Hostel is a double edged sword - a sexy road movie and an absolute gore fest, which will at times have you squirming. To put this movie in the category of road movie may seem surprising, but essentially that’s what it is. It has all the elements required, the protaganists set out with the idea of finding something better. It goes on to almost toy with the idea of identity, with the main protagonist slowing manifesting into what he most detests. Gender features to a great extent for example the women are all portrayed as immoral, as prostitutes or sluts and the men (who are few and far between) seek frivolity on unprecedented levels; they buy women, judge them on their physical merits and seek only to fulfill their own needs. However, none of them deserve the fate that awaits them, and even the innocent are not spared. They are little more than small boys lost in a wood full of predators, and very far from home, yet they too have been predators in their treatment of women earlier on, in this way it could almost be comparable to a contemporary slasher flick.
Behind its apparently bloody-mindedness, it is a deeply intelligent and angry film: graphic, but by no means extreme. Part fairy tale and part nightmare, the film proposes moral questions such as "What could you let yourself do if you did not have to account for your actions?" "What is a human life worth?" It is with musings such as this that we can see the direct influence of Takashi Miike, Eli Roth has wrapped biting social commentary in a bloody shroud, and it works. By no means is this the most profound or intellectual film in the season, narratively it leaves a lot to be desired, but the torture scenes are realistic and horrible. You cannot help but feel the pain of the victims, and this is where the film truly excels. For a few moments of nightmarish intimacy, you are made to empathize deeply with a stranger. Much like the closing scenes of Audition, you care about the victims and want their pain to simply STOP. 
It is here that the use of the road really becomes apparent, the viewer feels as though they have shared the journey and associate themselves with the experiences of the protagonists. This realisation is, for me, the scary part!Labels: American Cinema, Eli Roth, Gore, Hostel, Rachael McConkey, Road Movie, Torture
posted by Atomic Discourse Gale at 12:31 pm
5 Comments:
Hostel seems to deal with some pretty big emotional and cultural ideas at a first glance, but when you strip away all the beautiful women wondering around with their tops of and the gore fest second half the equations don’t seem to add up.
The film at first seems to be split into 2 halves; the first half plays out a bit like Dude Where’s My Whore House, or any other tit filled American Teen Road Movie. Yobish American 20-somethings trall across Europe, picking up a Swede along the way looking for the best sex and drugs money can buy. The second half mirrors the prostitution of the first half and it is played out with the 20-somethings bodies being bought (as they bought the prostitutes in the first half) but then tortured. A pretty easy formula to follow but holes seem to appear left, right and centre.
Held within the plot were typically American ideals, the idea that the lead character has made a mistake in the past (leaving a girl to drown in a lake instead of doing something and saving her) which seems to crop up out of the blue in a “hey mate, have I ever told you about the time…” fashion, which he will relive later in the film but react in a different way, thus relinquishing him or his guilt that he has carried around for many years but only told his mate about now. When he does re-enact his past but this time saving the girl she kills herself anyway, making it all a little none and void.
The gore was explicit as where the sex and graphic screens of nudity but they seemed to have no over arching moral message behind them (or to justify there use)apart from a line drawn connecting prostitution as physical degradation and torture to the more physical based torture but by no means is the line explicit, well as explicit as the sex and torture scenes.
I’d use the analogy of bashing in someone’s head with half a brick for going into a strip club but I’m not so sure about this escalating spiral of revenge/violence… The prostitutes don’t sell the men to the people that want to torture them for revenge or so that violence can be reciprocated to them. There is no tangible link between what the guys do and what the girls do to the guys, the women who sell the men are not prostitutes they are women that deliberately entice the men, letting and encouraging them to objectify them so that they fall into the sirens trap.
The men objectify the women and prostitutes in the first half and then by a twist of fate they are then prostitutes to fulfil torturers gratification. The men are enticed by the women, encouraged to ogle them so that they will fall into the trap in a scene that could have been lifted from any euro backpacker porn… “Oh we have to share a room with women, OK… Oh the women like to walk around with no tops on, OK maybe I could trick them into having sex with me… Oh they’re nymphos, wicked.” The women don’t sell the men for revenge for the objectification, the women sell the guys for money and use their bodies and sexuality to trap the men, ok a form of prostitution but a weak argument as if you start expanding out the definition like that then it just keeps expanding out of control.
I'm just finding it difficult (and this isn't a dig) to identify Hostel as some kind of ...cinematic parallel of Abu Ghraib. What happened there was terrible, we don't need tabloids to tell us that, but it happened in context (the context being the 'war on terrorism'). I think that's what made the events in Abu Ghraib so disturbing. They were committed by the very people who were supposed to be bringing civilisation and democracy to an 'uncivilised' nation. It's the hypocrisy, stupid.
With that in mind, Hostel exists without context. Politics and history are absent. Geography (sorry David) barely manages to make its presence felt. They could be anywhere in Eastern Europe. Nationalities range from German to Japanese to American...
What occurs in the torture chambers is mindless...what happened (happens?) in places like Abu Ghraib is systemic.
I think Hostel is the first film that I have ever been disgusted at because of the level of unjustified violence. It wasn't the grossest film I have ever seen, but it was all the more disturbing because it was pure ..well, titillation is as relevant a word as any.
Ok, I don't have much time, so this may be a quick and crudely put together post...
I agree in principal with most of your points, and I think theoretically the film sits on the proverbial fence with a lot of them, in particular, the seeming social commentary on American culture was something we argued about in the pub, (Alan thought it was more a commentary on tourism) but nothing here is clear cut, it's just a muddled up mess of sketchy politics, tits and ass and lacking a moral stance.
I guess i fail to see the point of the film in terms of adding something to my experience of watching it ( does that make sense??) I got no real sense of anything from it, much like vee has mentioned above, it 'exists without context'.
Anyway, all that aside, it was fucking disgusting. I felt really nauseous at the end. If you take it as a gore fest, pure and simple, then you're in for a treat, anything else and you'll be sorely disappointed.
That's my 2p's worth...
(Rach wrote)
'it's just a muddled up mess of sketchy politics, tits and ass...lacking a moral stance'
ha ha...you're right. And you're also right about it being a real gore fest. I think Eli Roth should have just concentrated more on the splatter fest aspect, set it in a traditional slasher context, and got rid of the pseudo political shizzle then maybe I wouldn't have had so much to complain about...
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