What does it mean
when Hostel becomes the new mainstream, when what is essentially a
slasher film unseats two relatively innocuous crowd pleasers like King Kong and
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as the top-grossing movie in the
land? Those were the first questions that ran through my mind as I sat in my
car—doors locked—and tried to pull my thoughts together after a late night
viewing of this film…
Once the initial
shock and unease began to pass, however, it dawned on me that rather stretch
the boundaries of morality, cinema, and good taste; this film seemed designed
to reinforce them instead. I know, that sounds preposterous—Eli Roth and
Quentin Tarantino as the new voices of conservatism. But before you write me
off as a crank, let me state my case.
Hostel has
a fairly simple plot: Three guys—Paxton, Josh, and Oli—are backpacking across
Europe and looking for a good time, a final fling before moving on to more
serious rites of passage like bar exams and graduate theses. The problem is,
they just can’t seem to hook up with the ladies. Out of desperation, they visit
one of Amsterdam’s famous red light establishments. Paxton and Oli eagerly
sample the wares, leaving the more reticent Josh to wander the halls as he
waits for them to finish up. The interior of the bordello is cast in an eerie
blue glow, and from behind every door comes the sounds and silhouettes of
passion. At one point, Josh accidentally enters a room where a dominatrix is
having her way with a client. Pay attention, folks. Considering what is to
come, this is the proverbial gun over the mantle. Sooner or later it is bound
to go off.
Later that night,
our heroes meet a Slovakian guy who tells them about a legendary hostel just
outside of Bratislava where they can get any girl they want. All they have to
do is show up. Thinking they have hit the jackpot, the guys literally catch the
next train out of town.
When they arrive
in Bratislava, everything is as promised—girls everywhere, and all of them as
willing as they are beautiful. The boys hook up right away. There’s just one
problem: The morning after their first night of partying, Oli is missing. It
isn’t long before we know what happened to him, but Josh and Paxton are
still in the dark. After a day of searching, they decide he must have left with
his new girlfriend. So they go out for one more night on the town before
catching the train to Barcelona.
That night, both
of them are drugged by their respective dates. Josh manages to stumble back to
the hostel while Paxton accidentally locks himself in the back room of the bar
for the night, a mishap that turns out to be a blessing in disguise.
In the morning,
Josh wakes up to a living hell. He has no idea where he is, but he’s handcuffed
to a chair, about to become the victim of some sort of homicidal sadist. When
Paxton discovers Josh is missing, he tracks down their dates from the night
before and demands to know where his friends are. The girls tell him that Josh
and Oli have become part of an art show exhibit. From the looks on their faces,
you just know this isn’t going to be pretty, but they agree to take Paxton to
it.
When Paxton
arrives at the so-called exhibit—which is located in an abandoned factory on
the edge of town—he is quickly taken captive as well. As it turns out, all
three friends have fallen prey to a group billing itself as “Extreme Hunting.”
Turns out sick and twisted guys from around the world are willing to pay big
bucks for the opportunity to play serial killer for a day. The hostel, the
girls, the Slovakian guy in Amsterdam, they’re all part of an elaborate bait
and switch operation.
Handcuffed to a
chair, Paxton’s fate appears to be sealed. Lucky for him, his “client” isn’t so
handy with a chainsaw, and rather than dismember Paxton as planned, he takes
himself out instead. Now all Paxton has to do is find a way out of this
hellhole. He emerges from his torture chamber to find himself in a hallway of
horrors. Everything is cast in an eerie green glow, and from behind every door
comes the screams and shadows of pain and horror. I’m not sure about Paxton,
but suddenly my mind flashed back Josh’s experience in the Amsterdam bordello.
This is precisely where Roth’s conservative message begins to emerge.
At the beginning
of the film, these three young bucks were just starting down the road of
fleshly desire. To them, the world was nothing more than an adult playground, a
place to roam and rut to their heart’s content. Nobody loses; no one gets hurt.
But their apparently innocent foray is brought to an abrupt halt by a group of
men who’ve clearly been roaming this playground for a lot longer than Paxton
and the boys. Rather than find satisfaction for their desires though, these men
have discovered that nothing in this playground truly satisfies. To gratify their
ever-increasing appetites, they must go deeper and deeper into ever more dark
and disturbing places. Enough is never enough.
At no point is
the final destination of this journey made clearer than when, en route to his
escape, Paxton encounters a man who is about to make his first kill. Mistaking
Paxton for a fellow Extreme Hunter, he asks him how his experience was. Did he
do it fast or slow? What does Paxton recommend? He talks about how he arrived
at this point, how he has traveled everywhere, tried everything, but nothing
seems to satisfy—until this. He hopes this will be the ultimate thrill, the
thing he has been searching for. All Paxton can do is stare at the guy in mute
horror, perhaps realizing that he could be staring at a reflection of his future
self if he allows his own slide into lust and hedonism to continue. I don’t
think I need to bother summarizing the rest of the flick here. You can probably
guess the main details—Paxton gets out, he gets revenge, he goes into therapy.
The key point is the parallel Roth draws between Paxton’s Amsterdam experience
and this pit of despair. He appears to be saying that the first inevitably
leads to the second.
I don’t know
about you, but this sounds like the sort of cautionary tale you’d expect from
your local pastor, who likely would have based his message on Romans 6:23, “The
wages of sin is death,” and titled his sermon, “Those who live by the thrill;
die by the thrill.” But who would have expected such a staunchly conservative
message from Tarantino and Roth, best known for promoting sin rather than
issuing warnings against it? What’s going on here? Have these guys suddenly
gone religious? If so, they’ve done it in a way that only they can. After all,
Roth appears to get as much of a thrill out of depicting pain and gore as his
characters get from inflicting it. And this is exactly where the path between
people like Roth and people like me begins to diverge.
Making a film
that warns people about the perils of messing around with lust is one thing.
But when you use the very behaviors you are warning against to make that
statement, things have a way of backfiring on you. People who are sophisticated
enough to get your message will get it. But let’s be honest, most people who
gravitate toward films like Hostel are not sophisticated enough to get
it, and so all this film really accomplishes is further desensitization, moving
the audience one step further down the very road Roth is warning them against
traveling.
But if graphic
portrayals of sex and violence aren’t an effective deterrent, how do we talk
about them? How do we portray the consequences of sin artistically without
creating a fascination with the very sins we are warning people against? That’s
a difficult question for any artist, no matter what moral or spiritual point of
departure they are working from, and I am certain it is a question that even
Roth and Tarantino wrestle with from time to time. I don’t hope to offer a
definitive solution here, except to recognize that censorship can often be just
as damaging—and just as effective at creating a fascination with sin—as its
counterpart. At the risk of taking the easy way out, I think it all comes down
to the individual choice of filmmakers and viewers alike. It’s just that some
people are better equipped to make such choices than others…
So what does it
mean when Hostel becomes the new mainstream? Many people will probably
write it off as nothing more than another entry in the voyeuristic gore fest
category inhabited by films like the Saw franchise and The Devil’s
Rejects. Just another sign that our society is slipping further and further
into moral oblivion. But that’s too easy, I think. Even though Hostel carries
a clear message that getting off on other people’s pain is not healthy,
for a movie like this to succeed as well as it has, clearly a lot of people do
get off on this sort of sadistic cruelty. Which leads to the uncomfortable
question of whether my own motives for viewing this film were truly “pure.” Was
I really just there as a critic—a minister of God, even—or do I somehow get off
on this sort of thing as well?
Whether Hostel
gives you the thrills you’re looking for or prompts you to point your
finger at a society you feel is hopelessly corrupt, I hope that it also prompts
you to look inward. A film like Hostel can tell us a lot about the world
we live in, but if we’re really honest, it can reveal far more about our true
selves.