Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch
(After Auschwitz, writing poetry is barbarous)
Theodor Adorno
When the British were forced to surrender at Singapore in 1942, Eric Lomax was one of the thousands captured by the Japanese. To the victorious Imperial Army, these defeated, humiliated soldiers were not men, but animals: and they were treated accordingly. 60,000 service-men were enslaved, joining 180,000 civilians forced in appalling circumstances to build the Burma Railway, also known as the Death Railway, to create a supply line for the Japanese between sea lanes in the Gulf of Siam and Japanese military gains in Burma.
The conditions for those working on the railway were appalling, and the treatment by Japanese forces brutal. As a consequence of taking responsibility for a clandestine wireless set (Catholics might be reminded of the martyrdom of Maximilian Kolbe) , Lomax was tortured and suffered significant mental injury. He was unable to talk about his experiences until later life, and only because of the persistent support of his second wife. Eventually, Lomax came to confront one of his torturers and was able to come to terms with what happened to both of them, and an extraordinary reconciliation took place. These facts provide the dramatic outline of this film.
Why do human beings torture each other? I don't mean here metaphorical or psychological pain (such as that within relationships or families, though the issues are probably related), I mean actual, physical, bodily torture: the water-tortures, the electrocutions and the mutilations. There are a number of mad, superficially rational answers to this question that many have used to justify inflicting pain on the weak: 'they need to be saved from their own heresy', or 'the enemy is stubborn and needs to be broken', or 'we need the information to save lives' (even though sensible warriors know that the quality of intelligence derived from torture is always going to be questionable, and put better store by other, more ethical, sources—such as the analysis of metadata).
The brutal fact that some people seem to enjoy inflicting pain on others is unavoidable this week, as the world deals with allegations about further atrocities in Syria. The UK is also still in the middle of a process of coming to terms with the possibility of culpability in actual torture, or the use of intelligence derived from it. Catholicism of course has traditionally held stories of violence and torture in what one might call 'a special place', and my breviary reminds me that the day I'm writing this is the Feast of St Vincent who 'suffered terrible tortures' before his martyr's death.
Viewers of contemporary film and television are also pretty familiar with brutality and torture. The Nordic Noir thriller the Bridge thought up some pretty appalling ways of killing people, as has the immensely popular US crime drama CSI-Crime Scene Investigation. And on the big screen, Quentin Tarantino has a tendency to paint the scenery with blood, splatter and gore, while for those preferring a less ironic representation of the impact of violence, the French thriller Irréversible has in my view proven yet unsurpassable for its chilling portrayal of what it is really like for the victim.
This means that it's increasingly difficult for realist cinema to compete with the horrific shock and brutality of mainstream representations of inhumanity, or the extremes of human bodily experience—something achieved by a film like Hunger by adopting a different approach to narration, and one informed by the fine art practice of its director.
This becomes a problem with this film, because the idea of a certain sort of horrific violence—the worst thing that can happen to a man this side of the grave—is used to give a sense of direction to the screen-play. Lomax cannot talk about what was done to him, something that happened in one specific cell in the prison in Burma. His struggle is represented by the recurring metonym of the door to the cell in which he was tortured. Around this image of the door to the small concrete room in which some appalling thing happened much of the narrative is structured, and it is a recurring motif to which the film repeatedly returns. What happened in the room? what did they do to him?? Show it to us. We really want to see.
There are two problems with this: one is the obvious moral one I have just alluded to about vicarious pleasure derived from re-living other people's pain (and on that point, I fear that most viewers of modern cinema have seen worse things on screen than could ever be represented in this film).
The other problem is about narrative. Lomax's heroism was to resist, and to survive torture; his tragedy was that most of his life was lived under the shadow of a trauma he simply could not come to terms with: the key point here is not the torture, but Lomax's relationship to it. Because of this misunderstanding, the retelling misses the point: the climax of Lomax's narrative is not what happened in that cell in 1944, but a no doubt rather un-cinematic moment of internal conversion. While the film explores some of this, the filmic element of the narrative constantly leads up to the moment when they recreate the acts of torture Lomax was forced to suffer. I think this was a mistake and left me with what I can only describe—appallingly—as a vague sense of disappointment as I left the cinema, because what we finally got to see just wasn’t ghastly enough.
On reflection, this was probably because the people who made this film are nicer than me—part of me has darker, more violent, more aggressive, and sadistic expectations than this film could ever satisfy: something in me wanted the torture to be worse. But that ‘something’—and the expectation of its satisfaction—was kicked back into life by the film, and the way they chose to tell Eric Lomax’s story.
(After Auschwitz, writing poetry is barbarous)
Theodor Adorno
When the British were forced to surrender at Singapore in 1942, Eric Lomax was one of the thousands captured by the Japanese. To the victorious Imperial Army, these defeated, humiliated soldiers were not men, but animals: and they were treated accordingly. 60,000 service-men were enslaved, joining 180,000 civilians forced in appalling circumstances to build the Burma Railway, also known as the Death Railway, to create a supply line for the Japanese between sea lanes in the Gulf of Siam and Japanese military gains in Burma.
The conditions for those working on the railway were appalling, and the treatment by Japanese forces brutal. As a consequence of taking responsibility for a clandestine wireless set (Catholics might be reminded of the martyrdom of Maximilian Kolbe) , Lomax was tortured and suffered significant mental injury. He was unable to talk about his experiences until later life, and only because of the persistent support of his second wife. Eventually, Lomax came to confront one of his torturers and was able to come to terms with what happened to both of them, and an extraordinary reconciliation took place. These facts provide the dramatic outline of this film.
Why do human beings torture each other? I don't mean here metaphorical or psychological pain (such as that within relationships or families, though the issues are probably related), I mean actual, physical, bodily torture: the water-tortures, the electrocutions and the mutilations. There are a number of mad, superficially rational answers to this question that many have used to justify inflicting pain on the weak: 'they need to be saved from their own heresy', or 'the enemy is stubborn and needs to be broken', or 'we need the information to save lives' (even though sensible warriors know that the quality of intelligence derived from torture is always going to be questionable, and put better store by other, more ethical, sources—such as the analysis of metadata).
The brutal fact that some people seem to enjoy inflicting pain on others is unavoidable this week, as the world deals with allegations about further atrocities in Syria. The UK is also still in the middle of a process of coming to terms with the possibility of culpability in actual torture, or the use of intelligence derived from it. Catholicism of course has traditionally held stories of violence and torture in what one might call 'a special place', and my breviary reminds me that the day I'm writing this is the Feast of St Vincent who 'suffered terrible tortures' before his martyr's death.
Viewers of contemporary film and television are also pretty familiar with brutality and torture. The Nordic Noir thriller the Bridge thought up some pretty appalling ways of killing people, as has the immensely popular US crime drama CSI-Crime Scene Investigation. And on the big screen, Quentin Tarantino has a tendency to paint the scenery with blood, splatter and gore, while for those preferring a less ironic representation of the impact of violence, the French thriller Irréversible has in my view proven yet unsurpassable for its chilling portrayal of what it is really like for the victim.
This means that it's increasingly difficult for realist cinema to compete with the horrific shock and brutality of mainstream representations of inhumanity, or the extremes of human bodily experience—something achieved by a film like Hunger by adopting a different approach to narration, and one informed by the fine art practice of its director.
This becomes a problem with this film, because the idea of a certain sort of horrific violence—the worst thing that can happen to a man this side of the grave—is used to give a sense of direction to the screen-play. Lomax cannot talk about what was done to him, something that happened in one specific cell in the prison in Burma. His struggle is represented by the recurring metonym of the door to the cell in which he was tortured. Around this image of the door to the small concrete room in which some appalling thing happened much of the narrative is structured, and it is a recurring motif to which the film repeatedly returns. What happened in the room? what did they do to him?? Show it to us. We really want to see.
There are two problems with this: one is the obvious moral one I have just alluded to about vicarious pleasure derived from re-living other people's pain (and on that point, I fear that most viewers of modern cinema have seen worse things on screen than could ever be represented in this film).
The other problem is about narrative. Lomax's heroism was to resist, and to survive torture; his tragedy was that most of his life was lived under the shadow of a trauma he simply could not come to terms with: the key point here is not the torture, but Lomax's relationship to it. Because of this misunderstanding, the retelling misses the point: the climax of Lomax's narrative is not what happened in that cell in 1944, but a no doubt rather un-cinematic moment of internal conversion. While the film explores some of this, the filmic element of the narrative constantly leads up to the moment when they recreate the acts of torture Lomax was forced to suffer. I think this was a mistake and left me with what I can only describe—appallingly—as a vague sense of disappointment as I left the cinema, because what we finally got to see just wasn’t ghastly enough.
On reflection, this was probably because the people who made this film are nicer than me—part of me has darker, more violent, more aggressive, and sadistic expectations than this film could ever satisfy: something in me wanted the torture to be worse. But that ‘something’—and the expectation of its satisfaction—was kicked back into life by the film, and the way they chose to tell Eric Lomax’s story.
