Americans Love Torture

"Saw 3" is coming out this month. And like "Saw" and "Saw 2," it's a movie about torture. Movies where people get tortured have been around for a long time, but they used to be made by Z-grade exploitation producers and they only ran at the drive-in. (They called them exploitation pictures because they exploited areas that mainstream Hollywood wouldn't touch.) Now we've got all these movies like Hostel and the Saw movies that are literally nothing but torture, and they're at the local Cineplex and advertised on prime-time TV. Remember that term Moynihan coined, "defining deviancy down"? These movies are mainstreaming deviancy. Deviancy now opens nationwide in 3,000 theaters. How can you expect a nation to abide by the Geneva Conventions when 80 percent of our teenagers spend their idle hours playing ultra-gory video games?