Torture: Just another plot device

THE FORMER Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky describes torture not as an "interrogation practice" or "necessary tool" but as a "temptation" and "scourge."

This is because 12 years in the Soviet gulag taught him that torture is "the professional disease of any investigative machinery," which if not suppressed, destroys or alienates the people most skilled in extracting information and reduces interrogation to "a playground for sadists."

Words to ponder when watching American movies and television nowadays. Until recently, scenes of torture were rare -- brief, horrific flashes meant to evoke pure evil. But ever since Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs" (1992) made casual cruelty look cool, the trendier bad guys have been slicing and dicing at will. And not just the bad guys: for five years now, Jack Bauer, the hero of Fox TV's "24," has been crushing bones and applying electrodes to get terrorists to confess.

What's new this year is the normalization of torture. The hit Showtime series, "Dexter," stars a hunky forensic police expert who spends his nights ritually murdering guilty but acquitted criminals; and two feature films, "Hostel" and "Turistas," show clueless Americans being vivisected for pleasure by grotesquely stereotyped foreigners.

Given that millions of people around the world now perceive the United States, rightly or wrongly, as having abandoned the moral high ground regarding treatment of prisoners, I cannot help but wonder how these entertainments project American sensibilities overseas.

Is art imitating life, or the other way around? Either way, Bukovsky's phrase, "a playground for sadists," keeps running through my mind.

Martha Bayles teaches in the Honors Program at Boston College and is a visiting fellow at Aspen Institute Berlin.