[HN Gopher] Torture prevalent, effective in popular movies, stud...
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Torture prevalent, effective in popular movies, study finds
Author : Shivetya
Score : 33 points
Date : 2020-03-06 21:42 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ua.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ua.edu)
| brundolf wrote:
| Interesting. The prevalence in even lighter films makes me think
| maybe the phenomenon is driven more by its utility as a plot
| device, or something along those lines.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| I just started watching Better Call Saul, and I was happy to see
| that when they tortured a character, he told them what they
| wanted to hear, but then others were like "You had wirecutters to
| him...he would have said anything".
| padseeker wrote:
| This reads exactly like an Onion headline
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| The onion is surprisingly accurate actually.
| lacker wrote:
| I think this study is misleading. They are classifying a huge
| variety of situations as "torture".
|
| From their paper, they describe one example in Zootopia:
|
| _Officer Hopps needs to find the drop-off location for "night
| howler" flowers (a poisonous flower that has been weaponized to
| turn animals "feral"). She turns to an organized crime boss to
| extract information from a lackey of the antagonists. The crime
| boss's polar bear enforcers hold the lackey over a hole in iced-
| over water, threatening to throw him in (and ostensibly kill him)
| if he doesn't give up the location. "Ice him," says the crime
| boss. The lackey quickly gives up the desired information and our
| heroes go on to (spoiler alert) save the day._
|
| Cartoon animals were threatening to throw someone into the water.
| Is that really "torture"?
|
| Later in the paper, they describe that they include any "threat
| of pain" to be torture, as long as it isn't self-defense. So a
| schoolyard bully saying "I'll punch you unless you give me your
| lunch money" is considered to be torture.
|
| Naturally, with this sort of definition of torture, they discover
| that most movies contain torture.
| jessriedel wrote:
| Yea, under this definition, every time someone points a gun at
| someone it's torture. This sort of re-definition of terms
| reduces the public's trust in academics on an important topic.
| jhpriestley wrote:
| simulated execution is absolutely torture, yes.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| https://nplusonemag.com/issue-34/essays/special-journey-to-o...
| eindiran wrote:
| Here is a copy of the paper:
| https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3342908
| Uhhrrr wrote:
| This would be fine and dandy and all part of an exciting
| narrative if not for the fact that torture in the real world is
| incredibly unreliable. Top Google results are mostly politicized
| so here's Wikipedia on it:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effectiveness_of_torture_for_i...
| devit wrote:
| The problems seem to be that the person may not know the
| information and the information may not be easy to verify.
|
| Wouldn't that make torture potentially effective in cases
| without those issues, such as torturing someone to get them to
| reveal a password to an encrypted device that you know they use
| daily?
| Ididntdothis wrote:
| Even if torture worked it still is immoral. It really doesn't
| matter how effective it is.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| This is literally the articles point.
|
| > "Evidence suggests that torture does not work, but media
| often show that it does," Kearns said.
| jessriedel wrote:
| The only thing mention in the article is that torture can
| lead to false confessions, which are undesirable but very far
| from showing that torture is not effective on net. What's the
| best citation for ineffectiveness?
| kybernetikos wrote:
| And in my opinion, it's had a noticeable effect on public
| opinion.
|
| Maybe I'm wrong, but it felt to me like everyone knew that
| torture was wrong before the first series of 24 came out, and
| then a few years later, everyone thought it was often the right
| thing to do.
| [deleted]
| ljm wrote:
| 24 was notorious for this, it practically celebrated it. It's so
| celebrated in film and TV that it even has tropes, like with the
| classic 'opening the bag of surgical instruments' kind of scene,
| if not the pure brutality of punching an answer out of someone
| strapped to a chair. Never mind the pure torture porn films like
| Saw and Hostel.
|
| Torture should be depicted for the pure atrocity that it is, not
| as an entertaining plot piece to imagine doing nasty things to a
| Russian/Middle eastern person.
| hyper_reality wrote:
| You make a good point, but how would you implement this? Would
| you place artistic limits on directors? Why do you think that
| torture scenes are so popular in film and TV - is this an issue
| with filmmakers trying to satisfy a bloodthirsty audience?
| GhostVII wrote:
| You could say the same thing about most violence in movies
| though. Tonnes of popular action movies have the main character
| casually shooting dozens of people, and portray it in a
| positive light (ex. John Wick). I don't think it is necessarily
| a bad thing either, it is reasonable to have violence and
| torture as a plot point in a movie, and portraying that
| violence accurately would just be upsetting to the audience.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Every simple solution is effective in popular movies.
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