Daily Mail, 22 February 2010
Air travel now appears to have turned into a sadomasochistic experience.
No, I’m not talking about the quality of the airline meals, nor the body searches before boarding the plane. I’m referring to that other facility for which the hapless passenger is a captive market — the inflight entertainment.
A couple of days ago, I returned from a trip to Australia. Since this is a seriously long haul of some 24 hours in the air, I took the opportunity to catch up with some films that I had either missed or wouldn’t normally feel like going to a cinema to see.
The result is that, in addition to the jet lag, I’m now having nightmares. For in selecting a couple of movies in particular, I found myself subjected to images of such sickening violence that they have burned into my mind and taken up residence there.
True, they had a ‘V’ for violence warning in the airline entertainment guide. But this also suggested that these were high-quality, well-reviewed films. There was no indication of quite how disturbing were the images I was about to see.
The first was the Quentin Tarantino movie Inglourious Basterds.This scooped the Supporting Actor award at last night’s Baftas, where it had been up for no fewer than six nominations.
I should have remembered that Tarantino’s signature is extreme and graphic violence, even though it is purportedly tongue-in-cheek — and an in-joke on other movies — and is therefore considered the last word in fashionable postmodern irony.
Such amused detachment is supposed to make the violence acceptable. But it is not.
The plot is all about a fictitious group of Jewish-American soldiers assembled during World War II to take revenge upon the Nazis by systematically murdering them.
The head of this commando group, played by Brad Pitt, orders his men to take thousands of Nazi scalps — an order which is taken literally, and so we are shown a scalp being sliced off to make quite sure we get the point. Hilarious!
It’s downhill all the way from there. What’s more disturbing by far than the actual images of blood and gore, however, is the psychopathic sadism and indifference to suffering displayed by the Brad Pitt character and his band of killers, who beat heads to pulp and twist fingers in open wounds.
All of this is played for laughs. But what exactly are we supposed to be laughing at? Sadism? Suffering? Genocide?
Tarantino has said his film takes aim at the ‘racism and barbarism on all sides’ in the war: the Nazis and the Jews, the Americans and the French.
But how can there possibly be any equivalence of ‘racism and barbarism’ between the Nazis and their victims? What kind of sick morality is this supposed to be?
Yet for such a stomach-turning farrago, Tarantino receives mass adulation. Apart from the Baftas, Inglourious Basterds has received eight Academy Award nominations and the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival.
Oh, and it has also taken more than $320million at the box office. Well, this may be Tarantino’s biggest-grossing film to date — but to me it is just gross.
The second shock to my system at 38,000ft up was the American thriller Law Abiding Citizen.
This is also a revenge drama, in which the wife and daughter of the law-abiding citizen of the title are murdered in a break-in at their house. In the attackers’ subsequent trial, a deal is done in which the actual murderer is released after his evidence sends his accomplice to execution.
The bereaved victim is so incensed by this apparent travesty of justice that he not only murders the released attacker but, after he himself is jailed, goes on to murder just about everyone else involved in the case.
The plot thus descends into total absurdity. But what makes it so repellent is the extreme sadism of the murders that the vengeful ‘victim’ carries out, slowly dismembering his family’s attacker in order to inflict upon him as much agony as possible — and in which the perpetrator of this torture, the supposed victim of injustice, takes a psychopathic pleasure.
If there’s supposed to be some message in these movies about revenge or justice, it certainly evaded me. These are simply exceptionally nasty, cynical pieces of celluloid trash.
The slickness in their making barely disguises the fact that these films are seriously sick. What is so disturbing is the sadism — the fact that the characters take such pleasure in causing other human beings extreme agony.
For years, violence in films has been becoming more and more extreme, even in categories lower than the ‘18′ classification.
As people come to tolerate the ever-more intolerable, the violence has to be ratcheted up another few notches in order to shock audiences and censors whose moral sense is being progressively dulled.
In one of the latest examples, the British director Michael Winterbottom has defended scenes in his film The Killer Inside Methat portray extreme violence against women.
This, apparently, depicts brutal scenes of rough sex and murder; the violence, carried out to a soundtrack of classical music, is depicted in close-up shots that leave little to the imagination.
So awful is all this that, when the movie was screened last weekend at the Berlin Film Festival, there were walk-outs and booing.
Winterbottom claimed he had deliberately set out to shock. ‘If you make a film where the violence is entertaining, I think that’s very questionable,’ he said.
What humbug. What else is a film like this supposed to be if not entertainment?
That’s why it is so sick. Winterbottom says it wouldn’t lead to actual violence against women because such acts are depicted as ugly and the central character, a policeman with a secret liking of sadomasochistic sex, is an unattractive figure.
But this isn’t how such films work on people’s psyche. Their main danger is that they have in general a desensitising or brutalising effect — and may indeed inspire a few disturbed individuals to commit acts of violence themselves.
They break the taboos against extreme behaviour simply by portraying that behaviour — and thus help destroy the constraints that preserve elementary norms of decency.
It is not enough to make the sadistic character unattractive. By turning sadism into entertainment, such films inescapably turn audiences into voyeuristic accomplices.
While movies are shaped by a society’s values, they also help in turn to shape those values. And our society has become increasingly cruel, voyeuristic and sadistic. Just think Big Brotheror The Weakest Link. Just think of the recent horrific crimes of torture both of and by small children.
It is striking that, with torture now elevated to the ultimate crime of crimes so that scarcely a day passes without some fresh attempt to arraign British or American forces for colluding in the mistreatment of terrorism suspects, some of the most fashionable movies have been labelled ‘torture porn’.
If torture is held to degrade and brutalise those who carry it out, then torture and sadism in even Bafta or Oscar-garlanded films degrade and brutalise those who watch them.
And to cap it all, we have to put up with the fawning over directors such as Tarantino or Winterbottom, who justify their warped fantasies by claims which are as pretentious as they are inane and amoral.
Next time I fly, I’ll stick to a book.
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