Torture is an effective way to get someone's attention in media; it is cruel, emotionally triggering, and inhumane. The media often portrays the hero or an innocent person as the victim of torture so that the torturers can be dismissed as the "bad guys" with little to no contest. However, what if the tables were turned? What if the "good guys" tortured the "bad guys" for the sake of entertainment? What if justice did not just stop at turning over the criminal to the police? When does torture become entertainment? These are the questions that come up when watching Quentin Tarantino's 2007 film, Death Proof.
The final scene shows the main female protagonists, Zoe, Abernathy, and Kim, driving in a Dodge Challenger, rear end Mike, the antagonist, in his car, pull him out, and beat him up until he lays unconscious and is, presumably, dead.
Not knowing anything else about the movie, except for the final scene, may lead you to write off Zoe, Abernathy, and Kim as cruel. However, knowing the context of the movie and that Mike is a sadistic, perverted, and diabolical ex-stuntman who has killed and tried to kill many women including our three main female protagonists makes the final scene feel like a sigh of relief.
So why is it that a protagonist can use something that only the antagonist should be using? To have a protagonist have both good and evil tendencies makes him or her all the more relatable because no one is perfectly good OR bad; instead, we are a mixture of both. Torturing the "bad guy", like Mike in Death Proof, speaks to our inherent nature that justice must be served, the ultimate form of "torture-tainment". So not only does the final scene feel like the denouement of the film, but it also reveals humanity's need for "eye for an eye" justice.
To this day, Death Proof remains one of my favorite movies because despite the problematic morality, I know it is just a movie, set in an entirely different universe other than my own. So if killing a man by beating him up with high heeled boots and drop kicks means that justice was served in the Death Proof universe, then I'm fine with it. In fact, I find it totally awesome.
You bring up a good point that torture lends to our inherent desire for justice. I agree that the fight for justice is inevitable, but I just think that it could be done in a humane way. I don't believe that torture is the answer because it is ineffective at best.
ReplyDeleteYou talk about a really good point: how our attitudes about torture can change depending on who is getting tortured.
ReplyDeleteIt really makes us stop to look at how we're being played by the media to respond a certain way. It's almost as if it is expected for us to feel good about torture. For some of us who are wary about torture in the media, I feel we ,too, are susceptible to perceive it as righteous judgement seeing the "bad guy" suffer for their misdeeds. Maybe this reveals that I am already desensitized to torture in the media... However, just because we're desensitized to it does not mean we can still oppose its effects.
Your point about torturing the antagonists at the end of movies is something I never thought of and is very insightful. It is almost a culture-norm to not only have the bad guy lose, but also physically demolished. What does it say about our culture if we need someone to get hurt in order to have closer in a movie?
ReplyDeleteThis is honestly one of the most well blog posts I have read all year. I love the idea that you bring up that all Americans care about is that justice and if the end justifies the means than it is ok to have a moral blind eye.
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