Just say no to torture porn

Though I'd be much happier if Joss Whedon got back to writing and directing movies, he can be just as insightful when he simply writes a diatribe.

I should be in a good mood this morning. I saw one pretty good movie ("Gracie") and one truly great one ("Knocked Up," reviewed in the previous post) last weekend, but all that good karma was just about wiped out when I woke up to find out that "Hostel 2" opens this weekend, and the even more disgraceful "Captivity" comes only two weeks later.

Now, I haven't seen the original "Hostel" because, well, it's just really not my thing. I enjoy a good horror movie, but the recent spate seems to be all about mutilation and nothing about suspense.

In the sequel, the apparently clever part is that it's young women we get to watch getting tortured rather than young men. In this case it's Laura German, Bijou Phillips and Heather Matarazzo (and I thought I would see anything with her in it, but certainly not now.) Elisha Cuthbert gets the honor of being abused on the big screen in "Captivity."

If you enjoy this kind of thing, you won't get any verbal abuse from me. I'm only asking that you stop and think for a minute before spending your money on this rather repulsive fare. I can't really put into words how much this disgusts me, so I'll let Joss Whedon do it for me.

On the great Whedonesque site, he recently unleased a rant titled "Let's Watch a Girl Get Beaten to Death." What set him off was the recent stoning death of 17-year-old Dua Khalil Aswad in Iraq, which was taped by standersby with cellphones and widely distributed on the Internet (please, I beg of you, do not now try and go find video of this.) Anyways, here's an excerpt of Mr. Whedon's insight, followed by a link to where you can read the rest of it. I highly recommend you take the time to do so.

A few of you may know that I took public exception to the billboard campaign for this film, which showed a concise narrative of the kidnapping, torture and murder of a sexy young woman. I wanted to see if the film was perhaps more substantial (especially given the fact that it was directed by “The Killing Fields” Roland Joffe) than the exploitive ad campaign had painted it. The trailer resembles nothing so much as the CNN story on Dua Khalil. Pretty much all you learn is that Elisha Cuthbert is beautiful, then kidnapped, inventively, repeatedly and horrifically tortured, and that the first thing she screams is “I’m sorry”.

Women’s inferiority – in fact, their malevolence -- is as ingrained in American popular culture as it is anywhere they’re sporting burkhas. I find it in movies, I hear it in the jokes of colleagues, I see it plastered on billboards, and not just the ones for horror movies. Women are weak. Women are manipulative. Women are somehow morally unfinished. (Objectification: another tangential rant avoided.) And the logical extension of this line of thinking is that women are, at the very least, expendable.

If we were all told the sky was evil, or at best a little embarrassing, and we ought not look at it, wouldn’t that tradition eventually fall apart?

I have never had any faith in humanity. But I will give us props on this: if we can evolve, invent and theorize our way into the technologically magical, culturally diverse and artistically magnificent race we are and still get people to buy the idiotic idea that half of us are inferior, we’re pretty amazing. Let our next sleight of hand be to make that myth disappear.

The sky isn’t evil. Try looking up.

For as long as I live, I will never be able to put it any better than that. To read the rest, click here, and please, please, please don't go see "Hostel 2" this weekend. It should be a fine summer weekend, so surely you can find something else to do. Hell, I might even go see "Knocked Up" again.