In her article Hostel II Representations of the body in pain, Gabrielle Murray comments that teenagers who were 10 when 9/11 happened are now 16 or 17. They are "grown up being told you are going to get blown-up. Terror Alert Orange… They want something to scream at" that is as shocking as the events of their lives. I think this is an interesting point to bring up. It says something about that generation which I think could be true. I’ve heard that my generation has a three minute attention span because that was how long it used to take for a modem to dial up to the internet. I think it could be the same reaction. When these children are brought up watching the news with topics like 9/11 and bred on orange, yellow, and red alerts, they will need horror equivalent or greater to entertain them in movies. It only makes sense.

In Edelstein’s review he claims ‘fear supplants empathy and makes us all potential torturers, doesn’t it?’ which is true, especially in relation to Abu Ghraib. I said this in a previous blog post and I think that when humans are in a situation of fear they will turn on their morals, logic, and better understanding in order to save oneself. This is the common archetype of ‘torture porn’. Murray writes that torture is not used to ‘unearth secret information’ in times of war and hostility, but torture serves the sole purpose of isolating and therefore controlling a group through their bodily vulnerability. We see this statement supported by the predicament in Abu Ghraib.

The label "torture porn" repulses me a little. Murray defines it as ‘the representations of mutilation and torture in films are pornography because they are illegal or at least unacceptable to contemporary cinema audiences’ while Susan Sontag claims that torture has predominately a sexual nature.

I really enjoyed the part in the article in which Murray discusses the exhibit in the art gallery, Blind Light. I would have liked to see and experience it myself. I think the disassociation between mind and body happens so often that we forget we function as one. The mind controls what the body does, the body controls what the mind thinks. It takes a piece like this in which one is totally incapacitated visually to create a connection between body and mind once again. And just thinking further on this idea, Sontag says "the Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one", which I agree with. But take away our visual dependency such as in this piece of art and we are panic stricken. I imagine myself in this glass cube terrified, heart palpitating, trying to escape, clawing at the sides like a rat. Though horror and torture porn movies depend on visuals to frighten and entice, there is much to be said about a new degree of horror that is created by obstructing our vision.