a serbian film is in many ways the antithesis of the film hostel. in hostel the pure innocent american selflessly saves the day and rescues the girl. in hostel, the evil is presented as emanating solely from a racially isolated corruption. hostel confronts us with our own feelings about torture and murder sadism as an act of pleasure. it's prepared to have an american citizen (the guy in the locker room) admit to these desires. it's basically hinting that the reason you watch all these horror films is to narcissitically self identify with the murderer, not the triumphant escape of the potential victim. but it has to step back here and desperatey reterritorialise this desire. isolating it geographically, then offering an attempt at redemption in the main characters rescue of the asian woman.
"a serbian film" is a clever way of throwing the wests shit back in its face. the plot is similar to aforementioned piece of crap hostel, in that its about people taking advantage of lax laws and poverty in eastern europe to create frontier capitalist ventures absent any human morality. but in a serbian film, this is all being funded by rich foreign investors. a serbian film doesn't try to sublimate anything into cheesy horror movie violence. it admits that the basis of all these desires are sexual. then it pushes this to the absolute limits, and we end up in a nightmare of depravity and murder. one wherein human life is literally destroyed first sexually and then murdered, and all to make a profit. noone in this film hides from the sickest reaches of desire, after all "there's a market for it".
but while hostel offers an act of heroism as some sort of redemption in the face of such dehumanisation and murder, a serbian film doesn't. it depicts a nightmare world wherein everyone is ultimately a victim. there's no way out for anyone, there's only corruption, a corruption mandated by money its inescapable necessity. a serbian film is simply refusing to hold back and hover around limits of decency.
but as i said in my previous post, that is the entire problem. that people enjoy this stuff. it may make the rest of us sick, we may not WANT it to be the case, and we may try to stop it, yet its clear that humanity is capable of these acts. capable of shutting down its empathic abilities completely and taking pleasure in this extreme violence. the very pain and cries and torment that is intended to induce sympathy in the attacker can become the very source of the attackers jouissance.
so its completely obvious why people would censor a film like this. because you think "let's do anything we can to stop people from even knowing that this kind of product is out there. let's try to halt the flows of these desires." we think that although we may not be able to stop them from occuring in people, we can at least fight so that noone in our society can ever start thinking it would be acceptable by the majority. we can (and very obviously should) prosecute the people who make this type of snuff in real life.
yet there is another problem here, for in our efforts to maintain moral standards in our own societies, we often end up overlooking the outsourcing of such taboos.
it's the same with the constant murder committed by our militaries. the campaigns of genocide. the depleted uranium that serbia itself was bombed with by NATO. the very violence that is absent from our tv screens, that our media and government work so hard to obfuscate. that their shills in the press provide endless rationales and justifications for. "collateral damage" "regrettable civilian casualties". don't worry, god's on our side, who wants to think of depressing stuff anyway, we were liberating them from a dictator! etc. etc. no, its just simply genocide no matter how much you maintain the official ideology of denial.
a serbian film is presenting us with the horrible outcomes of the most fucked up voyeurism. voyeurism that isn't unique to that country. we are left to imagine what kind of person would be buying the products created in the film. of course, my problem with the film is that it turns out to be us. and its obvious a lot of people will be into this for the wrong reasons.
again, there is a moment (and rest assured it will only last for a moment) when its possible to feel sympathy for the director character in the film. before you find out what it is he's actually planning. when he gives his drunken tirade about art, victimisation and what life has become under neo liberalism. a struggle to "prove you can take care of yourself", but for no other reason than survival itself. to live is to simply have to take care of yourself for the sake of it. to eat, fuck, sleep, drink, work - all for the sake of itself, being unable to deny that the only point of this is to delay your death for the miniscule amount of time that that actually works.
of course, this characters remedy to such existential malaise is an amoral disaster. the only aspect of the film i can say i really enjoyed was this characters passionate rant about art. art as an end in itself. i enjoyed this because it provides the ultimate cinematic evidence of my contempt for the concept of art and how it functions in the world now. not as redemptive, but as a kind of superstitious excuse for hedonism. as a kind of mad conceptual relic, a weapon no longer effective, one that by now weilding you can only find yourself doing the bidding of the enemy.
in fact, i can think of no other example were the notion of the "goodness" or "value" of art has been so thoroughly trashed.
the director characters rant about the circular purpose of life now stays with me as perhaps the most powerful section of dialogue in the film. because here he seems to elucidate very clearly an obstacle we all face and have yet to surmount.
the sense of asphixation, of life claustrophobically doubled over on itself. "i have to eat better, and exercise more, so i can lose weight, so i can be healthier, so i can be more attractive, so i can have a better career and be richer, so i can afford to eat better, so i can lose weight..." etc. etc. this is something that i think is key to the almost puritanical obession with enjoyment that has reigned in our ideology this past decade. life becomes very possible, but only when you have money, and everything is getting more expensive while you are only ever getting older. we've ended up losing any time for pleasure, because all our free time is subsumed in work. everything is now work. and what is the purpose of it all when we no longer believe we can change the world, or can even imagine a different way of organising it? enjoyment. but we face only isolation and consumption and when it comes down to it the only option open to us IS consumption.
accompanying this almost fascistic impetus to enjoy everything and shut the fuck up if you don't, we see rates of alcoholism skyrocketing (in the uk at least). mental illness and depression are statistically increasing. we live in a world were the desperate sense that something is wrong is rarely met by anything other than a subtle aggressive reinforcement of the superstitious idea that happy thoughts and behaviour can produce happy states of being.
so, perhaps the director character in a serbian film is an example of where this world is taking us. of what happens to the desire to enjoy when it malfunctions, when it starts to derive itself from acts of torture and evil. it's the ultimate form of negative solidarity - this isn't just bitching at the fact that you have to have a job but some other person doesn't, therefore they're a lazy scrounger and secretly stealing your enjoyment. this is taking the right wing idea in wanting your misery compensated in the lack of someone elses success to its final destination. becoming so sick you literally torture and murder people for enjoyment. you can only cum when someone else dies.
so we have an example of the unleashed desire of capitalism starting to consume itself. in a serbian film, it is ulimately people and their murder that has become an interior component of the commodity. so obviously we end up back were we started. arguing - is it an attack on the bourgeious morality that doesn't want to know of the autophagic forces the system has unleashed? or - is it just wallowing in cruelness for its own sake?
so, the question is the same as before - were does this type of film lead us? are we in the beginnings of a new anarchic era were this kind of violence becomes part of the media spectacle? we already saw the hanging of saddam hussien, and with phone cameras becoming ubiquitous, its impossible there won't be more snuff and violence enacted solely for the camera.
i'm going to watch "life and death of a porno gang" next, a film that was released and promoted alongside this one. i'm aware that there is supposed to be something redemptive about its ending. which will perhaps give me some hope after witnessing its vile brother film.