"I suppose there's a degree to which we must give superheroes beating criminals for information a pass just by the nature of the genre, the same way we give their vigilantism a pass but probably wouldn't approve of anyone in real life kidnapping a criminal, pounding the shit out of them, and hanging them unconscious from a lamppost outside One Police Plaza. But I think that a good writer, on some level or other, owns up to the ickiness of this behavior."
And after referencing Miller's DARK KNIGHT RETURNS and some current JLA story I've not read, Collins ended:
"At any rate, isn't torture what bad guys do?"
My reply is appropriately Batmanesque: "Yes and no."
A more articulate reply will probably take more than one essay, so right now I'll confine myself to (a) defining what is meant by "torture" in this instance, and (b) defining how I see it functioning in a narrative context.
First, let's take torture. In an earlier essay I made a distinction between two forms of violence that I felt had been conflated by early comics-critics Gershon Legman and Frederic Wertham, thusly:
"...I have to anticipate how these two deceased intellectuals might have found fault with my assertion that the paradigm of the adventure-genre (hero fights villain with both having the ability to defend themselves) does not match the paradigm of classical sadism (victimizer tortures victim, who has no ability to defend him/herself)."
Though both men repeatedly attacked the comics-medium as a breeding-ground for sadism, most of their examples of comic-book violence were drawn from stories featuring violent combat, rather than tales focusing on some helpless victim being tormented, though *here's* an example of an exception, from THE THING #9 (1953):
However, by itself the picture doesn't tell readers why the hoods are tormenting the girl: whether they're doing it simply for the pleasure of cruelty (which would put the scene in Sade's territory) or (more likely) in order to gain information.
Since torture for cruelty's sake is performed for different reasons than torture for information's sake, it seems logical to specify that the kind of torture Sean Collins references is the latter type, which I'll term "inquisitional torture." To the best of my recollection, Legman and Wertham never referenced scenes of heroes wreaking torture on villains, as Collins does above, though probably they could have found such scenes without much effort if they'd looked.
Inquisitorial torture had certainly been around in fiction for a long time prior to the birth of Superman. It's likely it reached its most prevalent (and cliched) form in various offshoots of the crime genre, where it gave us such gems of dialogue as, "Let me beat it out of him, captain!" And though the superhero genre was a fairly distant offshoot from the dominantly realistic crime-genre, Superman's first printed adventure does end on a note of inquisitorial torture, as the Man of Tomorrow sweeps up a criminal conspirator and dangles him from a high building in order to force the malefactor to tell all.
It goes without saying that none of Superman's juvenile readers (and maybe not all his adult ones) would have worried about any consequences stemming from the hero's literally high-handed machinations. Certainly none of those readers thought Superman a "bad guy" for forcing info from a criminal, because narrative omniscience allowed both the hero and his readers to know absolutely that the man was a criminal and so deserved rough treatment. The same would probably hold true for any stories in which Batman or Captain America slapped or punched
a crook around to make him disclose needed info. To my knowledge that's as far as most Golden or Silver Age heroes ever went, and usually the crooks gave in so quickly that the heroes weren't forced to indulge in prolonged clobberings, in contrast to your basic Fiendish Orientals, who implicitly enjoyed torturing for pure cruelty's sake.So it seems demonstrable that this basic, "muss-'em-up" level of inquisitorial torture wasn't viewed as "bad" by the reading-audience. In fact, I'd say that it was approached in such a cavalier fashion that it was little more than a rote storytelling device, whose purpose had more to do with building narrative tension than wallowing in the violence as such. Though superheroes were always omniscient as far as discerning bad guys from honest citizens, said heroes weren't quite omniscient enough to know where all of the evildoers hung their hats, and so "unfriendly persuasion" was necessary.
Now I will admit that as I grew up in the 1960s, I don't believe I saw a lot of inquistional torture by heroes, even of the "muss-'em-up" variety, in the mainstream comics of my time. Thanks to the postwar anti-comics crusade in which Wertham participated, most 60s comics were fairly restrained, even formalized, in regard to how much violence they showed. I feel sure that there must have been instances of "roughing up," utilized as I said for the purpose of building narrative tension, but all I can think of is the schtick in SPIDER-MAN #10 where the hero terrifies a thug into talking through the clever use of a phony spider-monster. As newsstand comics-sales declined in the 1970s, however, the major companies would slowly start pushing a harder brand of violence in the hope of reaching older audiences.
Because I grew up in a time when scenes of inquisitorial torture were rare in the comics, it's possible that I have a predilection to see such scenes as having a purely narrative (and hence non-ideological) function. In other words, a scene with Captain America beating up the Red Skull to make him talk is not necessarily emblematic of the fascism in American culture. I can think of comparable scenes that *might* imply a real ideological stance as such, as when Mike Hammer hauls ass on Dirty Commies in KISS ME DEADLY, but not every such scene carries ideological weight. All cats may look grey when one dwells in the darkness of ideological thinking, but the light discloses quite a bit more variegation.
I'll also admit that scenes of inquisitorial torture never had much significance to me. Since they show one character managing to overcome the will of another, they certainly provide some sort of dynamizing thrill to the audience, whether used in superhero yarns or crime stories. But they certainly weren't as thrilling as the fight-scenes, where the hero could theoretically lose (and at least might have to get help from some ally to win out). Such inquisitions were far more of a foregone conclusion: the hero would slap the villain around a bit and the villain would give in. Such scenes were too drably functional to incite any great moral concern, which is more or less what Collins is talking about when he talks about the possibility of giving such scenes "a pass;" i.e., recognizing them as essentially escapist and so not responsive to the concerns of realism.
And yet, Collins *does* question whether or not some scenes of more extreme nature don't require that their authors 'fess up to "the ickiness of the behavior." Certainly one of his main examples, Miller's DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, is one of the pivotal works that made the scene of inquisitorial torture a focus rather than a simple narrative function, and so in my next essay I'll talk more about the moral ramifications of the superhero inquisition.
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