Abject Hostility

Eli Roth's Hostel is a patently ridiculous post-slasher typically cited as the inception of the "torture porn" or "gorno" genre. Hostel is a kind of juvenile exercise in tolerance and excess, making only the grandest and most ridiculous gestures in order to test the audience for what they can accept and digest (and stomach). Roth gets derided in popular film criticism for shooting gore for the sake of gore and for being somehow morally corrupt, but in comparison to a lot of international horror cinemas—most obviously the trendy Asian Extreme pictures from Japan, Hong Kong, and Korea—its violent content is fairly tame. Being that the movie is presented by Quentin Tarantino, and seeing as how Roth posits himself to be a sort of Tarantino underling or disciple, we might consider the presentation of violence in Hostel as comparable to that of Pulp Fiction, where there is an excess of violent acts taking place narratively but very few (if any) taking place explicitly on-screen. For a film ostensibly about torture chambers in Eastern Europe, Hostel really only has one or two extended torture sequences, and most of the torture itself is implied: When our second protagonist falls prey to his torturer, his body is gored with a power drill and his tendons are slashed with a surgical knife, but in neither case do we actually witness these inflictions (instead we see his writhing body and pained face; we fill in the rest mentally); later, when our final surviving protagonist faces a nervous German torturer, he manages to avoid all but one graphic injury—the severing of two of his fingers, which is one of the only explicit injuries shown film-wide. As Marissa mentions in her blog entry on the film, the film's only real explicitly violent and aesthetically excessive sequence involves the removal of a girl's injured eyeball, at which point the violence is so absurdly indulgent as to resemble Tom Savigny splatter stuff—which stuff is typically intended to be more tantalizing and amusing than frightening or shocking.

Curious, then, that Hostel is usually considered in the context of films which break the rule of 'what you don't see is scariest'. Horror, and particularly slashers, liked to build tension in the classical Hitchcockian style: continue to subvert expectations by denying audiences the thrill of actually seeing what they're most scared of seeing, thereby heightening the impact when they actually see it. Hostel, Saw, and the rest of the splat-pack glut get slammed for showing us too much too often, but that's simply not the case: even just structurally, Hostel denies the audience what most probably paid and expected to see for the longest conceivable time, opting to build tension by dangling the expected inevitable for the film's first three quarters.

Marissa talks a fair deal about the subversion of slasher stereotypes and typical conventions in Hostel, with particular regard to its use of men as dramatic leads and primary targets. I think the decision is unusual by the standards of slashers, but it makes good demographic sense: the movie's target audience is young males, who are invited to identify with and live vicariously through the male characters on-screen. The implications of the identification are two-fold: on the one hand, eager young males (presumably, and I am generalizing a little here) identify with the "cool" male leads, hypothetically high-fiving each other in their theatre seats when the bro-tastic crew bang hot chicks and call each other fags. The earlier sequences encourage viewers to project ideal versions of themselves onto the male leads, with the potential for idealizing their world-traveling, pot-smoking, bar-carousing ways, which, when the heads finally start to roll, makes for big scares. The old slasher model operated under the pretense that young (heterosexual, white) males would prefer to see young (heterosexual, white) females in lead roles because of the potential for some Laura Mulveyian girl-Gazing (I guess), which is to say that if you're going to properly entertain your paying males, you'd better give them something to stare it. Hostel takes a different approach, but a financially/cinematically/demographically sensible one: Construct your slasher like a classical Hollywood film and have the strong, idealized male protagonists a)situated as both victims and heroes, allowing for frightening identification when characters are tortured and killed and pleasing identification when a character finally escapes/saves the day/gets revenge, b)characterized as safe Americans by contrast to the scary foreign Other, and c)set-off against a background of passive (attractive!) females who are (of course) both i)desirable sexual objects to be conquested and ii)devious backstabbers who must be punished by graphic vehicular slaughter. Cough. So, like: Marissa, you can relish in the torture of the males all you like, but remember that Eli Roth hates women, foreigners, homosexuals, and anybody unlike himself (probably).

UNLESS: This is a satire, ho ho! I doubt it, but whatever: This could be some scathing attack on consumerism and a critique of all of the things I just slammed the movie for being. Sure, entirely plausible. But I'm skeptical.

ALSO: Speaking of Eli Roth hating homosexuals, there's some really weird/interesting stuff going on earlier in the film with regards to the relationship between Josh and the Dutch torturer, but any somewhat vague or cleverly ambiguous insinuations are kinda left aside when the murdering actually begins. Being that Paxton is continually and so vocally homophobic, calling everybody a fag on every possible occasion and asserting his masculinity and heterosexuality wherever and whenever possible, it's a little uncomfortable when he goes on his end-scene Dutch-killing rampage and murders the only character with a somewhat unclear sexuality. Not saying that the movie itself is especially anti-homosexual or even homophobic, and I'm sure Eli Roth would defend himself by arguing that the film portrays American teens as they really are!, which is, like, homophobic and stuff, I guess, but Paxton's role as unstoppable hero muddles that a bit.

And ALSO: I feel really weird watching this movie in the beginning because I have no idea how a)I personally relate to it or engage with it and b)how I'm supposed to be relating to it and engaging with it, because I'm never entirely sure whether the movie wants me to despise the jock guys who play our protagonists (which, I kinda do, because they're pretty reprehensible and dislikeable, with the only remotely non-douchey one remaining totally passive/weak in relation to his more assertive and jocky buddies) or just happily relate to them or think they're totally bad-ass and awesome. Because I get the impression, and again I am indeed generalizing, that this movie's primary audience does relate to these guys, and that a lot of college-aged guys behave like these guys behave, and if that's the case then I probably fall so far outside of the movie's intended demographic that any enjoyment I get out of must be accidental. Which is weird. Airhead American teens often misread stuff like A Clockwork Orange or Catcher In The Rye and find those characters unambiguously cool or respectable when the texts themselves seem to be examining the protagonists more critically, but I never get the sense that Hostel is treating its characters with such a distanced/cautioned eye. Last week I saw Full Metal Jacket at the Mayfair theatre, and this is a movie that's pretty critical of all but one of its lead characters, and in fact it often seems to be outright making fun of them for being cold/merciless/idiotic pawns of the military institution, and yet the theatre was full of (generalizing!) teenage guys who (literally) hooted and hollered anytime Adam Baldwin's character said something about sex or violence or both. And it's like: Am I missing something, or are they? I feel way less confident about the way I look at Hostel and the relationship between its protagonists and its characters, and maybe part of that has to do with how I consider Eli Roth in relation to, say, Stanley Kubrick, who seems a little more reasonable and subversive when it comes to corrupt characters.

So basically what I'm saying is that if you relate to the protagonists or think they're cool, help me out here. I don't get it.