Hostel
(Eli Roth, US)

“People say, my movie, it’s really violent . . . But you know what? It’s theater. It’s a magic trick. It’s all done with corn syrup and fake blood. All my actors are still alive. What’s worse, my movie or Dick Cheney? Nobody actually died in my movie. People actually die because of Dick Cheney, and he doesn’t allow you to see it.”—Eli Roth in Salon, January 5, 2006

Recent signs of life in mainstream American cinema are heartening. Possibly in reaction to the jarring lurch to the right in the wake of 9/11, a growing number of films for the mass market have expressed a profound questioning of political axioms that have since taken root, and even shown glimmers of deeper ideological, if not aesthetic, revolt. (I’m referring to the likes of Munich and Syriana, but whether these turn out to be transient phenomena or the flagships of some sort of renaissance remains to be seen.) Other films, like Eli Roth’s Hostel, continue to offer familiarly revolting ideology, joining the mass-market armada that distorts unpleasant truths and nurtures a climate of fear, self-righteousness, and cultural isolation.

It would be easy to dismiss the film as yet more fodder for the multiplex, but it is fruitful to examine how Hostel, like many horror films before it, offers a gauge of repressed social or political concerns. Robin Wood delineated two broad camps of the horror genre, regressive versus progressive, and illustrated the dichotomy through a discussion of The Omen (1976) and TheTexas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). A comparison of the premises of the latter film and Hostel provides an interesting point of departure. In Tobe Hooper’s far more disturbing low-budget nightmare, evil resides in the remote American heartland, where a clan of psychotic cannibals culls unsuspecting youngsters for their human slaughterhouse. In Hostel, the site of immoral transgression, in this case a secret recreational torture complex, has been outsourced to Europe . On the face of it, one could argue that an astute allegory is immediately in effect, but everything else in the film contradicts such a reading. Rather than functioning as an effective contemporary critique, Hostel merely duplicates current circumnavigations of logistical, legal, and moral impediments to torture. As if unable to confront both the grisly underbelly of homeland security and prevailing ethics—in so doing, it would have joined the legacy of American cinema that has never failed to cast an introspective and uncompromising eye on relevant issues of the day—Hostel nervously projects national demons onto a distantly hellish haven. Roth’s film adds insult to injury (one could take that literally), or distorted fantasy to grim reality, in painting Americans as highly prized targets of torture, not as political retribution, but as sheer degenerate entertainment for the decadent rich. Easily disregarded as apolitical escapism, like so much post-9/11 pop-aganda, the film belies values that are both a product and warped refraction of the war on terror.

Roth has said that he was inspired by a Thai website offering “murder vacations,” and has also implied that Hostel houses a subversive message. But its scare tactics constitute little more than the inverted, decontextualized manifestation of an ongoing moral and political discourse, while its main undercurrents are far from progressive or subversive. Hostel is the offspring of a relentlessly fear-mongering mass culture, hell-bent on selling us a variety of bogeymen and terrorists lurking in every shadow and held at bay only by the saintly conduct of a police state whose every agency has been endlessly mythologized and feted, or by unlikely heroes like Hostel’s young American sex tourist in Eastern Europe . The film is no bold allegory, but nor is it a harmless distraction devoid of values or political currency, especially given its narrative’s central use of torture at this time, when the subject is unfortunatelyall the rage.

Embarking on a little European sex vacation, the film’s protagonists, young American dudes Paxton and Josh, team up with a happy-go-lucky Icelandic lecher (obviously destined for the chopping block) and eventually end up in Slovakia after the trio is tipped to the alleged existence of a paradise filled with loose and desperate women. They soon discover that something far nastier than venereal disease awaits them in this hostel-cum-brothel, situated in an inhospitable country where feral street urchins hunt adults, suspicious businessmen abound, police are brutal and corrupt, and horny Slavic nymphets are simply not to be trusted. In Roth’s Slovakian chainsaw massacre, unexpected hero Paxton uncovers the shady workings of an elaborate scheme whereby unsuspecting tourists are drugged and kidnapped by a ring of European lowlifes, only to languish without hope of escape in a far-flung industrial hellhole, awaiting their prolonged doom at the hands of rich reprobates who have paid dearly for the privilege of torturing them. (Americans, we learn, are the most highly valued victims.) Initially, one expects these cocky frat boys, admittedly depicted in an unflattering light, to get their comeuppance, and one of them does: a wimpy aspiring writer, whom the audience is duped into thinking is the main character, is killed off first (punishment perhaps for his excessive sensitivity, or for trusting a stranger). But his more virile, unflappable companion, Paxton, ends up bringing freedom to himself and one other ghost detainee.

To go back to Wood’s dichotomy, some horror films examine festering social sores with devious dissidence, while others do little more than reinforce the ideological status quo. Hostel utterly diffuses the possibility or punch of a timely allegory by making the architects of torture European or Asian. The participation of one particularly enthusiastic, neophyte American, coded as an aberrant psycho, is clearly and disingenuously included to detract from the otherwise obvious thrust here: that Americans remain victims, the subjects of irrational animosity, and targets the world over. Furthermore, since no opportunity is given for critical distance between the characters and the audience, there is never any doubt as to who the good guys are. Where Texas Chainsaw Massacre offered a paradigm of liberal American youth besieged by a demented patriarchal cabal (in Texas !), Hostel posits a world of difference between the lawless depravity of these machinating Slovaks and the innocent young Americans. Paxton is the character the audience is most meant to empathize with, and by the end of the film, he embodies moral indignation and righteous anger, and ultimately responds with what must be deemed just retaliation.

Despite Hostel’s distressing virulence, reviews of the film have focused mostly on its unprecedented display of graphic violence (a boring and occasionally nauseating spectacle) and ignored its roster of rampant societal phobias—from xeno to homo—which bespeak an odious sense of cultural ascendancy. Roth asks which is worse, his movie or Dick Cheney, while both the real ideological underpinnings of his film and its ultimately demagogic function in the current political climate seem to elude him entirely.

—George Kaltsounakis

Hostel.

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