Sado-porn

So, I rented Hard Candy last night. Interesting movie – a “tables turned” scenario in which the predatory pedophile photographer becomes the victim of the protagonist fourteen-year-old putative victim. She tortures him, subjects him to a pseudo-castration, and eventually coerces him into suicide. She’s the hero.

And it struck me – this is the essence of sado-porn. Anything is acceptable, given the right context. We’re supposed to be cheering for the young heroine, as she drugs the adult man, ties him down, plays out what he believes is a castration surgery, and then pretends to dispose of his testicles in the garbage disposal. Watching this movie, it’s apparent that any act, no matter how grotesque, sadistic, or violent can be not only acceptable, but laudable. The audience, horrified at the depravity of the victim, is supposed to cheer.

More overtly horrifying examples of contextual manipulation come to mind. The Sharon Tate murder, for example, or the social milieu that must have made Auschwitz possible, or perhaps the gassing of the Kurds, or Pol Pot’s antics in Cambodia; horrifying acts deemed laudable within a carefully created context.

Any given act can be considered socially desirable, given the right context: the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, the nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oklahoma City or the World Trade Center.

The destruction of Iraq, the corrosive impact of the Homeland Security Act, or the election of a petty, brutal little man to the highest office of the most powerful country in the world.

What separates the heroes and the villains? When does is an act of sadistic aggression, or wholesale destruction, become unacceptable, regardless of provocation? Apparently, the answer is never. When pushed sufficiently to the edge, any act becomes acceptable.

If this premise is accepted by a sufficiently large group of people, then they are fodder for manipulation. So long as there is a sufficiently persuasive despot who can instill a sufficient degree of fear and paranoia, any act of aggression can be recast as an act of self-defense.

The protagonist in Hard Candy is afforded the license of the righteous victim, and we identify with her.

A movie is such a little thing, isn’t it? A contrived scenario, whose purpose is to titillate, or entertain. This is just one little piece of sado-porn: extreme dehumanization of a dehumanizing villain. But this is the same phenomenon that promotes genocide – we only find the impulse laudable, because of the context from which we are viewing it.

This is the point on which there is no separation between the political right and the political left – no-one questions the process, only the context in which the impulse to objectify and destroy the villain is employed. Both parties condone vigilante justice, so long as they can identify with their respective victims, and the context in which victimization is viewed can be manipulated to justify a like response.

And until we recognize this, the substantive differences between political philosophies amount to so much window-dressing.