| It made its way into theatres just a week ago, but Hostel: Part II has already sparked off a few internet debates over whether its gruesome torture sequences have crossed the line when it comes to acceptable onscreen imagery. As well, many critics have accused director Eli Roth of barely concealing his underlying hatred or mistrust of women in his movies, which besides the original Hostel also include 2002’s Cabin Fever and one of the fake trailers in Grindhouse.
This is nothing new for a horror movie–some critics noted the undercurrent of male loathing of female sexuality in William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. But the uproar over the Hostel films is unusually heated, and Roth has become a lightning rod for the debate over the so-called "torture-porn" genre, with very few critical voices speaking up to defend him. For his part, Roth has insisted in interviews that both Hostel and Hostel: Part II are not simply exercises in crass exploitation but subtle jabs at current political and social issues.
Having both seen the film over the weekend, SEE writers Tom Murray and Dave Alexander–whose day job as an editor at Rue Morgue magazine in Toronto places him square in the world of horror films–weigh in with their opinions.
Dave Alexander: I really like the concept of the first Hostel–American kids abducted into Eastern European pay-to-play torture dungeons was a new type of horror that was and is very timely, given contemporary anxieties over hostile foreigners and fears of being kidnapped on foreign soil. The film’s commentary on consumerism is also appealing. However, the obnoxious fratboy characters and its T&A obsession sour the whole thing.
Tom Murray: I agree that the first Hostel had potential–it could have been an American version of Haneke’s Funny Games–but in Roth’s hands, it was a juvenile mess. Not that a juvenile film can’t be fun, but Hostel wasn’t fun, entertaining, or instructive–just slapdash in everything except the torture sequences, which is where Roth seemed to pour all his passion. I’d say that Hostel II is exactly the same–except that the characters are even more poorly written than in the first one.
DA: Roth is a smart guy who knows what the studio wants, so the characters are secondary to the torture setpieces. There are unlikely plot twists and characters doing unbelievable 180s with their personalities; it’s the gore and the cruelty that get all the care and attention–the torture-porn money shots, if you will.
TM: But it’s simply gore and cruelty. I was never scared or shocked during the movie, just sickened. I guess Roth would argue that that might be the point–something about desensitization–but I don’t buy it. It was simply an ordeal to get through.
DA: If you look at the film from that perspective, where he’s expected to deliver a bunch of scenes involving spectacular torture and cruelty, then he’s successful. Sadly, there’s a sizable demographic of horror fans, mainly younger males, who don’t require much more than that to get them in theatres. Roth isn’t as clever as he’d like us to think, though.
TM: I agree. In interviews he’s tossed around "9/11," "Abu Ghraib" and "terrorism" as prisms through which to view the film, but this seems lazy–the film is so diffuse it’ll accept any interpretation; by that token, you can do a film studies dissection of the Scooby-Doo movies and make it stick.
DA: It’s easy to read all kinds of things into the film in terms of subtext because Roth doesn’t add anything to suggest a political agenda in terms of this stuff representing any specific real-world horrors. Switching up the male protagonists for female protagonists just makes it more open to multiple readings.
TM: A few critics pointed this out in Tarantino’s Death Proof–that by leaving men out of the equation, by having a woman involved in the torture sequences, somehow this excuses it.
DA: More interestingly, there are all kinds of windows into Roth’s personality in terms of his feelings about women, from literal castration anxiety to the absolutely nihilistic final scene where a bunch of kids gleefully play soccer with the severed head of a "deceitful" woman. In fact, I got the feeling while watching the film that Roth was punishing all those women who wouldn’t give him the time of day in high school.
TM: I got the same feeling. I’m hesitant to suggest that Roth is really as misogynistic as he seems to be–it’s still, after all, just a movie–but he takes an undoubted glee in his torture sequences, especially with Heather Matarazzo (Dawn Weiner in Welcome to the Dollhouse), who seems to be making a career of being degraded.
DA: I also have to say that there wasn’t a single moment in Hostel II where I felt Roth was making a pointed statement about anything in the real world.
TM: That long, unblinking shot of Matarazzo being hung upside-down and bled out by another woman would seem to be a pointed statement, but about what I’m not sure.
DA: Roth would probably argue that he’s taking care to be not misogynistic by showing female-on-female violence instead of male-on-female violence, yet his camera leers at the torturer as she strips naked, then orgasmically tortures her victim with a scythe while writhing around in her blood. You simply can't get more torture porn than that.
TM: In your Rue Morgue interview with Roth, he objects to the term "torture porn," but I really can’t see how else you could describe it. This was the moment that bothered me the most–a lingering camera shot that eroticized the torture of a woman who’s been degraded throughout the entire film. It serves no other purpose, and Roth arguing that such an over-the-top scene does serve a purpose indicates a lack of imagination on his part, that he has to be so literal-minded. |
