Torture as an Inversion of the Social Order: A commentary on Roman Polanski's Death and the Maiden.

Abstract

Death and the Maiden operates as a representation of the three poles participating in the act of torture and beyond it. In this essay, the film is analysed by focusing on how trust in the victim's world, connected to the idea of a social contract, is broken by the act of torture with different consequences for each of these poles. Based on this idea and following the plot line of Roman Polanski's film, I will reflect on the conditions that maintain our social order, as well as the conditions that can break it –what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil.