing my reading but if you're finding it to be fruitless, then what kind of discussion are you proposing? If you weren't trying to provoke me, you certainly have a funny way of showing it. In any case, I apologize for my response.
I don't share your belief about what horror fans want out of a horror movie but then again, I don't think that's the issue at stake. The issue here is whether or not "torture porn" films are A) analogous to porn B) really do de-emphasize character, plot for the sake of fetishizing violence. I would argue B is only half-right. Violence is fetishized in these films but to what unique end is difficult to say.
well at some point I guess intelligent people just agree to disagree. In my opinion you are in a minority on the issue I brought up. I don't have scientific data to back that up, but I do know a little about what studios finance, what distributors are looking for, the story-telling and character developing abilities (or intentions) of many hard-core horror film writer/directors (This is NOT a value judgement) and what does well at the box office, and believe me, none of the above are spending nearly as much time on plot and character as they are on judging or figuring out how to develop and present a horrific scene. Again, this is not a value judgement. I think that people like Rob Zombie and Sam Raime (whom I have spoken to) are geniuses when they work in that genre for the brilliance they exhibit in those types of scenes, but there's no way I would use the same lens or brush to critique their work as I would to critique something like INSERTS which you did admirably.
I come to film criticism from a more formal approach (staging, camera work, lighting, editing, sound, music) than I do from story and character. I studied with Janie Place, Alain Silver, and focused on critics like Robin Wood. Maybe those names mean nothing to you, but they also approach film from a more formal side. That is bound to put you and me in different camps at times (hardly ever, but sometimes). I studied film criticism, but accidentally wound up on the filmmaking side of the business and I was immediately struck by how different the making of many movies (not all movies) was from what critics assumed (intentional fallacies aside). For starters, most of what passes for film criticism is really screenplay criticism. How many critics even mention or name the screenwriter in their essays?
To be told you are barking up the wrong tree is not meant to be offensive. To disagree with you is not to be provoking you. To disagree with some of the things you write is not to find reading you a fruitless experience. Most people that disagree (or even agree) with you, probably don't take the time to discuss it with you, so don't take their silence one way or the other and don't be offended if someone can't or doesn't want to see a detail your way.
I accept your apology. I enjoy most of what you write.
Roberto Quezada
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