Eva's been watching The Vampire Diaries with Jenn

[conuly]

And also some other shows, and I'm recently aware of something I ever noticed before or had totally forgotten: for at least the past 20 years, American media has been trying hard to sell the idea that torture works. It doesn't matter whether it's the good guys doing it "because the ends justify the means" or the bad guys for the same reason but also they're evil, or who it's being done to, if it isn't halted they get the results. People who don't know anything don't start lying in order to make the pain stop.

This is, of course, bullshit - and we've known it for hundreds of years.

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Comments

[rhoda_rants]

Yuuuup. I think about this every time a torture scene comes up in media. It does not work.

[mtbc]

It also puts me off watching shows I might otherwise have liked. I keep wanting, say, video evidence to leak to the media and cause a shakeup and reckoning, or somesuch, and it never does.

[conuly]

PTSD on the part of either party? Nah, who needs continuity anyway?

[dorchadas]

I think about this in tabletop RPGs, too--if the players want to torture someone, do I do the accurate thing and have the person just say what they think the PCs want to hear, do I play into their expectations, or do I stop the game and make sure we'll all on the same page about what kind of characters the PCs are?

This comes up more often in some games I like where you explicitly play terrible people (Vampire: the Masquerade, say) than others.

[conuly]

I think you take option two right off the table, and that if you do allow it, you make sure that other characters stop trusting torturers because nobody does.

[archersangel]

State Republicans push new voting restrictions after Trump’s loss (If you can't win by getting more voters, cheat!)

they've been like this for years with gerrymandering & closing voting locations, but now they're getting more blatant.

[conuly]

They're either more desperate or more convinced they're "too big to fail".

[shadowkat]

And also some other shows, and I'm recently aware of something I ever noticed before or had totally forgotten: for at least the past 20 years, American media has been trying hard to sell the idea that torture works. It doesn't matter whether it's the good guys doing it "because the ends justify the means" or the bad guys for the same reason but also they're evil, or who it's being done to, if it isn't halted they get the results. People who don't know anything don't start lying in order to make the pain stop.

This is, of course, bullshit - and we've known it for hundreds of years.

Yep. And it is in every television show and most books. I've seen a few that have questioned it. (Robert Heinlein weirdly did in one of his novels - "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls" - where the heroine is being tortured, and thinks - I'll just tell them anything for this to stop - and voila she does and it stops. I never forgot it. I read the book in the 1980s.)

I think part of it is just lazy writing on the part of the writers. And ignorance. A lot of television writers and novelists don't know anything about torture, never been tortured, and haven't studied it - or read history on it, and they've gotten their information from the same place as their viewers television shows.

Once I saw a television show - I think it might have been Buffy? I can't remember, where they said:

"I know we'll just torture them."

"Like that ever works. I got a better idea. We'll trick them."

Some shows mess it up a bit - by torturing someone else to get them to talk. (You won't tell me what I want to know? I'll kill so and so - what's it gonna be?)

But I will give Joss Whedon credit - I think he did question it in various films and television series. In The Avengers - there's this opening bit, with Black Widow, who is being tortured for information, but in reality, she's letting them torture her, so she can get information from them - and does, prior to taking them down. And later, she does the same thing, by letting Loki play her, while she plays him.

Whedon liked to subvert the torture trope and question it. He actually studied it - in Westerns and horror, so played with the idea, and flipped the trope, commenting on why it doesn't work.

So, yeah, I've seen better writers comment on the trope, and question it over the years. Some more subtly then others.

Overall, you are right - most don't.

[conuly]

I think, honestly, as a society we're going to need to start actively pushing back against this. People say "Oh, it's just a story" but we make our ideas about reality from stories. We need to all of us start letting shows and writers know that "torture works!" is an unacceptable trope, for a whole lot of reasons.