Captivity
Thursday, August 23rd, 2007Quick cut-out-and-keep guide to Captivity.
1. In it, Elisha Cuthbert plays a blonde hottie who gets kidnapped by a sicko
2. But it was re-edited to feature more torture…
3. …so it could be a proper torture-porn film, like Hostel and those Saw films that do so well
4. It was directed by Roland Joffe, who once directed The Killing Fields, and who has, with this, descended so low that he must now think of The Scarlet Letter as ‘the good times’.
I’ve seen it, Captivity. It was lame, it was boring, it contains a romantic sub-plot that simply beggars belief, and I sat wondering what all the fuss was about.
And there was fuss about Captivity – oh yes – an awful lot of it. First, because the film was re-edited to contain those aformentioned torture scenes not originally present. But mainly because, with its new torture-porn-friendly coat of paint, the studio launched an ad campaign featuring Elisha Cuthbert’s bruised and bloodied face that offended Los Angeles so much that studio chiefs were forced to withdraw it, look downcast and chew on their lips apologetically.
As a controversial sidebar to the controversy, Buffy man Joss Whedon partly used Captivity as the launch pad for a strongly worded and beautifully well-argued blog about global misogyny. He was appalled by the notion of Captivity, its implicit message about the treatment and standing of women in our society. His is a brilliant blog. Here’s a bit from it.
“Somewhere a long time ago a bunch of men got together and said, “If all we do is hunt and gather, let’s make hunting and gathering the awesomest achievement, and let’s make childbirth kinda weak and shameful.” It’s a rather silly simplification, but I believe on a mass, unconscious level, it’s entirely true. How else to explain the fact that cultures who would die to eradicate each other have always agreed on one issue? That every popular religion puts restrictions on women’s behavior that are practically untenable? That the act of being a free, attractive, self-assertive woman is punishable by torture and death? In the case of this upcoming torture-porn, fictional. In the case of Dua Khalil, mundanely, unthinkably real. And both available for your viewing pleasure.”
He’s made his feelings on Captivity known to the MPAA. More power to him that he’s prepared to do something about the issue. Something about his argument troubles me, though; specifically, his linking real-life footage of Dua Khalil’s honour killing (recorded by men on their mobile phones) to a horror film. To buy into his argument, you also need to believe that people who watch horror films do so for deeply unpleasant reasons, namely that they endorse the idea of inflicting pain on young women. But I don’t think so. I think horror film viewers come to the genre for a number of reasons: for the films’ transgressive allure, for catharsis, because they love a good safe scare or because they like to see characters in films overcome challenges, and being chased by a guy with a chainsaw is a bigger challenge than revising hard to get four Bs in your GCSEs.
But not because they enjoy inflicting pain on people — or even like the idea in hypothesis. In fact, it may be well be the opposite. Perhaps the audience for Captivity is present to work out some sub-conscious deep-seated fears they have about torture committed in their name, by their government. Maybe making the victim Elisha Cuthbert is the only way to present that concept in semi-palatable form to a viewing public, and perhaps Roland Joffe has not made a crock, a film that will slide into obscurity, notable only for its William Castle-esque attempts at shock promotion, but a revolutionary and subversive allegory for the treatment of terrorist suspects in the post-9/11 era…
Well, I’ve seen it, and I reckon not. But here’s the thing: there’s another mis-step in Whedon’s commentary – that the Cuthbert character dies. She doesn’t. She defeats the sicko. I wouldn’t go as far as saying she’s empowered exactly, but she gets up and walks away. Firstly, I’m not sure it’s completely fair to compare that scenario with that of Dua Khalil. Secondly, I wonder, has Joss Whedon seen Die Hard 4.0? You know the scene I’m thinking of…