The death of torture porn

(Be warned- there are massive spoilers ahead for the movie, A Serbian Film. If you ever want to see that movie it may be a bad idea to read this post. If you never want to see the film and read on understand that the spoilers are of a graphic nature because the film mentioned is of an extremely graphic nature.)

Back in 2005, film critic David Edelstein introduced into movie vernacular the term “torture porn.” It was used to describe a style of film that became popular with mainstream cineplexes during the middle of the first decade of the 2000’s. It’s a term that sort of needed to be popularized. There were a ton of films that came out during that decade that seemed to serve no purpose other than to push the limits of what their audience would watch. Hostel, The Devil’s Rejects, Saw, Wolf Creek- all were films that amped up the gore factor to make audiences squirm. Edelstein’s term was used in a manner to denigrate the audiences who liked those films. In its simplest definition, torture porn is the idea that its viewers are intensely, pruriently aroused by the sight of human bodies -- usually young, nubile ones, and quite often female -- getting torn into bloody chunks in the most awful ways imaginable. And in some ways- I agree with Edelstein. There was a huge section of the audience that liked those types of films not because they brought a great story to the screen, but rather because they found creative ways to kill and maim people. However, the overreaching aspect of that term doesn’t quite fit. Even though there is a subsection of fans who love those films, it’s not something that encompasses all fans of horror films. Also, it’s not really a new idea that filmmakers try to amp up the gore. Cannibal Holocaust was a cult hit in the early 1980’s. Japanese films have been pushing their viewer’s stomachs to the edge for years, most notably in the film Audition which I don’t recommend watching unless you have a super strong disposition. For me though, horror films represent more than what the mainstream push of these films brought to the table. Granted I have no problem with the Saw films, and would still contend that the first 2-and-a-half films are excellent- before they became preoccupied with the gore factor. Also, Eli Roth, for all his faults, does have a certain appreciation for the genre and makes films that are intended to be a throwback to the films that permeated the back alley theaters of the 1970’s. For the longest time I never saw exactly what the uproar was in the films, and I certainly never saw any reason for the genre to end. As long as there is money to be made and the films retain some semblance of artistic pedigree (albeit small in most cases) they should be made since they represent an important sub genre. That was until I saw A Serbian Film though.

A Serbian Film is a 2010 film directed by Srdan Spasojevic. It starts out as a good little film before losing itself in its conquest to push the boundaries of good taste to its outermost brink, and then go further. It revolves around retired porn star Milos. He has a wife and a son and is looking for happiness in his new life. He is poor but his family loves him and he is relatively comfortable. The only obstacle he faces is the jealously of his brother Marko who is a cop.

One day Milos is approached by an old co-star and given the opportunity to appear in an “arty” porn film being directed by hot new director Vukmir. He sees this as one big final payday where he can get enough of a nest egg to move out of porn and give his family a stable financial base on which to create their new lives. Milos agrees to star in the film and is only mildly curious when Vukmir tells him it is important that he know relatively no details of the porn film in which he will be starring.

The next morning Milos is picked up and driven to an orphanage where he is given an earpiece by Vukmir’s driver. A film crew follows Milos in and he immediately encounters numerous sexual situations, obviously set up, to see how he will react. He goes along with it until he is instructed to have sex with a woman in a room while a young girl dressed like Alice in Wonderland watches. Milos is disgusted by this and refuses to participate. He is then grabbed from behind and forced to stay in the room. He approaches Vukmir about this later and is shown a film that Vukmir calls his “most recent masterpiece.” It’s here where this film goes from being some kind of statement to traveling wildly off the rails. Ready? Deep breath.

Vukmir’s film is his driver helping a woman give birth to a baby girl. Rasa, the driver, holds the child as it comes out and then wipes away the birthing fluids. Rasa then proceeds to rape the baby which Vukmir proudly calls, “newborn porn.” Milos is sickened by this and heads to his car and leaves. As he is sitting at a light he is approached by Vukmir’s doctor (a female) who seduces Milos. Three days later Milos wakes up- beaten, bloodied, and with no recollection of what happened. He returns to the scene of the film and finds a series of tapes which he begins watching. He sees that over the previous three days he was fed a mixture of drugs designed to keep him in a angry, sexually aroused, and easily susceptible to suggestions state.

The first tape shows Vukmir talking Milos into beating a woman up who is chained to a bed. Milos beats her and begins raping her while Vukmir tells him she deserves it for cheating on her husband, a Serbian war hero. In the climax Milos is convinced into chopping off her head with a machete to induce rigor mortis  as he continues to have sex with her.  Another tape shows Milos chained face down on a bed when two men enter the room. One guy holds a camera while the other one sodomizes Milos. The final tape shows his former co star chained to a pole in a room with all her teeth knocked out of her mouth. A guy enters with a mask on and proceeds to force the woman to have oral sex with him. As he finishes he shoves his stiff penis down her throat to choke her to death.

Milos begins following clues from the tapes and begins remembering more events from the past few days. He was taken into a room and forced to sodomize a body that was under a cover. The masked man enters the room and begins having sex with another body laying under covers next to the one that Milos is raping. The mask gets taken off and it is revealed to be Milos’ brother who is raping Milos’ drugged wife. The covers are then taken off the body that Milos is raping and it is revealed to be his own son who is bleeding from his rectum. A fight ensues and Milos manages to kill most of the bodyguards while his wife kills the brother. Milos goes to shoot the last bodyguard but sees he is missing an eye so he jams his erect penis into the man’s eye killing him. Milos then takes his family home and locks them in a basement. He contemplates suicide but his wife convinces him that they should all kill themselves to relive themselves of these horrific events. They shoot themselves on the bed and are left for dead. A little later, another director comes into the room with a second porn star and instructs him to “start with the little one.” End film. Sounds like a charming little film, no?

As the film started screening it ignited controversies as people debated the artistic merits of the film. The director maintained that he was looking to deliver a message about the political landscape of Serbia and how the government was metaphorically, and sometimes literally, taking advantage of its citizens. That in and of itself is a noble goal and that would’ve been a good film to watch. However, by casing that idea inside this type of film it wipes away any sense of context and just becomes a film challenging the viewer to look away. See if you buy into the concept of torture porn, and that the audience that likes those types of films is only interested in gore, then what really is the message you are sending? While you may be trying to draw attention to the larger issues of your homeland, you are also engaging the viewers who want to cheer the gory macabre. To those viewers, you aren’t delivering anything more than a 90 minute exercise in bar raising. Furthermore, you are doing so by going so far to the extreme that it ceases to be fun to watch the film. And really, that to me is where the concept of torture porn films started to fall apart.

Many people who watch horror films (not all) watch because they like to root for the victims. They want the victims to survive. The best horror films reflect not only our own fears but reflect how we want to believe we would be able to react in that situation. The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the perfect example of this for me. While Leatherface is an iconic villain, what drives that story is the last surviving girl and the viewer just wanting her to get away. That’s why that closing image is a haunting one. She jumps in the back of a pick up truck as it pulls away and Leatherface is left standing there dancing around with his chainsaw. It’s not really a happy ending, but it’s one where you can celebrate survival. Fast forward now to the Saw films of the 2000’s. What sells that first film, and ultimately the franchise, was not the gore. It’s that reveal at the end and the live or die nature of the traps. The traps always were designed to be explicit but the important aspect of those scenes was that they were cased in the idea of “How far would you go to save your life?” Could you disfigure yourself? Could you take out someone else? Could you do something as simple as follow directions and not allow your adrenaline to overtake your rationality? That was the fundamental driving force of those films. Without that, it’s just a lunatic building contraptions that would befuddle the best construction workers.

That is where A Serbian Film fails. There isn’t really a good character here to root for. Milos is the closest thing to your protagonist but he stays in the situation a little too long and is sort of blinded by his love of money. The goal is noble, but he turns a blind eye for far too long, so long in fact that he comes off like a dummy. The wife and kid are sympathetic but they are never given any real back story. The brother and Vukmir and his goons are the antagonists of the story but they are so over the top cartoony that it loses the effectiveness of the story. The scene where the brother is raping Milos wife goes from being this intense disturbing scene to being just silly when they cut to his face as he is raping her. Then when Milos finally gets his revenge- he reverts to the same methods as them and the final kill of the bodyguard is just silly and smacks more of the director trying to be cute rather than add a solid ending to the story.

The part with Milos there is a real let down though. With the protagonist you are supposed to identify with them but they aren’t supposed to lose their last thread of humanity in how they fight back. You need to fight back but it needs to be done in a way where they are surviving the situation and not becoming as bad as their captors. Milos does that in this film. If the message is that the government corrupts good people than on some level it works, but Milos is never put in a position where he earns that benefit. He is just as seedy as the people he rallies against.

Essentially I think the problem here is that the director may be trying to deliver a message drawing awareness to the situation of his country. The problem is the method in which he chooses to do so. As a dramatic film, and adjusting some of the events- or even leaving some to the imagination- would’ve made this film work better as a message. As it stands, it is just a mess of a film that suffers in the last hour of the film. More importantly though it finally made me see what the critics of this particular genre were getting at. This doesn’t present torture as some weird gritty underground goofiness, but rather as a reality that an entire country engages in. It doesn’t work here and there is no subtext, despite how hard some critics argue that there is. This doesn’t do anything to drive home the conflict and civil unrest in Serbia, it is just a film- like many other films that aims to gross out the viewer. It doesn’t work here but it does effectively drive a nail into the genre’s coffin.