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The Extreme in Contemporary Culture
States of Vulnerability
Pramod K. Nayar
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eBook - ePub
The Extreme in Contemporary Culture
States of Vulnerability
Pramod K. Nayar
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About This Book
This is a study of vulnerability as a dominant cultural discourse today, especially as it manifests in ‘extreme cultures’. These are cultural practices and representations of humans in risky, painful or life-threatening conditions where the limits of their humanity are tested, and producing heightened sensations of pain and pleasure. Extreme cultures in this book signal the social ontology of humans where, in specific conditions, vulnerability becomes helplessness. We see in these cultures the exploitation of the body’s immanent vulnerability in involuntary conditions of torture or deprivation, the encounter with extreme situations where the body is rendered incapacitated from performing routine functions due to structural conditions or in a voluntary embracing of risk in sporting events wherein the body pits itself against enormous forces and conditions. The Extreme in Contemporary Culture studies vulnerability across various conditions: torture, disease, accident. It studies spaces of vulnerability and helplessness, the aesthetics and representations of vulnerability, the extreme in the everyday and, finally, the witnessing of (in)human extremes. Extreme cultures suggest shared precarity as a foundational condition of humanity. A witness culture emerges through the cultural discourse of vulnerability, the representations of the victim and/or survivor, and the accounts of witnesses. They offer, in short, an entire new way of speaking about and classifying the human.
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Chapter 1
Spaces of the Extreme
The vulnerability-helplessness dynamic of extreme cultures is spatially located. Spatial arrangements, whether torture chambers, prisons or the wide open sea (in extreme sports), determine the nature of the dynamics and the erosion of sovereignty of the body in such conditions. If torture chambers are spaces where absolute power asserts itself over the inmate’s body, then the sea or the mountain represents spaces where the individual voluntarily seeks helplessness, where the body is placed in unusual relations with extreme environments.
In all cases – extreme pleasure/thrill, extreme humiliation and extreme pain – the processes that generate these sensations are located in and enacted in spaces different from the protagonist-victim’s familiar spaces or routine. The BASE jumper or climber seeks places out in the wild. The tortured victim finds herself or himself in basements, the unfamiliar open places or specially designed chambers. Extreme spaces are extreme primarily due to the insertion of the body into settings radically distinct from the ones ‘it’ is used to. This results in alterations of perceptual frames of reference, and is integrated into the torture system in the films, and becomes the source of thrill and extreme sensation in extreme sports.
This chapter looks at two contrasting examples of extreme spaces. The involuntary or accidental incarceration of an individual in spaces that precipitate a crisis of sovereignty and destruction of subjectivity would be spaces of camps, prisons, torture rooms or even the great outside (snowbound and entrapped in Frozen, in a canyon in the vast spaces of Utah in 127 Hours, or on the bleak High Andes in Miracle in the Andes and Alive). Then there are the spaces of seas, mountains and rocks that individuals seek out, voluntarily, in order to generate and experience extreme sensations through the placing of their vulnerable bodies in situations of partially controlled helplessness.
(IM)MOBILITY AS VULNERABILITY
The vulnerability of humans folds into helplessness when their autonomy of movement is restricted. One of the most sustained modes of eroding the freedom of the individual has traditionally been incarceration. Writing about Nazi concentration camps, William Sofsky notes how these camps ‘compressed’ space and destroyed the territories of the person (p. 65). Steve Jones in his study of torture porn argues that torture spaces are spaces of control, where ‘supremacy is equated to spatial control in torture porn’ (p. 101). Torture spaces are architectures of control, where the body is made vulnerable in those spaces. The spaces of the body become spaces of the torturer’s control, and the physical spaces become the zones where this ‘inversion’, or Othering, of the spaces of the body takes place. One is helpless if s/he does not move, and helpless if s/he does.
Torture spaces are characterized by immobility regimes, whether in Abu Ghraib’s cells, in Saw’s specially designed chambers, basements in The Killing Room, suburban houses in The Last House on the Left, isolated houses in The Human Centipede (1 and 2), isolated villages in 2001 Maniacs, the outback of Wolf Creek or one’s own house in 99 Pieces. Immobility regimes work to destroy the sovereignty of the body, one of whose primary characteristics is mobility. These are regimes wherein running (to escape) does not alter the scope of the space – witness the killings in Wolf Creek, for instance. Immobility regimes are about forces of power and cruelty that often span places to be escaped from and places to be escaped to.
In the former (places to be escaped from), movement itself is the source of pain, and often of deadly danger. The traps in Saw and Cube, the highway in 2001 Maniacs (on which the fleeing kids are decapitated by a thin wire strung across the road) are instances of immobility regimes’ transformation of movement into dying moments. Immobility regimes in these films and representations, I propose, are modes of intensifying terrifying territoriality, because an escape route is kept open, or identified, only to ensure the protagonists’ death. Indeed visual parallels also exist. (One only has to look at the rows of cells in photographs from Abu Ghraib and the rows of closed metal doors of Hostel behind which unspeakable acts take place. The resemblance to the dungeons and labyrinths of gothic fiction and film is unnerving.1)
Immobility regimes are responsible for the space of the camp, or imprisonment, becoming extermination camps. (If the concentration camp was meant to elicit labour from the prisoners, the latter was simply created to send the Jews to their deaths, although many died of the hard labour in the concentration camps.) Take Saw, as an instance. In each case the prisoner is assured and even shown the route, often with helpful red arrows pointing in the direction, to escape the trap. The route is, of course, risky and entails the experience of considerable, even excruciating, pain. When Paul has to crawl across a cage full of barbed wire in Saw for example, he is given the option of leaving the confining space. But it is in the process of moving towards ostensible freedom that he dies. The space of imprisonment is transformed into the space of extermination, precisely in the moment of his movement towards leaving the former.
Immobility regimes are characteristic of extreme spaces in another, moral way. In order to escape a trap, the protagonist has to abandon, or sometimes kill, another protagonist. Her or his movement is shackled morally: by the obligation one human has towards another. In Scar, for example, we realize that Joan had escaped because she consented to her friend’s torture and death. In Koethi Zan’s novel, The Never List (2013), we realize towards the end that Jennifer escaped her own tortures by siding with the torturer Jack, as did the narrator of the tale, Sarah/Caroline. In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Chrissie runs out of the house even as she hears Bailey, her fellow captive, screaming inside. Steve Jones comments on the scene showing Chrissie hovering at the doorway of the house:
Movement away from the house is thereby equated with freedom. This shot also underlines the danger Chrissie faces. . . . The pull-back magnifies her vulnerability, dwarfing her against the ominous building.
Chrissie’s anguished expression attests to both her fear and also her inner torment as she weighs up her options. Self-preservation instinct is likely to conflict with moral thought in such circumstances since it seems counter-instinctual to remain duty-bound in the face of self-endangerment. (p. 114)
I shall return to the moral and ethical aspect of such sequences in a later chapter. For now, I wish to point to the immobilizing condition of the trap, even when the individual has the very real chance of escape.
Immobility regimes control space in two distinct ways: one, by physically closing off the spaces of incarceration and ensuring that movement induces pain and even death; two, by rendering the protagonist immobilized without real, physical restraints. Incarceration intensifies the will to escape in these protagonists but they remain, for a long time, immobilized by their social and other relations. Thus, the immobility regime remains in force even when the physical restraints begin to loosen or even disappear.
In all such representations of torture and immobilized humans, the last desperate attempt to assert autonomy and sovereignty by the protagonist – usually in a severely injured state – is not escape but collaboration. By ‘collaboration’ I mean the aid, comfort and physical help in escaping that the already-free protagonist often engages in with the more distressed captive. This might be Paxton slicing off the dangling eyeball in Hostel or Bobby trying to hold up the machine, at great pain to himself with the frames piercing his abdomen, so as to prevent the rods from piercing Suzanna in Saw 3D. Bobby’s visible helplessness in keeping up the weighted machine in order to save Suzanna’s life ensures that we see the setting as a disabling condition, one that is inimical to Bobby’s relations with Suzanna, or of one human with another. His progressive lack of agency as he loses his battle with the machine reduces him to a trembling, tearful – even debased – human because he cannot save Suzanna. While it requires inhuman strength to keep the machine up through his pain, the battle with the machine is primarily about how human vulnerability – in terms of injurability but also emotional attachments to, and moral obligations towards, fellow humans – is turned against Bobby.
Integral to immobility regimes is the social and technological architecture of control in these spaces. Architectures of control, by limiting the freedom of movement, render the humans helpless.
Surveillance as ‘Organizational Methodology’
Central to the horror of extreme spaces in torture films is the constant monitoring of the protagonist(s) through CCTV and surveillance. If, as we have seen above, torture porn films are allegories of control, part of this control is achieved through the conversion of the injured body into an object of surveillance and observation by a person or persons unknown. Catherine Zimmer’s reading of Saw refers to the camera as presenting the Jigsaw killer’s ‘organizational methodology’ (p. 87) because it is part of the process of confinement, control and power relations.
In these films, the documentation begins from the moment of capture and incarceration. The camera is not simply a recording or mnemonic device in these films. In the semantic scope of the torture sequence, the camera is an actor. It does not simply stand in for the torturer – though it does that as well – but functions as a particularly horrific ‘aesthetic’ strategy that (i) captures the agony of the victim and (ii) enrols the victim as a character in the documentary history of the events being filmed. The victim is the unwilling actor in the process of filming, although the victim is not representing but embodying suffering. The camera is thus an accomplice in the events unfolding in the torture chamber. When footage of victims is shown to each other (in Saw, for example) one sees a continuum in the documentation of suffering across peoples and bodies. The camera is what brings them together, filmed in diverse locations but united in their pain (or imminent pain), to be viewed by the others. Note Brett Easton Ellis’s deployment of the camera as part of his torture apparatus in American Psycho (1991):
Torri awakens to find herself tied up, bent over the side of the bed, on her back, her face covered with blood because I’ve cut her lips off with a pair of nail scissors. Tiffany is tied up with six pairs of Paul’s suspenders on the other side of the bed, moaning with fear, totally immobilized by the monster of reality. I want her to watch what I’m going to do to Torri and she’s propped up in a way that makes this unavoidable. As usual, in an attempt to understand these girls I’m filming their deaths. With Torri and Tiffany I use a Minox LX ultra-miniature camera that takes 9.5mm film, has a 15mm f/3.5 lens, an exposure meter and a built-in neutral density filter and sits on a tripod. I’ve put a CD of the Traveling Wilburys into a portable CD player that sits on the headboard above the bed, to mute any screams. (unpaginated, ePub)
The present victim and the next victim are united through the camera’s positioning. In another scene, the narrator/Bateman describes the setting:
I’ve situated the body [of the victim-to-be] in front of the new Toshiba television set and in the VCR is an old tape and appearing on the screen is the last girl I filmed. . . . ‘Can you see?’ I ask the girl not on the television set. ‘Can you see this? Are you watching?’ I whisper. (unpaginated, ePub)
The visualizing, mnemonic technology is important to Bateman in his choreography of horror. It is striking that in films like Saw, the victim in the trap freezes just enough to witness somebody else’s pain and torment telecast on the screen. The camera and screen thus function as an interregnum in the process of torture and contributes to the agony of the individual victim when s/he sees that the face on the screen belongs to a family member or a loved one. As Catherine Zimmer puts it, the video tapes are ‘essentially the means of a select release of information . . . escalating their horror and serving as a possible means of escape’ (p. 87). The camera, as Zimmer sees it, conditions the responses of the victims in such scenarios.
Extreme spaces are spaces of display, memory and documentation that compound helplessness and trigger the desperate attempts at freedom. With the logic of display at work in Saw and other films the ruination of the human becomes the subject of entertainment. Susan Sontag (2004), writing about the Abu Ghraib visuals, says:
To live is to be photographed, to have a record of one’s life, and therefore to go on with one’s life oblivious, or claiming to be oblivious, to the camera’s nonstop attentions. But to live is also to pose.
In the case of Saw, Vacancy and Captivity, where the camera documents suffering, the victim is further humiliated by having her or his screams and agony captured on tape, and disseminated to an anonymous and diffused audience. Writing about Abu Ghraib, Mark Danner said of the camera:
The ubiquitous digital camera with its inescapable flash, there to let the detainee know that the humiliation would not stop when ...