Ms. Kathryn Bigelow was disingenuous that her film does not endorse torture. She claimed that she simply showed things as they were without moral assessment.
Yet, the image of the torturer--intelligent, sensitive, animal-loving guy--which she created is her fantasy. Torture changes not only the tortured but also the torturers. All accounts tell that these positions very soon are becoming occupied by constitutional sadists and psychopaths for whom precisely the power of application or withdrawal of deadly force constitutes the main attraction of their occupation. While exceptions always exist, the art has a generalizing property which inevitably reflects on the artist.
In the end, as Group Captain Lionel Mandrake told General Jack D. Ripper about his Japanese captors "they were not interested in my answers. They were kind-of having fun." When Napoleon, the mass murderer and Jacobin General, instructed Marshal Berthier to prohibit torture he did so not out of humanistic impulses but because he insisted on unreliability and worthlessness of the whole procedure.
No comments:
Post a Comment