You know what's great?: Hostel

You know what's great? Hostel: Eli Roth's 2005 paean to the exploitative impulses inherent in the ignorant and entitled American male mind scape. A lot of 80's obsessed, torture porn hating online scribes and personalities will try to convince you it's a pointless wallow in dim witted frat boy antics devoid of style, purpose or merit. These are the same people who thought Piranha 3-D was a watershed of self aware brilliance and they couldn't be more wrong or more blind to the converse actuality. Hostel is about a great many things: the rise of anti-Americanism in the wake of the 2nd Iraq invasion, the preponderance of online avenues for snuff entertainment and the barbarous nature of the male youth of our country, incapable of empathy or reflection, raised on a steady diet of casual misogyny and pervasive pornography. Above all else though, it's a film about these characters slow realization that despite their delusions of proprietary dominion over all they encounter, they are nothing more than commodified meat to be bought, sold and exploited, precisely as they had done earlier with prostitutes in the red light district.

The construction of the narrative and the manner in which the plot unfolds is nothing short of masterful. We don't neccesarily like our thrill seeking protagonists, but we don't need to. This isn't a romantic comedy or redemptive drama. This is a harsh light being cast on the callous, bougoise dickheads who tag team hookers and spit nasty invective at any woman that doesn't meet their impossibly high double standards of physical perfection and unquestioning willingness to be "railed". When prince Paxton refers to bestiality cause a larger (actually realistic) woman he sees is "a fucking hog", it's not supposed to tickle our funnybone. It's an insight into a character who expects every female he encounters to be a toned, flawless plastic fuck doll. These men stomp off wherever their unquenchable libido leads them and seem to find exactly what they wanted. Assiduously, Roth strips the situation of its glamour. From one triumph to the next, foreboding details slip into sharper relief until the disappearance of two of his comrades forces Paxton to contemplate the severity of his predicament. He pleads his case to a dismissive policeman, who after learning he is an American quietly intones with knowing empathy, "You are so far from home". It's positively chilling.

To me, the greatest moment is when Paxton, alone and beyond frustrated by his fruitless search for his friends tracks down the two gorgeous locals who had attached themselves to his group at the hostel. There is no techno music now, no strobe lights, no dolled up beauties out in their dancing clothes. Just two disinterested working girls, barely recognizable without makeup and accompanied by a sinister brute in a smoky dive bar. The veneer of bar hopping and sport fucking is shorn as if with a razor, leaving bare and exposed the visage of the ultimate morning after. This is the point of Hostel and its penultimate moment, not the fantasia of lust and flesh that precedes it or the horrific dungeon hell it descends into following it. It's that crystalline realization this carefree party boy has that the party is over and he has no more friends.

Don't get me wrong, I love the inner workings of the Hostel and the Slavic behemoths in black jackets that serve as its security force. I love the gore and glimpsed atrocities Paxton witnesses while being dragged to his private hell. But Roth is wise in never showing too much of what goes on in these rooms, the mind fills in the blanks beautifully. His cinematography is impeccable, particularly that long shot of Paxton being led into the abandoned refinery that evokes Frye's introduction to Lugosi in Browning's Dracula. The Nathan Barr score is fascinating in how it teeters between lush strings and bombastic, energetic camp. The performances are uniformly excellent and the KNB gore beyond reproach. Why do people hate it so? I suspect because they hate Roth and begrudge him his success. Or perhaps they are unwilling to gaze too deeply into the unflattering mirror it holds up to the ugly and cynical modern American male we've all more or less devolved into. Whatever the reason, it's a film that will outlive its detractors because it is well made, clever and has a point. It touches on the problems, fears and reprehensible desires of our times with more potency, force and conviction than any of the last decades best picture Oscar winners could ever dream of.