The idea of spectacle within film has been much debated throughout cinema’s relatively short artistic lifetime. The birth of film began with, and was fuelled by, a hunger for spectacle; a need to see something that amazed and amused. In the essay ‘The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, Tom Gunning debates the idea of film working as a stage for impressive spectacle and how such a concept works with the development of narrative. The issue of visual spectacle is raised within the opening minutes of Hostel. We are kept from seeing something terrible. What the viewer does see is horrific, but only by suggestion. The camera calmly observes sharp implements and tools that we assume are used to wound helpless victims. This is signalled by the site of blood and remnants of what could be human flesh (Figure 1).[1]
Figure 1
In the background, a man whistles a tuneful melody, juxtaposing a sound of happiness and contentment with the threat of extreme violence (itself a potential reference to the torture scene in executive producer Quentin Tarantino’s film Reservoir Dogs (1992)). The fact that we do not see any actual violence in this opening montage of images does not necessarily mean the scene is lacking in spectacle as such. The images are constructed so they evoke a menacing atmosphere. But it is the threat of impending spectacle that adds power to the main events in the film, when they arrive. From the start, we have been warned that this film may show us things we find upsetting. However, we are kept from seeing them until the proper moment, with Roth working as a magician who keeps his audiences waiting for the final reveal. In a manner reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s use of violence less than half-way into Psycho, Roth allows his audience the excitement of visceral flesh-cutting relatively quickly, rather than leaving it to the climax of the movie. Spectacle is at the heart of this film and at the centre of its story. One could argue that the hunger to watch – to see what is happening, rather than the tools that are used for it – is present (and condoned by the filmmakers) from the outset.
After its dark and gruelling opening, Hostel plunges its viewer into a very different genre: the American sex-comedy. Playing to the traditions of ‘teen comedies’ such as Road Trip (2000) or EuroTrip (2002) with their arguably crude and sexually explicit jokes, Roth introduces the viewer to the main characters: loud young men on a search for sex and drugs. Less than ten minutes into the film, the viewer is treated to the sight of the three men ogling women who are standing on display behind glass windows. They talk about the girls as they display their bodies to the men. One of them remarks: ‘I hope bestiality is legal in Amsterdam, because that girl is a fucking hog’. From very early on in the film the display of human flesh is animalised and likened to meat. One of the young men then offers to purchase the services of a woman for his friend, saying it is his ‘gift’. The friend, Josh, declines this present, but when he enters a room within the brothel and discovers a prostitute engaged in fetish activity with a client, he is told: ‘You watch, you pay!’. In his essay ‘Shocked and Awed? Hostel and the Spectacle of Self-Mutilation’[2] Gregory A. Burris notes that ‘one of the most significant mirror images’ in the film ‘is the contrast between the Amsterdam brothel and the Bratislava torture house’.[3] Burris highlights the similarities between the two, as ‘both contain a long corridor lined with doors leading to adjacent rooms featuring various attractions – in the former scenes of sadomasochistic sexual domination; in the latter, mutilation and torture’.[4] The idea of a house full of rooms of attractions – where one goes to watch an event or performance to achieve a specific emotional or physical experience – has been brought to life onscreen many times before in pictures as diverse as Tobe Hooper’s horror The Funhouse (1981) and, in a sexualised form in the context of a drama, Scott Kalvert’s film The Basketball Diaries (1995). Hostel, however, goes one step further in its recognition of the uneasy similarity between the visual sensation of sexualised flesh and the spectacle of brutalised flesh.
The way torture is used as spectacle in Hostel is integral to the narrative structure. This fits in with Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg’s theories on the ‘spectacle of the wounded body’[5] and how it advances narrative and suspense. Drawing on an example from the film Beyond Ragoon, Goldberg raises important points on the nature of spectacle and story:
[…] the spectacle of the tortured native body in Beyond Rangoon is used to cordon off space as particularly threatening, to make the boundaries of a particularly hostile ‘danger zone’ within the relative peril of the whole environment. The narrative time spent by the protagonist in that space, then, is a time of particularly heightened fear and suspense. Thus, terror inspire by the spectacle of torture […] is displaced, as audience attention is removed from that person’s body […] to the potential of such pain to be enacted upon the white, Western body.[6]
In Hostel, Icelandic backpacker Oli dies first. He is never portrayed as the lead, but more of a ‘hanger-on’, having joined the two American men on their travels. Goldberg’s discussion of the ‘native’ is in reference to a non-white character who dies so as the audience’s fear can be built up to the destruction of a ‘white, Western body’.[7] In this instance, Oli is white, but he is a member of the foreign world, the country of ‘Not America’, and his death signals the impending threat that will sooner or later catch up with the two Americans as they spend time in the ‘danger zone’ of Slovakia. The spectacle of Oli’s torture is also restrained in comparison to the torture of Josh at a later point in the film. It is moderate spectacle to signpost the impending stronger spectacle; one that that is being saved for the torture of a central, American character rather than a peripheral Icelandic man.
In Hostel, the film builds to a scene of extreme gore where a young woman has her face blow-torched then, in close-up, has her eye (which is dangling from its socket) snipped out. The scene is a setpiece, deliberately designed to be one of the most memorable moments in the film. Roth apparently accepts this, and refers to the scene as ‘The Eyegasm’,[8] suggesting that the image is tantamount, from a cinematic perspective, to a sexual climax. It is worth commenting that there is an ejaculation of bodily fluid as the eye is snipped, with a bright yellow streak of liquid leaking from the socket. With this scene in mind, one could argue that Roth is actually working within the ideas set forth by Tom Gunning in his essay on ‘The Cinema of Attraction’. Drawing from other theories and debates, Gunning highlights notable traits of this form of entertainment:
What precisely is the cinema of attraction? First, it is a cinema that basis itself on the quality that Léger celebrated: its ability to show something. Contrasted to the voyeuristic aspect of narrative cinema analyzed by Christian Metz, this is an exhibitionist cinema. [9] The concept of the ‘exhibitionist cinema’ is evocative of the previously discussed topic of watching and paying for certain human pleasures. Though one must be cautious when making connections between such theoretical arguments and the cinema of today, Gunning’s comments do seem relevant in the context of Hostel where people pay (both in the film and in multiplexes) to see gruesome spectacles – spectacles that are laid out for the purpose of exhibition.
Laura Mulvey’s discussion on ‘Visual Pleasures in Narrative Cinema’[10] also raises some interesting topics for debate on the subject of watching a spectacle unfold for the viewer’s amusement. In the section of her essay subtitled ‘Pleasure in Looking/Fascination with the Human Form’[11] she discusses the notion of ‘scopophilia’ and Sigmund Freud’s interpretation of what the term means. In analyses of the definitions he attributed to it, she highlights that Freud associated scopophilia with ‘taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze’. This particular example gives way to a notion of child-like fascination; ‘their desire to see and make sure of the private and the forbidden’.[12] With Hostel and its sequel, Hostel Part II (2007) Eli Roth leads the viewer around a tour of the forbidden, showing them things they are not supposed to look at but still get a voyeuristic thrill at watching. This notion could be applied to the eye-snipping scene, where one could say a childish ‘I wonder what that would look like?’-feeling drives that crescendo of gore, allowing audiences to crave a higher level of visual spectacle. The scene gives them permission to be appalled and fascinated.
Hostel Part II raises the spectacle level. The film contains a premise that is, on the surface, almost identical. A group of young Americans (this time females) encounter brutal violence abroad. The staged torture scenes, however, are more impressive in terms of scale and inventiveness. In ‘The Cinema of Attractions’, Tom Gunning remarks that in narrative films the idea of visual attraction often ‘goes underground’. However, he singles out the genre of musicals as a potential exception to this rule. Though very different in assumed content and genre conventions, the Hostel films share notable similarities with classic Hollywood musicals, such as Lloyd Bacon’s Footlight Parade (1933), where scenes build up to big, lavish displays of visual attraction. The audience waits in anticipation for what attractions the filmmakers may show them next. This comparison is especially pertinent when discussing Hostel Part II, as the film’s heightened production values, compared to Part I, allow for a series of torture scenes that are designed looking visually arresting. One of the first of these scenes features a young woman being suspended naked in mid-air (an image very similar to a scene in another ‘torture’ film released the previous year, Saw III) while another woman, also unclothed, uses a long metal tool to slash her flesh, causing blood to flow down onto her (as seen in Figures 2 & 3 below).[13]
Figures 2 & 3
Jason Middleton, in ‘The Subject of Torture: Regarding the Pain of Americans in Hostel’,[14] suggests that the term ‘“torture porn” designates a film that constructs scenes of torture as elaborate set pieces, or “numbers,” intended to serve as focal points for the viewer’s visual pleasure, and (in some critics’ view) for which the narrative is merely a flimsy pretext’.[15] To say this is an accurate description of Eli Roth’s Hostel films would be a subjective opinion – some may argue that Roth’s plots are not flimsy and actually drive the narrative – but it would be naive to not to see the similarities in Middleton’s statement and the structure of the Hostel films. They are engineered so the viewer anticipates with fascination the next big ‘number’, as one would do during Singin’ in the Rain (1952)[16] or Moulin Rouge! (2001).[17]
The gender-switch in Hostel Part II, where women take on similar roles to those the men inhabited in the first film, adds complexities to the film, some of which I shall examine in later chapters. However, the subject of gender does have an important bearing on the discussion of visual spectacle in the Hostel films, since much of the impact of spectacle is derived from anticipation. With this second instalment, the anticipation has a different edge to it: viewers know that they are going to see women being hurt. The threat of misogyny, cultivated (deliberately or not) by Lionsgate and Sony’s marketing campaign for the film, adds to the anticipatory desire to see spectacle, as the viewer wonders during the build-up of the narrative how far the film is going to go. It could be argued that the idea that the torture of women is somehow worse than the torture of men is based in sexism in itself; a sexism that dictates that men can withstand pain as they are the stronger sex, whereas women need to be shielded from harm in case they cannot not cope with it. As it happens, Roth successfully dilutes both this sexist notion (by showing men suffering gruelling torture in the first film) and the fear of misogyny by making sure the most ‘spectacularized torture of a female protagonist’, as Middleton points out, ‘is conducted by a woman’.[18] The spectacle is there, but the anticipated undercurrent of misogynist violence is somewhat derailed, and this arguably makes the film a stronger and more interesting work in terms of both how it handles spectacle horror and gender politics.
Hostel Part III (2011) was not directed by Eli Roth. It was backed by a different company (though still a subsidiary of Sony) and did not receive theatrical distribution. It also alters the original pattern of Americans being tortured abroad. This time they are tortured in Las Vegas, and the film plays to a format perhaps more in line with 2009 comedy The Hangover than the previous two Hostel instalments.[19] The visual spectacle in Part III is interesting for two conflicting reasons. Firstly, it makes a point of portraying torture as a voyeuristic spectacle in the design of the ‘torture club’. In the film, Elite Hunting, the fictitious company that allows rich business men and women to pay to watch people being brutalised, appears to have expanded to the United States and has built a large, high-tech theatre of the gory and the sadistic; an auditorium where people can sit and bid electronically to see their darkest fantasies played out on stage. This stage is behind glass and resembles an operating theatre. This play on the word theatre is made apparent when a theatrical curtain descends and ascends in between ‘performances’. The second point of interest is this film’s relative lack of spectacle. Compared to the first two films, this picture is shy when it comes to showing its audiences the big ‘numbers’. They are there, but through editing and camera angles much of the gory detail is shielded. The most sustained and detailed torture involves a man having his face torn off, but this is mostly shown through suggestive extreme-close-ups. Another of the big ‘numbers’ features a girl being made to swallow large bugs; perhaps a deliberate nod to the questionable motives behind reality television shows such as I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here (2002 – 2013). Although explicit visual spectacle is more restrained in Hostel Part III, the conscious admittance that the film buys into a type of theatre or variety performance adds an interesting layer to the violence, and perhaps hints at an acceptance of the genre’s Gran Guiñol heritage.
It could be argued the Hostel series is based on the manipulation of spectacle to such an extent that the narrative becomes secondary. The films’ primary aim is to cultivate anticipation (in a similar way to various slasher-horror films of 1980s and 90s) then dwell on the violence and pain, offering viewers a feeling of repulsion and satisfaction. Roth rightly states that those going to see Hostel know what they are about to see.[20] They are going because they want to be tested. The spectacle is the draw in the way suspense would have been the appeal for those queuing to see an Alfred Hitchcock thriller. Though there are variants in design and execution, all three Hostel pictures use this to create a cinema of attractions that relies on the willingness of the audience to see extended scenes of pain and terror within the safe comfort of a cinema auditorium.
[1] Screenshot taken from the Sony Pictures 2007 UK DVD release.
[2] Gregory A Burris, ‘Shocked and Awed?: Hostel and the spectacle of self-mutilation’, CineAction (2010) <http://fiaf.chadwyck.com/fulltext/showpdf.do?PQID=2064963481&jid=006/0000053> [accessed 1 November 2012]
[3] Burris, p. 7.
[4] Burris, p. 7.
[5] Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg, ‘Splitting Difference’, in Violence and American Cinema, J. David Slocum, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp.245 – 270
[6] Goldberg, p. 248.
[7] Goldberg, p. 248.
[8] Roth talking in an interview on The Film Programme on BBC Radio 4 in 2007 , http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/filmprogramme/filmprogramme_20070622.shtml [accessed 8 March 2013]
[9] Gunning, p. 2.
[10] Laura, Mulvey, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, from The sexual subject: a Screen reader in sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992), pp.22-34
[11] Mulvey, p. 24.
[12] Mulvey, p. 24.
[13] Figures 1 & 2 taken from Sony’s UK DVD release of Hostel Part II
[14] Jason Middleton, ‘The Subject of Torture: Regarding the Pain of Americans in Hostel’, in Cinema Journal, 49, Number 4, Summer (2010), pp. 1-24 < http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cj/summary/v049/49.4.middleton.html> [accessed 04 December 2012]
[15] Middleton, p. 2.
[16] Singin’ in the Rain. Stanley Donen/Gene Kelly. MGM. USA. 1952.
[17] Moulin Rouge!. Baz Luhrmann. Twentieth Century Fox. USA/Australia. 2001.
[18] Middleton, p. 19.
[19] R. L. Shaffer, Hostel Part III DVD Review, IGN (2011) <http://uk.ign.com/articles/2011/12/21/hostel-part-iii-dvd-review> [accessed 9 December 2011]
The Hostel Dissertation 