“The Hills Have Eyes”: a review on sociology of victims
The movie is about a family who entrapped in a desert by monster-like humans. Like many other movies in the genre of horror, the location of story is the southern desert of the United States. The cannibals of this scenario are people who have been affected by nuclear tests. The victimized inhabitants have remained in their land and as a result of radioactive devastating waves have found a terrific face and body. The movie is not rated as a high-quality production in that it’s more of a simple follow-and-escape film with no complexity. The viewer is supposed to be horrified by the violence and of course the ghastly face of the raiders.
There is a scene in this movie making it deserved for a sociopolitical analysis. When Doug Bukowski (Aaron Stanford) plants the American flag in Pluto’s throat it clearly sends out a message. Needless to say that American flag stands for many things including US policy. The US government has performed a test on its nuclear weapons in the past decades whose one of its outcomes is the bodily disorder of some US citizens. They have lived during the past decades in stealth until a family who is also US citizen arrives. The main question may arise is that who is the victim in this battlefield? A representative from the new generation of US citizens plants an American flag in the throat of another US citizen who suffers from traumas of a nuclear test conducted by US government. That is, even if US government mistakenly has carried out the operation, politicians still believe that US policy is eligible to take victims even from its own citizens. What really matters are the benefit of majority and the very policy.
It’s like a social obligation that humans may become victims of unexpected events such as a nuclear test. Social obligations are not always like participating in jury which has no jeopardy. Sometimes, people should be ready to be sacrificed for their country even without their consent. Sociologist Erving Goffman in his classic Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963) applied the term stigma, a Greek word (stigmata) with heavily religious overtones to physical, racial, or sociological categories. According to Goffman, stigma refers to “bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier. The signs were cut or burnt into the body and advertised that the bearer was a slave, a criminal, or a traitor—a blemished person, ritually polluted, to be avoided, especially in public places” (Goffman, 1963, p. 1)*. In this movie, the cannibals who are no longer eligible to return back to society have spoiled identities. What has happened to their face is their stigma.
* Jack Nusan Porter
Goffman, Erving (1963). Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
By: Hossein Aghababa
