receive back to Horrorhead , a newspaper column all about the connections between repugnance and scifi . On Battlestar Galactica , there ’s an ongoing theme of torture : humans gang - rape an imprisoned Cylon ; the Cylons beat a mankind so badly he loses his eye ( not to mention all the human race they stamp out outright ) ; and there ’s even a small homo - on - Cylon washboarding early in the series . These are not scenes that take spot entirely offscreen . We see beatings ; we see the blooming , freaked - out face of Six the Cylon after she ’s been raped so many time she ca n’t brook up and has lost the will to eat . The question is , do we necessitate to see these scenes ? Would this series be as hefty without them ? And by extension , would any torment - laced scifi moving picture like The Hills Have eye or Cube be as beguiling if it lose the mutilations or the razor net that falls from the cap and reduces living humans to little cube of physique ? ( Spoilers ahead . )
The response is evidently complicated . For some people , torture puts any report beyond the pale : a couple of weeks ago , scifi writerKaren Joy Fowler told me in an interviewthat she decline to watch over Battlestar Galactica because there ’s too much torture in it . But millions of movie sports fan have turn near - future flick Hostel , about an notional Eastern European country that houses a torture - amusement heart for the fat , into a rage hit and franchise . And the television serial publication 24 , which is also a penny-pinching - time to come dystopia , also has millions of drooling lover who do n’t seem to mind that superspy Jack , our principal character , is always torment people with everything from ugly lamp to fists .
https://gizmodo.com/karen-joy-fowler-talks-to-io9-about-writing-in-the-futu-382800
Enough has been say about torture porn that I do n’t need to repeat the arguments too much here . They all boil down to one interrogative : Does watch torture make us more likely to tolerate it in real life ?
allow ’s look at one of the most famous examples of torture in scifi . Canadian flick Cube , which came out in the later nineties , was your classic , Saw - flair “ a cluster of strangers trapped in a weird place have to puzzle out puzzles to break loose frightful grody demise ” form of flick . For people kick upstairs with videogames , a form of amusement where you solve puzzle to avoid choke , the scenario was intimate . And the puzzle was even jolly cool : the character have to figure out a sequence of prime number in social club to get out from a giant cube building full of rooms that move around all the time . As they ’re figuring out the choice identification number successiveness , they venture into room that dig them , poison them , chop them up into little cube , and generally spew gore everywhere . Do we need the torture along with the cool math secret plan ? I ’d say yes . The total movie depends on the interview understanding the characters ’ urging , but at the same prison term the scenario is dreamlike enough that bringing in the torture enhance our sentiency of freaky otherworldliness .
But how about Wes “ Scream ” Craven ’s The Hills Have eye , a classic cultus motion-picture show from the 1970s that was just remade into a less - than - amazing franchise ? In the original , gritty - freakout pic , a mob whose motortruck break up down is waylaid by nuclear cannibal mutation in the desert . The torture is camp and hideous at the same time . In fact , the entire point of the movie is really the torture , and the escape , of our normal American family unit . Like Hostel , The Hills Have Eyes is literally about torture and what it can do to you . So the moving-picture show could n’t survive without torture , and in fact the straining itself is the detail . How will the great unwashed be dismembered ? Where will the stemma sputtering ? Will they really DO that ? Without torture , there would be no movie .
Let ’s return to Battlestar Galactica ’s anguish with these two examples in nous . Unlike The Hills Have optic , BSG is not about torment . It ’s about a horrific dystopia where agony has become part of everyday aliveness . Like Cube , BSG uses agony to explore the urgency of the situation its characters are in . So do we want the torture to finger that urging ?
One might ask the same motion about a scene in Iain M. Banks ’ novel The Algebraist , where we are treat to an intense scene of torture to show how malefic one particular fictitious character , Luseferous , really is :
[ Luseferous ] had decree that the final penalization of the bravo should be his own tooth . . . Accordingly , his four dogtooth teeth had been murder , bioengineered to become tusks which would grow without ceasing . . . These great digit - deep fangs had erupt out of the bones of his upper and lower jaw , deflate the flesh of his sassing , and had uphold their remorseless emergence . The lower set veer up and over his head , and after a few month worth of extension , came to rival his scalp near the top of his head , while the upper set produce in a scimitar - like paired sweep oar beneath his neck . . . Both sets of teeth then started to go into the assassin ’s physical structure , one pair slow force themselves through the bony plates of the adult male ’s skull , the other entering rather more easily into the soft tissues of the lower cervix . . . The fangs tunnel through his skull and into his brain were the ace which would shortly , and agonizingly , kill him . . . This unfortunate person , nameless assassin had been unable to do anything to prevent this because he was pinned helpless and fast against the paries of the chamber . . . his nutriment and bodily social function provide for by various tubes and implant . . . The fellow ’s ears and judgement still worked .
Could we have learned that Luserferous was a perverted person , as well as a dictator , without that passage ? Did it ask to be so elaborated and creative ?
Perhaps it could have been less detailed , but I would not have remembered it so vividly if it had not . Similarly , I would not have felt the horror of the humans ’ and Cylons ’ situations without see Six tortured by humans , and Baltar torture by Cylons . I am not certain if making something memorable is justification , but it is certainly excited realism . And in a genre whose intact narrative substance is the unreal , the scientific discipline fictional , a dose of excited naive realism can be potent indeed .
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