Immersion: ‘extreme’ texts,animated bodies and the media

‘Extreme’ media

A range of quite disparate texts have aroused concerns about the extreme. ‘Gonzo’ porn is frequently and erroneously cited as ‘extreme’ by campaigners such as Gail Dines (Tibbals, 2014). A more precise term, ‘extreme post-gonzo hardcore’, based on an earlier ultra-explicit aesthetic and associated with producers such as Extreme Associates and Max Hardcore (see Maddison, 2009), focuses on very athletic forms of sex play in which the body is pushed to the limit, on bodily fluids, and sometimes on apparently non-consensual activities. Online pornographies associated with fetishes or revolving around fantasy and roleplay scenarios, especially those in which violence is abstracted and stylized, such as the scenarios collected at the now-defunct erotic horror site, Necrobabes, have also been described as ‘extreme’. What is notable is that these types of pornography have quite different aesthetics and sensibilities; the first focused on high energy, ‘raw’ performances (Smith, 2012); the second with relatively little emphasis on graphic spectacles of the body and a much more stagey performance style.

Concerns about ‘extreme’ media have also focused on a trend in contemporary European art-house films that ‘have attracted attention for their graphic and confrontational images of sex and violence and which are said to employ ‘techniques that heighten the sensory and affective involvement of audiences’ (Horeck and Kendall, 2011: 2–3). Another kind of ‘extreme’ film belongs to the ‘torture porn’ horror genre which has been criticized because it is argued that it presents pain and terror as spectacle (see Jones, 2013). Other ‘extreme reality’ texts are said to focus on cruelty, humiliation and suffering (BBFC Home Office Consultation, n.d: para 32). The BBFC has criticized films such as Bumfights: A Cause for Concern (2002; Ryan McPherson) where ‘film makers persuade real homeless people who are often incapacitated through drink or drugs to fight or take part in dangerous stunts’ and ‘death films’ which show documentary material of ‘people being killed or seriously injured’, featuring music and captions that ‘suggest that the primary purpose of the work is to entertain’ (BBFC Home Office Consultation, n.d: para 34). Some images of this type that are taken from actual scenes of violence and recirculated have also been described as ‘war porn’ (Baudrillard, 2005; Harkin, 2006), for example, combat images posted by American troops in Iraq, or the photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib prison.

A further set of images have been drawn into the debate about extreme media, especially when this focuses on what young people are able to access and circulate online or on mobile phones. ‘Shock’ materials are images distributed online, sometimes humorously intended, at other times sent in malice to ‘hijack’ viewers (see Jones, 2010), and have been most recently the focus of YouTube reaction videos. They typically feature bodily fluids, injured bodies, and bodies that are not considered to be conventionally attractive engaged in sex. The framing of such images as types of ‘freakshow’ is evident in the way these are distributed and the apparently ‘unexpected’ shock responses and ‘rodeo reactions’ of their audiences (see Jones, 2010; Kennedy & Smith, 2013; and Paasonen, 2011, for discussions of this kind of material)

It is hard to see how this range of texts can be grouped together in terms of their producers, content, aesthetic, mode of distribution or intended audience – even within a particular category such as torture porn there are substantial differences between films (Jones, 2013). They are not related in and of themselves, but in terms of what they appear to represent for those who have focused on them. In particular it is the kinds of responses they are thought to call forth from their viewers that suggest their significance in representing something important about contemporary culture which is understood as ‘extreme’; manifesting in a Western fascination with ‘extreme’ practices and representations including extreme sports, ‘nature’s aberrations’, natural catastrophes, war, executions and spectacular accidents, suffering victims, ‘all manner of sexual acts’, the gross, and the display of ‘revulsion, disgust, horror and fear’. These appear to typify a culture in which ‘knowledge for most people has become a matter of spectacle, and everyday experiences and concerns are mediated by the images it produces of itself’’ (Boothroyd, 2006: 278–283).

‘A little porn … a little torture’: cruel culture

The linking of ‘extreme’ texts – sometimes also understood as ‘pornographic’ – to a more generalized ‘cruel culture’ has been particularly evident in discussions of the Abu Ghraib images which showed Iraqis detained at the prison being humiliated and tortured by US soldiers. According to Susan Sontag (2004), the Abu Ghraib photographs could be linked to porn in several ways; firstly, because they ‘enter public view … interleaved with pornographic images of American soldiers having sex with one another’, secondly, because they borrow from pornography (for example, they feature ‘a young woman leading a naked man around on a leash’ which ‘is classic dominatrix imagery’), and thirdly because they may have been ‘inspired by the vast repertory of pornographic imagery available on the Internet – and which ordinary people, by sending out Webcasts of themselves, try to emulate’. In turn, the photographs are presented as ‘part of a larger confluence of torture and pornography’, which is linked to an ‘increasing acceptance of brutality in American life’.

What is interesting is that, according to Sontag, their cruelty cannot be measured in terms of actual violence (which, she notes, statistics show to be falling). Instead this is evident as a sensibility; emblematized by the ‘video games of killing that are a principal entertainment of boys’ and ‘the group rites of youth on an exuberant kick’, marked by ‘glee’ and ‘high-spirited play’, and associated with a ‘culture of shamelessness’ which can be seen elsewhere in the ‘clamor to be invited on a television show to reveal’.

An extended discussion of the Abu Ghraib photographs in this context was given by Carmine Sarracino & Kevin M Scott, in their book, The Porning of America (2008); a discussion that manages not only to link torture to violent pornography, but to porn per se, to sadomasochistic sex, military domination, online shock sites, torture porn films, Nazi imagery in men’s adventure magazines of the 1960s, a fascination with sexual murder that defined ‘the nation that would become Nazi Germany’, American political commentary which has become a form of ‘porned entertainment’, and masculinity (Saracino and Scott, 2008: 166–167).

In this narrative, the guards at Abu Ghraib are presented as ‘intensely involved, on a daily basis, in porn’ and their records of torture are said to use ‘the visual language of violent and degrading pornography’, a language in which, we are told, the soldiers ‘were fluent’ (139–144). Torture is presented as a form of ‘sexual sadism turned into violent pornography’ (144–145), and set alongside soldiers’ sexual relationships with each other, their enactment of ‘pornographic scenes’ in front of their detainees, and the capture and distribution of torture images as a form of homemade porn (148).

Sarracino and Scott’s account makes numerous links between perverse forms of sex, porn and torture. They argue that the ‘mock violent, sadomasochistic sex’ of the soldiers reinforced their sense of power over their charges, becoming a ‘reproducible rehearsal of sorts for their treatment of the detainees’. Evidence that the soldiers had images of commercial porn, that they documented their own sexual practices, and that they engaged in torture is refigured as an ‘easy-to-imagine evening of entertainment’ – ‘a little porn, a little abuse, a little more porn, a little torture, and then some more porn’. Although the authors do not claim that the soldiers watched violent porn themselves, they argue that ‘it seems likely that the guards perpetrating the abuse at Abu Ghraib deliberately imitated the violent porn that now thrives on the Internet’ (2008: 149–153). The multiple confusions of material abuse at the prison with perverse sex and porn consumption is further extended in references to abuse-themed pornography at sites such as Sex in War and Iraq Babes, online shock sites and the porn produced by Extreme Associates in the US, to support a claim that hardcore porn has increasingly ‘gravitated toward humiliation and degradation’ (157).

Much of the media reporting of the torture at Abu Ghraib lacked any discussion of its context, in terms of conditions in the prison and Iran and in the broader disregard for laws governing the treatment of prisoners in the ‘war on terror’ (see Salon Staff, 2006). In accounts like the ones created by Sontag and Sarracino and Scott, this context of political chaos and state-sanctioned torture is replaced with an imaginary scenario where reality and fantasy, sexual practices and representations, sex and violence have become so intertwined that they cannot be disentangled. The material war on terror becomes symbolic of a more generalized cruelty and the abuse of Iraqi detainees is refigured as a form of violent pornography. What disappears in this account is any conception of pornography as a form of cultural production – indeed the authors explicitly state that pornography ‘cannot be defined as acting or “performance”’ (157), or a particular type of media different from the other kinds of media forms and practices that are mentioned – and of the differences between the real and the representational. Indeed, military domination and porn become the same thing – ‘asserting one’s will over another’ and requiring forms of ‘othering’ and objectification (139–144). Similarly, the pleasures of torture are aligned with the reception of torture porn films. Here, the ‘steady, throaty laughter from young men in the audience’ of those films becomes the aural equivalent of ‘the sheer joy on the faces’ of the Abu Ghraib guards. In both, a hideous and perverse confusion of response is detected: ‘orgasmic responses … erotic joy’ (Sarracino and Scott, 2008: 162).

While we are returned to a familiar ‘media effects’ discourse at various stages of Sarracino and Scott’s discussion, their account lingers on what is imagined as gloating (2008: 159). In the process a view of ‘men’s violence’ is equated with a series of sexual and textual perversions, and a similar system of equivalences around power is drawn; to be a prisoner is like being a woman; to be a porn director is like being a torturer or an enthusiastic viewer of horror films. This peculiar and reductive understanding of power and its alignment with masculinity is sustained despite the appearance of a number of women who figure as key protagonists in Sarracino and Scott’s account; Lynddie England, the US soldier at Abu Ghraib, Janet Romano, the director of the porn films under discussion, and the characters of Mrs. Bathory and Beth who are the protagonists in two of the four torture scenes from the Hostel films (Roth 2005, Roth 2007) which are described in detail. Regardless of who plays which part in any of these encounters, the dominating role is always coded as male and the dominated as female; thus, for example, Romano ‘as the director of violent porn movies – controlling all the action … becomes the dominant male, with the victims of degradation, as always, the females’ (2008: 159).

Media bodies: immersion, infection, animation, possession

The kind of account constructed by writers like Sarracino and Scott is underpinned by a notion of media effects which has proved tenacious in public debate, despite its lack of theoretical basis, conceptual usefulness or supporting empirical evidence (see Barker & Petley, 2001; Gauntlett, 1998). It also draws on notions of obscenity and on the idea of ‘pornography’, conceived not as a genre, but as a force and a sensibility that underpins the disordered production and consumption of cultural texts. ‘Gender’ is also used to gesture at power relations, regardless of its relevance. Alongside this runs a distrust of the new opportunities for engagement afforded by media technology, the accessibility of media materials, new modes of representation and the potential for particular kinds of viewer response. Particular areas of anxiety are the ‘mixing up’ of genres, of fictional and factual forms, and of media conventions related to the ‘representational’ and ‘real’. Concern is focused on the body and its responses, both as depicted in media texts and as elicited in the audience.

As Mikita Brottman has argued, the media texts that disturb us the most are often those that do not stay in their place. Defying genre boundaries they become ‘unclassifiable, and thereby culturally contaminating’ (1997: 99). The death films referred to by the BBFC as forms of ‘extreme reality media’ more radically confuse the separation of entertainment and documentation, media and reality, ‘refusing to fit into any existing cultural category’ (Brottman, 1997: 164). Porn is also seen as disturbing the broader boundaries between reality and representation; criticized as a ‘poor substitute for ‘real sex’ and perceived as ‘too real’ for performance because the sex it shows is unsimulated (Härmä & Stolpe, 2010: 110). This kind of boundary-breaking also takes place when genres that are expected to remain on the peripheries of culture become more visible and central, as they did in the case of ‘torture porn’ (Jones, 2013: 190). Like the ideas of media effects and obscenity, the idea of media as contagious and polluting is not new. As Debra Ferreday notes, it is possible to trace a longstanding perception of reading practices as ‘immersive and potentially transformative’, where ‘reality and fantasy become entwined through the act of feverish, disordered reading’ (2010: 416). A variety of figures; the depressive, the hysterical woman, the anorectic, the ‘youth enfeebled by autoeroticism’ (2010: 420), belong to this tradition. Susanna Paasonen has shown that this kind of view was also evident in early accounts of women’s romance reading as the occasion of dubious solitary pleasure and self-absorption, whereby ‘readers were lost to the world, turned inwards toward their desires and imaginations’ (2010: 146). The act of reading was itself seen as dangerously isolating, leading to an inability to tell fiction and reality apart. This suspicion underpinned the later dismissal of ‘popular genres, particularly ones aiming at affective and sensuous responses, such as romance, pornography, and horror’ (2010: 146).

As Ferreday argues, what often appears to be expressed by this kind of representation is the fear of ‘an uncanny, vacuous form of consumption’; inspired by and creating a form of ‘narcissistic self-absorption’ (2010: 419). In a discussion of the way that this kind of concern has developed around film spectatorship in the UK, Theresa Cronin shows how discourses of film regulation have increasingly concerned themselves with viewing as problematic because of its experiential and embodied qualities, so that the struggle over representations has come to focus less on the meaning of a text, becoming instead ‘a battle … fought over the body of the … spectator’ (2009: 4). The acceptability of media representation comes to settle, not on the viewer’s reading of a text, but on their presumed experience of it. This focus on the internal state of the reader, imagined as a turning inwards towards themselves and away from the world, also underlies the widespread depiction of engagements with pornography as a form of addiction, in which men become more interested in porn stars than their partners, lose their ability to get erections, and otherwise suffer damage to their ‘authentic’ sexuality (Smith & Attwood, 2013: 52).

Although this is not a new view of disordered reading practices, it may make sense as a variant of ‘a body-as-performance relationship’ (Waskul et al., 2004: 31), which resonates particularly with changes in the body’s significance in indicating personhood (Waskul, 2003: 93), and in the use of media and other technologies as part of that process in a ‘blending of flesh and media’ which produces ‘media-bodies’ (Jones, 2008). Unease with the crossing of representational boundaries is present throughout the accounts of ‘extreme media’ I have discussed here, not only in terms of disturbances of genre and category, but also of a perceived inseparability of media and bodies. The separation of body and media implicit in much media effects discourse where media is argued to impact on viewers seems to be less prominent here, with the focus instead on media and bodies as merging and fused, locked in a relationship conceptualized in terms of immersion, infection, animation, and possession. Here, media are galvanizing and it is not what they effect but what they call forth and elicit that becomes the focus of concern. Images are imagined as being in search of audiences; becoming a force in the world, while audiences are no longer passive, but perversely active, gravitating towards unhealthy kinds of images.

There is a sense here of media as ‘something we live inside as much as they are technologies we use’ (Rothenbuhler, quoted in Deuze, 2012: 27) and as something that lives inside of us. Media become sites of intense horror in discourses of extreme reading practices which focus on their inseparability from bodies. Becoming blank and vacuous or exhibiting ‘sadistic gloating’ and ‘glee’, the media-body makes literal the notion of a depraved and improper reading. It marks what seems to be a disappearing gap between reality and representation, and a state of immersion whereby the viewer becomes horribly animated, possessed and perverse. It marks the pervasiveness of media and of mediation itself in which technologies appear to have closed the gap between real and imagined worlds or destroyed our ability to tell the difference between them.

These shifts in the discourses of media engagement which are apparent in the accounts I have considered here provide a way of tracing changes in the way media are conceptualized. They are bound up with a larger debate about the ethics of looking and how this changes when media images are increasingly understood not just as images but as acts of communication. The accounts I have discussed here run adjacent to that debate; Sontag notes of Abu Ghraib, ‘the horror that the photographs were taken’ becoming ‘messages to be disseminated, circulated’. Looking is no longer ‘just looking’ but a way of taking part, acting in the world. The accounts I have discussed are unable to distinguish between film consumption, torture or war, or indeed between actual groups of men and women located in specific and material contexts and as such have little to contribute to this debate. All the same they point us to the likely concerns that academics will need to take account of, and to the urgency of developing critical work in this area.