The growing impact of 'torture porn' in mainstream cinema

[...] Something has, however, changed profoundly with the advent of 'torture porn' as a mainstream genre and the proliferation of real-life terrorist beheadings on the internet. The will and reach of the censor is slipping: increasingly, we will have to take responsibility for ourselves.

We might begin by questioning if we ever have the moral right to watch terrorist victims such as Daniel Pearl or Nick Berg being beheaded. I do not think we have, because the argument that has always prohibited the watching of child pornography - that the helpless victim was unable to give or withhold consent to the act or the filming - applies equally to al-Qa'eda's home-made snuff films.

The cinematic child of voyeurism and terror, 'torture porn' is a genre that gorges on the world's horrors and regurgitates them, but learns nothing from them.

The more of it audiences consume, the less they understand. In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four the panicked hero, Winston Smith, describes a nightmarish night at the flicks, as the audience relishes the sight of a boatload of enemy refugees being bombed, and roars with laughter at a mother's hapless struggles to protect her small boy from death.

We are not so very far away from that now. There must come a point at which audiences ask a different question from what will the torturer do next to his victims on screen? We must ask what watching him is doing to us. Read more