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The problem of Saw (Cineaste)

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David Libra

I dare you to try


Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda

PostPosted: Tue Jan 19, 2010 12:26 am
Post subject: The problem of Saw (Cineaste)Reply with quote

An article I read in the latest issue of Cineaste - an interesting take on some of the more disturbing implications of the mindset promoted by some recent works of the horror genre.

I linked to this on facebook, but thought I'd chuck it here for anyone who has an interest in film, politics and/or long-ish essays Razz:

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/_/print/PrintArticle.aspx?id=214793118

The problem of Saw: "torture porn" and the conservatism of contemporary horror films.

Christopher Sharrett


The Saw films initiated in 2003 by James Wan and Leigh Whannell represent the most lucrative horror franchise of the new century, and, with Eli Roth's two Hostel films (released in 2006 and 2007), figure as the most prominent examples of a reactionary tendency of the genre as it descends into what is popularly known as "torture porn," a form alarming in its diminishing of the genre, and its disregard of the psychological content and social criticism of the horror film at its height (although Saw and its sequels try mightily to mask their intellectual bankruptcy and retro grade politics).

An attempt to evaluate these films seriously provokes doubt about such a project's worth. Excruciating forms of torture and free-form bloodletting seem to be their chief draw, not the inane moralizing that tries to provide intellectual cover. The numerous gory tableaux of Saw tend to make one see them as further indicators merely of a braindead culture rather than inextricably linked to the political reaction and cynicism that pervades the cycle, making Saw a perfect emblem of the recent era's rightist ideology. Most important, the cycle is part of a tendency that jettisons the horror film's most progressive aspects, a project visible over the last thirty years.

The bloodshed of the Saw films contains a strong element of one-upmanship, as steadily increased budgets permit the filmmakers to pursue more extravagant ways of destroying the human body for the delectation of the male adolescent audience, constructed as such regardless of age or gender. Fanzines and Websites discuss the forms of torture in the Saw films (a nude woman sprayed with ice water in a freezer locker; a woman shoved into a pit of syringes; a woman decapitated by shotgun blasts) to the near-total exclusion of context, aside from outright absurd ruminations about the villain's motivations. The consequences of violence for the individual and society, for all the bogus moralizing of these films, is nowhere in evidence. Indeed, if Saw is an indicator, the lessons about screen violence taught by Penn, Peckinpah, Aldrich, Siegel, Scorsese, or master horror directors such as George A. Romero, seem lost on the current generation of filmmakers and audiences. But the franchise is important, at the symptomatic level, as a measure of the possible defeat by the contemporary film industry of one of the most contentious and subversive genres.

The horror film has fallen on hard times after distinguished beginnings in the Weimar cinema, notable contributions at Universal Studios in the Thirties, and interesting or at least curious films from Val Lewton, Terence Fisher, William Castle, and Roger Corman, among others. The Sixties saw the emergence of the horror genre as subversive form, an impulse well chronicled by Robin Wood in his pivotal, much-anthologized essay, "An Introduction to the American Horror Film." Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963), Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968), and George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) established the genre as keenly critical of middle-class life and all its supporting institutions, particularly the patriarchal nuclear family. Most important, the horror film began to eschew the supernatural in favor of the psychological, as the genre looked to horror as the product of middleclass life, not caused by external demons or a mad scientist's freak accident. The genre investigated the neurosis that is basic, as the heirs of Freud inform us, to the creation of notions of normality and otherness. Even where the supernatural appeared it was largely a device for the exploration of social oppression--in Rosemary's Baby and Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963), ghosts and devils are emblems of the entrapment of the female by patriarchy.

But the radical current of the cinema--in the horror film and elsewhere--faded with the cooptation of Sixties resistance movements. The psychological themes of the horror film, with their adjacent social criticism, became grossly transmogrified into the misogynist teen-kill "slasher" films of the Eighties, the most degraded example being the Friday the 13th cycle. The most representative moment of the collapse of the horror film's subversive agenda is John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) with its intriguing psychological prelude disregarded by the narrative entirely as the "evil" masked killer (so described by his psychiatrist) becomes the unstoppable, undermotivated bogeyman of Eighties horror cinema.

With the Reagan era, the horror film degenerated into the archetypal thrill ride representative of the corporatized, poststudio cinema. The subversive component nearly vanished, as the genre was relegated to a lowbrow vehicle for shouting "boo!" that its snobbish attackers accused it of being since its inception. Fans of the genre have taken heart in recent years with Romero's return (Land of the Dead [2005], Diary of the Dead [2008]), some entries into the "Masters of Horror" TV series, especially Joe Dante's Homecoming, and one or two reasonably intelligent remakes, including Alexandre Aja's version of The Hills Have Eyes (2006). All of these films seem a response to the atrocity that was the Bush era.

But there is substantial reason to curb our enthusiasm, especially given the problematical influence of the serial-killer films omnipresent in the Nineties, the worst impulses of which are manifest in the Saw films. There is no underrating the impact of Saw; at this writing there are six films in the cycle and a 3-D Saw on the horizon. The Internet is clotted with mindless palaver about the supposed moral virtues of the cycle's monstrous protagonist, with Websites dedicated to dissecting (if you will) the righteousness of the villain/hero's motivations (the assumption is, of course, that these motivations are adequately on display, developed in the cycle's exposition).

The films concern the fiendishly clever plots of a terminally-ill cancer patient named John Kramer, aka the Jigsaw Killer (Tobin Bell), who has already achieved status as a horror icon. Jigsaw is in the tradition of the Ming the Merciless-style, omniscient villain whose most distinguished incarnation is probably Dr. Mabuse; his most degraded realization in the recent period is as the serial killer Hannibal Lecter in the risible Silence of the Lambs (1991), then in a host of highly derivative films, even the intriguing, often ingenious Se7en (1995) to which Saw owes more than a little, and which may be representative, as Richard Dyer suggests (in a BFI monograph) of a pronounced social disintegration. While Dyer points to virtues in Se7en, I think at this point it may be instructive principally as a compromised index of an apocalypticism rampant in our culture with the general dismissal not only of Sixties radicalism but all tendencies toward social transformation. The same point might be made regarding the Saw films.

Dressed in a black-and-red bathrobe whose hood gives it the appearance of an inquisitor's vestments, Jigsaw devises intricate, usually deadly traps with which to "test" negligent fathers, cheating husbands, drug-addicted kids, "career women" who ignore their family duties, and so on; the tests are for the purpose of teaching the true value of life. At times Jigsaw resembles a New Age therapist as he encourages obsessive cops to "let go" of their fixations. A conceit of the series is that Jigsaw isn't really a serial murderer but a moralist whose devices are created to teach the erring victims the reality of their indulgent foolishness as they attempt to free themselves by making a decision that will supposedly aid in overcoming their sins (e.g., a voyeur must choose between losing his eyes or being torn to pieces); the derivations from Se7en are in these instances especially glaring. The notion of teaching the good old-fashioned values through torture and murder might tend to make one read the Saw films as a parody of the Bush years, were there any real signs of intelligence on display, including a touch of humor given a manifestly ridiculous character and situation.

But the filmmakers are far too smitten by the idea that Jigsaw might "have something" to his morality. The films are enamored of the cleverness of their plot structures, which are not nearly as intricate (or interesting) as the flash cuts and wrenching, nonlinear editing would make them appear. The cycle is intended as one long, complex narrative, with the viewer obliged to come back for each installment to fully "get it." The trick isn't uncommon to serial art, but in this instance depends on a conceit that has become prevalent in film scenarios, chiefly because it is a very easy way of getting a story told, and with a touch of mystical wonderment.

Like any number of films of the last twenty years (Magnolia, Crash), the Saw films partake of notions of synchronicity and coincidence, conceits drawn in the present moment from "chaos theory," with its idea that "everything fits together," and that all lives are interlocked at some cosmic level--it takes a genius like Jigsaw, the cruel but necessary father, to point this out. The killer's jigsaw insignia (he cuts a puzzle piece from the bodies of his subjects) suggests that suffering will eventually lead to a full and generous understanding of a seemingly meaningless existence (and viewers to a comprehension of the series), a notion not out of sync with Christian doctrine. The puzzle framework of the Saw films is itself a topic for discussion. While I know little of chaos theory's scientific value, it seems to have been one of many concepts influencing postmodernity's conservative drift, replacing political analysis with metaphysics in a variety of disciplines.

The Saw franchise is another of the postmodern cinema's examples of a vacuous critique of capitalist society from a decidedly conservative position. The sickly-green postindustrial world of Jigsaw, an environment whose overcast, bilious color palette has become the norm in numerous films projecting the nation as wasteland, suggests capitalist culture as a "fallen world" at the end of its road--for vaguely moral rather than political and economic reasons. Jigsaw's workspace is festooned with the debris of a collapsed industrial society, his cluttered lair simulating Dadaist installations, therefore incorporating adversarial culture into narratives more fascinated with wallowing in decay than raising questions as to the whys of its presence. For all his engineering genius and sheer fortitude--considering he is dying a cancer death--Jigsaw's world looks very out of date, his traps made of rusted pieces of iron and precyberspace technologies. He appears atavistic on various levels, the most crucial being his yearning for a more conservative society.

Jigsaw seems at certain points to embrace an absurdist worldview, acknowledging the cruel randomness of events as he imposes a rigid morality, trying to make a new order out of chaos--hence his jigsaw puzzle trademark. In the initial film, Jigsaw is merely a cancer patient callously treated by the medical establishment. As the cycle progresses and more elements are ladled onto the character, he is revealed as an angry husband whose wife suffers a miscarriage while taking care (foolishly) of loony drug addicts at a clinic, thereby depriving Jigsaw of a son. The son is finally incarnated as an ugly motorized puppet peddling about on a tricycle, programmed to announce via strategically-placed televisions the impending "games" of Jigsaw to his targeted victims. That the unborn son is manifest as a monstrous puppet speaks less to Jigsaw's grief and self-loathing than his rage at the destruction of the nuclear family--his son is not to be, in part because his wife isn't good at taking orders. The violation of the Oedipal trajectory is at the heart of the franchise, with Jigsaw the angry white male lashing out at a society he will either remake in his image or obliterate.

A dominant theme of the series is the search for a young sidekick who will carry on Jigsaw's work, another concern the franchise derives from Se7en and key assumptions of adventure fiction. In Se7en, the sense of apocalypse is especially heightened as the older cop Somerset (Morgan Freeman) can no longer teach, and the young cop Mills (Brad Pitt) refuses to learn. The older man/young acolyte construct is basic to genre fiction (its most sublime rendering may be Ford's The Searchers, its most hamfisted Star Wars). The idea that patriarchal law has found itself in an epoch where it can no longer he transmitted to adept male disciples causes an undercurrent of hysteria in recent cinema. Not surprisingly, the central characters of Se7en and Saw reach back to tradition as a way of asserting their authority and wisdom. The Morgan Freeman character in Se7en listens to Bach as he studies Dante and Thomas Aquinas for clues to finding a murderer influenced by these sources. Jigsaw is a particularly erudite engineer and universal mind whose Torquemada-like lessons seem a last-ditch attempt to preserve stability in a disorderly world. The sense of disorder in Saw, from the cluttered mise-en-scene to the manic editing to the nauseating color scheme, exteriorizes the male's panic. Although Jigsaw seems self-possessed enough, there is a sense of the world over which he presides slipping into chaos, conveyed by a lighting scheme that refuses sunlight (again, Se7en), except in flashbacks connoting a lost golden age (moments in Jigsaw's married life). The bourgeois household under siege, symbolically or in fact, has for some years been an emblem of the decline of the West, with Saw a relevant representation.

Jigsaw's pursuit of a disciple is frustrated. He seems on the verge of success with a young drug addict named Amanda (Shawnee Smith) who claims that Jigsaw "helped" her by subjecting her to a skull-crunching device that became a logo of the series. But instead of "tutoring" subjects by allowing them options (lose your arms but gain a new life), Amanda ends up becoming a flat-out killer, and one with an exceptionally dirty vocabulary and overwrought temperament. The female strays too tar from paternal will; she is the archetypal hysteric who can't get past her neurosis to understand the male's superior wisdom. She is replaced by an unwholesome cop named Hoffman (Costas Mandylor), who may well have been Jigsaw's initial choice (if my reading of Saw V is correct). He seems at least as savage as Amanda, but, at this moment of the franchise, he is on the ascendancy, although there is a strong sense that Jigsaw's quest will come to naught, since "true" morality is nowhere to be found, the remaining righteousness in Sodom long gone.

Jigsaw, the disgruntled, middleclass white male professional, fits in a long tradition of male characters fed up with democratic institutions, determined to set their own rules. The Western is of course replete with such figures, but Jigsaw might be associated with the resurgence of the new vigilante cinema, including the remake of Walking Tall (2004), as well as Death Sentence (2007), based on the same Brian Garfield source novel that produced the Death Wish cycle of the 1970s. (It is not coincidental that James Wan, Saw's creator, directed Death Sentence.) More significant is Nell Jordan's The Brave One (2007), structurally the most dependent on the original Death Wish. The new Walking Tall may be the most dismissible of the cycle, its one claim to the new "liberalism" of the genre the casting of former wrestler Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, a nonwhite actor, whose presence does little to unite issues of race to its stale story of the armed strong man restoring the beleaguered community.

The new vigilante cycle is smart enough to provide various liberal ideological patinas to conceal its agenda, making Saw's presence all the more disturbing, suggesting that the perceived need for liberal cover is paper thin. The new vigilante is cannily embodied in the Jodie Foster character of The Brave One. By casting a lesbian reasonably open about her sexuality, directed by a "serious" filmmaker, the film axiomatically gains some legitimacy--the poster art, showing a distraught woman clutching her head in tormented meditation, her other hand limply holding a pistol, seems to want to debunk the notion of the phallicized woman made popular in mass art over the last three decades, adjacent to the cooptation of feminism (the liberal sentiment is limited--I've noted that the DVD art has Foster aiming a 9mm at the consumer). Foster's character is a street gunfighter, but a pensive, self-critical one, who quotes D.H. Lawrence's notion of the essential American soul as hard, isolate, and a killer.

Yet for all her self-awareness she isn't involved in fighting, say, gaybashers. She is resolutely heterosexual, and at the film's heart is vengeance for an assault on the normative middle-class couple (that Foster's murdered fiance is nonwhite does nothing to mitigate the idea of a specific race and class under siege). At the same time, the film's despair seems precipitated by a crisis in confidence, the sense that the Bush crowd has delegitimized bourgeois institutions by promoting a climate of fear (9/11 allusions pepper the film). The anxiety is not that far removed from that of the post-Vietnam/ Watergate legitimation crisis that propelled the earlier vigilante films, and the disaster films that thought it good that everything should go up in flames since the empire's prospects for conquest were suddenly so diminished. In the current decade, as in the Seventies, the project of the vigilante cinema is about relegitimation, about being able, to use a line from The Brave One, to "walk the streets unafraid." While the film pretends to denounce violence ("the brave one" is the person who lives without the gun), it shamelessly targets poor minorities, necessarily portrayed as totally deranged, with no more embarrassment than the Charles Bronson Death Wish films had about such focused racial signification. The most important unifying principle linking the Death Wish cycle to The Brave One is the dismissal of social institutions, assumed to be effete and worthless, and the picking up of the gun not in support of revolutionary violence but as validation of the bourgeois subject's right to strike out at a dysfunctional system whose key role is to protect the middle class and its property rights.

Neither The Brave One nor the new Walking Tall ushered in a new wave of vigilante films per se, but we mustn't be too literal-minded in studying the terrain. The incredible popularity of comic-book-superhero films, their adolescent awfulness one index of the political consciousness they represent, with a rebooted, "darkened up" Batman in the lead, speaks to the need of the pissed-off citizen to strike back, or to find a strong dad who can.

The Saw films are predicated on this essential principle. While Jigsaw wanders about his lair in a robe rather than roams the streets with a gun, his kinship with the vigilante tradition is evident and noteworthy. The poisoned urban decay that makes up the mise-en-scene of the franchise is not the product of a collapsed social system, even when the occasional bigwig is the victim (a soft-headed judge is tortured with a cascade of pig innards). Individual choice, the clarion call of the American civilizing project, informs Saw and is its consistent ideology. Although Jigsaw's project seems to be one of "reformism," his course is one of obliteration, including self-annihilation. The impulse toward destruction and suicide has been basic to the conservative vision of America since its inception, preferring conflagration to rational social change.

Eli Roth's Hostel films looked immediately suspect due to their affiliation with the loutish Quentin Tarantino, who serves as producer and promoter. Indeed, Tarantino's sensibility is clearly on display, including incessant, pointless allusions to other films (including Tarantino's), and a child braggart's consciousness of cinematic formulae. The vacuity of Tarantino has, sadly, shaped the outlook of a sizable sector of the new filmmaking generation, his self-absorbed nihilism not yet deterring viewers from regarding him as a formidable auteur (although Inglourious Basterds may put a dent in his facade).

But even with the Tarantino burden, Roth's films, particularly Hostel: Part II, would seem to be the most self-consciously political phase of torture porn. Roth's attempt to portray capitalist society of the Bush era as based solely on predation is apparent enough, but Roth seems not to have noticed that the point was made, and with considerably more wit, intelligence, and political awareness in Dawn of the Dead (1978) more than thirty years ago, a work insightful enough to know that predation isn't unique to one phase of the capitalist state. Roth's statements in interviews and DVD commentaries reveal a mind both confused and uncommitted. While he decries the Bush era, he separates it from the imperialist project basic to the nation's history. He supports the death penalty, is "not against war in general," and above all retains allegiance to a basic vision of his audience that necessarily informs his art: "They want to see people gettin' £$%$ed up--bad!" (1) We have, then, the time-honored problem of an art work partaking amply of the problems it supposedly wants to criticize.

The Hostel films concern college kids on sexual holiday in Eastern Europe--boys in the first film, girls in the second--who are set upon by a wealthy, male-dominated "hunt club" that pays huge amounts of money to its contractor to capture, mutilate, and kill feckless young travelers. The films borrow awkwardly from the Hansel-and-Gretel narrative framework that informs much horror. The torrents of blood in these films are not mitigated in the slightest by perceptive wit or inflections to the genre. There is the very ponderous introduction of characters, an equally ponderous journey deeper into danger, the slow reveal of suspicious characters, and then the prolonged final act wherein the youngsters meet their fate. What some see as brilliantly ironic strikes me as suggesting that the concept of irony has become lost: the sheepish, henpecked businessman, rather than his more macho buddy, predictably becomes the Id-turned-loose in Hostel: Part II. And Roth's sense of equivalency is ill conceived. He wants to show how the young, thoughtless predators become the prey, but the young people, although self-involved and obnoxious, aren't particularly predatory (Roth seems not to have noticed that gender relations in patriarchal culture have an inherently exploitive aspect not confined to rich kids on vacation), and are certainly the most attractive figures of these films, while the Eastern European murderers are wholly sinister and merciless, and in several instances repulsive.

Compare these groups to, for example, the good and evil families in Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) or Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes (1977), or, more crucially, the rival families of Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946), Wagon Master (1950), or Anthony Mann's remarkable Man of the West (1958). Roth's juvenile view of otherness is most visible in his portrait of postcommunist Eastern Europe, a typical "oriental" land depicted as both exotic and profoundly threatening. The decayed factory that is the home base of the murderers, like the rest of the industrial wasteland portrayed in these films, has no connection to economic policies of the West that destroyed not just the Soviet state but also the last vestiges of socialism, indeed leaving nations ripe for a parasitical economy for which Roth's ideas find no tangible, resonant metaphor. Hostel: Part II has been praised for the privileged role it gives the female, particularly the penultimate scene in which one of the women travelers castrates a businessman-killer, joins the hunt club, and decapitates a woman who lured her into the killer's lair--the woman's head is used as a soccer ball by a group of feral children, themselves the subject of grisly violence earlier in the film.

The triumphant woman of Hostel: Part II is little more than another instance of the female constructed as male, internalizing fully the values of the predatory dominant society the film pretends to critique. Any view of the film as feminist must confront moments such as the film's centerpiece, the "Countess Bathory" sequence, wherein a statuesque nude woman from the photofantasies of Helmut Newton uses a scythe to slash to ribbons a trussed-up young female victim (who is portrayed as the homeliest, the least "with it" of the travelers, and necessarily a target for the murderers and the audiences who enjoy the cynicism of the film's assumptions).

The Saw and Hostel horror films are only a few examples that make very doubtful a view that the essential subversion of the horror genre is showing signs of return. Films such as The Descent, Dark Water, and Silent Hill seem to relegate the female to the position of phallicized male, or to suggest her hopelessness without the male, or punish her for neglecting her duties as keeper of the household--the latter point is most obvious in the endless English-language remakes of Asian horror focusing on maternal duty. Of the deluge of gory Asian horror films now available in the West, the most compelling and intelligent seem to me Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale (2000), in which Japan's educational system (one could imagine the U.S. system in the same depiction) is a monstrous institution destructive of the young, teaching murder and mayhem, and the Iron Man films of Shinya Tsukamoto, quasisurreal films suggesting the mania of the new Japan, driven insane by corporate, technological capitalism. Tsukamoto's films (now almost twenty years old and not really representative of Asian new wave horror) portray a society at the brink of exhaustion and collapse, although their only response is nostalgic, offering (in Iron Man: Body Hammer [1992]) Ozu-like glances of an older Japan, perhaps as total fantasies to give a sense of the seductive and essentially conservative impulse of nostalgia. Yet these films show how gory violence can still be intelligently put to use in describing a civilization in crisis. (2)

It should be noted that some recent horror films have been unfairly painted by reviewers with the torture porn brush. Rob Zombie s films seem perilously close to Tarantino in their obsessive focus on pastiche, but House of 1000 Corpses (2003) and The Devil's Rejects (2005) come across as raucous, anarchical celebration, combining horror iconography with soft-core porn (with which bluenoses have always associated the genre) to remind us of a time when the genre could shock tender sensibilities, even if Zombie's work is too mannered to do so.

Confronting the torture-porn phase of the new horror film can, of course, make one feel open to charges of prudishness as concerns increase, and the serious viewer will conscientiously consider whether or not s/he is prudish. Fans of the horror film must be prepared to make distinctions, and say clearly why Dawn of the Dead is a significant work of the genre while Saw is relative rubbish except as a symptom of the state of culture. It is important, I think, to place Saw and other such films in the context of genre history, recognizing that the issue at the center of any critique is not so much hoary arguments about the role of violence in cinema, but the regressive nature of popular cinema in the current moment, its sense of the worthlessness of human beings, and the horror film's embrace of dominant ideas about power and repression.

End Notes:

(1) Eli Roth commentary, Hostel: Part II, Sony DVD, 2007.

(2) I am grateful to Tony Williams for his remarks to me about Asian horror, and for his regular briefings in Asian Cult Cinema.

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rocketronnie 



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PostPosted: Tue Jan 19, 2010 1:02 am
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I've always thought cinema studies was the refuge of self absorbed wankers and this article proves that once again. I can't believe i just wasted ten minutes reading it. Twisted Evil
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Bucks5 Capricorn

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PostPosted: Tue Jan 19, 2010 5:42 am
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I thought the problem with Saw was that I had to wait until another 10 months to see the final part (Saw 7).
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Black_White Scorpio



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PostPosted: Tue Jan 19, 2010 6:36 am
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That's a lot of words........
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David Libra

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PostPosted: Tue Jan 19, 2010 9:40 am
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rocketronnie wrote:
I've always thought cinema studies was the refuge of self absorbed wankers and this article proves that once again. I can't believe i just wasted ten minutes reading it. Twisted Evil


Really? What was your problem with it? I thought it was refreshing, well-argued and, if at times a little slavishly 'leftist', raised some very valid (or at least contestable) political issues.

There is no doubt that cinema studies, like any field of art criticism, can attract pretentious wankers, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of interesting discussion and analysis going on at the same time. This is very much the sort of field I want to get into myself (although I suppose some might see this as further proof of your sentiment Razz). But yeah, Cineaste is by far the more academic and arguably self-important of the film journals - I generally prefer Sight & Sound, myself.

Member (and anyone else who can't be bothered reading what is admittedly a bloody long article), the Cliff's Notes version is this: films like Saw and Hostel preach an essentially conservative world-view, by promoting vigilante retribution and backwards moralising and using them as an attempt to justify the voyeuristic and sadistic scenes of violence in the films. I have often thought much the same, and this is the first piece I've read which has seriously addressed my concerns about this genre.

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rocketronnie 



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PostPosted: Tue Jan 19, 2010 1:16 pm
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David wrote:
rocketronnie wrote:
I've always thought cinema studies was the refuge of self absorbed wankers and this article proves that once again. I can't believe i just wasted ten minutes reading it. Twisted Evil


Really? What was your problem with it? I thought it was refreshing, well-argued and, if at times a little slavishly 'leftist', raised some very valid (or at least contestable) political issues.

There is no doubt that cinema studies, like any field of art criticism, can attract pretentious wankers, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of interesting discussion and analysis going on at the same time. This is very much the sort of field I want to get into myself (although I suppose some might see this as further proof of your sentiment Razz). But yeah, Cineaste is by far the more academic and arguably self-important of the film journals - I generally prefer Sight & Sound, myself.

Member (and anyone else who can't be bothered reading what is admittedly a bloody long article), the Cliff's Notes version is this: films like Saw and Hostel preach an essentially conservative world-view, by promoting vigilante retribution and backwards moralising and using them as an attempt to justify the voyeuristic and sadistic scenes of violence in the films. I have often thought much the same, and this is the first piece I've read which has seriously addressed my concerns about this genre.


The problem is no-one really cares about this stuff. Like who cares? its only an interpretation anyway, about as valid as an argument that says its a bloody good film because its blood splatters are originally and artistically shot.

The only people who care about this stuff is the author and a phone-box-sized group of cognoscenti who are into such elitist discourses. Most people who go see horror films dont base their choice of entertainment on whether it is left or right leaning, but on whether they are going to be entertained etc. Furthermore there is no way to measure whether the film has any effect on the politics of the viewer or not. Given that the critique has about as much validity as me asserting that Alpha Centuri is made of cheese.

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Deja Vu 



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PostPosted: Tue Jan 19, 2010 1:22 pm
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I have a couple of problems with the article...

It's bloody long for starters.

It's clearly too intellectual for me.

I fail to see the value in intellectualising movies that are clearly not up to the scrutiny. Torture porn, or "gorno" does not claim to be earth shattering or cutting edge, or make political statements about society. So what's the point of such a critique?

Horror films have always been about revenge, and (im)morality. Look at some of the "classics" from the 70's. Saw et al is all about genre film-making.

Finally, how do you delineate between films such as Saw, and a film such as AntiChrist? Would the author feel the same way about AntiChrist? If not why not? Is it simply because horror movies have never been considered "arty" enough? What makes a film like AntiChrist a "worthy" exercise in film-making?

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David Libra

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PostPosted: Tue Jan 19, 2010 2:57 pm
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rocketronnie wrote:
David wrote:
rocketronnie wrote:
I've always thought cinema studies was the refuge of self absorbed wankers and this article proves that once again. I can't believe i just wasted ten minutes reading it. Twisted Evil


Really? What was your problem with it? I thought it was refreshing, well-argued and, if at times a little slavishly 'leftist', raised some very valid (or at least contestable) political issues.

There is no doubt that cinema studies, like any field of art criticism, can attract pretentious wankers, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of interesting discussion and analysis going on at the same time. This is very much the sort of field I want to get into myself (although I suppose some might see this as further proof of your sentiment Razz). But yeah, Cineaste is by far the more academic and arguably self-important of the film journals - I generally prefer Sight & Sound, myself.

Member (and anyone else who can't be bothered reading what is admittedly a bloody long article), the Cliff's Notes version is this: films like Saw and Hostel preach an essentially conservative world-view, by promoting vigilante retribution and backwards moralising and using them as an attempt to justify the voyeuristic and sadistic scenes of violence in the films. I have often thought much the same, and this is the first piece I've read which has seriously addressed my concerns about this genre.


The problem is no-one really cares about this stuff. Like who cares? its only an interpretation anyway, about as valid as an argument that says its a bloody good film because its blood splatters are originally and artistically shot.

The only people who care about this stuff is the author and a phone-box-sized group of cognoscenti who are into such elitist discourses. Most people who go see horror films dont base their choice of entertainment on whether it is left or right leaning, but on whether they are going to be entertained etc. Furthermore there is no way to measure whether the film has any effect on the politics of the viewer or not. Given that the critique has about as much validity as me asserting that Alpha Centuri is made of cheese.


But isn't this what art analysis is all about? Perhaps, admittedly, the problem is with mentioning a film like Saw in the same paragraph as art, but that opens up a can of worms - what films qualify as 'art' and why? I tend to delineate between films made with the primary purpose of turnover (e.g. most if not all the films made by Hollywood and the big American studios, Bollywood and mainstream films from Europe and everywhere else) and those aimed at the festival circuit and elsewhere, although I would never be so naive as to claim that there is no grey area.

Magazines like Cineaste and Sight and Sound tend to be a little more generous in the films they deign worthy of analysis, and hence you get essays like the one quoted here attacking the Saw films for their perceived lack of artistic merit and critiquing the political implications of the films. Keep in mind that Cineaste proclaims itself as "America's leading magazine on the art and politics of cinema", so whatever the validity of their mission statement, you have to say that they're reasonably committed to it.

Even if we throw away Saw's artistic credentials and look it as a pure work of entertainment, should we not be just as concerned about the use of violence as a hook and method of entertainment and systemic promotions of paradigms that support, say, vigilante behaviour? I disagree that movies have no effect on the world-views of the audience - it's easy to underestimate just how much influence movies, tv and pop culture have on our conception of society and even our behaviour.

Deja Vu wrote:
Horror films have always been about revenge, and (im)morality. Look at some of the "classics" from the 70's. Saw et al is all about genre film-making.

Finally, how do you delineate between films such as Saw, and a film such as AntiChrist? Would the author feel the same way about AntiChrist? If not why not? Is it simply because horror movies have never been considered "arty" enough? What makes a film like AntiChrist a "worthy" exercise in film-making?


If we take your penultimate paragraph to be true (which I agree with, largely - the horror genre has never really done much for me), then there is your delineation between a film like Antichrist and a film like Saw. The former, for better or for worse, does aspire to artistic intentions and was probably not made with the primary purpose of making money (whether the primary purpose was to feed Lars Von Trier's huge ego is another question). The reason why we keep seeing Saw sequels every year is because the first movie was marketable and the filmmakers clearly have a successful formula that audiences are comfortable and familiar with. If Lars Von Trier were to announce that he was going to make Antichrist II, I might concede your point, but there's something fundamentally different going on here.

You've actually summed it up better than I probably could have. Saw is genre film. You know pretty much exactly what you're going to get, and that's one of the main reasons why it's so popular. Antichrist is the antithesis of genre film, subversive, and, not irrelevantly, technically brilliant in almost all of its aspects.

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stui magpie Gemini

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Joined: 03 May 2005
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 19, 2010 7:39 pm
Post subject: Reply with quote

rocketronnie wrote:
David wrote:
rocketronnie wrote:
I've always thought cinema studies was the refuge of self absorbed wankers and this article proves that once again. I can't believe i just wasted ten minutes reading it. Twisted Evil


Really? What was your problem with it? I thought it was refreshing, well-argued and, if at times a little slavishly 'leftist', raised some very valid (or at least contestable) political issues.

There is no doubt that cinema studies, like any field of art criticism, can attract pretentious wankers, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of interesting discussion and analysis going on at the same time. This is very much the sort of field I want to get into myself (although I suppose some might see this as further proof of your sentiment Razz). But yeah, Cineaste is by far the more academic and arguably self-important of the film journals - I generally prefer Sight & Sound, myself.

Member (and anyone else who can't be bothered reading what is admittedly a bloody long article), the Cliff's Notes version is this: films like Saw and Hostel preach an essentially conservative world-view, by promoting vigilante retribution and backwards moralising and using them as an attempt to justify the voyeuristic and sadistic scenes of violence in the films. I have often thought much the same, and this is the first piece I've read which has seriously addressed my concerns about this genre.


The problem is no-one really cares about this stuff. Like who cares? its only an interpretation anyway, about as valid as an argument that says its a bloody good film because its blood splatters are originally and artistically shot.

The only people who care about this stuff is the author and a phone-box-sized group of cognoscenti who are into such elitist discourses. Most people who go see horror films dont base their choice of entertainment on whether it is left or right leaning, but on whether they are going to be entertained etc. Furthermore there is no way to measure whether the film has any effect on the politics of the viewer or not. Given that the critique has about as much validity as me asserting that Alpha Centuri is made of cheese.


Mate no one gives a stuff about a whole lot of rubbish that academics spend their lives and govt grants studying. This is no more or less valid than heaps of others.

Doesn't mean I read it though Razz Too long and I'm not interested in the topic. The Saw and Hostel movies are rubbish.

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