Divine revelation: about as accurate as torture.
Torture is an ugly stain on the soul of humanity, and I’ll be honest: I did not expect to be writing about it on a storytelling website in 2019. I just assumed everyone watched John Oliver’s segment on torture four years ago and got the memo, but apparently not, because I can’t seem to go more than a few days without running into yet another story spreading debunked myths that support torture. And this isn’t just in bad stories either. Progressive authors like John Scalzi and Tomi Adeyemi do it, too – exactly the sort of people I would expect to know better.
If even spec fic’s socially aware vanguard is glorifying torture, then it still needs to be talked about. Let’s see if I can explain why so many stories get it wrong and why we need to do better.
How Stories Get Torture Wrong
In most stories, torture is portrayed as a contest between the torturer’s skill and the victim’s willpower. The torturer inflicts enough pain, physical or psychological, and the victim eventually gives in, telling all they know. The scene ends, and the plot continues. The story may or may not address the trauma brought on by such an exchange.
In real life, torture is nothing like this because most people will say anything to make the pain stop. That might be the truth, a conscious lie, or just whatever the victim thinks their tormentors want to hear. And since the torturer has no way to know if the victim is telling the truth or not, they can never trust anything the victim says.
So instead of a cutoff point where the torturer magically knows their victim is telling the truth, the agony just keeps going until some arbitrary ending, usually when the torturer’s pre-existing biases are confirmed. “Oh, what a surprise, it turns out all the people I was suspicious of are in on the plot. How convenient!”
This is even more likely if the victim doesn’t actually know the answer to their tormentor’s questions, something that happens in fiction with bizarre frequency. In those stories, the victim will try to stay silent for a few moments, before eventually confessing that they don’t have the information. Somehow the torturer knows they’re telling the truth and stops torturing them, even though that’s exactly what someone who did have the info would say!
In reality, when torture-derived information is followed up on, it almost always leads to wasted resources, false leads, and the conviction of innocent people. Sure, it’s technically possible that the victim might divulge the truth and the torturer might believe them. It’s also technically possible to take out a hostage-taker by shooting wildly into a crowd of civilians, but any character doing that would be laughably incompetent.
All of this is incredibly well documented, most notably in a report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. But you don’t even need modern sources to figure this out! Some casual googling turned up this account of a 17th-century duke who realized people will say anything under torture. If a 17th-century duke can figure it out, so can your characters.
How These Myths Promote Torture
First, let’s acknowledge that even if torture worked the way it does in fiction, it would still be wrong. Inflicting pain on a human being at your mercy is deplorable no matter what kind of benefit you get out of it.
However, even though torture doesn’t work that way, lots of people think it does, and that’s warping the argument. To many, the debate over torture isn’t whether we should be inflicting gruesome suffering on human beings for no reason. Instead, they see it as a debate over whether inflicting that suffering is worth the lives it saves in foiled terrorist attacks and the like.
Every story that portrays torture as a reliable means of extracting information is reinforcing this incorrect belief, which means they are promoting torture whether the author intends it or not. Every time a gritty anti-hero beats information out of a suspect or a mean villain cuts on a side character until they reveal what’s happening, it confirms the existing bias that torture works and should be considered in that light.
If you need further convincing, imagine there was a widespread belief that global warming was only going to happen in countries outside the United States.* Even if that were true, it would still be vital to stop climate change. But it’s not true, and if a bunch of people believed it, it would warp the entire argument. Any story that played into that belief would be contributing to the problem.
Beyond reinforcing harmful misinformation, stories where the good guys employ torture also normalize this inhumane practice. If the otherwise-likable protagonist thinks it’s no big deal to electrocute information out of a hostage, how bad can it really be? I’d like to say this is a rare phenomenon, but it’s not. TV shows like Supernatural and Daredevil are more than happy to show the hero beating up their captives, and damn the consequences.
Why Storytellers Use Torture
While every story is different, there are essentially two reasons most of them use torture: as a way to advance the plot and to establish how edgy or evil a character is. Plot-wise, torture is one of the most convenient devices out there. It allows characters to learn a bunch of information quickly, and it’s automatically full of drama from all the pain one character is inflicting on their helpless victim.
For characterization, some stories like to show an anti-hero torturing people to prove how edgy they are. This isn’t your grandparents’ protagonist, kid; they’re willing to do what it takes, and they sleep with a copy of The Prince under their pillow.
That’s what happens in Scalzi’s The Collapsing Empire, when part-time freighter captain and full-time edgelord Kiva Lagos exposes a captive to the vacuum of space to learn what his bosses are up to. There’s even a moment where the captive, after breaking down, insists he’s told Kiva all he knows, and somehow she can magically tell he’s speaking the truth.
In other stories, we learn how the villain is super bad because they torture info out of the hero. Adeyemi does this in Children of Blood and Bone, where we get page after page of the evil king inflicting gruesome injuries on the hero until she tells him what he wants to know. He, of course, immediately believes her and commits his entire military based on the information, because there’s no way she could be lying!
These reasons for using torture all fall apart the moment your audience knows anything about how torture actually works. They won’t take it seriously as a method for gaining information, the same way they won’t accept that a hero can get up and fight at full strength three days after breaking their femur.
Using torture is even worse for anti-heroes like Kiva, who in theory we’re supposed to like. Once they start torturing prisoners, a large percentage of the audience will just want them to die in a fire. And heaven help you if you want to do a redemption arc for a villain who tortures!
Fortunately, Adeyemi knew better than to try that, but the creators of Netflix’s Umbrella Academy didn’t. Just a few episodes after the time-traveling hitman Hazel torturers a random civilian to death,* the show expects us to cheer for him getting to live happily ever after with his girlfriend. I, for one, hope she finds out and smothers him in his sleep.
What Storytellers Can Do Instead
I’ve seen some storytellers try to address this problem by giving the torturer a supernatural ability to detect lies, with the logic being that then it really is a contest against the victim’s willpower. I don’t recommend this for two reasons. First, a lot of audiences will miss that little detail, and the story will still read as supporting torture.
Second, giving a major character magical lie detection is actually super inconvenient. You’d be surprised how often stories depend on characters not knowing if someone is lying or not. This is why characters like Deanna Troi have a reputation for being useless. Supposedly, they can detect falsehoods, but that would destroy most mystery plots, so instead their powers stop working for unexplained reasons.
Instead, you need to figure out what you want to accomplish with torture and bring it across some other way. If the goal is to get information, then the heroes can piece together clues from what their captive has in their pockets. “From the pictures on his phone, it looks like he probably planted the bomb down at the harbor. Good thing we didn’t try to beat it out of him!”
You could also have your characters employ interrogation techniques that are actually known to work, but those usually take time. They depend on building a rapport with the prisoner, then offering them things they want in exchange for information. If that works in your story, then great, go for it!
If you want to establish how gritty your protagonist is or how evil your villain is, the best option is to show them doing things that benefit themselves at the cost of others, with a difference in degree between an anti-hero and a villain. An anti-hero might start a bar fight to cover their escape or finish off an injured opponent to stop them from being a threat in the future. A villain might burn down a building to collect the insurance money or subjugate a conquered people for cheap labor. Torture as it’s usually portrayed isn’t a good option in either case, because it doesn’t provide any believable benefit to the torturer.
How Torture Should Be Portrayed
If you are going to have torture in your story, it needs to be portrayed accurately. One way to do this is showing how laughably inaccurate the information gained by torture is. It turns out that any time people are tortured for information about witches, the area is suddenly teeming with witches. Fascinating! This portrayal works best for dark comedies, as villains who believe information gained through torture are generally too incompetent to be taken seriously.
Alternatively, you can show that the real use of torture is to break people. Sometimes this is to a purpose, like drawing a confession regardless of guilt; other times, it might just be for the torturer’s twisted pleasure. If that sounds like an extremely dark premise for a story, it is. It will narrow your story’s appeal, so you’d better have a good reason for including it.
Most stories lack such a reason, so accurately depicted torture will be pointless unpleasantness. An easier way to avoid writing pro-torture propaganda is to skip torture altogether, and I’m really looking forward to the day when most storytellers realize that. It’ll make for better stories, and it’ll chip away at the support torture has in real life.
P.S. Our bills are paid by our wonderful patrons. Could you chip in?
Members of the military and the FBI once met the producers of 24 and had to tell them to tone down the torture. New recruits were coming in with completely the wrong idea about how interrogation works and thinking that torture was acceptable. And there were concerns this kind of portrayal would encourage the view in other countries that America was torture-happy. (Yes, the terrorists watch these shows too).
When I started writing my first series, I actually put in how useless torture is – and thus it isn’t used by members of my agency – exactly because people will tell you what they think it needs to stop the pain. I’m pretty surprised so many TV series, movies, books, etc still see torture a viable device to give the heroes (or villains) information. Having them really work for it is so much more interesting, for one thing. Gives you more scenes to write, gives you more ways to display the different skills of your characters, too. Much better for writing.
I can see torture work for the villain trying to break a hero or just doing it for twisted pleasure, but that’s definitely going into ‘pure evil’ directions (which means an old-fashioned villain who has no deep motivation and will not have any redemption arc).
I really do think a lot of the reliance on torture in fiction is laziness. It’s just such an easy plot device for getting information across.
Well, I prefer for my characters to show their brains or deviousness instead – even the villains, because only a good villain makes for a good hero.
We’ve included torture in the long-running text RPG campaign, but I think we’ve managed to avoid glorifying it or presenting it as anything approaching reasonable. The game started with the PCs mercenary company being wiped out by a pretty horrible spell, so it started out dark as fuck anyway, with built-in motive for revenge. (It got lighter with time. We got our what-if darkness kicks in the side chat and then went to write something that let the characters inch towards normal society.)
My character was a cold-blooded bastard who’s been on both ends of torture. Every time there was magic involved it took a long time to confirm the truth and pain never ended at the truth – although his torturers were competent and made sure that cooperating meant less pain, but there was always more questions – and if there wasn’t any mind-poker around or other ways to confirm the story, well, yeah, no chance. (“Might be true, might be shit, can’t tell and we’re in a hurry because these fuckers just attacked my heart and tried to kidnap him and I’m going to cut this one up for that anyway and it’s just a pity we don’t have time to do it the long way because we need to get to a bolthole NOW.” *stab*)
“I’ve seen some storytellers try to address this problem by giving the torturer a supernatural ability to detect lies, with the logic being that then it really is a contest against the victim’s willpower.”
Resisting the ability to detect lies shouldn’t be about willpower, but about compartmentalizing, putting up fake memories or throwing enough chaff at the lie detector. Which, granted, are feats of mind that are more difficult to do in pain.
The thing is, when you have setting which enables even mild degree of mind reading as routine magic, of course there will be counter-measures to that. You’ll be sending out scouts who might be captured – you make sure they know as little as possible, train them to compartmentalize like bureucracy, AND get someone to put a shield on their mind. Some of it is willpower, but there’s host of other variables as well, so yeah… The way I figured, by the time the shield in Spider’s mind was broken enough for the mind poker to get through to even clear and superficial things like “is this statement true or false”, they first needed a potion to clear his mind so there _was_ any such thing as true or false. Pain and sleep deprivation fucks the mind up. I love being awful to my characters. It’s all in backstory and snippets and boy it had effect all the way in the game.
“Alternatively, you can show that the real use of torture is to break people.”
Break people, send a message, or for pleasure/revenge. That’s pretty much it. If I ever was to take the campaign and re-write it for wider consumption I’d make pretty damn certain that some of the stuff Spider does is double underlined not cool.
It was a fun, emotional campaign to play, even with the super dark start things developed in strong tones of trust, hope, courage to live and coping with enormous tragedy. For the other two main characters growth mostly happened during the revenge-rescue-revenge bits. One grew up after adopting a kid, one learned to allow himself emotions. Spider started out very… suited for the environment and not really feeling any need to be something else than what he was, and only when things calmed down and they got retired for real, and we wrote a good bit of those years too. He started out pretty damaged and having some normal human bits out of alignment. It was only after the pressure was off that the bits he’d intentionally shut down got to grow.
The misinformation thing could work in a dramatic story if the villain is more interested in exploiting everyone’s paranoia than finding the root of the issue. People who were accused of witchcraft in the Salem witch trials had their property confiscated by the people leading the hunt. It’s why Giles Corey refused to plead; he knew that doing so would mean his kids would lose their land and belongings, so he let himself be tortured to death so that it wouldn’t happen.
That would certainly be a situation where the goal is to break people rather than get actual information.
I love the show burn notice and it’s portrayal of spy stuff. One of my favorite shows.
It’s a great show! One of my favorite lines from TV ever is “Torture is for sadists and thugs. It’s like getting groceries with a flamethrower. It doesn’t work, and it makes a mess.”
Thanks for writing this. I was in a very frustrating debate with other people online, in a spec-fic-group on Facebook, about this very topic… And some other people also insisted that beating someone up for information, or dangling them off a roof top threatening to drop them etc, ISN’T torture, because torture has to be, IDK, done in a proper torture dungeon with proper torture tools or something. This is JUST LIKE how people used to think that it can’t possibly be rape unless a stranger jumps out from behind a bush when you’re walking home alone and attacks you. Thankfully, fewer and fewer people believe the latter, but it still seems pretty common NOT to label anything our favourite TV heroes do as “torture”.
It’s only torture if it comes from the Torture region of France. Otherwise you have to call it sparkling interrogation. ;)
I’m glad you liked the article though, perhaps it will be useful in future arguments!
A thought provoking column again, Oren.
I think your comment about reliance on torture in fiction as laziness is spot on, Oren. Among the (many) other problems in “The Collapsing Empire,” the use of torture to advance the plot and illuminate characters suggests the author gave up, ran out of energy, suffered a failure of imagination. (okay…and screwed up the story…)
The use of torture in literature suggests there is a deeper problem, I think, especially in science fiction and fantasy: violence is nearly always the answer to a problem and itself is praised. (Especially the trope of the apparently weak protagonist who discovers/is given great strength and bashes their enemies/the city’s enemies/the world’s enemies. Bam! Pow!) Struggle and conflict do seem to veer that direction.
It is not difficult to go from violence as normative virtuous behavior to using violence to extract truth.
Of course, when one has the chief executive of a state suggesting that — wink, wink, nudge, nudge — if police accidentally bump suspects’ heads as they are pushed into a squad car, or that, yeah, of course torture works! and who cares? they are just bad guys, right? — violence as substrate to society is reinforced.
Finally, Rakka has a good point (I’m distilling here): Some people like to cause pain. Probably connected with power over the powerless in some way. Check Amnesty International — how many countries torture for the heck of it?
Sigh.
Well, in political ways, there are uses for torture (such as making the populace afraid of what might happen to them, if they don’t ‘behave’). But, yes, there’s been a lot of glorified violence, too. And while humans are violent beings by nature, we have spent a long time trying to codify violence and narrow down its use to certain situations (such as specific sports or war).
A lot of good points! I would like to see a blog someday about killing prisoners too, because this is another one that sets my teeth on edge. We’re supposed to be rooting for a “hero” who bumps off a prisoner whenever it’s convenient. In real life this is a war crime and it should be treated as such!
Can villains only use torture?
Not just any villain or all villains, just villains of the brutish type, as in they think brute force and torture will will out information from their victims. Other villains, at least the ones in my mind, will either use supernatural abilities (like you suggested) or rely on cunning tactics.
It depends on how they use it. If villains use torture as a means of getting information, it will probably hurt the story because either the torture works and then the story is reinforcing misconceptions, or it doesn’t and the villains look incompetent.
If they’re using torture because they are especially cruel, or to extract false confessions, or other actual uses of torture, that can work, but it’s very dark.
If the goal is to show the torturers as incompetent or as people who believe in the effectiveness of torture (as many have in history) then the use of torture is justified.
In real life various organisations have used torture, fully believing in its effectiveness. Those aren’t necessarily comically incompetent organisations, they are groups with some terrifying incompetent streaks. Writers need to show the uselessness of torture, not skip it entirely.
I agree that showing how torture doesn’t have the expected or desired effect is also a way of using it in the torture … just don’t glorify or promote it as a great way for the hero to act.
‘using it in the story’ … geez, I should look at what I write two seconds longer, seriously.
One interesting story about torture is that it was the thing that caused one of the only Arab-American(born in Lebanon) FBI agents to quit the FBI. Ali Soufan was one of the greatest interrogators around, as he would engage in extremely long dialogs with terror detainees in Arabic. As he argued with suspects about religion and politics in the Middle East, they would eventually reveal something of value.
He also noted that in several cases, detainees would stop talking to him after they were tortured, and the flow of information would stop. Ultimately the nature of the CIA and their use of torture caused him to quit. The fact that the CIA also withheld information that would have allowed him to have potentially stopped 9/11 made this worse. Gathering information wasn’t the problem, it was about the fact that it was not shared widely enough and was not analyzed properly by those that could have done something.
Yeah it turns out if you do wildly unethical things, you might lose some of your best employees.
Great article! I didn’t know people were still relying on “torture as a means to find accurate info” in high profile shows like the ones you mentioned.
I also enjoyed your breakdown of how to use it properly, it’s spot on. :]
Thanks! Yeah, unfortunately it is still really common. I’m hoping that’ll change though!
Thanks for the amazing article! This is why Mythcreants is the best writing advice blog – you’re not afraid to challenge cultural narratives that many people insist on defending. Great breakdown on why torture doesn’t work, and excellent advice on what to do instead.
That’s high praise! I’m glad you enjoyed the article, and I hope the next one will he helpful to.
‘Taxi to the Darkside,’ while a grim documentary about real world torture and how ineffective it is, has some interesting commentary from people about what kind of interrogation actually works. It’s much more about sitting down and listening to the person and finding out what kind of carrot will work to get their cooperation.
Thinking about this more, an interrogation scene has the potential to reveal a lot about both the character being interrogated and the interrogators. Going straight to torture just means the character says “I use violence to solve all my problems.” While the victim is usually either “no, please stop, I’ll do anything” or “I EAT PAIN FOR BREAKFAST”.
Once the torture starts, there is no possibility for the interrogator to show any positive virtues. They can’t be cleaver, sneaky, empathetic or merciful. There is no creative solution to the problem left.
Torture can still be used in scenes that reveal deeper character, like the example with Picard, or when Mal and Wash were tortured in Firefly. But it really has to be about the impact the trauma has on the characters, rather than just furthering the plot.
My favourite interrogation scene was with Black Widow in the 2012 Avengers movie. It just subverts everything about how these torture scenes usually go.
Yes, Black Widow played Loki like a harp in that one, it was glorious. By pretending that his mind games worked on her, she made him reveal his plan, because of his arrogance. She was playing with his character flaw, which is a legit way of interrogation.
I’m all for clever, sneaky, empathetic, and merciful solutions to finding information. They’re more effective, they’re more inventive, and they’re also less damaging for the hero character who uses them. Outsmarting the captured enemy like Black Widow does in “The Avengers” is a lot more interesting and makes her character look good. Just torturing the enemy until they give information which is true (something I wouldn’t believe for a second with a character like Loki who is, when all’s said and done, the God of LIES) is not half as interesting and makes the hero look bad, after all.
Torture does have its place in storytelling (well, clearly not in light-hearted stories, but that goes without saying), but using it to gain information just doesn’t make sense, not knowing how inefficient it is. In cases where a confession (even a false one) is needed (beside the witch hunts, I could also think of political reasons to have someone confess to a crime they didn’t do). In cases where the villain wants to break someone’s will. In cases where the villain is just into that and bored (if they’re pure evil).
Some good points.
I do want to slightly disagree about something. You say:
“stories where the good guys employ torture also normalize this inhumane practice”. I say not necessarily. Good guys sometimes do shitty things. Flaws make characters intetesting. One can have the good guys do something horrible (like torture) and they have to live with the consequences. Stories where the good guys are only good, and always do the right thing can be a bit boring.
Also “teeming with witches”, not “teaming”
The problem with ‘good guys using torture’ in a lot of stories is that they don’t have to live with the consequences. The torture works, they get the information, there’s no punishment for using such means to gain it. That is the problem.
You can very well show a good guy lose it and take his fists or a weapon to a prisoner to force them to give up information – if you also show that the information is false, just thought up to end the pain, and the good guy gets into trouble for using violence on the prisoner.
Exactly. Or the hero has to live with pseudo-consequences, like he goes around brooding about how dark and monstrous he’s become, but there’s no REAL consequence to it beyond the brooding and furrowed brow.
There’s a scene in 24 where they believe Jack’s girlfriend’s brother has information, and the girlfriend threatens him with Jack coming in to torture him. This is filmed from Jack’s perspective where he’s all sad that his girlfriend sees him as the kind of man who tortures people – and for no better reason than that he does in fact torture people, like how unfair is that!
You torture a couple of people and everyone thinks you’re capable of torturing. What is the world coming to? ;)
One other thing: You can’t really make a big deal about a character’s no-kill-rule (if the character does have such a rule, of course), if they freely torture people and behave in abominable ways otherwise. If you show over and over again that the character has NO respect or consideration for others, at least not for villains, not KILLING villians becomes completely arbitrary.
I talked this over with a fellow geek the other day: Think about when Jason Todd was killed by the Joker, something that wouldn’t have happened if Batman had killed the Joker first. For a decent-person-version of Batman, this is seriously agonizing. He can stick to his guns and say that he doesn’t regret anything after all, because we gotta stick with our moral principles even when the price is terribly high, otherwise the bad guys have essentially won already. OR he might actually regret letting the Joker live – in either case, it makes for a compelling story.
For an already evil version of Batman (like Frank Miller’s horrible version in AllStar, for instance), letting the Joker live was simply idiotic. His only reason for doing so was a completely RANDOM no-kill-rule. Like, too bad for Jason that Batman got all hung up on not killing rather than, say, wearing his lucky socks every time he goes out to fight crime.
Some writers think that you can turn a hero SO grimdark that they’re really just evil, and still let them have a no-killing-villains rule, but it just doesn’t make sense!
In Batman’s case, one could also argue whether letting beaten-up henchmen lying around isn’t going to lead to some of them dying, which would break the no-kill rule.
The real reason why the Joker still lives is, of course, the fact that he’s Batman’s nemesis and they’ll never scrap a villain as renown as him. Keeping him in the running doesn’t get easier, though, especially with the invasion of the grimdark.
Hmm… What if someone’s personal (or cultural) moral code specifically prohibited killing but allowed, say, torture or other things that we would find horrible? Even if they were wrong, there could still be an in-story reason for it. It could be an example of https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlueAndOrangeMorality .
A thought regarding Batman, and in particular The Dark Knight and the Arkham games.
In The Dark Knight, the police let Batman into the Joker’s cell to beat information out of him. As a result, the Joker tells Batman *exactly what he wanted him to know, at the time he wanted the information released.*
In the Arkham games, when you have to shake down the Riddler’s informants, Batman grabs them, threatens them, and then they immediately promise to tell you all they know. I realise this is actually because they don’t have specific animations and dialogue for extended individual roughings up, but I kind of like the unplanned implication that what gets results for Batman is the fear of what he might do – the whole ‘superstitious and cowardly’ thing – and that it doesn’t work on his rogue’s gallery because they understand him well enough to know that he has a line he won’t cross.
And yes, it’s the Arkham games, so even then that line is somewhere south of brutal, repeated blunt-force trauma, electrocution and high calibre rubber bullets, but I think I had a point in there somewhere.
This is one of the things I appreciate on Game of Thrones. Despite the cruel behavior of many of the characters, it’s rare (can’t even think of an example right off though I could have forgotten given the hundreds of characters and scenarios in it) for torture to be portrayed as effective in getting useful information.
Better yet, the characters who torture don’t usually seem to be under the impression that it works for this purpose unless they’re idiots. Tywin Lannister finds his men torturing prisoners to get information on the Brotherhood and cannot contain his contempt.
Ramsay Bolton admits that he does it for his own amusement. Interestingly the only useful info he gets from Theon is when he briefly pretends to be an ally helping him escape.
Season 3 of Stranger Things is in my top handful of favorite torture scenes (I think torture scenes can have value as showing what a protagonist has endured, not about the information). Steve works for Scoops Ahoy and is being tortured by Russians and just keeps telling them he works for Scoops Ahoy until he basically has a mental snap. The guy has faced physical abuse multiple times and literally faced down monsters and the end of the world scenario twice. I do wish fiction covered the fallout from the trauma of torture and other abuses more. Modern writers would never portray or use rape so callously. They are not dissimilar.
*Spoilers for the original Star Wars trilogy*
How would you classify Han and Leia’s torture in Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back? That wasn’t torture for the sake of information; it was to get Luke’s attention. So technically, it worked. And Darth Vader does end up getting a redemption arc.
It worked, because it wasn’t about information … and because it was done by the villain, it also didn’t fall into the ‘show the good side using torture efficiently’ problem.
I’m not sure whether I’d call what Vader had a full redemption arc. He decided to sacrifice his own life for his son, which showed that Luke was right and Vader wasn’t fully evil. For me, that’s not full redemption.
One of the best torture scenes in history of literature has got to be O’Brien’s torture of Winston in 1984.
Despite being the darkest torture I have ever read, it clearly added a lot to the story.
It’s also interesting how the purpose of the torture was the exact opposite of most media torture. The purpose was not to get accurate information out of Winston, but to get wrong information into him. Essentially, it was torture of the “engineering a false confession” variety.
I’d also add deterrence to the purposes of realistic torture. The torture from 1984 is once again a good example of this.
thank you
I liked how the torture is portrayed in Ichi The Killer. Kakihara, the protagonist, knows that the victim doesn’t have the information; he’s just doing it because he’s sadomasochistic. There’s a funny scene where a yakuza member walks in on Kakihara pouring shrimp tempura on a guy who is suspended by hooks through his back and it’s incredibly awkward. It shows that the torture isn’t effective.
Just a little thing about the wording:
If that guy likes to hurt others, he’s sadistic (named after the Marquis de Sade, who wrote stories about sadists).
If that guy likes to be hurt, he’s masochistic (named after Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who wrote stories about masochists).
Sadomasochism is the sexual relationship between a sadist and a masochist. Technically, someone who likes to hurt and to be hurt could be called a sadomasochist, but there’s other words for them in the BDSM community.
Yes, in the movie, Kakihara was in a consensual sadomasochistic relationship with his boss. When his boss goes missing, he tries to replace the relationship with both sadism and masochism. After he gets in trouble for the torture, he voluntarily cuts out his tongue. He claims it’s for penance, but it’s really for his masochistic urges.
The summary is “a sadomasochistic yakuza enforcer comes across a repressed and psychotic killer who may be able to inflict levels of pain the enforcer can only dream about.”
Two things:
1) I do agree that most stories don’t need torture, but I disagree that the best way to challenge beliefs about torture is to avoid it. There are people who will never have their beliefs about torture challenged otherwise and certain aspects of torture have yet to be challenged in mainstream or committed ways. Remember, enough people believe the myths that you needed to write this article.
2) I disagree with ‘breaking’ the victim. Torture victims are not broken and that phrase is kind of harmful even if I know you didn’t mean it to be. It plays into the idea that torture victims are damaged or controlled by the torturer, that the torturer is able to do something to their mind and make them helpless. This is not true. I would use using another phrase that is more accurate. Otherwise readers will get the impression that torture /can/ work for something that villains might want. This is also harmful.
How do you think torture works? I’m really interested in why you think humans have tortured for millennia.
History shows that the only way torture actually does work is by breaking the tortured person’s will (which is very much ‘breaking them’) and making them obey the torturer, either do or say what the torturer tells them to. The same which can be done with brute force and pain, by the way, can also be done with psychological manipulation, but that came later. Pain is easier to inflict, although psychological means often bring better results.
As I mentioned in another comment here recently, one of the places where torture was most defined and inventive was Ancient China where the laws stated that a criminal had to confess their crime to be sentenced. Since, as you may imagine, most criminals do not freely confess, torture was applied to get the confession – ideally, from the real culprit, but sometimes also from someone else to placate an influential social group or make it look like justice had been done.
What I know is that at least one interrogator (using psychological means to earn the trust of the person questioned – a much more efficient way to gain information) was turned off by new colleagues at the CIA coming in and beating up those people, because “24” had given them the false impression that this was the best way to go. Needless to say that destroyed any trust the interrogator had gained before. He left the CIA over this.
Torture can be brought into a story on the villain’s side – no matter whether they’re just utter sadists who enjoy causing pain or whether they use it to control others (through torture or the fear of it). What you should never do is having your protagonist use it.
You know what bothers me? Writers writing about why torture is ineffective and wrong- but getting angry when they are given a suggestion that wording may be harmful. I think I see some condescension in your reply and offer the idea that some of your readers are victims of torture or have worked with victims.
Asking how I think torture works and using ‘breaking’ the victim on an anti-torture post shows you may not be fully committed to your view of torture as wrong and ineffective. This isn’t your fault. Even I have believed subtle pro-torture ideas before. The point is to recognize and correct the belief. I say again, torture victims are not ‘broken’. That is a phrase torturers use to make torture seem effective if the ‘information’ angle doesn’t work. Politicians have also used pro-torture rhetoric, even they thought torture was wrong.
Torture victims are not broken. Victims of slavery and human trafficking, police brutality, prisoners of war, etc- none of them ‘broke’ as a result of torture. They are strong, resilient, and their trauma doesn’t mean they are broken. Whether you are using ‘break’ to suggest the victims give up/give in to the torturer OR to suggest the victim’s trauma means they are broken – both of these are harmful ideas given to us by torture-apologia.
This subject is VERY difficult and there is misinformation everywhere. I do not blame you at all. What I am bothered by is a person claiming to be anti-torture getting upset with me, challenging me, over a simple suggestion of word usage that can be harmful to victims.
Torture can force a false confession and it can force short term compliance. This does not mean the victim is broken. If you read accounts by victims, especially victims of human trafficking (not quite torture in the legal sense, but it can be depending on if criminal organizations are covered under the law), you can see that compliance is often not a sign of a broken will, but a tactic to stay alive.
By all means, question me! I am not perfect! However, I still think the idea of breaking victims is a harmful one that needs to go. :) I simply wanted to suggest that and I apologize if my comment came off as rude. Your blog is a treasure.
Victims of torture are traumatized, as other victims of violence are. That, to a degree, means they are ‘broken’. It does not mean that they are destroyed for all eternity or will never recover from the situation. They are broken and they will mend as soon as they’re out of the situation which broke them, as broken bones, for instance, mend when given the chance. It’s indeed not irreversible.
Breaking a will means putting a person into a personal situation in which they will do what is asked of them to avoid more pain or more subtle trauma. That is simply human nature – we avoid pain any way we can. This breaking of a will is not irreversible. It happens in a certain situation and keeps on going until that situation is resolved. As long as the torturer has complete control over the victim, as long as they can efficiently continue the torture at any given moment, their control will last. As soon as the situation has changed and the victim is removed, the control of the torturer will be nil and void. That is why many witches, for instance, recanted their prior confessions under torture afterwards (which in turn led to them being executed as quickly as possible so they couldn’t recant).
If you have a better word to describe the situation which arises during torture, in the moment a victim complies to a degree to avoid further pain, then I would like to know.
I am against using torture as a device to gain information, because it doesn’t work like that and the most long-lasting uses of torture were never meant for gaining information – not by secret services and not by other organisations. You don’t repeat that which doesn’t bring results. As I wrote before, torture is efficient to exert control over someone for a certain period of time. It doesn’t last forever, but it happens. In this way, it can be used in a story in my opinion, but never by someone on Team Good.
I want to apologize. Before, I said the idea of breaking someone was torture apologia. I want to amend that, because I don’t necessarily think it is torture apologia, but very iffy language that can lean into torture apologia. It gives the torturer too much power over the victim, power they don’t truly have in real life.
However, I do stand by the statement that torture victims are not broken and trauma does not mean they are irreparable or weak.
Again, this is complex subject. All I want is an open discussion about it in order to make things better. Thank you.
Me again! I wanted to add that in case it wasn’t clear: I think we must examine the meaning and intention behind common expressions like that. Where did it come from? What meanings does it hold? Are there differences in the connotation and definition? Can it be easily misunderstood?
If you take the time to read these comments, I appreciate your time, patience, and care for an emotionally and academically difficult subject like this.
When it comes to the expression ‘breaking’, I’m not a specialist for the English language (English isn’t my native language, either), but I know that there’s also the expression of ‘breaking in’ a horse for riding – which, in essence, means overcoming the horse’s will and making it accept the idea of carrying a human.
These days, that’s no longer a violent process, but done by gaining the horse’s trust and slowly getting it used to it, by showing it that no danger comes from the saddle and the human on its back. In the past, this was done by violence, by subduing the horse and forcing it to accept the human’s superiority. In this way, it has a certain similarity to what happens during the process of torture when the will of the torturer overcomes the will of the victim to a degree (as written above, this process is not irreversible and will be reversed as soon as the situation changes, unlike with the horse).
This, however, is my theory, I can’t tell you whether these two expressions are merely similar or whether they are linguistically linked.
Generally, of course, ‘breaking’ means destroying something. Some things which are broken can be mended or repaired – such as broken bones or furniture – while others remain broken.
I will admit that breaking does have different connotations in other languages or when it isn’t your native language. I get that.
I appreciate your analogy. However I still think it is a problem. I don’t know if I can explain it well. The breaking in a horse analogy still gives torturers too much power and makes the victim passive and without their own will. Torture cannot change a person’s mind or break their spirit in a way this post implies. I just think you should consider what other wordings you can use and give victims more agency. Making them out to be passive recipients of abuse is not helpful and makes it seem like torture is an effective tool to get someone to do something. Someone might read your post thinking victims are damaged forever or are passive and will suddenly be eager to do what is asked of them. I simply feel the post doesn’t have helpful language around victims and so the spirit of the post falls flat.
The problem is that there is no helpful language to express all the levels on which torture works.
I have my agent speak of ‘faking to break’ in connection with torture – pretending to have reached that moment when you give in and bide her time until she can make her getaway. Her agency doesn’t use torture because it’s not effective and there are better ways. The only person I’ve depicted using torture within the now eight books is a very incompetent guy who gets nowhere with it. I’m not here to excuse my regular use of it.
No, a torture victim is not passive – they’re usually actively resisting the torture until the moment they can’t any longer (which is that ‘breaking’ point). Depending on how good the torturer is, that point may never come (they might, for instance, kill the victim instead or the victim might be freed).
Psychological tools are usually much more effective than what we see as torture (physical as well as mental torture, both exist), too. Torture not very effective, which is why it’s not widely used these days (even the secret services usually use other means to turn or convince people).
Would you consider adding that in your post? A section on portraying victims accurately? Like “not passive/having real trauma symptoms/not breaking under torture” sort of post. Readers may not be as familiar with victims of any kind and a post on this would be helpful. I feel like this post doesn’t cover victims as well and they probably deserve more time devoted to them especially because people tend to blame them thinking the inmate must have done something to ‘deserve’ torture or that the suspect ‘needs’ to be tortured, etc. The way we talk about victims can have propaganda in it as well.
Thank you for the conversation!
It’s not my post, so I can’t add that, but I think it would be a good idea to add it to the post or make one about the victim’s side to make it clear that they are not passive.
Thank you. I look forward to reading such a post. It will be very helpful. I love this blog. I would ask that in the future, you try to be more accepting of good-faith suggestions, at least when they point out how you can improve your overall message. It is upsetting to receive anger and some condescension when you are just pointing out how the message can be approved. If you are truly committed to showing how harmful torture is, everyone must be open to suggestions about how to take that a step more. If you cannot do so, you are not helping anyone. If you truly believe torture is wrong, a suggestion along those same lines should not bother you. You have to be as open to changing your mind and improving as those of us who read your blog to make our stories better.
Since this was braught up by several listener questions recently, I re-read this article. Thanks again for tackling this topic, it is very important, since there are so few “sources” on torture aside from fiction that irl interrogators get their ideas from stories.
“…most people will say anything to make the pain stop.”
That’s a very understandable reaction to torture, but not the only one. Everyone reacts differently and some people (including those who had cooperated and shared information previously) will stop talking and become more resistant after torture. Which makes sense since they’ll hate the torturer. They might also not trust the torturer to stop hurting them even if they do cooperate (or lie to tell them what they want to hear).
To quote the excellent blog scripttorture.tumblr.com *: “Torture does not make victims passive or obedient.”
So, yes, a random trucker might very well have the willpower to truthfully insist he didn’t know anything until he died. It is one possible reaction to trauma.
The problems mainly start not in showing one or the other reaction to torture (or trauma in general), but when stories subtly or not so subtly judge some reactions as better or more heroic than others. How often have you seen heroes in stories withstand all torture without even develloping symptoms, while minions start talking at the “mere” threat of it? (btw threatening torture is already torture in itself, but it is often used to make heroes seem less reprehensible since they didn’t “have” to go through with the threat because the minion, supposedly lacking willpower, started talking after being threatened.)
Again quoting scripttorture here, particularly the article Getting Started ( https://scripttorture.tumblr.com/post/172408537599/getting-started ) : “Resistance to torture is the norm. Studies on the historical use of torture to force confessions show that an average of 90% of victims refuse to comply with torturers long enough to sign a confession.”
Meaning, torture isn’t only horrible at getting truthful information, it’s even bad at forcing false confessions!
Not only are nonviolent ways of interrogating or influencing people more effective, adding violence to the mix *reduces* the effectiveness. Some people might comply *despite* the violence, leading torturers to assume they succeeded because of the violence, but that is not the case. Bribery for example works much better.
Bribery and other forms of non-violent influencing and possibly coercion can also be better tools for storytelling, since the character actually has to be clever and find out things about the suspect, instead of just brainlessly beating them.
*I’ve linked to this blog on another comment as well, I hope that’s ok. They also have posts evaluating the depiction of torture in fiction, including in Star Wars, which is worth a read. Although, as everything on that blog, it obviously comes with a trigger warning.
Hm, I tried a couple of times to post a comment here with links in it and it didn’t work. I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong when trying to post comments with links? Is there a limit, like is more than one link per comment too much?
All links need to be checked by a moderator first. Depending on the time you comment, it can take a while until someone checks them. Both Oren and Chris are in the US, so if it’s night there, they’re probably sleeping.
When you post a link, it can take a while for your comment to appear.
Cay’s right, though oddly, that isn’t what happened here. Normally, when someone posts a link, it goes to our pending approval folder, and you should get a message saying so. This time it was sent straight to the spam folder for unknown reasons. Anyway, I rescued it and told the filter it wasn’t spam, hopefully that won’t be a problem again.
Thanks Oren for saving it! Yes, it didn’t tell me that my comment was awaiting moderation, that’s what was weird. I also tried to post it before and waited like a week, so it wasn’t that either. I’m just glad it worked now :)
NP. If something like that happens again, feel free to use our contact form or just email me to let me know. I usually read all the comments, but sometimes I miss one, and we might reach a point where there are too many for me to personally read.
I can’t help but feel upset that I said what the previous commenter said about how torture “breaking” people promotes the idea that victims are passive and obedient, the response was less welcoming. “How do you think torture works? I’m really interested in why you think humans have tortured for millennia.” I hops this means this blog has learned to consider readers’ suggestions especially when they point out harmful parts of the writer’s words. :) (Sorry for my poor English.)
I was the one writing the response you are referring to and I’m not a writer of this blog.
I have discussed the topic with the other commenter and we both agree that victims are not passive – I never meant it differently. Yet, the term ‘breaking’ can have different meanings and, unfortunately, there are no others to discuss the way torture works.
Yet, I am not a writer here, I have not posted this article and my comment, which was harsh, as I’m admitting here and have admitted before, does not reflect the way the owners of Mythcreants think or act.
Addendum, it was only after I posted that I realized you and I were originally having this conversation.
As said in the comment before, I do regret my harsh comment, especially as it turned out we had a pretty similar idea about how victims of torture react, even if we had a different interpretation of the term ‘breaking.’
while we’re on the topic of English terminology: a lot of people dislike the use of the term ‘victim’ specifically because it often carries implications of passivity, helplessness etc.
something to be aware of.
What if the torture is necessary for the magic to work? Is this pro-torture propaganda?
It’s weird to say the least. What kind of magic would be based around torture? How would torture create magic powers in the first place?
This would probably be one of a few kinds of magic where the usefulness wouldn’t play a role – all people using it would most likely be hunted and killed.
Assuming you’re not talking about self-torture (and there is a historical precedent for using SELF privation or abuse as a route to mystical experiences), I would say yes, for the same reason that the “ticking time bomb that we know will go off in one hour and we know this is the mastermind we have in custody, in fact we know everything except where the bomb is” is pro-torture: we’re looking at a scenario where the torture is necessary because the author decreed it so and enforced their will with glaring contrivance.
A bit late to discussion but there is one thing that wasn’t discussed here.
Tortures in fiction are- por a lack of better word- pretty. Elaborate rituals, enough to draw blood, but nothing that would pernamently disfigure. The recovery is just a matter of time.
IRL tortures had no regards to state their victim ended up- even famous prolonged ones were a form of execution. The only thing that comes close to showing real life consequences is Griffith in Berserk. But even this pales compared to real life accounts like Stones for the Rampart where teen boy is beaten for days by Geastapo and saved by his friends only to suffer for days before he sucummbed to his injuries.
Not to mention that one of the most common forms and threats of torture for both sexes is brutal rape.
I have an alternate scenario on the topic of torture.
1. The villains torture someone to break them, but it’s off screen.
2. When the heroes find them, they figure out that they were a torture victim and want to avenge them.
Do you guys think that might work for darker stories without promoting torture, or is that a bridge too far?