Beauty in Brutality: A Defense of Laugier's Martyrs

Major Spoiler Alert
This post is meant to be an in-depth discussion of Pascal Laugier's Martyrs. If you have not seen this film, I urge you, nay, BEG you: do not read this post. You risk ruining one of the great horror films of our time for yourself. If you're unfamiliar with Martyrs, it is a brutal, harrowing film, not for the weak of stomach. Only watch this film if you feel you're ready. In any case, please experience the film for yourself before you read this discussion.

I call this post a defense of Martyrs, and you may well wonder why it needs defending when it is adored by so many horror bloggers. The first time I watched it, by the time the credits rolled, I was in complete, slack-jawed awe. Watching Martyrs isn't so much like watching a regular movie as it is having a profound, deeply-unsettling experience. I thought about it all night and into the next day, then I turned to the internet to see what other people were saying. To my (naive) surprise, this film is not universally loved, and those who dislike it seem to hate it with a vengeance.

One commenter suggested that Laugier should shoot himself in the head for having brought this film into the world. Another stated that not only Laugier, but anyone who actually liked Martyrs should be sterilized. It was called a worthless piece of torture-porn masquerading as an art film, a psuedo-intellectual piece of expolitation. And, on some level, I understand this reaction. Martyrs is a film designed to repulse, to provoke, and to digust. But this negative reaction was so counter to my own that I couldn't help but feel these commenters were missing something important.

If you were to characterize Martyrs in one word, what would it be? Devastating is an apt choice. Repellent? Yes, it is that. Cringe-inducing? Thought-provoking? All true, but the one term that came back to me again and again as I considered it, was Beautiful. A strange term for such an undeniably ugly film, but that is the purpose of this essay: to illustrate how at its core, Martyrs really is a work of beauty, one that uses a canvas of brutality to expose the beauty beneath.

Martyrs plays like two different films spliced together, yet doesn't seem disjointed. If nothing else, Laugier is a master of misdirection. The film begins as a straightforward horror film that along the way, morphs into an entirely different beast. When the film opens, we know that a young girl has escaped from horrible abuse, and has been taken in at an orphanage where she pushes everyone away. Everyone except for Anna, another abandoned girl whose gentle nature makes her the only one worthy of trust. We shortly find out that the abused girl, Lucie, is haunted by some sort of vicious demon-woman who inflicts bodily injury upon her when she's alone. This demon-woman reminded me of something out of a Japanese horror film, setting up expectations that Laugier exploits masterfully.

After the initial appearance of Lucie's supernatural tormentor, we flash forward 15 years into the home of a typical family with an 18-year-old on his way to college, and a high school daughter who is a star athlete. The scene is cozy and the family seems amiable, with the kids and their father verbally jousting over breakfast. A ring at the doorbell rouses the father from the table, and no sooner has he opened the door than Lucie has blown a foot-wide hole into him with a shotgun. She storms the house, gunning down the entire family. And the thing is, she barely looks at the parents to see whether they are indeed her tormentors from fifteen years ago. You get the feeling that Lucie is out of her mind, projecting her past abusers onto a perfectly innocent family. At this stage in the film, that is where the real horror comes from. Not only does Laugier explicitly show all the murders, he makes you doubt they are justified at all.

After the killing spree, Lucie rubs her hand in the mother's blood, then holds it up, saying, "I did it. Look. I did it," to appease her supernatural stalker. But she is not placated. She stages a ferocious, terrifying attack on Lucie, jumping on her back and slashing long, deep gashes into it with a straight-razor. Every scene in which this woman appears, naked, bestial, and utterly relentless, is flat-out terrifying, rivalling any scary movie I've seen.

Your first clue that Lucie might be delusional comes when Anna arrives to help her clean up the mess she's made. After fleeing into the woods, Lucie says, "She's in the house," referring to the demon-woman. Anna says, "I know," and heads straight into the house to see what's happened. She doesn't seem to even entertain the notion that the woman is real, but instead needs to witness what Lucie has done.

Even in the aftermath of this horrible scene, Anna is fully committed to protecting Lucie, dragging the bodies out to a pit in the backyard. It is revealed that Anna is actually in love with Lucie, when Lucie expresses her gratitude by repeatedly kissing Anna's face. Anna then kisses Lucie on the mouth, only to be pushed away. Lucie loves Anna, but not in that way.

It is in Anna's nature to help people. She's committed to helping Lucie get out of the horrible mess she has made, but when she discolvers the mother is still alive, she can't help but to try and help her escape. When Lucie discovers this, she goes batshit, smashing the place up and accusing Anna of never believing her. Once again Laugier's talent for misdirection shows itself. You start to think that the rest of the movie will be Anna trying to escape from this enraged, psychotic that she has befriended since childhood. But it doesn't turn out that way. Instead, the demon-woman makes another appearance, and this time Lucie seems to give in rather than fighting. The woman carves deep gashes along Lucie's arms and bashes her head into the wall. It is here that Laugier confirms what you may have suspected: that the woman is nothing more than Lucie's delusion. The film intercuts shots of what Lucie thinks is happening with what Anna actually witnesses: Lucie cutting herself, and slamming her own head into the wall. There are also flashbacks revealing who the woman is. She is the woman Lucie saw when she was escaping her torturers, but could not save. The hallucinations were borne of Lucie's own guilt. The first half of the film ends with Lucie slashing her own throat.

If Laugier had lengthened the first half of the movie to feature-length, it still would have worked. You'd get the twist that Lucie is delusional and harming herself. It would have been scary, brutal, and sure to be talked about and revered in horror circles. It also would have been pretty pointless.  That's not necessarily a bad thing. If a horror movie scares the crap out of you, it's done its job, right? This is why the second half of Martyrs makes it transcend the genre and turns it into something utterly unique. It is also why so many people hate the film, and why I love it.

At this point, the audience is wondering where the film could possibly go. I had the idea that perhaps there would be a second twist and it would turn out the woman really was a vengeful spirit and she would begin attacking Anna, and Anna would have to solve the mystery of who the torturers were and stop them before the spirit would leave her alone. Misdirection. Instead, Anna finds a secret stairway to a dungeon in which the woman from Lucie's past is still alive and being tortured.

Again, Anna is compelled to help the suffering woman. She brings her upstairs, bathes her, and painfully removes the staples that have pinned a metal blinder to her skull. But the woman is not a vengeful monster. She is a victim, utterly ruined by years of torture. And unsurprisingly, she doesn't want to live. She begins cutting her arms and freaking out. All the while, Anna is trying to calm and comfort her. Suddenly, a hole explodes in the woman's head as a team of professionals with guns invades the house. Clearly, they're not the police, and have something to do with Lucie's torture. They take Anna to the basement.

This is where, for me, the movie really got interesting. An old woman in a head-wrap and shades shows up and explains to Lucie what exactly is happening. They are an organization that has been systematically torturing young women for years in hopes of discovering a martyr. The Mademoiselle explains, "Anyone can be a victim. Martyrs are exceptional beings. They survive pain, they survive total deprivation. They bear all the sins of the earth, they give themselves up, they transcend themselves." Then she makes it clear that Anna is going to be the next subject in their grand experiment.

In countless horror films, innocent victims are tortured and mutilated for the perverse enjoyment of a psychopath. But Laugier presents a group doing no less dreadful things all for the betterment of mankind. Think about it. Their goal is to create martyrs to gain insight into what lays beyond death. With that knowledge, we would no longer just be floundering about, wondering how to best be spending our time and energy. We would know what we had to do to prepare ourselves for the next world. In this way, Martyrs ceases to be a straight-up horror flick and becomes something akin to a grail quest - the quest for transcendant knowledge. The ultimate goal is truly the meaning of life. As such, we can understand their motives much better than that of your garden-variety psycho. We may despise their methods, but we want the answers just as much as they do.

What follows is 20+ minutes of isolation, cruelty, and torture, all performed as Mademoiselle says, "methodically, systematically, and coldly." Daily beatings are delivered not by maniacs, but people who don't enjoy what they're doing, yet believe in the cause. This phase of the movie is what really gets to people. Even commentors who reported liking the film admitted having to fast forward through some of this sequence. Some say that Laugier went overboard with this seemingly unending series of beatings, but I disagree. The repetition works in the film's favor, forcing the audience to vicariously experience the horror with Anna. It is also important in that you witness Anna's stages of dealing with her suffering. She begins by fighting it. Screaming. Tugging at her chains. But by the time it's over, she has resigned herself to her fate and ceases to fear anything they can dish out.

In The Power of Myth, Jospeh Campbell explains that the only way for God to become lovable was to take on human form, because as a human, he is capable of suffering. And it's true. It is precisely those times of suffering and loss that we really feel our compassion for others. Many Christians report seeing Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ as one of the most moving religious experiences of their lives. Basically, that movie is a biblical torture-porn, showing every stroke of the lash and every harrowing moment of the crucifixion in graphic detail. It is easily as brutal as Martyrs, and was a huge hit among ultra-conservatives. I'm not a Christian, but I've always dug Jesus and was very much moved by Gibson's (admittedly anti-Semitic) film. Why? Because here was the gentlest man who ever lived, who preached a doctrine of "love thy neighbor as you love thyself," and he was made to suffer the most horrible death imaginable. It was the first time I ever felt I understood the notion of "He died for our sins." His sacrifice should have made all true believers shun the very idea of violence and stirred the most compassionate part of themselves, leading to an unwavering commitment to peace (of course, we all know how that worked out).

The point I'm trying to make here is that when I say Martyrs is a beautiful film, what I mean is that by creating this saintly figure, then putting her through the most atrocious torture imaginable, Laugier has made it possible for us to really feel her suffering. When Lucie commits her murders, we feel it is justified by what they did to her. We feel sympathy for their children, but it only goes so far. By contrast, when the hero of the movie becomes the victim, we feel compassion for her character, a compassion we can only feel fully when witnessing her destruction. This is what makes the film a beautiful, if painful, experience.

Some people have accused Laugier of tacking on a cop-out ending to Martyrs. After Anna is skinned alive, thus bringing about her martyrdom, she passes her transcendant knowledge on to the Mademoiselle. On the eve of passing the message on to her followers, the Mademoiselle tells her assistant, Etienne to "keep doubting" the existence of the afterlife, and shoots herself. After my first viewing, I defended the scene as the only possible way it could have ended, since Laugier clearly doesn't know the meaning of life. But since then, I've come to realize that what the Mademoiselle was really doing was sending a message to her followers, in the most certain of terms, that we are not meant to know the answers.

She makes it clear that she has received the message, it is clear, it is precise, and "it admitted of no interpretation," and then refuses to pass it on. She is telling her followers to abandon this quest for answers. There are many ways to interpret her final remarks. It could be that Anna told her there is no afterlife, and that knowledge was so disappointing that her life lost all meaning. Or perhaps Anna told her God is real and that her blindly ambitious and ruthless pursuit of power would lead to her eternal damnation. Considering her love for Lucie, and her kindness toward everyone, it is possible the meaning of life is love and kindness, qualities that the Mademoiselle clearly does not possess. But Laugier doesn't supply the answers, instead leaving the ending ambiguous and letting the questions linger in the audience's minds. I know that I couldn't stop thinking about this movie for weeks, a sure sign that Laugier did something right.

Ultimately, Martyrs asks the question: How far would you go to have all the answers? How far is too far? Clearly, the Mademoiselle's methods are too far. The knowledge kills her, which is a roundabout victory for Anna. If Mademoiselle's followers heed her message and abandon their pursuit of martyrs, then Anna's sacrifice is the salvation of countless young women who might have shared her fate. At the closing credits, we see images of Lucie and Anna as children and are reminded of their love for each other. For Anna, love is the meaning of life, and no one needed die for her to know it.

Perhaps Laugier's message is that the meaning of life is not knowing. The uncertainty we feel is what leads us to construct our own answers and meaning. Or perhaps I'm projecting my own views onto the film. So be it. The message is only half of communication-meaning only comes about from the receiver's interpretation of the message. The only certain thing about Martyrs is that it will make you think. It's easy to dismiss Martyrs as pseudo-intellectual torture porn, but what other horror film makes you think about the meaning of life itself?

Dollar Bin Horror's 30 Days of Horror Challenge: Catch-Up Session #3

Day 13: Favorite Horror Comedy

Peter Jackson’s epic gorefest, Dead Alive (aka Braindead) has the special distinction of being the only movie I’ve ever watched twice in a row. Back when I was first exposed to Dead Alive, I made it my personal mission to show it to everyone I possibly could. On one occasion, I had brought my unrated copy (it is essential not to watch the R-rated version by mistake) to a friend’s house, one who happened to be a hardcore Christian. Needless to say, it blew his effing mind. When the movie had around 5 minutes to go, another of our mutual friends showed up and wanted to know what in Hell we were watching. I convinced my Christian friend to sit through the whole bloody mess all over again. Good times.

I also screened scenes from Dead Alive in a college literature course entitled “Comic and Tragic Visions.” I paired the “I kick ass for the Lord” scene with the murder scene from Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures to illustrate how a shift in tone makes all the difference between comedy and tragedy. The splatterfest of Dead Alive is more violent by a power of ten, but it doesn’t seem that way because it is played for laughs. Meanwhile, the single murder in Heavenly Creatures manages to be deeply disturbing, even though little of the violence is actually shown.

Also, raise your hand if you spotted the Sumatran Rat Monkey crate in the cargo hold of the ship in King Kong.

Day 14: Favorite Zombie Movie

I could easily have swapped my #13 and #14 picks, but Shaun of the Dead seemed more of a traditional zombie movie, so it gets this spot. While there are plenty of excellent walking dead films out there, and I had to think long and hard about placing Shaun above Romero’s seminal Night of the Living Dead, there’s simply no other zombie movie that I could watch any time, no matter what mood I’m in.

Another reason Shaun gets the zombie, rather than horror comedy, distinction is that it pulls off that rarest of feats: it manages to be funny and scary in equal measure. Even more amazing than that, it gives you a good dose of the tragic and romantic as well. The scene where Bill Nighy bites it is heart-wrenching, even though he has been depicted as an overbearing jerk until that moment. And you can’t help but root for Shaun to save his relationship through heroism in the face of zombie holocaust. In short, Shaun of the Dead has everything you could possibly want from a film.

Day 15:  Favorite horror film involving serial killers

Now, if you restrict this category to movies about actual serial killers, I’d have to go with none of the above. I don’t watch those films, fascinated as I might be by the subject matter. The problem I have with serial killer biopics is that they cash in on genuine tragedy and exploit real human deaths at the expense of the loved ones of the victims. Imagine being the parent of someone murdered by the BTK killer, then going to the video store and having to stomach the presence of a cheap flick profiting from the worst thing that has ever happened to your family.

Luckily, there are plenty of fictional serial killers to choose from, and my favorite among them is the debonair yet unhinged yuppie scumbag Patrick Bateman from American Psycho. In adapting Bret Easton Ellis’s novel, director Mary Herron wastes no opportunity to viciously skewer the empty-suit Wall Street parasites that populate this 1980’s period piece.  Bateman is all surface with no depth, constantly reiterating that he is empty inside and while he looks the part of a human being, he has no human emotions. The film goes to great lengths to illustrate that he could be speaking for any one of his equally soulless colleagues and be right on the money. The difference: he’s a serial killing sociopath just clinging to the last vestiges of normalcy. (Spoiler alert) Or is he? Herron ends the film with a perfect sense of ambiguousness over whether Bateman’s killing sprees have actually occurred, or if he’s just lost his ability to distinguish fantasy from reality.

If you like your horror with a dose of social commentary, American Psycho is the way to go. And while you can argue that the yuppie-bashing gets a little heavy-handed at times, to me it never gets old.

Day 16: Favorite Childhood-Themed Horror Movie

Poltergeist. No contest.

When you watch Poltergeist as a kid, it goes straight for all the classic childhood fears: evil clowns, things under the bed, scary trees, ghosts, being abducted, and the presence of demonic forces. It’s like Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg set out to traumatize an entire generation. The beauty of this film is that when you revisit it as a parent, it is ten times worse. There’s an instinctual thing that kicks in when you have kids, and your greatest fears suddenly shift off of yourself and onto your offspring. You no longer fear being abducted; you fear your kids will be.  And when Zelda Rubenstein tells you the abductor is “The Beast,” the chills are convulsive. JoBeth Williams gives the outstanding performance of the film, and I can no longer watch her most emotional scenes without tearing up myself. 

On the downside, some of the special effects are incredibly dated. I’m sure members of the younger generation encountering Poltergeist for the first time will find much of it laughable (the tree eating the kid, the researcher tearing swathes of bloody latex off his fakey-looking skull, etc.). Fortunately, the most chilling sequences don’t rely heavily on special effects (the stacked chairs, Zelda Rubenstein’s speech, skeletons in the unfinished pool). It seems like a film about due for a remake, but I hope they think twice. We don’t want any more dead children on our hands.

Day 17: Favorite Horror Film Remake

It seems like everybody’s main complaint about modern American horror is the dominance of remakes. And I’ll admit, it is getting annoying. But in general, I’m pretty open to remakes and don’t mind if they stray significantly from the source material.  For instance, I found a lot to like about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake. It strayed so far from the original, I think it could have held up as its own film with no ties to the original franchise. All they would have had to do was put Leatherface in a Luchador mask or something, and voila, you’ve got a new horror franchise. That said, the movie is pretty uneven, and for every scene that works, there’s another that falls completely flat.

The TCM remake I’d classify as a reboot, because the filmmakers set out to create a new vision of familiar material. There’s another form of remake that generally pisses me off to no end. That is the American remake of a foreign film. But I kind of understand the phenomenon—Americans as a rule simply don’t watch foreign language films (and thus deserve what they get when the remake falls laughably short of the original). Oddly enough, my favorite remake falls into this bastard category. Matt Reeves’s Let Me In preserves everything that was good about the original Let the Right One In, and somehow manages to improve it.

I do admit I like the way the swimming pool scene was done better in the original, but the addition of the car crash scene more than makes up for it. Since I’ve already written about this film on my other blog Films My Spouse Made Me Watch, I’ll direct you there for additional thoughts on the film.

Day 18: Favorite Foreign Horror Film

This is a tough one, because most of my favorites from the last decade have been foreign (specifically European). But one film does seem to stand above the rest as an example of next-level, game changing horror. For me, Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs lived up to and surpassed all the praise that horror bloggers have piled on it. I tried not to read too much about it in advance, because well, that’s the advice I was given. So forgive me if I write mainly in generalities—I simply love Martyrs too much to ruin it for anyone.

The little I read about Martyrs had me expecting a film that was terribly disturbing, but not scary. Wrong, wrong, wrong. The movie starts out pants-wetting terrifying, but becomes something altogether different in its second half. It is a film that brings a strange kind of beauty to its brutality. Martyrs ends up being one of the most thought-provoking films I’ve seen in any genre, and perhaps someday I’ll try to do it justice with a proper discussion. But for now, I’m content to just caress the DVD case and stare at it in awe.

Are we there yet? Not quite. But my hands are cramping up. I’ll be back for a triple entry tomorrow, then see if I can’t keep up for the rest of the challenge.

MMM Blogfest 2011: The Girl Next Door

I honestly have to wonder if anyone could actually like The Girl Next Door. That's not to say that it's bad. On the contrary, it is a well-made and extraordinarily powerful film, but I can't say I liked it. I can appreciate it, but that's not quite the same thing.

This is the type of movie that you have to recover from. During the course of the movie, I found myself shouting at the screen, hugging my knees to my chest, and ultimately shedding a few tears. It made me angrier than any other film has, and I've been wandering aimlessly around my house for the past hour, unable to get it out of my head. I suppose I'm a bit of a masochist, but as a horror fan, that's exactly the kind of reaction that I live for. When it happens, you're no longer just watching a movie, you're having a profound experience.

I've gotten through other films that are similarly hard to watch, Martyrs in particular comes to mind, but while I love Martyrs, I can't say the same for this film. So what's the difference? For one thing, Martyrs starts out full of horror movies conventions before it takes you to unexpected and vile places. It is scary and disturbing from the get-go. Not so for The Girl Next Door. It begins in a normal suburban neighborhood full of kids just entering their teens who are still enjoy a playful romp through the woods. The kids are realistically rendered characters who aren't a bunch of wild-eyed innocents; they have their moments of cruelty and are playing at adulthood by cussing and talking about sex. The characters felt like kids I knew at that age, just clinging to the last vestiges of innocence. There's even a sweet little episode of puppy-love that sets the audience up for a major fall. Sure it's emotionally manipulative, but that's what movies are.

The Girl Next Door doesn't so much pull the rug out from under you as it escalates, little by little, into one of the most depraved scenarios possible. It's a slow build that leads you to an almost overwhelming dread of what's going to happen next.

The most disturbing element of the film is that the neighborhood children so easily become monsters when given permission by an adult to be as cruel as they please. The torture of a young girl becomes their new game, and they eagerly invite others to witness and participate. You have to wonder how the filmmakers and the child actors' parents dealt with the psychological impact of acting out such atrocious scenarios. They are taking part in horrors that no child should have to see.

On some level, this is an exploitation film, but then, so are all horror movies. The thing that sets it apart from pure exploitation is that it deals with profound themes like the loss of innocence, mob mentality and people's capacity for cruelty, the powerlessness of children, the repression of 1950s America, and the difficult choices that we sometimes fail to make, or make too late. Like I said, this is powerful stuff. If you watch The Girl Next Door, don't expect to be entertained. Expect to be confronted with the darkest side of humanity that we push away in order to stay sane.

Can we retire the term "torture porn" already?

When the term "torture porn" started popping up, I figured it was just a case of mainstream movie reviewers finding yet another way to write off horror films as a degenerate art form. But then I noticed the term creeping into horror blogs as a shorthand for the kind of movies even some die-hard horror fans don't like. I understand why these ultraviolent, graphic films are off-putting for most reasonable human beings, but I also find the label "torture porn" to be lazy, presumptuous, and insulting.

The purpose of any horror film is to be scary, to ferret out our most primal fears and manipulate them, bring them to the surface and make us face them. For some people, these deepest of fears involve the supernatural, or vicious, man-eating beasts. Personally, I can think of nothing scarier than being captured, bound, and tortured to death by some sick bastard who is getting off on my pain and fear. Movies like Hostel and Saw (around which the term "torture porn" seems to have originated) cut right to the heart of this fear and put it on display, daring you to watch. It's not a comfortable viewing experience, and it's not meant to be.

So if these films are doing exactly what horror is supposed to do (disturb, unsettle, and frighten the viewer), why are they so quickly dismissed by certain viewers? Perhaps they are too effective. Maybe they are just so disturbing that some viewers don't get what they want from them, which is entertainment. Many horror fans like their scary movies to be more fun than disturbing. Take away the element of fun, and what's left? Just the pain and fear. They are suspicious of the motives of anyone who would like horror devoid of fun. They don't understand the appeal, and can only imagine that fans of this kind of horror must get off on watching violence. So obviously, torture movies must be like porn to these sickos.

This is what I find so insulting about the term "torture porn." It implies that fans are fetishists who take pleasure in the pain of others.  Now I can only speak for myself, but the attraction for me is much different. I only enjoy horror films when I can put myself in the place of the victims and feel their fear. To me, all good horror asks its audience the question: What would you do?  How would you react in this situation? To get the most out of a horror film, viewers must make themselves vulnerable, lower their defenses, and let the movie do its work on its own terms.

Perhaps this is another reason some are so quick use the "torture porn" label - the inability to lower those defenses, to let themselves be scared. If you can't put yourself in the victim's place, you either identify with the killer (and probably do get off on the violence), or you act as a voyeur. A viewer who doesn't feel fear during a torture scene must see it as pointless violence for violence's sake. No wonder it seems like nothing more than porno for psychos.

Not long ago, I watched Pascal Laugier's Martyrs for the first time. It was the single most powerful film experience I've ever had, and despite being relentlessly brutal, harrowing, and ugly, I thought the film was absolutely beautiful. Yes, there were prolonged scenes of torture, but this was really a film driven by ideas, and the violence was used in service to these ideas. The violence could certainly been toned down, but it would have been to the detriment of the film. Laugier is not content just to present the ideas as pure ideas, but wants the viewer to experience them vicariously. The end effect is emotionally devastating. I ascended from the mancave literally in a daze, to which my wife can testify.  The next day, I looked up reviews to see what critics were saying about Martyrs. In retrospect, it was probably a little naive, but I had no idea how many people would despise the film. Going through the negative reviews, I found that the "torture porn" label was ubiquitous and uniformly applied by critics too lazy to try to discern the film's meaning. And that's the problem with the term - it's a cop-out. It allows critics to decline the challenge presented by films such as Martyrs. I'm not saying these movies are for everyone, but those who dislike them should at least explain themselves rather than resorting to such a tired, misapplied label.