Tolerating abhorrent acts

Recent US films have been transforming audiences into vengeful warriors

by Michael Nenonen <mnenonen@republic-news.org>

If Hollywood fantasies reflect the American imagination, then torture is becoming respectable in the United States. In recent years, movies like The Passion of the Christ, Sin City, House of 1,000 Corpses, and Kill Bill have been astoundingly successful. These are only some examples of torture cinema, an increasingly popular Hollywood genre.

Torture wasn't always part of America's cultural mainstream. Even in the 1980s, when the Reagan regime was butchering Central America, torture remained a cultural taboo. By steadfastly denying that the US used torture as an instrument of policy, Americans could hold onto their delusions of national innocence, delusions that have long reinforced the myth of American exceptionalism.

According to this myth, America is the most shining example of virtue ever known to humankind, and that as such it transcends the rules that govern the affairs of lesser nations. American exceptionalism bolsters American egos and encourages national solidarity, and our southern neighbours are reluctant to give it up.

Unfortunately, by now most Americans must know in their hearts that their government relies heavily on torture to achieve its ends. The world's most prestigious human rights organizations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have reported systemic torture in places like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Prisoners have suffered attacks by dogs, prolonged stress positions, sleep deprivation, suffocation, hunger, electric shock, beatings, and sexualized humiliation. These violations are documented by many photographs, only a few of which have been released to the public. Those we've seen are horrifying enough, but the photos yet to be released are apparently even worse. Finally, through the Mahar Arar case, Canadians and Americans alike have learned that the US also "outsources" torture to places like Syria.

Thus, many Americans have lost their sense of national innocence. This forces them to make a difficult choice. They can either preserve their ethical principles while discarding American exceptionalism, or retain American exceptionalism while drastically modifying their ethical principles. This second option is endorsed by people like Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, who advocates the institutionalization of torture as a component of the War on Terror; journalist Robert Kaplan, who encourages the abandonment of "Christian" compassion in favour of the murderous "pagan ethos" exemplified by societies like Ancient Greece and Imperial Rome; and talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who views the outrage over the abuses at Abu Ghraib as a reflection of a dangerous "feminization" of American culture. Such views are warmly received by America's powerbrokers. For a nation's ethical sensibilities to undergo such a profound transformation, however, its people must learn how to enjoy these new fantasies. This is where the entertainment industry steps in.

As David Walsh writes in A Culture At The End of Its Rope (World Socialist Web, April 13, 2005), ". . . for the first time in American history, abuse and torture of prisoners of war has become state policy. Nothing that took place at Abu Ghraib would be out of place in (Frank) Miller's work. If films like Tarantino's Kill Bill, Vol. 2 and Sin City are not cartoonish endorsements, they certainly represent a participation, consciously or not, in the campaign to accustom the American public to bloody revenge and torture as legitimate means of treating one's ‘enemies’ . . . . To be ‘entertained’ even by imitations of torture, or to seek to entertain by such imitations, suggests a disturbing degree of indifference to the pain of others. It is already the result of a general process of brutalization in the culture and it helps further inure the population to suffering."

Is Hollywood conspiring to poison America's conscience? I doubt it. Instead, I believe the industry is responding to public demand. Whereas filmmakers like Michael Moore and George Lucas appeal to people with progressive ethical principles, torture cinema caters to those preferring a more vengeful value-set. Torture cinema has a competitive edge because spiritual disintegration is easier than spiritual integration. It's tempting to rationalize our crimes as appropriate responses to an utterly corrupt world; we thereby preserve our sense of virtue by imagining that the universe must be far worse than we've become. In doing this, we compromise our capacity for love, wonder, and curiosity, emotions that wither in a world appearing so viciously contemptible.

Children and teenagers are major consumers of torture cinema, and are the ones most susceptible to this degenerate ethical reformation. A 15 year study published in 2003 by professors at the University of Michigan has been added to the mountains of evidence that early consumption of media violence is a strong predictor of violence in later life (L Rowell Huesmann, Jessica Moise-Titus, Cheryl-Lynn Podolski, and Leonard D Eron, “Longitudinal Relations Between Children's Exposure to TV Violence and Their Aggressive and Violent Behavior in Young Adulthood: 1977 - 1992,” Developmental Psychology, Vol. 39, No. 2.)

The researchers report that "Violent scenes that children are most likely to model their behaviour after are ones in which they identify with the perpetrator of the violence, the perpetrator is rewarded for the violence, and in which children perceive the scene as telling about life like it really is." While young people may understand that the acts of torture in movies like Sin City are grotesquely exaggerated, they may still believe that the ethical vision informing these acts is sound. They may carry this belief into adulthood, where it will probably find a political voice.

So where does this leave us? Perhaps Leon Trotsky said it best: "Fascism has opened up the depths of society for politics,” he wrote. “There lives alongside the 20th century the tenth or the thirteenth. . . What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance, and savagery! Despair has raised them to their feet, fascism has given them a banner. Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of the normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism." (Leon Trotsky, What Is National Socialism? 1933).

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