Movies: Could Obamacare have prevented the Jigsaw killings?

It will serve to be sufficient review of the allegedly final Saw flick that, as the movie slumped towards the final scene of a seemingly interminable 91 minutes, I had time to wonder: Would Obama style health care reform have prevented the creation of Jigsaw, the conceptual franchise-like serial-killer meme embraced by the various murderers of the film series?

Admittedly, it's a bizarre idea, but not one without merit.

Let's review the convoluted origin of the Jigsaw meme. Start with John Kramer, a seemingly wealthy architect or engineer. John cooks up the basic Jigsaw concept when he weaves together three key motivational threads: 1) a sort of gonzo moral hyper-libertarianism that arises from a miscarriage his wife suffers, the product of an unintentional act on the part of a petty criminal/junkie; 2) an obsession with the idea that the precious gift of life is being squandered by the majority of people, a product of being diagnosed with inoperable cancer; and 3) a messianic view himself as the man who has a teachable insight into the value of life and how this value can be understood only through facing death in a test-situation, a product of a failed single-auto accident suicide attempt John made after losing his wife and learning about the cancer diagnosis.

Let's assume that these three events are all necessary conditions for the creation of Jigsaw. If John suffers Event 1 without 2 and 3, he becomes a Glenn Beck fan and Tea Party movement organizer. Unpleasant, sure; but not a serial killer. Event 2 without the others and he is just a man whose successful life is cut short tragically by cancer. Event 3 requires events 1 and 2, so it can't occur in a vacuum. Events 1 and 2, without the failed suicide attempt, just leave John a bitter, terminally ill man, but he'd stop short of becoming the head of a moralistic murder-cult.

Though John is mastermind of the whole Jigsaw thing, he's not the sole Jigsaw killer (which is really more of a philosophy or a brand, than an individual). To truly "stop" the Jigsaw killings, I think we'd have to show that none of Jigsaw's various acolytes would have developed the concept on their own. So let's run through the Junior Grade Jigsaws and lay out their origins.

Amanda Young: Amanda was a dead-end junkie with a tangential connection to the miscarriage that started John's transformation. She was an early Jigsaw victim who, after escaping the head-mounted reverse bear trap, became a semi-convert to John's ideology. Later, it is revealed that Amanda doesn't really care that much about John's philosophies – she build's deathtraps, not tests, for example – but is motivated more out of some Stockholm Syndrome-esque love of John as a father figure. (Debatably, none of the Junior Grade Jigsaws seem to actually care about John's philosophy – which makes John, oddly enough, a total failure on the messiah front.)

Mark Hoffman: Detective Hoffman comes to Jigsaw's attention when he discovers Hoffman is conducting vigilante killings under the guise of Jigsaw traps. Viewers discover that Hoffman has a history of police brutality prior to his posing as Jigsaw or becoming a part of the actual Jigsaw killings. Even after joining up, Hoffman's motivations never jibe with John's, a conflict that plays out through the last three or four flicks.

Jill Tuck: Ex-wife of John, it's somewhat unclear whether or not Jill is really a Junior Grade Jigsaw. Her early appearances in the film suggest that she is not linked to John's post-Jigsaw existence in any important way; but, as the film series progressed, there were more and more hints that she was aware of John's actions (Hoffman claims she knew from the get-go) and may have even assisted in his murderous activities. Regardless, she only kicks into serious levels of Jigsaw-like activities after the death of her ex-hubby and the delivery of posthumous instructions on how to protect his "legacy" by offing Hoffman, who is more interested than outright murder than John's odd notions of spiritual trial through extreme mortification.

Lawrence Gordon: Prior to his run in with Jigsaw, Larry was a successful, if self-absorbed doctor, who liked nabbing a little ex-martial nookie now and then. Like Amanda, Larry converted to Jigsawism after surviving his own trap experience.

I propose that, given the Junior Jigsaws' histories, none of them would have become Jigsaw without John's interaction. Amanda would have perished in some appropriately sordid junkieish manner. Jill would have never received any instructions about trap building or acolyte killing. Hoffman might still be a killer cop, but he'd never have the template of Jigsaw to hide behind and he doesn't seem creative enough to have cooked up the idea by himself (the contrast between John's demented creativity and Hoffman's vigorous, but simplistic, violence is one of the contrasts exploited in the film). And, without falling victim to a Jigsaw trap, there's no reason to assume Doc Gordon would live out his life as anything other than a tail-chasing, low-grade douchebag of a medical professional. In summary, if something could have prevented John from becoming Jigsaw, nobody else would have picked up the pig mask and all of Jigsaw's victims (not just the dozens of trap victims, but the two teams of SWAT personnel and the handful of police officers and FBI agents that died in violence related to the case) would have all lived.

This is where the issue of Obamacare comes in.

In descriptions of the Saw franchise, John's discussed as have inoperable cancer. This term might be technically correct, but the commonly understood sense of the term as it is used to describe John – that John was doomed the moment he was diagnosed with cancer – is misleading. John's cancer was, apparently, to advanced to consider an operation to remove the cancer. However, even within the film series, we learn that John was not out of medical options. In Saw VI, it's revealed that John approached his insurance provider – the in-jokily named Umbrella Health – to request that the company help cover the cost of an experimental intervention's clinical trial. Umbrella – specifically, executive William Easton and his crew of hand-picked denial specialists – denied John coverage to save a few bucks, closing John's last door to treatment, creating the second condition (and, by extension, the third) necessary for the existence of Jigsaw.

Under Obamacare, John couldn't have been denied coverage for the experimental intervention. Currently, it is illegal for insurance companies to deny you coverage if you want to participate in a clinical trial. This was law several years prior to the current wave of reform. However, in some states, companies must pay for the clinical trials, but may stop "routine" coverage – that is to say, they'll pay for you to participate in the clinical trial, but you have to pay for every other cost (doctor visits, prescriptions, etc.) – during the trial. Under the health reform bills signed into law by President Obama, not only are insurers required to cover clinical, experimental treatments in a trial setting, but they must maintain a national baseline of routine coverage throughout. So, under Obamacare, John Kramer would have had coverage for the experimental treatment he requested.

Would this have, for certain, prevented John from becoming Jigsaw? Nothing's for certain. We can imagine a scenario in which John takes the treatment, nothing happens, and the second necessary condition for the creation of Jigsaw is still in play. That said, I think it is more likely than not that entering John in the clinical trials would have ended the Jigsaw story before it ever began. Best case scenario, John's cured. The second necessary condition for the creation of Jigsaw never develops. No reverse bear traps or giant pig ovens. Even if the treatment didn't take, there's the question of timing. By denying John coverage and creating the second necessary condition while John was still possessed of some measure of physical strength, Umbrella Health leaves an important window open when John is both obsessed enough to become Jigsaw and healthy enough to do it. The more time John spent in a clinical trial, unconvinced of his doomed state, the less time he has as Jigsaw to create plans and recruit able bodies to replace his ailing one. In this second scenario, I think you've neutralized Jigsaw by stalling John's conversion to the point where he'd either lack the time to become Jigsaw or be so frail that a suicide attempt would be something he'd be unlikely to come back from.

Conclusion: We can't say for sure whether Obamacare would have prevented the birth of Jigsaw had it been in place when John needed it. Still, it's good to know that, come 2014, we can worry a little less about future Jigsaws being made.

Movies: I suggest social promotion, if only to avoid having to see this one again next year.

There's a bizarre allegorical mirror at the heart of The Final, Joey Stewart's 2010 torture porn-lite teensploiter. In the film, a group of clever young people steeped in horror flick conventions and lore band together to create an allegorical atrocity for mass consumption. Which, in broad terms, is what the Stewart and his crew are doing as well. Neither atrocity comes off as planned. A Saw for the post-Columbine teen set, The Final is a plodding combination of promising ideas and poor execution. The result is a film that has plenty to talk about, but is stammering and tongue-tied. It's exemplary of a sadly too common failure in horror: a film that is "about something," but simply isn't very good. Such film suffer from Romeroism.

Stewart starts off strong enough. Perhaps the most interesting thing about The Final is that it seems to spring up directly from the headspace of its main characters. Like the children combatants of the superior Battle Royale, the teens in this film find themselves thrust into a situation that taxes the limitations of the cognitive tools they have to make sense of the world. The result is they must rely on the rough and naked products of their own imaginations, such as the painfully earnest goth girl diary entries we hear in voiceover, or the ready-built tools of the media sphere around them, as when the aforementioned diarist adopts the look and mannerism of Asami from Miike's revenge-horror Audition to carry out her own revenge plot. The most emotionally real characters in The Final fluctuate between these extremes of helpless vulnerability and a detached, learned cruelty that's the only enduring thing the adult world bequeathed them.

In contrast to Battle Royale, the world of The Final seems like a projection of this mindscape. BR focused on the collision of youth and adulthood; The Final starts by removing adults almost entirely from the picture. This absence is communicated in the film's first act by making sure the faces of the adults in the film are always obscured. (Think of the Austin Power's bit where the characters' naughty bits are always conveniently covered – it works like that.) Without the stifling effect of adult authority, the characters live in a world made up of operatic emotions and vapid received stereotypes. Every bully is not just a jerk, but the biggest a-hole you can imagine. The school's mean-girls aren't just self-absorbed drama queens, they're sadist driven to seek out a constant stream of fresh hells to inflict on others. Consequently, there's a dramatic logic to absurdly extreme revenge plot the underdogs – a costume party that turns into a subCaptivity-grade torture-fest – cook up. In a world where everybody relentless follows trajectory of escalation based in simplistic logic of their characterization, then any revenge plan must skew towards the most horrific and definitive result. This relentless logic of character feels appropriate because the filmmaker initially handles it with ironic detachment. Unfortunately, that doesn't last.

By the end of the flick, Stewart trades in his winningly ironic and satiric tone for the less attractive tone of a hectoring afterschool special. I can see why Stewart might have felt the need to throttle back. When the world seems to reflect the tumult inside out victims-turned-torturers, the films builds quite a bit of sympathy with them and comes dangerously close to working as a sort of apologia for school shootings. As a remedy, Stewart slips in a character that acts as our moral touchstone: a generic "nice guy" who, despite the easy charisma of actor Jascha Washington, is intrusively out of place. Furthermore, the return of adult figures to the plot, complete with lessons about bravery and honor, feels like a total loss of nerve. This feeling is compounded by the bloodless torture-scenes that follow. When it is time to unleash hell on his characters, Stewart's resolve fails him.

Perhaps this could all be forgiven, but an unevenly paced script and lackluster visuals give you ample time to ponder why The Final isn't coming together. The result: a D, at best.

Movies: Piggly wiggly.

In Teddy Wayne's upcoming novel Kapitoil, a fable of business and family ethics set on Wall Street in dwindling twilight of the 20th Century, Qatar (pronounced like "cotter" and not "kay tar," I've just recently learned after a lifetime of mispronunciation) white collar migrant programmer and mathematical genius Karim Issar is invited to the Limelight by two co-workers. The co-workers use the popular ten point scale to evaluate the appearance of the women in the club. Karim, the narrator of the novel, observes:

They observe the dance floor and and assign ratings to different females from 1 to 10. They say an overweight female is "the worst" and is "four 40s deep," and rate her a 1, which means 1-10 is a poor scale, because it assigns a point even when someone is "the worst" and there exists only a 9-point range.

A friend joins the overweight female, and she is additionally overweight, and Dan says she's "even nastier" and also assigns her a 1, even though if she is in fact inferior, she should receive less than 1 (or the first female's rating should retroactively rise slightly). This is why the Y2K bug is happening: Humans usually do not anticipate what comes next after what initially seems to be the limit, so they programmed their computers to function up to the year 1999 and not 2000. Even Jefferson and Dan, who are resolving this problem nonstop, did not consider the maximum-limit issue in this context. But possibly it is because they have been drinking alcohol, and also they are not the most considerate people.

This passage sprang to mind while watching Kim-Jin Won's 2007 horror flick, The Butcher. I couldn't help think of those critics who suggested that flicks like Hostel and Saw were about nothing but the physical act of torturing people. They were ultra-thin works devoid of sub-, con-, or urtext. It was just about the image of the human body being put under extreme physical duress. Honestly, this appeal to meaninglessness is almost always the last refuge of the useless critic. All expressions, no matter how vapid, are born of time and place and directed by human intention. There's always something beyond the literal.

(NB to bloggers still riding the dead "about nothing" horse, the smart critic has moved on to "it's got no soul" as their non-point point of choice. It's a vague, yet nuanced sounding critique that the film in question lacks the key, but intangible essence of authenticity. Though criticizing a flick for not having something that you can't define or identify is no less lame as critical position, it places you in a comfortably religious realm of argumentation: the existence of soul - as either a religious concept or a aesthetic principle - is simply a matter of faith and those who disagree with you are simply non-believers, to be pitied or demonized as needed. The argument has a ruthlessly mindless efficiency in that it doesn't invite counter-argument the way claims of meaninglessness inevitably do.)

More importantly, The Butcher, like the proverbial second fat chick, forces us to reevaluate what we assumed was the limit of torture porn. If the Hostel franchise, with its ugly American characters and the overt reworking of free market logic as deathtrap, was the zero point of meaning, the The Butcher either dips into negative numbers or forces us to start adding numbers to our ranking of Hostel.

A stripped down, real-time experiment in brutalizing the audience, The Butcher takes the framework of the infamous torture porn subgenre and distills it, boiling the concept down to a starkly unpleasant 75 minutes. In that time the film asks a single question of the viewer, "How much suffering would you take before you sacrificed another to end it?"

Set in an abandoned industrial fossil, the real-time film covers a single shoot by a trio of snuff filmmakers. The flick fuses the first person POV approach of Blair Witch and [REC] to the hyper-squalor vibe of torture porn: The film is cobbled together from footage shot by the snuff filmmakers and footage shot from cams attached to head harnesses strapped to each of the victims. There's the nameless director, his assistant, and their hulking star: a massive, violent, inarticulate monster who wears a pig mask throughout the flick and is identified by the filmmakers simply as "the Pig." The filmmakers alternate between maniacal bloodlust and clock-watching boredom. The director takes a call from his church-going mother. He and his assistant discuss the difficulty of getting good victims and the nature of the market (the American market is especially ravenous when it comes to their product, we're told). Absurdly convinced of their own value, jealous of their prerogatives as "artists," yet desensitized and incapable of human sympathy (perhaps the sole prerequisite of artists) as death camp doctors, the director and assistant anchor the film with their oddly inhuman presence. Their skewed values - they see Americans as perverse for craving their product, but that a strange professional pride in cranking out snuff - tempt the viewer to consider the whole film as an satire on the hyper-stylized violence and clumsy moralism of Korea's contribution to the "Asian extreme" genre.

Satire or not, they make for great villains. Though the link is most certainly unintended, the bizarro professional pride of the filmmakers reminded me of the lamentations of Wall Street bankers post-collapse. In their ability to sever their moral compunctions from the professional act of feeding a market for which they felt nothing but contempt, the snuff filmmakers of The Butcher perfectly, if unintentionally, represents banal professional evil. When you hear the filmmakers bitch about their work conditions, you get the same little throw-up in you mouth that you get when you hear some architect of the Great Recession wonder, "Why aren't they grateful?"

The exception to this is "the Pig." A too-obvious borrowing from Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the Pig is naked copy of Leatherface. That said, I think Won should at least be given credit for emphasizing some of the characteristics that make Leatherface memorable. Like his original, Pig has an odd relationship with the "family" of filmmakers around him. He's a prima donna. Moody, excitable, easily offended, but also desperate to be praised, the Pig seems to throb with a thoughtless murderous energy that is barely kept in check by the surreal professionalism of the other two filmmakers. This vibe of monstrous childishness is often lacking from the descendants of Leatherface, but the Pig's got it.

These filmmakers start with four victims: two men, two women. The victims are bound at the wrists and ankles. They have ball gags in their mouths. The assistant reveals that two of the victims, are actually married. The other two are strangers. That's all we ever learn about the victims. The married victims have names, but they aren't particularly important to the "plot," such as it is. We're going to develop a quick nomenclature system right here to distinguish these basically interchangeable meat slabs: married male = V1, married female = V2, unmarried male = V3, and unmarried female = V4.

The plot: After some shop chat, the filmmakers decide V2 should be the first to go. When V1 protests, he's beaten until his vomits on himself. V2 is dragged to the slaughter chamber and Pig decides that he doesn't like her smell and refuses to kill her. The director and his assistant decide daylight is burning and swap out V2 with a double header of V3 and V4. Off-screen, we here them get dispatched noisily and quickly. Turns out Pig got overly excited and failed to drag out the murders to a suitable running time.

Distraught as the waste of victims, the filmmakers drag V1 and V2 into the now blood-soaked slaughter chamber. The director cuts a deal with V1, if he can withstand 10 minutes of torture without asking the filmmakers to quit, then the filmmakers will let his wife go unharmed. Failure to last the full ten minutes means the filmmakers will kill V1 and his wife. V1 agrees and the Pig goes to work. First V1 is beaten with a hammer about the head and neck. Buzzed with bloodlust, the Pig then rapes V1 for a minute or two. Finally, Pig takes a chainsaw and chops V1's left hand in half.

This breaks V1. He begins to beg the director to stop the torture. Because V1 was unable to last the full ten minutes, the filmmakers turn to kill V2. V1 begs for a second chance. The director offers an alternative deal. Seems the director feels the snuff op has gotten in a creative rut. There's more than one way to skin a human, but the filmmakers feel they've pushed the whole extreme slaughter thing as far as it can go. If V1 can provide them with a truly novel idea for killing V2, then the director will let him go. No new ideas and the filmmakers will kill both of them. Faced with the prospect of more pain, V1 embraces his new role as slaughter consultant and provides the killers with a novelly grotesque way to dispatch his wife, V2. The director approves of the new plan and they let V1 go.

V1 limps his way out the ruin/studio, incurring even more damage when he steps in a particularly nasty bear trap left around by the filmmakers to deter snoopers. Meanwhile, the filmmakers begin to execute V1's plan for killing his wife. The Pig, overzealous in his duties, offs V2 before the filmmakers can fully execute V1's plan. Foiled twice in one day, they give chase to V1 who manages to escape by stealing one of the filmmakers' cars. Safely away, V1 breaks down and cries.

Roll credits.

Weirdly paced, lacking dynamic characters (though not devoid of characterization), hanging on a barebones plot, filled with dialogue that's mostly grunts and screams, and hinging on profound betrayal that makes the sole survivor's victory of impossible odds a bitter triumph that forces the view to wonder if death wouldn't have been better, The Butcher is a thoroughly unpleasant film. And, for now, it may well represent the height (or nadir, depending on your point of view) of the torture porn aesthetic. And, as such, it makes for an interesting test case for some of the claims made about the subgenre.

First, despite The Butcher's refusal to add backstory to the elements within the film, even this minimalist assault on the senses isn't without context or broader meaning. The filmmakers are an acid etched portrait of Won's perception of the South Korean film game circa '07. Long protected by an isolationist quota system, Korean filmmakers could depend on a certain marketshare by virtue of government mandate (similar systems exist in countries all over the world as bulwarks against what's perceived as American cultural imperialism). In '07, the Korean quota system crumbled. In a free market, Korean filmmakers saw their marketshare evaporate to imports. The negative impact of the removal of government protection was exacerbated by the spectacular failure of several big budget homegrown productions. Increasingly, filmmakers turned their attention to the production of extremely violent productions meant for overseas consumption - films meant to be gobbled up by an American audience with a seemingly unquenchable appetite for films in which Asians do horribly violent things to one another. The Butcher shows this cultural logic taken to its absurd extreme: the sacrifice of local value for a degrading product meant to appeal to foreigners hungry for exploitative fare. Arguably, The Butcher, made outside the studio system for a pittance, is exactly the kind of film it professes to mock, though I have my doubts. Compared to stylish fare like Oldboy, The Butcher tries hard to avoid entertaining the audience. It alternates between tedium and discomforting imagery in a way that's meant to abuse the viewer rather than pander. Of course, there will always be people who find that entertaining. Whether that makes Won's film insincere or foolish rather than biting is something individual viewers have to decide.

Second, this raw "torture porn" flick complicates the idea that the point of torture porn is the sick thrill of allowing the viewers to vicariously torture folks. In fact, a majority of flicks in the subgenre focus intensely on the victim's experience rather than the experience of the torturer. By locking most of the film into the literal POV of the victims, The Butcher gives this thematic logic is purest visual expression. Any critical assessment of the subgerne predicated on the notion of identification with the torturer fails to reflect the prevalence of this victim-centric experience.

Third, The Butcher reflects an important aspect of the subgenre in that it is a film produced outside the states. The impact of torture porn on American horror cinema is vastly overstated by critics. Recently I read the blog of film studies professor who lamented that her students tastes ran towards the "torture porn fare Hollywood has been pumping out in spades." In spades? After the disastrous crash and burn of Captivity, only a single franchise in the subgenre seems to have any life in it - Saw - and even that is reportedly shutting down after the next installment. Compared to the endless flood of zombie-fare, torture porn was a minor blip on the Hollywood scene. The subgenre's afterlife has mostly been in foreign productions, where its found a home in the cultish "extreme" currents of various national cinemas.

More a curiosity for those who view horror as a sort of emotional endurance test than an enjoyable film, The Butcher is a near perfect example of the horror genre's least understood, most maligned subgenre and a stands as a challenge to professional and amateur critical establishment that has never developed an approach for dealing with the inevitable consequences of the concept of fear as entertainment.

Movies: Fresh blood for an old saw.

The only franchise to emerge from the overhyped and still ill-understood "torture porn" moment at the opening half of the decade, Saw opened its sixth installment this weekend. And, as we have for the five pervious installments, trusty horror-wingman Dave and I made or way to Court Street for the ritual.

At this point, I'm not sure I look forward to the release of a new Saw flick. My motivations for going are somewhat murky, even to me. Dave and I both admit that there's a sense of challenge, as if to quit going before the filmmakers quit making them would be some sort of admission of defeat. Though we both understand that this is pretty absurd. Along side that "don't let them win" impulse, I do feel genuine affection for the series. But, honestly, it's kind of like the purposefully irregular visits one makes to the friend that used to be cool way back when but has long since turned into an embarrassment. You can't pretend that you've got no feelings for the schmuck, but you kind of dread the encounter. In that vein, I very much enjoyed the first couple of Saw flicks and, even after the quality of the films started to bottom out, I still found great joy in the Saw ritual of getting drinks, hanging with the Courtesans (who, in contrast to my increasing resignation, are the last practitioners of that energetic school of New York media criticism whose final great gasp was the Astor Place Riot), and discussing death traps over burgers later. That said, I'd be first to admit that, without that ritual framework, the movies since the third or fourth installment wouldn't have been worth seeing. (I assume this was part of the charm of the original slashers - though the fact that the latter flicks still have their fans who defend them on the grounds that they're quality works both confuses me and makes me wonder if we're still talking about the same phenomenon.)

So, you can imagine the shock last night when I walked out a Saw flick pleasantly surprised. Though I know this is weak praise for those who dismiss the series outright, Saw VI is the best installment in the series since the second flick back in '05.

The filmmakers announce their intention to give the increasingly sluggish series a shot in the arm with their opening trap (the pre-title sequence trap scene that is to Saw what the intro mini-adventure is to the Bond series): a savage and minimalist zero-sum game in which two crooked loan officers must compete to see who will trim off the most flesh from themselves before a timer runs down. In this half minute scene, we get a taste of everything the newest crew is bringing to the table. Gone is Jigsaw's tedious moralizing, replaced by a sort of dark avenging "you hurt people, now it is your time to hurt" motivation. He sinks into the background and, instead, we watch as the two players get more and more desperate and violent. This scene plays so hard and so fast (nearly real-time) and so brutal that it provoked appreciative golf claps from the notoriously finicky Courtesans.

For this sixth outing, the filmmakers work hard to re-ground the series in its primary dramatic focus - the fate of the people trapped in seemingly impossible dilemmas - and ruthlessly undertake the work of clearing away three film's worth of distracting and hopelessly tangled backstory. The filmmakers are extremely successful at the first task: Director Kevin Greutert and screenwriters Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton deliver the one of the leanest and most focused Saw films of the franchise. The business of the pulling the franchise out the the continuity k-hole it's been tumbling down since Saw III remains, when the credits role, an unfinished task; but given the scope of repairs that are called for, the progress they make in simplifying the baroque mythology of the Saw universe is praiseworthy.

As with most Saw flicks since the second film, Saw VI contains two related plots lines: one which focuses on an extended trap sequence and another which gets all ouroboros with the franchise's overly-elaborate continuity. Saw flicks are generally better when the former is given more screentime than the latter. Happily, VI has got the ratio right.

The majority of the flick focuses on the staff of the appeals review office of the Umbrella Health Insurance, the office responsible for scraping off desperate sick folks whose infirmities threaten the bottom line of Umbrella. The ten-person staff, from the sad sack janitor to the hungry khaki-clad strivers in the cubical pens, ends up in a series of traps, their fates decided by their sleazy "it's just business" salaryman boss, William. This plotline somewhat resembles the trial series that forms half of Saw III, though this plays considerably harsher. In III, the player - Jeff - had to repeatedly decide if he could forgive the people in the traps (he blamed them all for a miscarriage of justice involving the death of his son). If he could, he could free them and move on. In VI, William's put a grimmer position: His co-workers are stuck in a series of traps built so that William must repeatedly chose which people will live and which will die.

The secondary plot involves Hoffman, Jigsaw's surviving disciple, and Jigsaw's wife, Jill, carrying out what they believe will be the last Jigsaw game. Hoffman also takes on the task of eliminating anybody who can link him to the Jigsaw murders, a bloody process that goes a long way towards thinning out the extensive cast of secondary characters and the loose ends they come with. All the while, Hoffman and Jill eye each other warily, each certain that the other is going to try a double cross. Too often the film drags in these parts - most notably during an extended imagined discussion between Jill and her deceased serial killing hubby - but the work needs to be done given the amount of unnecessary baggage the filmmakers need to jettison. By the end of the flick, the filmmakers have managed to rework Jigsaw's character (yet again) into a more familiar and flexible vigilante type. The Amanda relationship is redeemed, salvaging a truly unique character dynamic that the makers of Saw III squandered. Finally, Hoffman is recast as a more direct, less philosophical sadist - sparing us, hopefully, from future lectures about the pedagogical value of traps. The Saw world is still a bit shaggy, but this pulls the franchise back from the self-reflexive circularity that was becoming liability. As in Saw V, I still can't imagine a first-time watcher understanding any of this secondary plot; but, unlike V, I can imagine a viewer still enjoying the film despite this material.

Visually, this isn't the most attractive Saw flick. I suspect that the strict budgets that have made the franchise so profitable are starting to take their toll on the films themselves. Many of the sets and traps look messy rather lavishly squalid. The lighting is no longer as crisp and the colors are too often overwhleming or washed out. The film is competent, but not stylish. In contrast, the editing has improved. The seasickness inducing editing that was a hallmark of the series has calmed somewhat into a still jittery, but more effective style. Most of the actors turn in adequate performances, with Peter Outerbridge (William) and Shawnee Smith (Amanda). In fact, Outerbridge turns in what might be the first truly genuinely effecting moment of the franchise. When Outbridge's William locks eyes with one of the people he has doomed, the Saw series finally hints at what the real emotional cost of tough moral decisions might be. Even the normally painfully-wooden Costas Mandylor finds a groove. By making his character more brutish, it actually makes Mandylor's inert persona into an asset.

I don't know if Saw VI will turn out to be an outlier or if it reveals that the franchise is going in a new, more vibrant direction. Either way, it is a welcome addition to the series.

Movies: I want to play a game, Part 3 - Don't everybody all volunteer at once.

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Movies: I want to play a game, Part 2 – Hate the game, not the player.

To boil down everything we discussed in the previous post to its most essential point: If you were a victim in a Saw movie, the only salient survival factor that could be known, and therefore acted on, would be the number of players in your particular game. There are at least two other potential factors that could determine whether you survive or not, but they are unknowable prior to your death or escape and there's crap-all you can do about them. You're better off assuming that they aren't in play.

Once we've established the focus of our thought experiment on the number of players, we can divide the traps into two groups: 1) single- and two-player games and 2) games with three or more players.

At this point, the skeptical reader might well ask, "CRwM, why arbitrarily divide them into these two groups?"

Fair question. The reason I divided them into these two groups is that, after working through all this, I found that single- and two-player games essentially have the same strategy. Once you go above two players, though, there's a host of new issues that you have to take into account. However, because we haven't walked through the thought experiment together, that what I think is a natural division looks arbitrary from this point in the journey. Which is to say, lighten up Francis.

On to the survival strategy for single- and two-player games.

Let's get single player games out of the way because they're the simplest and least interesting.

A truly single player game is one in which only a sole person in the trap can affect the outcome of the game with their choices. The player could be the only person in the trap - examples of this include the web of razor wire web and the flammable slime traps from the first film and the fly-trap death mask from the second film – or they could be the sole decider in a trap that involves others – examples: Amanda's test, Jeff's various trials in Saw III, the hair-puller from Saw IV.

The strategy for a single player game is simple. Always play. You don't, you die. Arguably, there are reasons that somebody might choose to die. Many of the traps are disfiguring or involve profound psychological trauma. Though it never really happens in the flick, it isn't hard to imagine a game player deciding that the cost of escaping just isn't worth it. But, for the sake of this thought experiment, we decided to assume that every player wants live regardless of the costs.

So, if you're in a one-player Saw trap, assume it is well built, assume it is a valid game, choose to play along, and you will have done everything you could to live.

Told you it was simple.

Two-player games are a little more interesting. First, they rarely happen in Saw. There's only been two of them. Second, each of the games was a unique game type that demanded different strategies. Third, the characters in the first two-player game failed because they understood the form of the game they were playing but couldn't bring themselves to play, but the characters in the second game misunderstood the game and one of them still survived.

In the jargon, Jigsaw's two player games are either zero sum games or deadlock games. Because the term deadlock game is somewhat obscure and the term zero sum game has a common usage that doesn't fully jibe with the meaning of the term in game theory, we'll get some quick definitions out of the way.

In a zero sum game, the sum of wins (+1) and losses (-1) always come out to zero. If somebody wins, somebody else lost. In Sawian terms, it means that there are two players in a trap and only one of them can get out alive.

Jigsaw doesn't make many traps that are zero sum games. For all the bizarre radical individualism in his personal religion, Jigsaw's big on teaching lessons about interdependence and teamwork. However, he does occasionally build a zero sum game trap. Most notably, the bathroom trap that anchors the entire first film is a zero sum game. Dr. Lawrence and Adam get locked in the world's filthiest bathroom. The good doctor can only get out if he kills Adam. Failure to kill Adam means not only will he be screwed, but his family gets it as well. Adam is expected to saw his own foot off and escape, leaving the doc and his family high and dry. Basically, only one of them can win. It's built into the game.

In the film, both Adam and the doc bite it. They fully get that they are playing a zero sum game and are ultimately unable to play on those terms. The opt not to play – instead they try to work their way out of their predicament – and both end up dying.

Sadly, the only way to survive a zero sum game is to play before you get played. If, as we agreed to assume for this discussion, survival is your ultimate goal, then no matter what the other player chooses, you must choose to play.

The other type of two-player trap is the deadlock game. To explain a deadlock game we need to touch on dominant and dominated strategies. In simplest terms, a dominant strategy benefits you no matter what the other player chooses to do and a dominated strategy screws you no matter what the other player chooses to do. Not every game includes dominant and dominated strategies; but when they do, always play the dominant strategy and never play the dominated strategy. In a deadlock game, the dominant strategy also leads to the most mutually beneficial outcome. It's one of those happy cases where everybody following rational self-interest actually leads to the best result.

The best example of a deadlock game in the Saw franchise is the mausoleum trap at the beginning of Saw IV. This over elaborate trap works thusly: Player 1 and Player 2 a both connected by a neck shackle to chains that lead to an automated winding drum in the middle of the floor. The game begins when one of the players's movements trigger the winding action. The winding action pulls the two men closer together. Eventually, it will strangle them both. The key to player 2's neck shackle is connected to the back of player 1's collar. Once player 2 is free, he can get retrieve a key for player 1's collar. Player 1 has his eyes sewn shut and cannot see. Player 2 has his mouth sewn shut and cannot effectively communicate with player 1. Various stabby and slicey weapons are shattered about. This is a deadlock game. Both players can win if they both play the game correctly. There's no need for either one to die. In fact, doing the rationally self-interested thing means they both escape.

But we don't always do the rational and self-interested thing. In this case, the problem is that one of the players literally cannot see what the rationally self-interested action would be. Unable to communicate, player 2 can't explain to the blind player 1 what is going on. Assuming he is under attack by the trap maker, player 1 starts lashing out with stabby things left about the field o' play. Player 2 is eventually forced to fight and kill player 1. He frees himself and escapes.

There are two neat survival tip hidden in that mess. To really be a player in a game, you need to be able to make a genuine choice to play or not play. If, for some reason, you can't understand what it means to opt in or out, then you aren't really choosing to do either and you don't fit our definition of a player. That sounds bad, but it doesn't need to be. Think in terms of the mausoleum trap. If player 1 had simply not acted in any way, player 2 could have easily freed them both. What's the take home: Don't act like a player if you're not a player.

One of the most interesting things about the mausoleum trap is that it's a deadlock game that, if one of the players does not choose the dominant strategy, becomes a zero sum game. This curious shift in the mausoleum game is important; it provides us with the key (fittingly enough) to surviving games with three or more players. But, that's for the next entry. Let's recap.

ANTSS READER! You've just found yourself in a Jigsaw trap with one other person! What do you do!?!?!

First, determine the number of players in the game. You may need to decide that, for some reason or another, you are not actually a player in the game, but just another trapped person. That's cool, but act like what you are or you'll fuck everybody up.

Second, the players need to determine the actual rules of the game. If you can't complete this step, go back to step 1: Somebody thinks they're a player, but they aren't.

Third, no matter what your partner chooses, always, always, always choose to play.

Movies: I want to play a game, Part 1 – Think like a victim.

There was, for a brief time, a horror blog meme in which people waxed bloggy on the horror films victim that you would save if you could. (Mine's the first victim, the hippy chick, in Jaws, but that's beside the point.) While I never officially participated in this ring o' posts, it did get me thinking about a curious viewing habit of mine: I never really ponder saving a victim in a horror flick. Instead, I find myself wondering if, in their place, I could find a way to escape their fate. For example, I'll imagine that I'm one five kids trapped in the posh country house with Jason lurking outside. What would I do? I think the answer, for the curious, is to split up. Despite the logic of a million horror movies saying otherwise, splitting up is the best strategy. Each person separates and books it in as straight a line as possible in different directions. The different directions thing is key. Splitting up to search an old farmhouse, for example, isn't really splitting up. Splitting up makes distance and time work in your favor. For every victim Jason managed to claim, it becomes increasingly unlikely that he can claim another victim as the distances between potential victims increase and Jason's knowledge of potential victims' locations decreases. Continue running until you reach an Air Force base with access to nuclear weapons.

I first noticed this habit of mine watching Two Thousand Maniacs, Herschell Gordon Lewis's low-fi splat Southern revanchist fantasy. In that flick, one of the victims is nailed into a relatively small wooden barrel. Dozens of long nails are then hammered into the sides of the barrel, making it a sort of economy-class iron maiden. Then the barrel is rolled down a hill. The victim, presumably, bounces around inside, being pulped by repeated impact with the nails. After seeing that flick, I got obsessed with question of whether or not one could survive that death trap. I eventually came to the conclusion that, if you agreed that that painful mutilation was better than death, then you should shove your feet and hands against one side of the barrel and prop your back hard against the other side. This will, unfortunately, cause massive damage to your hands, feet, and back. But, if you could hold that pose for just a minute or two – which, granted, is no small thing – then you could prevent yourself from being bounced around, which is where the real damage of the whole barrel roll thing tips irrevocably into fatality. Sadly, the whole thing's academic as the first thing the ghost rednecks do when the barrel stops is look inside to see their handiwork; but still, you'd have given yourself a few more painful moments of suffering existence and the chance to try to think your way through another deathtrap. For what that's worth.

As it is Halloween, it's time to roll out yet another installment of the critically reviled, yet perennially popular long-running Saw franchise. This got me thinking: If the structure of each kill in the Saw flicks is, essentially, a game in the truest game theory sense of the term. Therefore applying a little bit of game theory logic to the traps of Saw should allow us to generate a few survival strategies for Jigsaw victims. What does game theory tell us about Jigsaw's traps.

Reader beware: I'm no expert on the subject of game theory, so this series is something more along the lines of a thought experiment informed by limited exposure to game theory. We're just thinking aloud here. Still, I think the results are interesting.

First, let's define some terms. We'll keep it simple. Games are discrete events that have a set number of players, a defined number of strategies (in Jigsaw traps, these are always "play along" or "don't play along"), and a set number of outcomes. NB: Not all game theories games meet this criteria, so you can already see were abusing the concept. This is why I've never been awarded a Nobel Prize in Economics.

All this sounds obvious, but it is important. Within the Saw franchise there characters who start off in a trap alone only to realize that they are, in fact, part of a bigger game. For our purposes, we'll say that every time you change any of the three criteria of a game, you're in a new game. If you are wandering through a trap maze and you suddenly find yourself with a group of people all in the same fix, consider yourself in a new game.

The idea that each trap is a discrete event is sometimes very easy to figure out: Often a Jigsaw trap involves a single person making a single yes/no choice. But more complex games confuse the issue. In Saw II and Saw V both featured characters working their way through a trapped filled environments. Is each trap a separate game or is the game over when the players are either all dead or have exited the environment? This is wrapped up, curiously enough, in a later issue: the number of players. We'll discuss it in more detail later, but for now let's agree that in games with one or two player games, each trap is a new game. In games featuring three or more players, the entire time spent in the trapped environment is a single game.

Every game needs players. Players are defined in our little thinkie thought post here as any person within a Jigsaw trap that can affect the results of the game by making a choice of whether or not to play the game according to Jigsaw's rules. Again, this sound obvious, but it is an important distinction. Throughout the franchise, we meet characters trapped in Jigsaw games that are not actually players. In the first film, Amanda (not yet a Jigsaw cultist) must decide whether or not to kill a man for the key trapped inside him. If she does not kill the man, a bear-trap like device on her head will spring into action and rip her head apart. There are two people in this trap, but Amanda is the only player as only she can affect the outcome of the game with her choice.

Number of outcomes is tricky, mostly because some strategies lead to certain outcomes, but others only might lead to specific outcomes. Namely, your dead meat if you don't play along, but playing along does not ensure that you're going to survive. Case in point, the man in the web of razor wire web in the first film (seen in subsequent flashbacks): Though he tries to play Jigsaw's game, his body gives out. Furthermore, living through the trap might not be a given victim's best-case scenario. In actual game theory, this would not be incidental. In some Jigsaw traps, part of the game's logic involves the victim pondering whether or not living mutilated or implicated in a crime or whatever is worth playing the game. For the purposes of making the conceptualizing Jigsaw's traps as games as easy as possible, we'll consider just two outcomes: Players either live or die, and living is always better than dying.

For all the gonzo Rube Goldbergian inventiveness of Jigsaw's traps (and we'll consider traps designed by any member of his cult to be a Jigsaw trap), there are only three variables that actually make any difference to a victim's survival.

1. Trap rigor: Is the trap well made? In his early period, Jigsaw made a few traps that a person might survive simply on the basis of blunder. Such a fuck-up appears in the fourth film. This is an unlikely out, but it is there.
2. Game validity: Is there really an out? Like ideological and religious leaders everywhere, the second Jigsaw starts to fade, his followers start to screw-up his teachings. Specifically, Amanda and Hoffman both construct traps that don't actually have escape routes. If this is the case, you're screwed no matter what.
3. Number of players: How many people can affect the outcome of the game? Remember that we're counting only those people who can alter the course of a game by choosing to play along or not as players.

That's it. At rock-bottom, whether you've got a bear trap on your head or you're on the bottom of a Jacuzzi full of puréed rotting pig corpses, those are the only three variables that matter. (There's a single exception to this – we'll get to that later.) You'll note that, from the perspective of a victim within a Jigsaw trap, you can only be conscious of the last one. If factors 1 and 2 are in play, there's no way you could know it and, therefore, no way you could reasonably factor it into any strategic response. Maybe you'll get lucky and the trap has an unforeseen out that you'll stumble across (this happens twice in the series: in Saw 4 and Saw 5) or maybe you're screwed no matter what you do (this happens at least twice in the series: S3 and S5 - curiously, the death trap in S5 also happens to be the trap that lacks vigor, so it was built to strictly kill, but had an unforeseen out): Either way, you cannot be sure and your better off acting as if you are in a rigorous trap that's a valid game.

This means that you focus on the remaining factor: How many players?

From a perspective of survival strategies, all of Jigsaw's traps can be organized into two categories, each of which demands a separate approach.

1. One and two player games.
2. Three or more player games.

In the next post, we'll discuss how you'd survive one and two player games.

Link Proliferation: In which you meet the Iranian Little Red Riding Hood.

You Gotta Be In It, to Win It

Why haven't you entered the Every Damn Comic of Solomon Kane Ever Contest (EDCSKEC)? Do so, right now. I randomly select a winner on Monday.

Ghostly History

A now and then tour of Manhattan sense through the lens of the Ghostbusters flick.

Fairy-Tale History

The Telegraph has an interesting story on the historical age of fairy tales.

The common take on fairy tales is that they were relatively recent when Romantic nationalists started recording them in 1600s. Using "Little Red Riding Hood" and taxonomy techniques borrowed from the biological sciences, one team of anthropologists has teased out a memetic history that traces back more than 2,600 years.

A study by anthropologists has explored the origins of folk tales and traced the relationship between varients of the stories recounted by cultures around the world.

The researchers adopted techniques used by biologists to create the taxonomic tree of life, which shows how every species comes from a common ancestor.

Dr Jamie Tehrani, a cultural anthropologist at Durham University, studied 35 versions of Little Red Riding Hood from around the world.

Whilst the European version tells the story of a little girl who is tricked by a wolf masquerading as her grandmother, in the Chinese version a tiger replaces the wolf.

In Iran, where it would be considered odd for a young girl to roam alone, the story features a little boy.

Contrary to the view that the tale originated in France shortly before Charles Perrault produced the first written version in the 17th century, Dr Tehrani found that the varients shared a common ancestor dating back more than 2,600 years.

He said: “Over time these folk tales have been subtly changed and have evolved just like an biological organism. Because many of them were not written down until much later, they have been misremembered or reinvented through hundreds of generations.

Personally, I find the concept of the meme dubious at best. The application of genetics to abstract concepts like a story's themes and tropes seems to confuse phenotypes with genotypes, leading to lots of false positive "links" between things that are not really related. Still, the variants they've discovered and the range they've recorded is interesting.

Tortured History

Over at Pop Matters's, Marco Lanzagorta turns in another LP-worthy post. This time he ponders the evolution of the "torture porn" flick and traces its roots from Ulmer's The Black Catthrough 70's 'sploiters and up to now.

He contributes some original stages to the common historical narrative, most notably the "Inquisition flicks" of the 1960s and 1970s.

The first clear trend of torture films that emerged during these years can be termed as the inquisition flick. As with The Black Cat, Poe’s work served as inspiration for a film about madness, corruption, and obsession. Roger Corman’s The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) takes place in 16th century Spain and the climax involves a young man trapped in the titular torture device. The torturer, played by the inimitable Vincent Price, is revealed to be the demented son of an inquisitor.

While the violence was kept to a reasonable level, the commercial and critical success of The Pit and the Pendulum is likely to have influenced a series of films that depicted a demented inquisitor torturing, mutilating, and humiliating innocent bystanders. Most of the time, their victim was a young virginal girl who refused the sexual advances of the inquisitor. Not surprisingly, the amount of violence and sexual situations increased with each new entry in this subgenre. The most notorious flicks in this trend include The Witchfinder General (1968), The Bloody Judge (1970), Mark of the Devil (1970), and Mark of the Devil 2 (1973). Evidence of the cruelty and brutality of these films is the fact that most of them have been banned or censored at some point in time.

However, like everybody who has tried to define torture porn as a subgenre, he gets tangled up in his own definition.

Therefore, because of our complex cultural intertextuality, it may be difficult to define the exact generic conventions of the torture porn subgenre. Nevertheless, it is possible to avoid sophisticated intertextual conundrums and identify a torture flick as one where acts of torture are the main visual and narrative drivers of the storyline.

That sounds good until you start looking at examples. For example, the violence in the French Chainsaw-manqué Frontier(s), which is the columnist says can be "considered the pinnacle of the torture porn subgenre," is extreme; but whether it is torture or not (beyond the most basic assertion that any violent captivity would be torture) is dubious and, even if we decided it were, you'd need to defend the claim that torture was the driving narrative force behind that film.

Movies: In which we vivisect the torture porn issue for the last time.

I find Turistas an interesting film – perhaps, admittedly, out of all proportion to the value of the work itself – because it touches on a theme that pops up now and again on ANTSS: the troublesome concept of "torture porn."

Almost a year ago I wrote a four post series about the much reviled subgenre in ANTSS. It began with the claim that I didn't actually believe there was, in fact, a definite subgenre. As evidence, I pointed to the fact that there were really only two franchises anybody could point to as belonging to the set and, perhaps more importantly, that the original term was coined not to describe a type of film, but a manner of showing violence within a film. Torture porn was something a film did, not something it was. This might sound like an esoteric distinction, but it helps explain how things as diverse as The Passion of the Christ, which is far more brutal than any of the horror flicks so labeled, and the show 24 used to pop up in discussions of the phenomenon. Though I suspected that it was a product of horror fandom's myopic insularity that this phenomenon was perceived as a specifically horror-centric thing – in the Flatland of movie fandoms horror fandom is Pointland – I resigned myself to its use as common parlance and sallied forth to discuss what the subgenre might look like.

I've learned two important things from the experience of writing that series of posts.

First, if you can't put your argument forward in a single post, then don't bother to put it forward. Usage shows that visitors to the blog read the posts as they first went up, but since then the vast majority of readers never ever get past the first post. This is true even when the visitors are directed from blogs that link to every post and urge readers to check them all out. Several hang in there for the second post, and a select few manage to struggle on to the third; but I haven't had but a stray one or two visitors actually make it to the fourth post. This is especially noteworthy since the forth post actually contained a section regarding issues and problems readers had raised during the original series, some of which I had answers for, but many of which I had to simply admit as valid criticism. The number of "I gotcha" posts I get harping on subjects worked through in the forth post is tragic. When blogging, adopt the famed axiom of Phil Spector: "If it can't be said in three minutes, it isn't worth saying."

The second thing I learned from creating the series is that I should have gone with my gut.

There is no such thing as a torture porn subgenre.

In my initial post, I identified what I thought were the few films everybody could agree were torture porn films, and I then identified what I believed to be their common characteristics. Since posting that original series, film labeled torture porn by the horror blogtwit pro am hit the scene that, one by one, systematically demolish every genre boundary placed on the hypothetical grouping. Even the simplest definition – Sean T. Collins applied lex parsimoniae to the problem and developed a suitably Ockhamian definition: "Horror films in which the physical brutalization of a person or persons, frequently to death and always while somehow immobilized or held captive by the brutalizer or brutalizers, is the primary locus of horror in the film." – no longer holds. Why? Because we've mistaken bats for birds under the mistaken notion that all flying things must be the same.

Let's look at the film in question.

Whether it was an intentional effort to cash in a perceived trend or simply the laziness of critics, John Stockwell's action thriller Turistas was saddled immediately with the ill-fitting label of torture porn. A summary of the plot does nothing to disabuse one of the validity of the comparison. A co-ed group of tourists – Americans, an Aussie, two Brits – end up stranded in an isolated section of Brazil. Mercifully, the patch of coastline they find is a tropical paradise of pristine sands, cheap booze, and lovely skin. Not so mercifully, the locals appear to be patched in to an organ piracy network of a nearby mad doctor liberates Euros of their innards in order to provide organs for the oppressed and downtrodden. He's like a kidney Robin Hood.

After the traditional party scene and a suitable number of breast displays, the tourists find themselves doped and robbed. They leave paradise in search of help, only to be lead to the home of the mad doctor. There, one of their number is processed by the good doctor. The rest attempt an escape, leading to an extended chase scene in the jungle. What follows is a running battle through the local jungle and an underwater cave system between the doctor and his henchmen and the would-be non-volunteer organ donors.

I admit that the overall parameters of the plot – young travelers caught in violent exchange with locals, their ignorance of which exacerbates the problem – calls Hostel to mind. But I submit to you that those same parameters describe hundreds of film plots, few of which could be described as torture porn. Furthermore, with its extensive jungle scenes, mad scientist baddie, and an extended chase structure in the latter fourth of the film, I'd say that the flick has as much in common with The Most Dangerous Game and various versions of Island of Dr. Moreau, than with commonly agreed upon torture porn flicks like Saw.

There is the infamous and crucial set piece in which a young woman is disassembled for her medically valuable viscera, but even that most torture pornish of scenes is curious. First, it is debatable whether or not the young woman is tortured. She is most certainly murdered, but the surgery takes place only after the victim has been put under anesthesia. She dies in a chemically-induced haze, making vague grunting noises until she expires. It is unclear how much pain she might be feeling, though her mouth remains ungagged throughout the operation and she does not scream or protest. The implication is that she's knows something is wrong, but she's pretty much gone under an insulating layer of dope. She does not really witness any of what is happening to her. The mad doc keeps up a running monologue of what he's doing and why he's doing it, though she doesn't really hear him. The question is, does this constitute torture? Admittedly, it is an extreme crime. But, oddly, it's a crime that specifically minimizes the suffering of the victim. It is certainly constitutes physical harm, but I'm not sure that it constitutes "brutalization," to use Sean's term. This isn't, I think, out of any humanitarian concern on the doc's part. A struggling and resisting victim increases the likelihood of a screwed up op and slows the whole thing down. Still, the result is the same: unlike torture, the organ theft op is not intended to cause pain and suffering.

Insomuch as torture requires the victim perceive their own torture as suffering, if anybody in the scene is tortured, that grim distinction goes to one of the Brit tourists who, strapped down on a surgical table next to the victim, witnesses the entire operation sans drug-buffer, all the while under the assumption that the same is soon to befall him. However, while this victim's confinement is certainly an according Hoyle torture porn aspect under the Collin definition, he's never physically brutalized. He briefly escapes only to be killed as most of the doomed characters in this film are: sudden death by bullet.

Whether it is locus of horror in the film or not is an equally debatable point. Certainly it establishes the stakes for the characters, justifying why a bunch of relatively pampered tourists are suddenly are extremely willing to not only risk their lives, but also kill others, in order to escape. Otherwise, however, the operation itself is only a tiny bit of the film. Only one of the ten deaths in the film are attributable to the mad doctor's deplorable efforts to reform the organ donor waitlist process. The rest occur during fights in the jungle surrounding the doctor's house (plus one henchmen who dies when the quick to anger doctor stabs him as a definitive review of his less than stellar henching). Even during the operation scene, the gory process does not take center stage. Unlike the claustrophobic, extended scenes of punishment in Hostel or Saw, the operation, which takes up about 4 minutes and 12 seconds of film altogether, is broken up with footage of the rest of the tourists' efforts at escape, which actually runs a slightly longer 4 minutes, 18 seconds. Even when it is the focus of the film, it isn't quite the focus of the film.

My point with this last bit isn't to finally see if Sean's definition fits Turistas or not, but to show that we've got trouble if we try to a definition that suggests that one relatively small section of the flick is the "locus" of the film's horror. We'd have the same problem with Martyrs, which includes quite a bit of horrific imagery and power in the first half of the film, most of which revolves around the revenge plot and the "ghost" that haunts one of the main characters. Yes there's torture, but is the last third of Martyrs its locus? What about Ambition? Is the gory finale the source of the film's horror? Or is it a sort of explosive release of the growing horror the viewer has felt building throughout the movie?

These could be debated (along with just about every other torture porn flick), but we could simply toss out the rather unproductive debate by getting rid of the sticking point that torture porn is the essence of certain films. Instead, if we agree with the term's coiner that torture porn is a visual and narrative strategy, and it can be used in many different films and for many different reasons, then we suddenly can discuss the links between Hostel and Turistas, as well as Reservoir Dogs and The Passion of the Christ and BSG (in which I'm told robot torture occurs, as seemingly illogical as that all is: why program them feel pain?) and so on without getting tangled up in the question of whether or not something is "authentically" torture porn. We can also toss out the critically lazy idea that "torture porn" films are some special subset of flicks concerned solely with the depiction of graphic, extended acts of violence. While admitting that there is something distinct and notable about the visual and narrative value of such depictions of violence, it leaves a requirement to confront the rest of the film. To have exhausted one's critic arsenal by dismissing an entire work on the basis of one filmmaking strategy would appear as stupid as announcing that all films that used unreliable narration or extensive montages were pointless. "They're just about narration. Montages are just about the editing – what's the point?"

Anywho, I've never been happy with the concept of torture porn as it is currently used and, on consideration, I believe it is because treating it as genre, instead of a collection of techniques, is inherently unhelpful. As of now – right now, just then, it happened already now – I'm dropping its use as a genre identifier for ANTSS.

That's all very well, you might say, but how's Turistas?

Eh, it's kinda goofy. Attractive kids. Clunky plot. Strained seriousness with an ill-considered and inconsistent anti-colonial message. I wouldn't bother.

True Crime: "Mr. Wan, Saw 7 is calling on line 1 for you."

Germany is looking down the shaky and forgetful barrel of a new era of crime. The citizens of that fair nation live in the terrifying shadow of a recent explosion (read "two known cases") of what the ever-quick-to-dub media has dubbed "silver crime."

What, pray tell, is "silver crime." We turn to the Time UK Online for a little enlightenment:

A group of well-to-do pensioners who lost their savings in the credit crunch staged an arthritic revenge attack and held their terrified financial adviser to ransom, prosecutors said yesterday.

The alleged kidnapping is the latest example of what is being dubbed “silver crime” — the violent backlash of pensioners who feel cheated by the world.

“As I was letting myself into my front door I was assaulted from behind and hit hard,” the financial adviser James Amburn, a 56-year-old German-American, said. “Then they bound me with masking tape until I looked like a mummy. I thought I was a dead man.”

He was freed by 40 heavily armed policemen from the counter-terrorist unit last Saturday. The frightened consultant was in his underwear, his body lacerated by wounds allegedly inflicted by angry pensioners.

The group of "impoverished" pensioners included two couples that lost a sack of Euros in the American housing market. The first couple used the cellar in the vacation home to hold the financial advisor hostage. The second couple, a pair of retired doctors, supervised the abuse. The frightening, if fragile-hipped, foursome hoped that they could beat the financial advisor into giving back all the money they lost.

The financial advisor almost escaped when, after stripping him down to his skivvies beating him badly enough of break a rib, the four amateur torturers allowed their victim a backyard smoke break.

"Oh, God! Please don't kill me! And, um, can I smoke in here?"
"In the house. Ah, no."
"Then, if you're not beating me right this moment, could I step out and have a quick smoke."
"Of course, my dear man. We're Germans, not savages. Besides, the wife's missing her stories. We can pick this up in thirty. That work for you?"

The financial advisor made it over the vacation house's back wall – the cash-strapped pensioners were so poor that they couldn't even build a decent backyard wall for their vacation house – and went running in his tightie-whities for help. However, the pensioners gave wheezy chase to the fugitive financier, shouting that he was a thief. (Having stolen, apparently, several bruises, cuts, and a single pair of briefs.) A "helpful" group of young men subdued the nearly naked "burglar" and, as you do, handed him over to the two old couples chasing him. The police, presumably, would have better things to do than investigate a robbery.

For attempting to escape, the financier was beaten again.

Convinced that they'd finally broken the suit's will to resist, the elderly couples had the advisor fax a request for funds to a Swiss bank. The advisors fax contained a coded message that played on the fact that the German word for a financial policy is spelled like the English word for "police." His captors did not notice the call for help and, a short time later, the counter-terror unit arrived.

Comic cred goes to Dinosaur Comics.