Torture porn

“Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating?”

—George Orwell, 1984

Nothing like a cornball movie from 1970 to drive home a cultural shift. I watched Kelly’s Heroes at a friend’s house. It’s a classic. Clint Eastwood, playing a World War II U.S. soldier named Kelly, looks impossibly young.

To force info from a captured Nazi, the troops get rough. They pull out a bottle of booze and get the German drunk. Before the first swig, the Nazi complains that the Geneva Convention prevents torture. After a few stiff ones, he’s happy to slur out some secrets and salute. Kelly and the guys head out on a new mission to push behind enemy lines and rob a German bank.

In the 1970s version of World War II, improbabilities abound. Donald Sutherland plays Oddball, a longhaired hipster who drives tanks and says things like: “Why don’t you knock it off with them negative waves? Why don’t you dig how beautiful it is out here? Why don’t you say something righteous and hopeful for a change?”

Oddball is a far cry from the character played by Sutherland’s son, Kiefer, in Fox’s 24. Kiefer’s counter-terrorism agent Jack Bauer slices and dices, breaks limbs and shoots kneecaps—all for a good cause.

Kelly’s Heroes, light and irreverent, reminds me of Hogan’s Heroes, the ‘60s sitcom about Americans in a bumbling Nazi prison camp. Hogan and friends call on the Geneva Convention, and the Nazis comply.

Once upon a time, the Geneva Convention guaranteed that “no physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever.”

What, no sex in their violence?

Today, Hollywood’s torture porn turns us on—from Hostel sequels to Captivity, in which Elisha Cuthbert plays a fashion model who’s “drugged, taken, and placed in a cell where she is forced to endure unspeakable mental and physical torture” by a sadistic killer.

Writes David Edelstein in New York Magazine, “Fear supplants empathy and makes us all potential torturers, doesn’t it? Post-9/11, we’ve engaged in a national debate about the morality of torture. … Who do you want defending America? Kiefer Sutherland or terrorist-employed civil-liberties lawyers?”

Sure, we frowned over Abu Ghraib and the report by whistleblowing specialist Joseph Darby about the actions of his U.S. military colleague, Charles Graner, Jr. In widely reported testimony, Darby told of being shown photos of a detainee with a bag over his head, handcuffed to cell bars. Darby recounted Graner’s words: “The Christian in me says it’s wrong. But the corrections officer says, ‘I love to make a grown man piss on himself'.”

Graner went to prison.

International groups like Human Rights Watch argue torture isn’t limited to a few Graner or Jack Bauer-like rogues. It’s a deliberate, conscious policy choice by our administration. Though Congress passed the Anti-Torture Act, when signing it, Bush appended the law so that it could be suspended when, um, necessary.

In Orwell’s classic book 1984, “thought criminal” Winston Smith faces “the worst thing in the world” in Room 101. Threatened with rats eating his face, Smith agrees that two plus two doesn’t equal four.

His torturer says, “Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.”

Can we knock it off with them negative waves?