HOSTEL: PART II

Harry Potter? Don’t make me laugh. The boy-wizard saga is getting “dark”, so we’re told – the latest instalment is the “darkest” yet – but Harry and his mentor J.K. Rowling are clueless Muggles when it comes to sadism, and the kind of blood-soaked cruelty that drives the gorno genre. Good for them, we hasten to add. Gorno films – short for ‘gore-nography’, also known as ‘torture porn’ – are the ultimate in jaded thrills, and a fairly reliable sign of the upcoming Apocalypse; they include Saw and its sequels, The Hills Have Eyes, The Devil’s Rejects, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake and its recent prequel, plus of course Hostel and now Hostel: Part II. The point in all these movies is to watch people being sadistically tortured as they whimper and plead for their lives. It’s a sick genre, and appeals to sick people.

I won’t detail the extremely violent scenes in Hostel: Part II. They exist, they work within their limits – by which I mean they’re ‘well done’ – and they’re not why I liked it. For many, that won’t be enough. Some people simply can’t get past the violence in these films; online Hollywood columnist David Poland had a famously visceral reaction to Hostel: Part II, especially its most graphic scene about halfway through which he called “the most disgusting, degrading, misogynistic, soulless shit I have ever seen in a movie that’s going to be released widely in this country … At that moment [director] Eli Roth became a little less human to me … Now, if he and I crossed paths, I would refuse to shake his hand.” That’s one extreme; the other are the people (yes, they do exist) who watch these films solely for the torture scenes, like connoisseurs of barbarity. If you buy the DVD of Jason X – not gorno, but close enough – you can actually “Jump to a Death”, watching only the grisly deaths without the dull bits in between.

That’s the other extreme. In between are people like me, who consider all three Saws to be inept, dangerous and beneath contempt – but also consider Hostel: Part II to be one of the best films of the year. Partly it’s because Saw is so cack-handed, poorly plotted and clumsy in its rhythms, whereas Hostel: Part II is elegantly made and thrilling in its build-up. More importantly, it’s because Saw has a horribly reactionary message whereas Hostel: Part II has a much more trenchant, even profound one. Saw glorifies the torturer, painting him as smarter than his victims (the Hannibal Lecter approach), even more compassionate; the best thing they can do is submit to his authority. Hostel: Part II gives its torturers a flawed human face, not to excuse them but to ask why they do it. Its answer is twofold: firstly, because there’s a human impulse to cruelty and sadism. Secondly, because the gap between rich and poor allows that impulse to flourish outside the social norms that control it. “I’m not allowed to kill my wife,” explains an American businessman – so he kills helpless young backpackers in Slovakia instead.

That’s the plot, which was also the plot of the first Hostel – though this one substitutes young women for young men. It also marks a quantum leap in style and technique for Roth, so much so that you have to wonder if Quentin Tarantino (credited as producer) also helped with the filmmaking. The plot is Tarantino-like, with women turning the tables on ruthless killers as they did in Kill Bill and his latest, Death Proof. The style is also Tarantino-like, notably the use of duration and willingness to take it slow. The opening scene, a police interrogation in a hospital room (irrelevant to the plot per se), is eerily tense and it just builds and builds, making unsettling use of low hospital noise in the background. You sense that something is wrong, but don’t quite know what – the very definition of paranoia. 

Once the plot launches, Roth (or whoever) is equally adept at toying with audience expectations. Extreme violence – which we know is coming – is pointedly delayed, the film dropping hints of menace: predatory men on the train, a creepy concierge at the hostel. Even the violence itself is used with a certain artfulness; a literal bloodbath (the “disgusting” scene in Mr. Poland’s rant) is followed by a beautiful – yet creepy – sequence of our heroine bathing in the hot springs near the hostel, as if to say, provocatively, ‘If this is beautiful, why can’t that be beautiful?’.

Above all, Hostel: Part II uses its first half to flesh out the ‘clients’ who pay money to torture and kill. We see them in a montage, bidding for the rights to the girls; they’re ordinary men (albeit rich men), putting in their bids while playing golf, sitting in boardrooms, going to the park with their grandchildren. The winners are a pair of American businessmen – one gung-ho, the other more hesitant. The gung-ho one explains why he wants to kill – to feel like he’s moved “to the next level” (shades of Leopold and Loeb, the arrogant students who killed for kicks). It’s like the first boy who loses his virginity in a high-school class, he adds, pointedly (and not coincidentally) conflating sex and violence; his classmates notice something more about him, some new power, some mysterious aura. “Do you think we’re sick?” asks his friend. “Fuck no!” he replies, incidentally (and not coincidentally) speaking for gorno fans everywhere. “We’re the normal ones!”.

Can this be true? Many feel repulsed by the notion that Man (or Woman) has a natural propensity to violence. I thought of Hostel: Part II last week, when I heard that some UK schools are now running classes to teach pupils how to ‘deal with their feelings’ without resort to violence. This is part of a new approach, the conviction that violence isn’t hard-wired in our psyches but can be trained away, washed out like a bad stain – yet it’s also true that life is violence, sublimated into various acceptable forms like power, success and the free market, zero-sum games with winners and losers.

That’s the final twist in Hostel: Part II, and it’s hugely satisfying. Violence is tied to inequality, whether it’s America vs. Eastern Europe, powerful grown-ups vs. powerless street kids, haves and have-nots or just rich vs. poor. Like Antonin Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty” (which claimed that theatre was itself an act of violence, shattering our false reality), violence is part of living in the world; kids are violent, even a puppet show is violent. The real question is what kind of violence is “allowed”, which invariably translates into ‘what can you afford?’. Scott Bowles in USA Today claimed the film was unintentionally funny, because “for all the blood and intestines spilled over 94 minutes, the climax of the movie centres on a bribe” – which is true, except it’s intentionally funny. In fact, it’s the whole point.  

Obviously, the film isn’t for everyone. It’s been called sick and twisted (not without reason), and especially misogynistic. Yet the feminist reading turns out to be a red herring. For a while, Hostel: Part II looks like it’s going to be a movie version of Marilyn French’s infamous dictum that “All men are rapists” (and killers, and torturers) – but in fact it’s not about the patriarchy, as revealed by our heroine's ultimate fate. Money talks, gender is so 20^th-century. Welcome to the world of global capitalism.