The beauty of these movies is that they’re blank slates to assuage our guilt—the scenarios are so ambiguous (random people plucked from ordinary assholery) and the characters so bland, they allow every one of us to imagine we’re the guilty douche in the torture chamber/poisoned house/corpse-sprinkled public bathroom. And they let us feel better, by presenting someone worse than us (drug dealers, wife beaters), and creating some sort of internal justice system. “Sure, I wrote a few misogynistic blog comments and scowled at a homeless man, but THAT guy killed a kid with his car! He’s worse than me! He deserves to have his extremities slowly twisted off by a giant Medieval crucifix!”
Hmm. And I thought they were popular because we are a nation of filthy fucking sadists whose constant exposure to violence has desensitized us to all but the most graphically nauseating depictions of human suffering.
But maybe I’m wrong. Actually, I hope like hell that I’m completely fucking wrong.
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