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LuckyAlbatross -> RE: Reactions to Hostel (2/9/2006 5:12:10 PM)
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This is the essay that I put on my LJ- spoilers attached.
Hostel is a movie about three college-age backpackers screwing their way through Europe. They find themselves somehow in Slovakia sold off to a torture house and given over to a club of sadists who get their thrills by hacking and killing.
If that’s all you want to take it for- you will be quite satisfied. The gore and gruesome factor in this movie is particularly high and you won’t leave hungry for blood. They make a passing attempt at depth: our hero gives a story early on about a brush with death when he was younger, one of the new members of the killer’s club explains his need for new and permanent thrills versus the temporary quick pleasure of a fuck. But really, you will remember this movie for the gore and death. One thing to note though: They COULD have shown a lot more than they did.
But I found the movie actually piqued my interest on quite a few levels.
First is the S&M level. The first complete torture scene that we are treated to involves a power drill. When the torturer first picks up the hardware, amongst all the other hand operated elements, almost everyone in the audience laughed. I’m pretty sure this was a visceral response to try and process the horror of actually picking up a drill to menace someone. Myself, DCS and NV however, had absolutely no reaction of laughter. I think perhaps because for us it was a bit more real, it was a part of our sphere of existence in some fashion. After the first few torture scenes, no one in the audience laughed, because it had BECOME real for them at that point and they had to deal with it.
S&M is not always fluffy. It’s not always about the good endorphin highs, the spiritual travels and the endurance points. Sometimes it’s blood and pain. I know for a fact that there are some sadists in the world who will watch Hostel and get extremely aroused by the movie, the killing, the torture. I know the difference between the ones in the movie and the ones who don’t do it is a mere breath of conscience and self-awareness. A mere conviction that it would be wrong to do that. Even a lot of kinksters don’t like to consider that, that in some ways we really are NOT different than evil wrong people. Our desires really ARE that deep, that dark, that cruel, that taboo.
This is both a good and a bad thing. It helps us explain and become more acceptable. Blindfolds and kinky sex hooray! Gags for the masses! On the other hand, it pushes the cruelties further away.
Another level is that of judgement of death. Our protagonist gets a lucky break with a chainsaw and manages to escape- by killing his torturer and a guard. He kills another torturer in the process of rescuing a girl. In escaping by car he has to choose whether to give himself up or run over the people who led him to Slovakia and seduced and sold him. He chooses to run them over. Later he is faced with a choice of running a gang of children over or not. He actually gets the children to kill the men following him. In the very end, he is faced with the opportunity to walk away or kill the torturer who killed his friend. He not only kills him, but exacts revenge by slicing off the two fingers which he had lost.
Is one form of murder ok? Is vengeance ok? Is killing someone to save yourself acceptable? Is torture worse than murder? Are the children as wrong as the men? We learn in the movie that the hero wants to be a lawyer. Here he is faced with real life issues and exacts justice at every turn.
For myself I know I could kill. I know if faced with the right circumstance, I would kill without mercy and without regret. That disturbs me on occasion while it also comforts me. What bothers me most is how easily I would dismiss anything except my own sense of righteousness when the time came, and how fragile that balance is. What would make me better than someone who would burn an eyeball out with a blow torch?
In another sense of death, the woman our hero saves kills herself after seeing her face mangled and burned. Was her death wrong because she wasted the life he had given back to her by rescuing her? Or did she allow him to escape by providing a distraction? Does it matter? How do you balance good or bad? Does it even matter?
Frankly I liked my ending better. My ending was that the hero, by traveling through Europe to find the best pussy to screw, is forced to learn the thrill of the kill. Thus he himself becomes addicted and a member of the killer’s club. His sense of right and wrong is as skewed as anyone’s and falls victim to his own desires for more.
Instead he exacts revenge on the torturer by slicing off his fingers and then slitting his throat, leaves him for dead and gets on the train supposedly towards home and safety. The end.
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