When others say it better…

“On March 13, 2007, I [Maggie Nelson] awoke to find my neighbourhood blanketed by an ad campaign for a movie called Captivity. The first round of advertisements, which consisted of 30 billboards in Los Angeles, and 1,400 taxi-cab tops in New York, was divided into four panels, each charting a woman’s progress through four possible stages of being: “abduction,” confinement,” torture,” and “termination.”

The abduction panel showed a black man’s hand or a black-gloved hand (the difference blurred, so as to provoke racial panic while shrugging off the trick) over her mouth. The confinement panel showed a close-up of her face, smeared with dirt and mascara, pressed against a chain-link fence. The torture panel featured her faced bandaged up like a mummy’s, a tube shoved up its nose, with dark red blood draining out of the tube, then out of the frame. The termination panel showed her mostly disrobed body splayed over a table, its dead head dangling toward the ground, its dead breasts facing up towards the heavens, another sacrifice to God-knows-what.

After a public outcry, which Reuters said came in the form of a “flood of e-mails and phone calls from angry parents and offended women,” the confinement panel was the only one that remained. And remain it did, everywhere, for four months. Sometimes I’d find myself standing in front of a poster for the movie at a bus stop, then I’d look up and see one on the eastern horizon. On the street level, if often appeared alongside advertisements for two other movies to be released concurrently – Eli Roth’s Hostel: Part II, which featured a menacing man in a blood-spattered butcher’s apron, ready to perform the torture-killing of three female college students on vacation in Europe, and Gregory Hoblit’s Fracture, which featured a close-up of everyone’s favorite movie monster, Anthony Hopkins, with the bragging slogan “I SHOT MY WIFE” in huge red letters floating over his face. It was a real you’ve-come-along-way-baby trio.

Or that’s at least how Courtney Soloman, CEO of After Dark, the marketer behind the Captivity billboard campaign, pretended to see it. “The movie is certainly a horror movie and it’s about abduction, but it’s also about female empowerment,” Solomon said. He was trying to explain that he, too, had been upset about the abduction-to-termination billboards – not because of their graphic nature or their glorification of sexualized torture, but because they were “misleading” about the arc of the film. He explained that after many test screenings and focus groups, they had reshot the ending “so the main character ends up in as much of a positive situation as the situation would allow.” This is, I suppose, one version of female empowerment – the kind you might see looking through a pinhole, angled toward hell.

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…And then, when the movie finally comes out, Solomon throws a release party in West Hollywood at a club made over into a torture chamber, draped with the original “OTP” advertisements and serviced by the Suicide Girls, and call the event “[his] little personal tribute to [the women’s groups],” and later tries to bait groups like the National Organization of Women into having a “town-hall style debate” about the film (which, for obvious reasons, NOW declines to do). And the wheel keeps on turning.”