Torture seems to be the in-thing in media these days. Whether its film, TV or literature everything now has a 'torture' scene. It maybe says a lot about the 21st century that sex scenes are now considered boring and have pretty much been replaced with an obligatory ten minute scene involves electrodes, bolt croppers, scalpels or the common yo-yo. Increasingly the question is becoming "why?".
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The precipitating factor for this piece is the 4od 'drama' Utopia.
To spare the wrath of the Fire God, Knife Missile and Angel of Vengeance Upon Those Who Spoil I will at this point insert:
** SPOILER ALERT**
Episode I of Utopia has, as expected, a torture scene. Without going into the details it is: a.) somewhat nauseating to watch, b.) no doubt effective, and c.) arguably has what will now become a cult threat: "Wilson.. Wilson I've got... the spoon now.." .
My problem with torture scenes is pretty much the same objection I have to torture in real life - its largely pointless. As any number of police forces through the ages have proven people will agree to anything and implicate anyone in anything once you start bolt croppering parts of their anatomy off. But, as military intelligence has also found over the years, the quality of the intelligence you gain by this method is only marginally better than the intelligence provided by psychics, astrology and random guesswork.
In practice for torture to be an effective information extraction tool you need know, in advance:
1.) That the victim really does know what you want to know,
2.) Have some way of checking whether what they've told you is true before you let them go.
3.) There not to be some kind of 'duress' code that renders the whole activity pointless.
Utopia fails resoundingly on this; torturing people who don't know what your on about will just result in a.) meaningless garbage (she's dead, the address is in my computer), or worse yet intelligible garbage (Easy enough to see how the scene in Inglorious Bastards just ends up with the German soldier in the ditch picking a random spot on the map). Why then do supposedly super-skilled, Illuminati-esque intelligence agents persist in these ridiculous scenes??
The answer of course is depressingly obvious - its a cheap way to introduce tension and ""drama"" for a production without the writing, directing or acting to produce genuine suspense. This is where the threat of torture is far more intellectually satisfy and often leads to far better scenes. One can quite believe that when confronted with Michael from the first Godfather film calmly, quietly, explaining to you what will happen if you do not immediately tell him what he wants to know that people buckle. But to pull that off the writer has to have created a character who is fearsome and awe inspiring, the actors need to pull off both dread and ruthless confidence, and the director needs to make the whole thing work. Alternatively you get a B-list actor with a tub of chillies...
(A note here about the episode of Sherlock in which Mycroft is attempting to persuade Irene Adler to give up her phone. As Sherlock rather directly points out torturing Adler is pointless because of point 3 above, and once the phone is fried any further expenditure of effort is futile).
To add to the stupidity of the whole torture theme, the only scenes where the hero does get tortured and does know something they never tell it anyway - Scarface, Lethal Weapon, various Bond films, at least one of the Under Siege franchise, Stargate (film and TV series) etc etc etc.
Its time for film and TV to move past the obligatory torture scene, and maybe time for some fairly serious introspection if, as a society, we now see people getting their eyes cut out with a spoon as a selling point of a series.
/Z
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