On the
crowd-pleasing xenophobia at the heart of two recent hit films.
It’s hard
to argue with success, and Eli
Roth’s Hostel (2005) and Pierre Morel’s Taken (2008) are by many measures
two of the most successful films of the last decade. Hostel made more than $80 million worldwide (on a budget of $4.5
million), led to a sequel two years later, and contributed significantly to the
rise of an entirely new sub-gerne (the horror sub-genre generally
known as “torture porn”). Taken
cost a lot more to make (budget of $25 million) but also made a lot more at the
box office (worldwide gross of over $225 million), has its own sequel coming
out later this year, and fundamentally changed the career arc
and general perception of its star Liam Neeson. Neither film was aiming for
any Oscars or to make the Sight
and Sound list, but clearly both did what they were trying to do well enough
to please their audiences and hit all the notes in their generic (in the
literal sense) formulas.
What the
two films were trying to do is, of course, a matter of interpretation and
debate (although Eli Roth
is more than happy to tell us his take on what his film is about);
moreover, they’re clearly very different from each other, in genre and goal and
many other ways, and I don’t intend to conflate them in this post. Yet they
both share an uncannily similar basic plot: naïve and fun-loving young American
travelers are abducted and tortured by evil European captors, against whom the
travelers themselves (in Hostel) or
the traveler’s badass special forces type Dad (in Taken; young
Maggie Grace apparently gets to fight some of her own fights against additional
Euro-types in the sequel) have to fight in order to escape. While it’s
possible to argue that the travelers in Roth’s film help bring on their own
torture as a result of their chauvanistic attitudes toward European women (in the
sequel Roth made his protagonists young women, and much more explicitly
innocent ones at that), there’s no question that the true forces of evil in
each film are distinctly European. Moreover, since all of the young travelers
are explicitly constructed as tourists, hoping to experience the different
world of Europe, the films can’t help but seem like cautionary tales about that
world’s dangerous and destructive underbelly.
It’s that
last point which I’d really want to emphasize here. After all, bad guys in both
horror and action films can and do come from everywhere, and that doesn’t
necessarily serve as a blanket indictment of those places; if anything, I would
argue that the
multi-national and multi-ethnic villainy of (for example) James Bond films
is a thematic strength, making clear that evil can and will be found
everywhere. Yet both Hostel and Taken are precisely about, or at least originate with, the
relationship between American travelers and Europeans, about the naïve ideals
of cultural tourism and about creating plots that depend on very frightening
and torturous realities within these foreign worlds. “Don’t travel to Europe,
young people,” they seem to argue; and if you do, well, be prepared either to
kill a ton of ugly Europeans (or have your Daddy do it) or to be killed by
them. Not exactly the travel narrative I’d argue for!
Crowd-sourced
post this weekend, so one more chance to add your responses and ideas!
Ben
PS. You
know what to do!
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