How Hollywood embraced torture scenes post-9/11
Richard Beck examines how the ‘war on terror’ changed American TV and movies.
The 60 Minutes II segment on Abu Ghraib included an interview with General Mark Kimmitt, the deputy director of coalition operations in Iraq, who appeared on the broadcast to deliver the Army’s official response. Asked about the photograph of the dead man packed in ice, the first thing Kimmitt said was, “It’s reprehensible that anybody’d be taking a picture of that situation.” Dan Rather pounced: “Reprehensible that anybody would take a picture of that situation? What about the situation itself?” Rather’s response suggested he thought that Kimmitt was being evasive, or that he felt worse about documentation of the crimes than he did about the fact that crimes had occurred.
To some extent, this was a fair suggestion; Kimmitt was playing the role of the public relations crisis manager, and he spent much of the segment trying to insulate the military from the blowback that was obviously coming, insisting repeatedly that the abuses did not reflect the Army’s “values.” But Kimmitt’s reaction to the photographs shouldn’t be understood only as a PR maneuver. The photographs were not just documents of a crime—the camera was one of the weapons with which the crime had been committed. Nothing communicated the viciousness and ghastly inventiveness of the American guards at Abu Ghraib more effectively than the fact that they wanted to photograph what they were doing. The content of the photographs showed the kinds of abuse that were meted out, but the existence of the photographs showed that at least some of the soldiers were proud of what they were doing and had fun while doing it. At the very least, it showed that they were willing to stand by and not intervene. In that sense, the fact that someone had taken a picture of the dead man was the most reprehensible thing about the situation. It meant that beating a man to death wasn’t enough. It meant the Americans wanted to commemorate their own brutality and bring digital trophies home from the war as well. They might as well have scalped him.
Back home, Americans became obsessed with looking at scenes of torture. Torture became more common in action films and TV shows, and the violence depicted therein also became more explicit, as though producers and directors were trying to figure out exactly how much their audiences were willing to take. Before September 11, prime-time television showed its viewers fewer than four scenes of torture each year, on average. After September 11, that number began to increase, and three years after Abu Ghraib there were more than a hundred torture scenes broadcast during prime time each year. Understanding that viewers would identify with different characters at different moments—the hero, his woman, the villain, the captive—writers and directors considered torture from many different angles. What would it be like to torture someone? What would it be like to watch someone else torture someone? What if you loved the person being tortured? What if you hated them? What if it was yourself? Under what circumstances would it be justified?
The action drama 24 was at the heart of the country’s fascination with torture, and its writers came up with many different circumstances under which torture was justified. During the show’s second season, which was written and filmed after September 11, torture changed from an ancillary element of the show’s violent atmosphere to the main focus, and as a result 24 became the most popular show on television. Throughout the seasons, Bauer and his colleagues withhold medical treatment from a suspect (a radicalized white woman), torture a female co-worker who has betrayed the Counter Terrorist Unit, cut a terrorist with a knife until he passes out, step on a computer programmer’s bullet wound when he won’t divulge information, threaten to torture Jack’s ex-girlfriend, torture the adult son of the secretary of defense (with the secretary’s approval), torture a fellow CTU agent who they mistakenly think is a mole (they later apologize, and she goes back to work), and torture the husband of Bauer’s lover by electrocuting him. At one point, Bauer temporarily resigns from the CTU so that when he illegally tortures someone, it won’t officially be connected to the agency. In the fourth season, they torture a child. (Bauer himself also gets tortured from time to time, so as to keep one side from running up the score by too much.)
Hollywood movies embraced torture as well. In the fall of 2004 a low-budget horror movie called Saw was released in theaters across the country. The debut feature by the writer-director team Leigh Whannell and James Wan cost just over $1 million to make. Its thin plot revolves around two men who wake up in a dank room with tiled walls and floors. Sickly fluorescent light flickers overhead, the tile is crumbling, and the toilet is filled with shit. One of the men is chained to a bathtub, and the other is chained up on the other side of the room. A dead body lies on the floor between them, an apparent suicide by gunshot. Neither man knows how he got there, but they soon deduce that they have been kidnapped by a serial killer known as Jigsaw, who subjects his victims to various “games”—all of them involving torture—as a way of punishing them for their sins and flaws. A woman who is addicted to heroin is forced to kill a man who has been knocked unconscious by an opiate overdose. “Most people are so ungrateful to be alive,” Jigsaw tells her after she survives the ordeal. “But not you. Not anymore.” One of the men in the bathroom is unable to find the key that unlocks his chains, so he has to cut off his own foot with a hacksaw to escape. He’s a doctor, and he’s been targeted due to his cold bedside manner as well as the affair he’s having with one of his medical students. With its cast of B-list actors, cheap sets, and gory stunts, Saw took in more than $100 million worldwide. With a return on investment of about 8,500 percent, it was one of the most profitable movies ever made.
A new Saw film was released each year for the following six years. The franchise was extraordinarily influential, reviving what had been a marginal genre of extreme horror filmmaking. The 2005 film Hostel gave the Saw premise international scope, following a group of loud and naive American tourists whose backpacking jaunt through Europe sees them captured, tortured, and dismembered by a cabal of aristocratic European sadists. Hostel turned itself into a franchise as well. In the second installment, one of the victims is eaten alive, and one of the heroines cuts off a man’s penis and throws it into the open mouth of a snarling dog as she strides out of the room. In the third, a psychotic surgeon uses a scalpel to remove a victim’s face.
Torture made inroads with other genres as well. Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, released just two months before the publication of the Abu Ghraib photographs, focused overwhelmingly on the physical torture Jesus endured leading up to his crucifixion, and it became the highest-grossing Christian film of all time. In 2006, one critic at New York magazine finally came up with a name for the category: “torture porn.” “I’m baffled,” the critic wrote, “by how far this new stuff goes—and by why America seems so nuts these days about torture.” But the only baffling thing about it was the critic’s bafflement. By 2006, the country had spent nearly two years taking in as much torture as the studios could churn out, as though they were trying to build up a tolerance to the world in which they lived, a world where being a patriotic American now meant identifying with soldiers who beat people for fun and used markers to write slurs on their captives’ bodies.
Saw, 24, and The Passion of the Christ came from two different media and three different genres, but each of them presented its audience with a world in which torture was effective, inevitable, and above all necessary. Bauer never wanted to torture anybody, but circumstances always found a way to force his hand. Halfway through the show’s second season, Bauer captures a terrorist subject, ties him up, and shows him a live video feed on a TV. The terrorist’s wife and children have been captured as well, and American agents are pointing guns at them. If the terrorist doesn’t tell Bauer what he needs to know, the family will be killed. “I despise you for making me do this,” Bauer says. When the terrorist still refuses to reveal the location of the bomb, Bauer has one of his children shot. (The shooting turns out to have been staged, but neither the terrorist suspect nor the show’s viewers know that at the time.) Bauer lives in a world where there is always a clock ticking down, a nuclear bomb waiting to go off, or an assassination plot waiting to unfold, and all the ticking time bombs turn the legal protections of due process into a civic luxury the country can no longer afford. Bauer is a hero because he’s the only one strong enough to sacrifice his conscience on the altar of the greater good. “That’s the problem with people like you,” Bauer tells a colleague after shooting a suspect in cold blood. “You want results, but you never want to get your hands dirty.”
Similarly, the people in the Saw movies didn’t ask to be kidnapped by a psycho, and they certainly didn’t ask to be locked inside a lethal escape room, but the will to survive justifies anything. This is even true in The Passion of the Christ. Jesus doesn’t want to be tortured and killed. “Father,” he prays, “if thou be willing, remove this cup from me.” But God tells him that his ordeal, to which he must go willingly, will save the human race, make the forgiveness of sins possible, and usher believers into the kingdom of heaven. Gibson’s film makes it clear that the torture, the ordeal, is what made Jesus’s sacrifice so powerful. It wouldn’t have been enough for a centurion to sneak up from behind and run him through with a sword. The torture sanctifies his death.
In 2007, Jane Mayer wrote a magazine profile of Joel Surnow, the executive producer of 24. She spoke to Cyrus Nowrasteh, a hard-line conservative screenwriter and one of Surnow’s best friends. Nowrasteh told Mayer that he and Surnow thought of 24 as a post-9/11 fantasy, “a kind of wish fulfillment for America,” in Mayer’s words. “Every American wishes we had someone out there quietly taking care of business,” Nowrasteh said. “It would be nice to have a secret government that can get the answers . . . even kill people.” Part of the wish being granted by 24 is the desire to see a good man sacrifice his own happiness to save the day (Bauer’s love interests inevitably betray him, leave him, or die), but in the torture porn movies, evil frequently triumphs. The fantasy that unites 24, Saw, and The Passion of the Christ isn’t that the right side always wins; it is that heroes can do evil things without compromising their moral integrity, so long as they are forced to do them. That’s how Americans rationalized what happened at Abu Ghraib and the CIA black sites.
Even if the photos made it impossible to deny what U.S. soldiers had done, Americans could still cling to the belief that torture’s victims bore the ultimate responsibility because of their inherent savagery. Yes, we tortured our prisoners, they said, but only because they made us.
— An edited excerpt from Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life by Richard Beck.
