Thread: This Hostile World

I'd like to share this article here on the issue of violence in film, and the film Hostel II:

I've included a link below because of the length of the article...

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On June 8, 2007, Eli Roth’s sequel to his 2006 number one box office horror film Hostel opened nationwide. According to the film’s advance press, the sequel promised to surpass the original in gore and scenes of torture. The second film picks up thematically where the last one left off; Hostel was about a group of tourists, lured unsuspecting to a hostel in Slovakia where they were tortured and murdered by wealthy businessmen for pleasure. The first film had male protagonists, part two features a group of young female college students who are tortured to death.

If you have a sister, a female cousin or an aunt, then you know a woman who has been sexually abused or raped. You mother may be a survivor of rape or incest herself. You may not have had any way of knowing this about her unless she told you, but perhaps one day as a child you snuck up behind her to surprise her, and she burst into tears and left the room. Or you heard her calling out in her sleep because she was having night terrors, an aftermath of rape. She may have slept with the lights on. Your daughter, who suddenly seems withdrawn, may not be able to tell you that her boyfriend forced her to have sex with him, or that a male teacher touched her inappropriately after school. You may have a girlfriend who refuses to have oral sex and won’t talk about why; who cries during sex and can’t stop, who doesn’t remember anything about her childhood before the age of six. If you’ve lived next door to a woman who is being battered, you my have heard shouting or screams coming from her house at night, or seen a police car in her driveway. If you have any women friends or you work with women, then you may know someone who has come to her job bruised or with a broken limb or blackened eye because of a violent partner. You may also know a woman who is missing or who has been murdered.

here is a link to the rest of the article: www.hostileworld.blogspot.com

you should make it clear that you're the author of the article, max...

because you deserve every bit of applause you should be getting from all who read the whole thing!... there are so many brilliantly worded passages in this long, but must-read-it-all-no-matter-what! piece that it would take too long to list them... the one i copied and absolutely must excerpt here is this:

There’s no penalty or punishment for hurting a woman; just the opposite, in fact, you make money. It’s disheartening to know that if films like Hostel II were about a killer with a taste for torturing puppies Americans would be out in the streets.

and this:

We have abandoned our kids as a society, and we are seeing the effects of our culture: our children go to school and they murder each other.

words fail me, max... i've just finished reading your whole article and am drained... totally drained... you've plucked out my heart and my soul with your incredibly eloquent writing and graphic-to-the-point-of-agony imagery... i want to cry and i can't... feel like throwing up, but that won't help, either... i really wish i could print your piece and force every person on the planet to read it!

gotta go now and try to recover, so i can finish my day's work... don't know if i'll be able to... your words will stay with me forever, i think... i could have written this, becuase you said all that i think and feel about the subject, but know i never could have done it so well... all i can add is 'thank you!'...

love and hugs, maia

ps: may i have your permission to post a link to this piece on imdb?... all there who know me know how firm i am on not ever helping anyone write anything with violent content and newcomers frequently ask me why... with this, you've just written the ultimate 'why'... m

ps: the white on black is pretty hard on the eyes, when reading more than a paragraph or two... can you reverse that?

wow, wow, wow, wow. That really left me rather speechless. My mind is racing about a million miles an hour, but there aren't any words that can be formed. This was wonderful. That, 'I might just puke because I'm choking on my own disdain for this sort of violence desensitizing us all' sort of wonderful, but wonderful nonetheless.
Very powerful, and I think it's something that needs to be read by more people. I share a lot of the same views as you and, as a woman, can also relate in a different way to your piece. It's true what you said, that if you know a woman the chances are you know a woman who has been abused in some way.

That actually brought tears to my eyes. Max, you don't mind my forwarding the link to my friends, d'you?

hey, spaceguy!... i sure hope your friends are more open-minded and mature than the raft of adolescents on imdb, where i posted the link!... aside from a couple who do seem to think with their brains, all i got in return was one of the worst flamings of my online life!... non-stop dissing that's nasty and stupid and childish to the max... so bad, i'm not even going to go back to the site for a while... seems all the little boy types who feed their hormone-riddled pea-brains on that kind of scheiss, need to justify their sick pastime by shredding anyone who shows it for what it really is...

i don't regret having tried to share this moving piece with others, just that it brought out the beast and worst in so many, rather than the best i'd hoped to see a touch of, at least...

love and -battle-weakened hugs, maia

No offense, but the article takes some pretty extreme liberties with the movies (haven't seen either of the Hostel movies and I wouldn't be surprised if they were as bad as you say, but Grindhouse I did see) it talks about. It also relies on pathos to make its point, which is great for convincing an audience, but is not so great for actually proving a point.

If you want to prove a point, you bring in facts. It is a fact that over the past 50 years violence against women (and in general) has gone down even as this supposed "desensitization" has occured.

Yeah, violence is a problem. Rape is still the more underreported crime. But I don't think there's any statistical link between criminals and violent media (except possibly violent porn, since it stands to reason that someone who needs violence to get off alone would need it with another person).

Really, the only way to beat something is to lure it out into the open. Censoring something won't make it go away, it'll just grow in a taboo environment where people can deny that it even exists.