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Notes on Gore

Constintina

I had about half a post written about  my sometime contentious relationship with veganism (I am vegan), PETA, food justice, and a whole mess of other stuff, but then Renee had to go make an excellent post about the frequent failings of PETA and too many other animal rights orgs and activists in recognizing the history of dehumanization of people of color.  The comments are still going strong, and I should probably wade through them before throwing my hat in the ring of related ish.

So instead I will finish up this post about  my special feelings towards Violent Movies.  Specifically, GORY movies.  I love them.  Sometimes.

There’s a lot of talk these days on my corners of teh  interwebz about Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarentino’s latest, an ahistorical revenge fantasy filled with Jews gorily killing Nazis.  Quentin Tarantino is not Jewish, so far as I know, nor is the fictional head of the Nazi-vanquishing title outfit played by Brad Pitt.  Brad Pitt is supposed to be part American Indian, however, which is why he and his Basterds like to scalp Nazis.  This all rings a little…problematic to me.  I’m also not here to defend the film (which I haven’t seen) or QT’s oeuvre, which is also problematic, to say the least.  I am just here to discuss the fact that I find the idea of Eli Roth beating the bloody hell out of a Nazi with a baseball bat to be rather appealing. I’m planning to go see the thing–get a large popcorn and soda and (hopefully) enjoy the hell outta some air conditioning for a few hours. Setting Nazis on fire?  Sounds good to me.  As my internet friend Sabotabby wrote:

It’s a movie that has Brad Pitt killing a bunch of Nazis in brutal and historically improbable ways. Either you read that and go “DUDE, AWESOME” or you don’t. I think you know by now which camp I fall into.

I got into a brief discussion about “torture porn” with another internet friend earlier today, prompted by a discussion of said film.  He said that it was “torture porn” and thus vile. He thought torture, and thus “torture porn”, was inexcusable.  I think that torture is inexcusable. “Torture porn” is a made-up nongenre that links together often very disperit films based upon the vague idea that they eroticize or sensationalize or just depict graphic acts of torture (or other gory violence) for the audiences viewing pleasure.  Everything from Hostel to Saw III (et al) to Funny Games has been widely referred to as “torture porn”, despite their widely varying intents and treatments of violence.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Back to my defense of Inglourious Basterds against charges of evilness by virtue of being “torture porn”.

Revenge fantasies that involve oppressed people torturing their  oppressors are all fine and well, So far as I’m concerned.  They can be cathartic, they can be healing, they can be a lot of fun (at least for those of us who can distinguish between fantasy entertainment and reality, which hopefully those of us who are grown-ups can.)   Even besides the oppressed/oppressor context—fictional graphic violence can be can be cathartic and otherwise enjoyable for a variety of people for a variety of reasons.  I don’t think I’m so special a snowflake that my love of gore is wacky and subversive whereas all those other (probably dude) people are just sick. Fuck that.

I hope that most of us at Feministe are in a s/m sexually fantasies are not bad (0r good) in and of themselves.  Violent movies of the thrill-ride/cathartic horror variety are a similar thing.  If I hadn’t loaned my copy of Men Women and Chainsaws out and never gotten it back, I could look up some pertinent quotes.    One thing I know from doing phone sex and talking to countless cis straight-identified men watching (non-torture) porn is that the subject of identification in a given text (or film) may not be the one the author(director) intended or that a critic might expect.  We know what they say about making assumptions,  don’t we?  So I won’t judge anyone for liking “torture porn” or any other maligned violent genre in and of itself.

People across a lot of different demographics like violent movies.  Not just teenage boys, or grown men who think like the stupider of them as marketers have historically led us to believe.  I’ve been fascinated by gore ever since I used to sneak peeks at the boxes in the horror section of the video store when I was a little kid.  I’d have nightmares.  I wondered what could possibly happen in these terrifying, anything goes, sometimes X-Rated (Wizard of Gore!) monstrosities.  When I was older and actually started watching “real”, adult, horror I was sorely disappointed in how…crappy and boring most of it is. But I do enjoy a good, creative bloodbath, and I don’t think the art of depicting (fictional) violence is anything to sneeze at.

So, It annoys me time and time again to read stuff like the following, from Entertainment Weekly’s cover story on the Watchmen movie:

Snyder hopes the female fans he gained from 300 (and Gerard Butler’s abs) will watch Watchmen, too, though it’s hard to imagine that they’ll be buzzing about this film in the same way. ”I think its human themes appeal to all,” says Malin Akerman, whose character Silk Spectre is a knowing commentary on the obligatory superteam-sexpot heroine. ”But I do think men will have a much easier time swallowing all the violence.”

Hi. I’m a woman. I want more violence, pls, and I don’t give a fuck about Gerald Butler or his abs.

I was thrilled a couple months later when my friends at Entertainment Weekly (I‘ve been a subscriber for, like, over a decade.  They’re my friends.) ran an article about how OMG, we were all wrong!  the horror movie audience is generally actually slightly more female than male (just like the population overall is slightly more female than male, but lets not push things!)  Of course the article had to posit theories as to why this bizarre fact could be. Including that it (wait for it) gives them an excuse to cuddle with their boyfriends.  I’m fucking barfing right now,  No, I am, really.  I just did it again.  Also, can we just note that it’s a cliché as old as cinema itself that dudes like scary movies cuz they give them a chance to squeeze the hand of their ladydates.  But these are DIFFERENT, GENDERED grabby motivations, cuz dudes are just cuddling cuz they wanna score.

In any event, I’m excited for the main subject of the above-mentioned EW article, Diablo Cody’s Jennifer’s Body.  It is supposedly gory,  it’s both written and directed by women (a rarity in mainstream of the genre, or in Hollywood at all,) and it’s named after my favorite song on Hole’s classic Live Through This album.  So: I’m going.  I have this almost charitable project going of trying to make one-sided peace with Diablo Cody, who wrote the thing.  I want to support women in the film industry, I especially want to support current/former sex workers in the film industry who have written popular books, especially since one day I would like to be them. I want to be able to forgive her for subtitling her memoir Candy Girl “A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper”–implication being that all those uneducated trashy stereotypes are “likely”.  Unlike a witty blogstress such as herself who seems in interviews to have been more engaged with her work as an anthropology project than as a job.   I hope that all those reader reviews I’ve seen on Amazon about how patronizing she is when discussing her coworkers, how above other sex workers she posits herself as being are inaccurate…because while I thought Juno was extremely overrated, I would love to have this movie actually be good! I wanna get behind the ex-stripper with the Oscar! I’m not hating!

But I am digressing.

I know I’m not the only one here who appreciates some splatter.  Why do we like it? Why do you like it?  And even more interesting, why do some people find it upsetting that we do?

36 thoughts on Notes on Gore

  2. It’s funny, but I always assumed Tarantino was Jewish, too. Huh. I can’t imagine where I got the idea, but at least I’m not alone.

  3. Dude. Amen to every single word in this article. Y’know what I like? Monsters. Monsters squashing people and impaling them and eating their heads. I had pretty complicated feelings- which I haven’t been able to put into words- about Inglourious Basterds, but I was still pretty excited the whole way through. Mostly I’m just posting because it’s exhilarating to read another woman who likes gore just for its own sake (or maybe, more realistically, for reasons that she can’t boil down to a soundbite). Thank you for writing this.

  4. imogen:

    Y’know what I like? Monsters. Monsters squashing people and impaling them and eating their heads.

    ME TOO.

    Thank you so much for this comment. You just made my night.

  5. Funny enough, I was kind of looking forward to Diablo Cody’s next movie until I found out it was named after a Hole song, and I’ve decided I’ll give it a pass.

  6. I don’t find the idea of someone bashing a Nazi to a pulp to be high entertainment. But that might have something to do with the fact that my father is German, and that my Opa served in the war. He had to, or he would have been killed.

    I wish I could ride the joy train of blood and guts with Inglourious Basterds, but it’s an all too real horror that touches my family even today – my Dad has problems processing real emotions or showing vulnerability.

    Damn that reality getting in the way of good gory fun, eh? That said, I used to happily watch Evil Dead movies. Until I was assaulted, then all the rape kinda made it less fun and more anxiety-inducing.

  7. Napalm Nancey-

    There’s lots of violent entertainment that I find triggering an unfun as well. I in no way meant to undermine the many legitimate reasons that one might personally be unable to watch or enjoy a gory (or any kind of) movie.

    That said, people deal with grief and trauma in different ways.

    I can empathize with you to some degree, as my grandfather also served in WWII (albeit on a different side) and, like pretty much everyone else I know who served in a war, came back scarred and unable to talk about it.

    I’m a failure as a gorehound and haven’t actually seen the evil dead movies save Army of Darkness. There’s rape in the first two? I didn’t know that and am glad I do as that’s often something that wrecks a movie for me.

  8. Constantina, there is a fairly infamous scene in the first Evil Dead movie wherein ones of the female characters is raped by a possessed tree.

  9. The trailers for Inglourious Basterds are actually a bit misleading. It’s less about Brad Pitt’s character scalping Nazis than it is about Shosanna (a French-Jewish character played by a French-Jewish actress, and pretty much the closest this movie has to a primary protagonist) planning to set Nazis on fire.

    As for gore, I tend to prefer mine animated — Dunno why, it just feels more impressive, for some reason. Luckily, my favorite gorefest ever happens to fit in this category. It’s a lot like Pulp Fiction, if Pulp Fiction was animated, set in the 1930s, and included immortal gangsters (you haven’t seen amazing gore until you’ve seen someone bleed in reverse.

  10. I used to get called “Nazi Nancy” as a kid because I was proud that my Dad was German. I had no idea about WW2, not a good idea. All I knew was that there were all these talented Germans that wrote classical music and made amazing boats and invented air ships and stuff. And my Dad, my endlessly clever Dad that built stuff from nothing and the kindly relatives from far away that would send me wonderful gifts. Needless to say, I was horrified when I finally learnt about what happened to the Jewish population, and I think a lot of German people carry a guilt about that. I know I do. I guess, Nazis are a great staple for being bad guys in movies, and I’m really down with that. I watch old war movies starring Kenneth Moore, etc, and Indiana Jones films. I love that, with the bad accents and the mowing down of the “Chermans” with the machine gun. But person-to-person violence, when you look a person in the eye, and you pound at them like an animal until they’re nothing but meat… that’s never right to me. I don’t care who is the victim.

    I mean, the reality of the war to me, the thing that makes me feel better about it all? Was the fact that my Grandfather, who was dropping bombs on Berlin in WW2, overcame his own PTSD and deep scars to let my mother marry a young German man, and in the end, they became good friends. Real healing, and nobody had to be beaten to a pulp in a fictional movie for that. But I’m a pacifist to the core, so I’m probably hard to speak to in this way.

    That said, I understand where you were coming from in this post, now that I’ve thought about it. I think bringing up Inglourious Basterds probably derailed it for me, and that’s a shame cause your core point is awesome: Women love horror and gore too. My little sister is a HUGE horror fan. She’d watch horror movies non-stop as a kid, it was the 80s, it was the best time to. She makes these brilliant zombie t-shirts and her art is deeply, deeply gory and bloody. And I fuckin’ LOVE it. You might too: http://originalnilson.deviantart.com She also sells t-shirts, by the way, and believe me, they are fuckin’ wicked.

    So, I guess one could say that I’m all for gore and horror. I’m all for it. Theatrical fun, yeah, it’s brilliant. But there are certain movies I find problematic and I’m not going to go soft on them for reasons of bolstering my feminist ideas (not that I’m saying you’re doing that – everyone is comfortable with different things in movies, kinda like with sex, it’s just that if I said I was okay with this movie, that’s what I’d be doing).

    Sorry I got you wrong! And thank you for acknowledging that Inglourious Basterds is problematic.

    Oh, and there’s rape in all three Evil Dead movies. First one and maybe the second one, there’s raping greenery (trees). In the third, the fair lady gets raped by the evil zombie Ash. It’s horrible. Which is a damned shame cause I really loves those movies, and I really, REALLY love Bruce Campbell. He’s a top guy and I love watching him work. I stick to Bubba Hotep these days.

  11. I love gory and scary movies and have been watching them since I was a kid. And, yup, I’m female and know quite a few other women at work who like scary movies.

    I like the thrill, I like seeing them beat the bad guy at the end, I like seeing interesting and new ways of killing people, I enjoy watching the fight choreography (more applicable to action movies, admittedly). Sometimes I like thinking about the things they don’t always explain in the movies, the whys and wherefores and what-abouts that surround the plots and characters in the movie.

    Violence in real life, even just yelling, is incredibly upsetting to me. In the movie it’s not real and I know it’s not real and even if I get caught up in the story, I never lose that knowledge.

    On that note, I really enjoyed Inglourious Basterds. But I know I like QT’s movies so I was expecting to like it.

    A friend said once that he can’t watch scary/gory movies because he always imagines the violence happening to him. I do too, to a certain extent and particular things really make me cringe, but I guess I don’t feel it quite as strongly as he does. He thought it was really odd but we never got a chance to really finish the conversation.

    Anyway, I don’t know if you’ve seen it before but I really like Final Girl.

  12. I grew up watching horror movies with my grandfather since I was old enough to spend the night. I can’t count how many times my parents got mad at him over it, but I’ve always loved them. I think for me it’s a safe way to vent about the idiots in the world you’ve always hated but can’t do anything about. Many times I actually root for the monster. Despite the relative gore-lessness of it, Shutter is one of my favorite movies ever now. If you haven’t seen it I highly recommend it. I won’t ruin the end, but let’s just say that the REAL bad guy gets his due.

  13. Hey, nice to read about other womne who watch horror and like gore.

    I’m not sure where it comes from but watching people ‘die’ in sick, inventive ways is just kind of fascinating. Maybe its to do with the reassuring tangibility (may not be a word) of gory deaths, the physical transformation from life to death and the stages in between, or how you can detach a skeleton from a person unless someone’s had thier scalp removed and you can see the skeleton behind the person, and its all just like oh, death, right there under the surface.

    And yeah vicarious pleasure at someone getting what they ‘deserve’. I mean ‘Last House on the Lef’t was bloody hard to watch for the first half but at the end, chucks per minute went way up.

  14. Suzanne-

    Ah, that rings a bell. Do you (or anyone else) have an opinion on how it was handled? Sexual violence is much more likely to bother me, but there are exceptions and rape by possessed tree might be one of them. The giant lobster raping Divine in Multiple Maniacs isn’t upsetting to me, for instance.

  15. I like action/violence in movies as long as it doesn’t touch too close to reality. Kill Bill? Tons of fun. Angel? I’m there. Requim for a Dream? Not so much.

    Violent movies which are particularly misogynistic I also find hard to watch—I couldn’t sit through all of Sin City.

  16. I feel it is important to point out that ‘Funny Games’ (dir. by Michael Haneke) is in NO way a “torture porn” flick. In fact, it turns the tables on the thrill-seeking set that enjoy watching torture. It takes the premise of violence as entertainment and makes the viewer uncomfortably aware that thay are no longer a mere observer – that in fact they are consumers of other fellow humans’ misery and pain. Funny Games seeks to blur the lines so that movie-goers can be challenged to examine their desensitization to horrific acts that in are quite non-fictional.

  18. I’m with Chava, fantastical violence is fine by me, the realistic stuff? eh I’ll pass.

    I’ve always considered torture porn as the kind of films that show women being tortured all sexily. I didn’t realize torture porn can encompass all kinds of movies but I can see how that makes sense too. But yeah, I won’t ever knowingly watch a movie with my definition of torture porn. That’s just not entertainment to me.

  19. It really depends on context for me, and sexual/sexualized violence pretty much always turns me off. I’m a big fan of Jhonen Vasquez (I know he’s not done a movie, but Johnny the Homicidal Maniac is ridiculously violent…in a good way), and I love Kill Bill, the Descent, etc . I’m even okay with the Final Destinations I’ve seen. I don’t know how I feel about Tarantino in general. I like some of his stuff, but sometimes he drives me up a wall. I walked out of Grindhouse. The hubs really wants to see this new one, though, so I’ll give it a shot.

  20. I like horror movies and revenge movies a LOT. Like everything else in this world, it’s complicated. I think it’s partially because I a very much afraid of violent death, and therefore fascinated. I can imagine all those awful things happening to me, vividly, too. I identify with the victims and root for evil to be vanquished, especially in revenge movies (Female Convict Scorpion, for example). I love the campy “fun” kind of violent movie, but I also appreciate movies that give the violence emotional weight and real horror. I think that art, such as film, is (or can be) the adult and appropriate place to express dark feelings. I also think this could be through creation of or even just experiencing the art.
    I am also morbidly curious. I just have to see the so-called extreme or “torture porn” movies for myself, can it really be that bad? (“Banned in 50 Countries!” “Sickest Movie of All Time!” etc. ) Most of the time no, it’s not that bad. Sometimes a movie will live up to the reputation it has, and I’ll be horrified and delighted at the same time. Two of the last I saw that did live up to the hype were Salo: 120 Days of Sodom (and only sort of, I was over-prepared for it and so not as shocked) and a short film called Cutting Moments.

  21. I really pretty much just can’t sit through the stuff that earns the torture-porn label (Saw, Hostel, Turista), and I don’t tend to like slasher flicks or horror that relies on human interaction and drama for most of the plot development. Ultra-violence and monsters are a huge selling point for me, though. It’s something of a problem with couple movies choices for me and my husband; he likes zombie movies where they’re a metaphor for the human condition and the movie focuses on the people, I want Dead Rising: The Movie.

    If somebody made a movie-length version of the t-rex vs. t-rex vs. t-rex vs. megagorilla fight scene in Peter Jackson’s Kong Kong I’d probably just park myself in the theater and not leave until the movie did. If someone remade Crank 2 without the epic levels of misogyny and racism, it would be one of my favorite movies. I’d enjoy the Zatoichi series a lot more if it weren’t generally so bizarrely bloodless, though I understand that they’d probably blow half the budget on squibs. If the rebooted 007 franchise decided to dispense with the spy stuff and just have Daniel Craig as a guy who’s commissioned to blow up stuff and start fights with anyone available every 5 minutes for Her Majesty, I wouldn’t care.

    The idea that I have to have some special vagina-related reason for any of the above (Liking movies about biplane-flying squids vs. allosaurs with chainguns facilitates cuddling!) is just weird.

    “”But I do think men will have a much easier time swallowing all the violence.””

    Srsly, Malin Akerman? Srsly? All the…six slo-mo fistfights? Maybe it was just the length diluting the action, but Watchmen seemed way less violent than it should have been, given the ass-beating-prone characters and mass-murder-conspiracy plot. It was certainly not excessive by the standards of an action movie.

  22. I don’t like violent movies or violence at all. It makes me very uncomfortable that I am expected [by the movie-maker or other people] to laugh or otherwise enjoy seeing people get mutilated. Generally the only context where I think it’s tolerable is when it is meant to be horrifying, to demonstrate how horrifying violence really is.

    But it’s interesting to read this article and comments to see how people can feel differently about it.

  23. Speaking of Nazi revenge flicks, I was rather looking forward to the Nazi zombie movie Dead Snow. It was a huge disappointment and I don’t recommend it. First of all, I was under the misguided impression that it was a group of young Germans who got to kill the Nazi zombies, and I thought it was kind of nice that the zombie genre would allow Germans to kill Nazis. But actually they were Norwegians. And then (SPOILER ALERT) the Nazi zombies prevailed in the end. And the movie itself was just a concatenation of every horror-film cliche imaginable, with huge swaths of extreme stupidity.

    I understand the point made about how beating Nazis to a pulp might not be the best entertainment out there. But it’s what I generally like about the zombie and vampire genres — they have interesting things to say about how unnatural immortality is. In the case of zombies, immortality is actually repugnant and we want to put it right. Maybe I am hyperintellectualizing what is simply gore, but in gaining closure after killing zombies, we are reminded that death is an inevitable outcome of life, and something that we ultimately cannot win a fight against.

  24. I love horror movies, whether they’re genuinely frightening or hilariously awful, and I find that most recent hyperviolent gorefest movies fall into the latter category (I giggled all through The Descent). I’m also usually rooting for the monsters (they’re just defending their habitat).

    But I really don’t like Tarantino, and the idea of a Jewish revenge fantasy helmed (in the movie and in reality) by a non-Jew bothers me quite a lot. It seems to imply that we can’t defend or avenge ourselves without the guiding hands of “real men.” Or maybe I’m being too sensitive. Plus, what about all the other people who weren’t part of the perfect Nazi world? Don’t gay, disabled, Roma, and political victims have just as much of a claim to fantasy revenge?

  25. I am not a fan of horror movies, mainly because I often have nightmares and racing thoughts at bedtime that are specifically linked to the some aspects of the movie. Even while the movie is happening, I usually feel like I’m (over)reacting to the action onscreen as if I were part of the action rather than viewing a piece of fiction. So, I try to avoid suspense and horror movies for those reasons. I admit I have wondered why on earth some people like gory movies in the past. As I’ve aged though, I have accepted the fact that divining or judging other peoples motives is not really useful or necessary.

    However. I really enjoyed some of Q.Tarantion’s movies for the Quality of the Filmmaking and have suffered throught the consequences of my cognative dissonance while watching them. I dont’ remember having any nightmares specific to his movies either, although, my wicked subconscious will probably rectify that for me tonight with some Ingloriously Barterdized Nightmare. I also thought Silence of the Lambs was spectacularly made, but totally stressed me out in ways that would take up too much space to detail. Suffice it to say lesson learned on that one.

  26. I am not a fan of horror movies, mainly because I often have nightmares and racing thoughts at bedtime that are specifically linked to the some aspects of the movie.

    That’s my deal, too. A pretty ridiculously un-scary movie (like Signs, fer chrissakes!) can scare me to the point where it affects my quality of life for *months* afterwards (seriously, depending on the movie sometimes I can’t sleep, sometimes I can’t be alone without being terrified at night, I used to get panic attacks in the late afternoon ’cause it would start to get dark out…) Violence I don’t mind so much, but things that are out-to-get-you I can’t stand. I’m a very visual person too, so *seeing* something is a lot worse than reading about it — until I imagine what it might look like and then I’m screwed (reading a plot summary of a TV show online had me jumping at shadows for a week because I read it and then promptly imagined a very convincing image of the concept.)

    It’s a pain ’cause I even often enjoy these movies and shows as I’m watching, and I’m might think I’m perfectly fine, then the next day I’m a basket case all night. Makes it hard to watch a lot of popular stuff with people too — I hate to explain that sure, watching Supernatural might be enjoyable as hell and I might be fine, or the first episode might scare the living fuck outta me and force me to inspect the ceiling of every room I enter multiple times a *minute* and check behind me for ghost women every few seconds for 3 days (which, yes, the latter option was the reality as it turned out. Sigh.)

  27. Quentin Tarantino is not Jewish, so far as I know, nor is the fictional head of the Nazi-vanquishing title outfit played by Brad Pitt. Brad Pitt is supposed to be part American Indian, however, which is why he and his Basterds like to scalp Nazis. This all rings a little…problematic to me.

    I went and saw Inglorious Basterds over the weekend and I think the movie has gotten some uneven press because its structured in an odd way. I’ll do my best to avoid spoilers. There is certainly some degree of revenge fantasy in the film, but thats mostly parallel plot and character motivation. Fundamentally, the film is a genre western set in Nazi occupied France.

    In Deathproof QT took the basic “maniac killer hunting women” trope of Grindhouse fare and had a bit of fun inverting it and turning the maniac killer into the hunted party. I think he’s doing a similar thing in Inglorious Basterds. Because the film is so deeply rooted in the western genre, you have the old trope of “cowboys and indians.” The Jewish soldiers, the German/Aryan soldier in the Basterds, and their part-Native American leader, are playing the part of the “savage indian” that is so central to the whole western genre while the Nazis are playing the civilized, intelligent, white lawmen. With a bit of perspective QT fucks around with how you’re generally supposed to approach those tropes. That inversion is part of why the final scene in the film is so satisfying. QT uses perspective to invert who gets to be the hero and who gets to be the villain just as in Deathrpoof he inverted who gets to be the hunter and who gets to be the victim. There are certainly a ton of problems and blindspots in the film (which pretty much sums up QT’s career), but I don’t think the problem of a non-Jew directing a Jewish revenge fantasy is among them because that really isn’t what the Basterds plot is about (the theater plot could well be, though).

  28. Napalm Nacey:
    That’s awesome about your sister. thanks for the link and your thoughtful respone.

    Dena:

    I think for me it’s a safe way to vent about the idiots in the world you’ve always hated but can’t do anything about. Many times I actually root for the monster.

    Absolutely! Same. And I will check out shutter, thx for the recomendation!

    chava :

    I feel similarly. I actually hated Requim for a Dream, though largely cuz I thought it was at heart an exploitative, psuedo-edgy DARE psa that was racist, to boot. It came out around the same time as Traffic, and I found the portrayals of black people in both films to be frighteningly similar and A Problem, but that’s really a whole other bowl of fish.

    I had mixed feeling towards Sin City–parts were so visually strikining and awesome, others made me want to smack someone, and not in a nice way. Mostly it pissed me off cuz I like Clive Owen and hated how he swept in to save hookertown, when the hookers were really doing just fine without him. Sigh. Wait, there were lots of other things I hated too…

    cpinkhouse:

    You are totally right, and that’s exactly why I threw it in there–I read multiple reviews that derided it as “torture porn”. They completely missed the point, of course, but still that’s part of how the film (the remake, at least,) was marketed and categorized in the public imagination, which is ridiculous.

    Linoleum Blownaparte:

    Thank you! I will watch that asap.

    groggette (Ali) :

    I’ve always considered torture porn as the kind of films that show women being tortured all sexily.

    Yeah, I think that’s the impression a lot of people have, but a lot of it it (maybe most of it? hard to quantify) isn’t that at all. Hostel, which may be the archetypical “torture porn” film, isn’t that. There are tons of problems with it in terms of playing into sexism and homophobia, but the crux of the film is some stupid (male) US American sex tourists getting punished for their misogynist imperialism. Really. The Saw movies didn’’t even really go there, to my recollection, until the third one, which is a big part of why I’ve been so hesitant to watch the most recent few. That and the fact that they’re terrible movies, but the first two were fun, terrible movies.

    Kate J:

    I am also morbidly curious. I just have to see the so-called extreme or “torture porn” movies for myself, can it really be that bad?

    Same, I still have that 7 year old girl in the video store inside me. I actually have a standing date to watch Salo with a friend who doesn’t want to see it alone. I’ve never heard of Cutting Moments, I’ll look into it.

    preying mantis:

    Maybe it was just the length diluting the action, but Watchmen seemed way less violent than it should have been, given the ass-beating-prone characters and mass-murder-conspiracy plot.

    For real. Wish they coulda cut that godawful sex scene and thrown some more violence in.

    Asenath Waite:

    But I really don’t like Tarantino, and the idea of a Jewish revenge fantasy helmed (in the movie and in reality) by a non-Jew bothers me quite a lot. It seems to imply that we can’t defend or avenge ourselves without the guiding hands of “real men.” Or maybe I’m being too sensitive. Plus, what about all the other people who weren’t part of the perfect Nazi world? Don’t gay, disabled, Roma, and political victims have just as much of a claim to fantasy revenge?

    I have really mixed feelings towards Tarantino. Sometimes I hate him, sometimes I kind of like some of his stuff, etc. He’s talented, but often infuriating. I also had kinda “huh?” feelings about Tarantino/Pitt leading the Jews through their revenge–I still want to see it and hope it will be fun, but it totally does seem to play into stereotypes.

    Your point about others persecuted in the holocaust is REALLY important and I agree 100%. I think that perhaps at this moment, Jewish fanatsy revenge against Nazis is probably more palatable (or at least seen as more profitable) in a Hollywood film than queer or romany or disabled revenge. ?uestlove recently tweeted about whether Hollywood would make a big revenge fantasy set during US slavery with enslaved blacks brutalizing whites–probably not.

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  30. Don’t gay, disabled, Roma, and political victims have just as much of a claim to fantasy revenge?

    Ok, without spoiling too much, I’ll say this: the biggest act of revenge in Inglorious Basterds is carried out not by the Americans and their white leader but by a French woman of Jewish descent and her French lover of African descent. What happens transpires in Paris, as a direct result of occupation, with no outside aid or knowledge. The Basterds are ultimately irrelevant to the major events of the film’s climax.

  31. “In the third, the fair lady gets raped by the evil zombie Ash.”

    Is this in a special edition? I’ve seen that movie like five times and never seen a rape scene.

    “It’s a lot like Pulp Fiction, if Pulp Fiction was animated, set in the 1930s, and included immortal gangsters”

    Title pls?

    “Two of the last I saw that did live up to the hype were Salo: 120 Days of Sodom (and only sort of, I was over-prepared for it and so not as shocked) and a short film called Cutting Moments.”

    You may want to check out Martyrs, if you haven’t.

    “I think that perhaps at this moment, Jewish fanatsy revenge against Nazis is probably more palatable (or at least seen as more profitable) in a Hollywood film than queer or romany or disabled revenge.”

    It probably has to do with the perception of systemic anti-semitism as a thing of the past, so a film about Jews vs. Nazis is comfortably anchored somewhere else in time and place. Pretty much everyone else who got swept into the death camps for apolitical reasons (queer, Roma, Muslim, disabled, etc.) is still being oppressed to one degree or another, so it gets uncomfortable/incendiary for modern audiences pretty quickly. The fact that we haven’t really had movies about actual slave revolts out of Hollywood leads me to believe there’s no way in hell they’d make a revenge fantasy about it.

  32. Is this in a special edition? I’ve seen that movie like five times and never seen a rape scene.

    The edition I own doesn’t have an explicit rape scene or anything, but theres definitely the implication. She gets delivered, Evil Ash makes some tasteless comments (can’t remember off the top of my head), grabs the struggling woman, reprises the “Gimme some sugar, baby” line from earlier, and leans in to kiss her as the scene cuts. Not exactly ambiguous.

  33. “And even more interesting, why do some people find it upsetting that we do?”

    I thought I’d reply to this. I don’t find it upsetting that people like these movies because I believe in freedom of choice and everyone has different likes and dislikes. But ever since I got out of high school (and was less influenced by friends) I stopped watching movies like this. I want feel good movies as much as possible and violence doesn’t make me feel good. Maybe it seems more real to me than other people even though I logically know it’s fake. And there is enough bad and violent stuff happening in the real world that I don’t want to watch it in movies. I want to laugh when being entertained. Drama without much violence is okay too sometimes.

  34. Quentin is not Jewish, that’s true; however, Eli Roth is. There’s a Roth interview from last week detailing how Tarantino consulted Roth and met his family at a gathering, on where to go with this concept, and whether the concept of granting absolution could enter into this storyline. Roth said no, absolutely not. Roth’s opinion is likely obvious due to the nature of his films, but there it is. The interview is linked- it doesn’t have everything the one I Stumbled on last week did, but it’s a close approximation:

    http://www.slashfilm.com/2009/08/21/interview-eli-roth-talks-inglourious-basterds-going-method-to-play-the-bear-jew-nazi-atrocities-and-quentin-tarantinos-place-in-history/

    Haven’t actually seen the movie, but plan to this week. There are parts of Tarantino’s work I like (Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction were corny but entertaining) and parts I don’t (Exploitation revival flick Deathproof and it’s conjoined twin whose name I forget dear god no), but I’ll give this one a shot.

  35. two quick things:

    first:
    “I think that perhaps at this moment, Jewish fanatsy revenge against Nazis is probably more palatable (or at least seen as more profitable) in a Hollywood film than queer or romany or disabled revenge.”

    It probably has to do with the perception of systemic anti-semitism as a thing of the past, so a film about Jews vs. Nazis is comfortably anchored somewhere else in time and place. Pretty much everyone else who got swept into the death camps for apolitical reasons (queer, Roma, Muslim, disabled, etc.) is still being oppressed to one degree or another, so it gets uncomfortable/incendiary for modern audiences pretty quickly. The fact that we haven’t really had movies about actual slave revolts out of Hollywood leads me to believe there’s no way in hell they’d make a revenge fantasy about it.

    i think this is true to a degree, but i think it has at least as much to do with the relationship between folks in (political, social and cultural) positions of power in the u.s. and zionism. the uncritical support for the israeli state and its ideology that dominates the u.s. political landscape makes racialized violence involving jews one of the least threatening things to portray, as long as it sticks to one of the two main narratives: jews vs. nazis / jews vs. arabs. in either of these, jews killing people in messy ways is seen as A Good Thing, or occasionally A Complicated Thing (which makes it Okay After All). take “Munich” or “Waltz with Bashir” as parallels to “Basterds” and the pattern is pretty visible.

    this is, clearly, pretty fucked up. and also disappointing. i mean, if i’m going to see a good revenge story involving folks an ashkenazi mischling like me shares a history with, can i get it without the racism (anti-arab and otherwise) (and btw, quentin, if i’m not horribly mistaken scalping’s a british thing that got introduced to the americas as part of a colonial bounty-hunting program)? and without making Those Evil Germans the point, as if the u.s. government and corporations weren’t pretty damn complicit in setting up that lovely little attempted genocide? and even without erasing the millions of non-jewish folks killed in that period (from anarchists and secularists in franco’s spain to queers and roma in nazi-occupied europe to tokyo and dresden’s incinerated citizens to the thousands upon thousands of radicals massacred by u.s.-supported post-war regimes all over southeast asia…)? thanks.

    second:

    constintina, you once wrote this brilliant post on why radicalism and goth go together. i can’t quite reproduce the argument, but i think it’s relevent to the gory movies too… can you cut & paste that snippet into this thread?

  36. @Rozele-

    Great comment and also, oh man, do you mean that coming-out-as-goth thing I wrote some years ago? I’ll look for it, and anything else goth related I have in the archives.

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