I don’t get it. Isn’t the media supposed to have a liberal bias?
You hear that all the time: mostly from right-wing media personalities who are feeling slighted that their archaic belief structures are no longer accepted as the norm, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day (unless it’s digital, then it’s just blank). For the most part, Hollywood and other TV/movie producers are very much on the lefter side of social issues. Can you imagine a TV show about how being gay is wrong and homosexual couples don’t even deserve civil unions? I can’t even fathom how that would end up on the air. Even Nashville, a show set in the Bible Belt, has a much loved gay character who’s told over and over that he is loved, no matter who he is. Remember that show about how getting an abortion would be wrong and you would go to hell? No? Because they didn’t write it. Granted, it’s often brought up as a halfhearted alternative and then quickly abandoned so that the writers can continue with their ‘reluctant pregnancy’ storyline, but that’s more lazy writing than right-leaning politics. I don’t think it will be a controversial statement to say that I agree: story media leans left.
So if Hollywood and the media are so relentlessly left-wing, what the HECK is with all the torture?
Now, I’m not objecting to the idea of torture on TV. I mean, I do hate it, but I also don’t really like watching someone’s eyeball get pulled out (thank you, Tarantino), and I get that shock value is a cheap and easy way of keeping someone’s attention. So, fine, there is and will always be torture on TV. What I AM objecting to (as loudly and fervently as possible) is that in our media portrayals, torture always works.
Often, torture is portrayed as a terrible thing, dangerous for your soul; it’s a horrible necessity that the main character has to stoop to in order to “get things done.” Think of a show like Supernatural, where the main character reluctantly learns torture skills while trapped in Hell, and every time he tortures someone he feels like he’s losing a piece of his soul; or Arrow, where the main character reluctantly learns torture skills while trapped in A.R.G.U.S., and every time he tortures someone… yeah, you get the picture. The writers are telling us, “Hey kids, torture is bad! It makes a part of you die. But sometimes you have to do the necessary thing instead of the right thing.” It’s an interesting moral question to ask, and I don’t object to the moral ambiguity of “the necessary choice,” but it forgets one important fact:
Torture isn’t ‘necessary but morally bad,’ because torture doesn’t work.
Can I underline and bold that for you, too? Torture doesn’t work. We’ve all read the damming reports (and if you’ve been led astray by the aforementioned right-wing on this issue, try this article on for size), and even people who still cling to the party line that torture works sometimes also agree that sometimes, it doesn’t. People under torture will do anything to make it stop, so they will tell the torturer whatever that person wants to hear. Lying is commonplace, and confessions which later turn out to be false happen all the time.
Now, I will grant you that there are many people out there who don’t agree with me, or hard evidence, or reality. And as condescending as I’m being towards them, they do have the right to that opinion. Those people aren’t what I’m writing about. What I want to know is, where on Earth are the American writers who agree torture doesn’t work? How is it that an industry which is so known for its “left-wing bias” has skewed so totally and completely to the right on this issue? Is it expediency? Torture is an easy way for a character to be given information, and it’s edgy and dark! Is it copycatting until you forgot where you started? 24 had torture and it was popular, let’s have some too!
I don’t know what the answer is. But I do know that it’s a disturbing trend; and one I hope will start to swing back to the center. Writers, if you’ve going to force me to sit through gruesome scenes of traumatic torture on my cable TV, can you at least keep it to the villains?
Or have the victims start lying, like those who are really tortured do. There’s some moral ambiguity I’d like to see on TV.