I would like to dedicate this post to the film Sucker Punch, which I have never seen. In it, there are a bunch of sexy girls doing sexy girl fighting and the message of the film is “Don’t objectify women.” There’s a lot of articles and videos and comments about how this is actually a smart thing to say. “That’s why the film is called Sucker Punch,” they claim. “You think you’re getting one thing, but actually you’re getting another.”
The problem of course, is that you think you’re getting one thing and then you actually get the thing. A film that claims to empower women by wagging its finger at the audience for objectifying women…but also objectifies women in the process is not just hypocritical, it’s just bad art.
Truffaut famously said that there is no way to make an anti-war movie, because no matter what you put up on the screen, it will look cool. (I’m paraphrasing here.) I believe the same can be said for violence and objectification in general. I have to remind myself of this fact every once in a while, because I, and perhaps you as well, have a tendency to start overthinking these things and trick ourselves into imagining a deeper message or a subversive statement hidden in what is merely filth.
So yeah, I watched Cannibal Holocaust and for maybe about thirty minutes, I wondered if it was secretively a good film. At minute thirty-one I snapped out of it.
To begin with, I will argue in the film’s favor that it is shocking and compelling, and you might argue that something novel is valuable in and of itself. I watch a lot of horror movies, and I’ve seen a lot of make-up and special effects. A lot of that looks rather tame in comparison to seeing an actual, living animal be torn apart in excruciating detail on screen. While I hated that it happened, and I hated watching it, I have to admit, I found it hard to look away.
But, I would argue, that is meaningless out of context and even less than meaningless within context. The plot of the film is that four documentarians go missing while filming a cannibal tribe in South America. Some professor decides to go and look for them, and hopefully retrieve the film they shot, so he contracts a jungle guide and the jungle guide’s jungle guide to make contact with the tribe and recover the footage. The first half of the film follows the professor and his guide going through the jungle, meeting the indigenous people there, getting the film. The second half is found-footage style and follows the exploits of the four filmmakers.
Throughout the film, the behavior of the local tribes are sprinkled throughout and the message that the film wants to present to us is that they are, yes, violent and, yes, sometimes cannibals, but that is their way. We should respect that.
It doesn’t need to be said that the violence shown on screen is not based on, nor indictive of actual indigenous people living in South America. They are meant to be a caricature, but the film would like to trick is into believing that this is ok. Well, I’m not falling for it, movie.
Most of the movie’s message is that the four filmmakers are awful people, capable of heinous crimes against the local people, all for the sake of their film. They are the true monsters, we are told. And yet, at the same time, we are complicit in their crimes. As we see the young men assault and eventually murder a young local girl, the audience views it through the lens, the literal lens, of the monstrous cameraman filming it. “See?” says the movie, “You are just as bad as those disgusting cannibals. You are a part of this crime too.”
But, I wasn’t a part of that crime. At least, not until I watched this movie. And I had no desire to take any part in it, until I got bored on a Friday afternoon and started watching a notorious horror movie out of curiosity. The movie would like to implicate the white, “civilized” filmmakers as also being violent murderers and in doing so, would like to point the finger at me, the audience member, for watching such a thing. “They have done this violent crime for your sake,” the movie would have us believe. But no, I did not ask for it, nor did I want it.
This type of message has been retold in a variety of formats and genres. The war movie that discusses that war is hell, while also glorifying war. Funny Games would like to accuse me of wanting to see people get murdered. Sucker Punch wants me to feel bad for watching the objectification of women. (I guess. I’ve never seen it.)
And it’s easy to get tricked into believing that these films have something to say. That perhaps there’s a meaning to all this violence and sexualization. Eggheads like me can get tied up in knots trying to justify these things, but really, it’s just creating more filth. A film like Cannibal Holocaust is not showing us what evils lurk in our hearts, because the evil was never there until it was shown on screen. These things do nothing and say nothing, but just put more evil in the world. Best not to look.