Against the Torment Nexus
the definition of insanity is Amazon Prime's overproduced Beast Games
Illustration: one of CoverGirl’s official Hunger Games lewks.
The Torment Nexus tweet below is funny because it’s true. Like most sci-fi fans, I can think of a few famous examples whereby science fiction became science reality, but the mechanisms by which this happens are complicated. It’s not so straightforward as sci-fi authors being so wise they predict the future, though that does sometimes come to pass. More often, though, sci-fi fans pursue research in such a way that causes their favorite stories to come to life. In other words: life usually imitates art.
If you’re reading this essay close to its publication date in early 2025, you might have immediately pictured Sam Altman, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or another street preacher of the Singularity. Many openly cite science fiction as an inspiration for their work, after all. But if you were somehow reading these words several years before, in late 2021, you might have assumed that I’m discussing Zuckerberg’s decision to rename his digital phone book “Meta.” This was seemingly in response to the Metaverse tech bubble at the time, itself inspired by fiction like Ender’s Game and Ready Player One.
We seem to love immanentizing the Torment Nexus. But my high school english teacher told me that stories like Ready Player One are dystopias, i.e. visions of a society we don’t want to live in. So, what gives? Over and over again, art is affecting life in the exact opposite way the author intended.
Since the genre is sci-fi, the titular torment comes from some piece of unreal tech. The tech is usually what Zuck et al. are trying to invent, but of course, a machine can’t torture people without someone pressing the on switch. From 1984 to Squid Game, the horror is a societal invention. Telescreens may enable mass surveillance, but they don’t arrest you for wrongthink.
That to say, we shouldn’t call any one piece of technology a realization of the Torment Nexus, any more than a hammer should be called a murder weapon. It acquires that meaning through context. In general, sci-fi authors are not in the business of writing about the unique and inherent dangers of a given technology,1 but rather exploring how society might use such tools. As such, a Torment Nexus story is about the connection – one might even say nexus – between a dystopian society and the tools, pretexts, and elaborations of its violence.
This is a rather broad definition. For example, the classic American zombie movie is a kind of Torment Nexus. Here, the specific science in fiction is biology, where a disease or fungus can turn someone into a shambling corpse that feasts on human flesh. The Walking Dead et al. assume that society has devolved into a Mad Max farce where the uninfected regularly kill each other in competition over scarce resources dating to the pre-zombie times.
If that’s how humanity really reacts to such a crisis, forget about ever recovering the population. We’ll be dead in days. Since before we were anatomically correct, humans were social creatures entirely reliant on one another for each individual’s survival. Even solitary figures like Henry David Thoreau and Ted Kaczynski relied on others for simple shit like roads, textiles, and laundry. Indeed, postcollapse societies are often marked by their resilience and political reorganization, not simply their production of Negans.
Fiction assumes that the American societal reaction to zombism would be extreme, individualistic, and violent: therein lies the dystopia. Conversely, in Haitian religion zombism is a spiritual condition, not a biological one, and it means that your soul has failed to pass onto the afterlife properly.
A Haitian zombie is an individual enslaved in their own body. But the condition is far from permanent, and all that a would-be Robert Neville needs to do to save the zombie is feed them salt, the taste of which reminds them that they are dead.
The Robert Neville of I Am Legend is alone in zombie-infested New York, battling against all odds to create a cure for zombism. In I Am Legend, as in most American zombie films of the period, zombism has a 100% infection rate, a 100% fatality rate, and has all but decimated humanity. These changes to the zombie serve to make Robert Neville even more badass, for having survived
The fantasy behind zombie apocalypse fiction is that against all odds you, the viewer, would make it. Nobody watches The Walking Dead and identifies with the mindless hoards: they believe, consciously or not, that if a similar calamity befell their society, they’d be like Robert Neville or Rick Grimes. This kind of story became so popular in the 2000s that a name was even coined for it: pessimism porn. In first defining the term, Hugo Lindgren wrote:
econo-porn also feeds a powerful sense of intellectual vanity. You walk the streets feeling superior to all these heedless knaves who have no clue what’s coming down the pike. By making yourself miserable about the frightful hell that awaits us, you feel better. Pessimism can be bliss too.2
Lindgren was writing about the apocalyptically bearish financial advice such as abounded online after the 2008 financial crisis. But there’s a clear analogue to fiction. In the classic zombie apocalypse story, every person on Earth, except our ragtag band of protagonists and some other key players, are infected or dead. Anyone bitten is already dead.3 In a genre about survival, this means that only the uninfected are worth caring about. The entire framing of the genre encourages us to see others as heedless knaves, getting what they deserve, while preppers, the ultra-violent, and the Daryls finally get to inherit the Earth. In other words, in these fantasies, “the moral grays of modern life resolve into reassuring blacks and whites.”4
There’s an attractive fantasy here. Wouldn’t you like to be Neo, Katniss, or Rick Grimes, just a little bit? The desire to be special is the least special desire, and it colors our relationship to art in more ways than one. When it comes to Torment Nexuses, especially the wildly commercially successful adaptations, this desire sells us stories with built-in self inserts.
Fans of the zombie genre regularly fantasized, through memes and corny t-shirts, about the “coming” zombie apocalypse, when they could finally stop going to their stupid jobs and start killing people. You can see where they got the idea. In the classic zombie flick, the infected are mowed down by the dozen with no more concern than the baddies in a war movie. In this way, the Torment Nexus of undead bodies lost its horror, and instead became a vehicle of wish fulfillment for individualistic pessimists living through an increasingly confusing modernity.
For a long time, zombies were almost unavoidable. Even ostensibly non-zombie games made in 00s, like Morrowind and Half-Life, feature some creature that’s obviously a zombie, even if they refuse to call it as such. That they’ve waned in popularity doesn’t mean we’ve stopped wanting to be the protagonist. It just means we’ve found new vehicles for our fantasies.
Some of the scholarship around war films is enlightening here. Like Torment Nexus stories, war films have a peculiar tendency to glorify the conflict they’re portraying, even when the director claims to have made an anti-war movie. François Truffaut is famously quoted as saying that there is no such thing as an anti-war film, and though he didn’t elaborate, many film scholars have written on this theme in response. After all…
2nd image is a passage from “Is There Such Thing as an Anti-War Film?”
… there’s definitely something there.
Some film scholars have reduced Truffaut’s statement to simple cause-and-effect: nothing can be depicted on screen without glorifying it. If you show a war staged by theater kids and art majors, it necessarily seems less horrible than a real battle. Without picking this theory apart, we already know it doesn’t explain the immanentization phenomenon. Torment Nexuses are usually novels before they’re films, if they’re ever adapted.
Luckily, this isn’t the only theory about the failure of anti-war films. To Dr. Agnieszka Soltysik, certain war films like Saving Private Ryan have an emotional register in common with melodramas, and as a result, their message is undercut by the need to follow genre conventions.
Melodrama may seem like a strange descriptor. In general, we associate the genre with woman-led domestic dramas like Steel Magnolias, but film scholars actually coined the term retroactively to discuss otherwise unrelated films which happened to employ the same emotional register. Unlike the words “musical” or “drama,” people made melodramas for decades without knowing they would one day be categorized as such.
With this in mind, we now have an interesting, expansive possibility: that there are other works in this emotional register which we haven’t yet discovered are melodramas. In “War Film as Melodrama,” Dr. Soltysik argues that melodramas are “always seeking to generate sympathy for a virtuous victim and (if successful) moving its audience to tears,” and to this end, “can be adapted to a wide range of settings and background situations.”5
Here’s an incomplete sequence of melodrama DNA that Dr. Soltysik identifies as deleterious to anti-war messaging in “Is There Such Thing as an Antiwar Film?”:
Begins and ends in a peaceful state
Focuses on the perspective of an infantryman or grunt
Compelling characters are often found in “virtuous victims, scared, usually young, beleaguered, endangered, defined by suffering”6
Emotional deaths made in service of the story’s goal: relatedly, the idea that a death during war is anything but “in vain”
You could be forgiven for thinking that list was describing Seong Gi-hun, sopping wet meowmeow and centerpiece of Netflix’s Squid Game. Or else Katniss Everdeen, whose intense investment in her sister’s wellbeing sets the stage for the ultimate tear-jerking death in Mockingjay. Or else Guy Montag, who leaves his job as a book-burner to learn from refugee Harvard professors in Fahrenheit 451.
While the worldbuilding of each Torment Nexus story varies greatly, the arc each of our protagonists takes through the Nexus is pretty static. The start of the narrative shows them safe, but struggling. The struggle is peculiar to each Nexus: in Katniss’s case, it’s the upcoming Reaping, and for Gi-hun, it’s financial problems. The initial discontent precipitates a direct conflict between the hero and the Nexus. Guy Montag keeps a book rather than burning it: Katniss volunteers as tribute: Gi-hun agrees to participate in the Squid Game.
Remarkably, each protagonist shows a great degree of autonomy in their stories, despite the autocracy that rules them. Montag lives in a surveillance state, but still escapes with his life. Though the end of Fahrenheit 451 sees him living in destitution, he has won in that the spiritual emptiness that troubled him at the beginning of the novel is gone. He gets to read books. Most others in his society can’t say the same.
For greater effect, our protagonists are sometimes the focal points of rebellions, making society-level change a part of their personal story arc. But this is hardly a requirement. Sometimes, our Torment Nexus tour guide wins by surviving when everyone else dies. Gi-hun is the only survivor in a field of 456, for example. If art were a simple reflection of the world as it exists, then Squid Game would have been about the 98% of the field who dies pointlessly. Most participants don’t get what they want. Indeed, most die for no reason at all, their debts never discharged and their bodies never buried.
But… well, that’s a bit of a bummer, isn’t it? The story of Mr. Park who died during Red Light Green Light won’t compel anyone to keep watching, let alone to renew their Netflix subscription. Social critique stories are still bound to the laws of storytelling, and will follow them even at the cost of the social critique. This happens to war films, too. Dr. Soltysik writes, “Many films that present war as painful, horrific and costly also represent it as important and necessary.”7 This is an inadvertent side effect of their narrative structure.
When a protagonist suffers intensely for a goal, getting what they want validates the suffering they experienced. And the audience experiences catharsis, too. After sitting through the famously gory opening of Saving Private Ryan, the rest of the film “flattens out into something more conventionally affirmative and reassuring, determined to make Spielberg—and us—feel like our ordeal was “earned” and of worth.”8
Though the authors of The Hunger Games and Squid Game want to tell a story about how a murder game show would be bad, the structure of their stories actively undermines that reading. In both texts, our point-of-view character is the ultimate winner. We see the entire proceedings through their eyes, during which their fellow competitors, the heedless knaves, die en masse. Most are nameless. The Hunger Games has a smaller field, so most murdered children are named at least once, but book-Katniss actively avoids thinking about them in human terms, preferring “Fox Face” and similar epithets. In Squid Game, scores of people die each round, most never earning the audience’s attention.
As viewers, this puts us in one of two spots. Perhaps we see ourselves in the protagonist, taking quiet pleasure in the idea that we, too, would survive. Alternatively, we become simple consumers of the spectacle, thrilled by the blood sport before us while safely detached from it. Because the stories are about Katniss and Gi-hun, not about the Torment Nexus itself, we increasingly forget about the terms of the spectacle in favor of rooting for our favorite. We hope certain people die so others can live. We feel shortchanged if characters don’t achieve their goals after suffering so much for them. And so we forget the entire premise, which is that no one needed to die in the first place. As Dr. Soltysik writes, “by creating suspense, tension, and an approximation of adrenalin-fueled excitement, the Hollywood war film seems to be able to tap into an aspect of combat that antiwar films tend to underestimate, namely its pleasures.”9
This isn’t the fault of any audience member. The story’s DNA is melodrama through and through. The hero survives! The hero fucking gets what they want, they get their riches and they get to live. Even though both Squid Game and The Hunger Games try to claw this back (Gi-hun never uses his wealth, Prim dies two books later) many audience members walk away secretly thinking, "I could be Gi-hun. I could be Katniss." I certainly did.
–
In the West, Squid Game built off the cultural cachet of The Hunger Games, which since at least 2012 has been a by-word for a type of game show. (Consider the websites that let you generate your own Hunger Game, or the Cover Girl tie-in makeup line. Neither suggests great horror with the premise.) Before either genre, zombie movies indulged the armchair Stormtrooper’s desire for carnage. In both cases, it can’t really be said that these stories are effective critiques of existing societal dynamics, or that they warn us against future dystopias. The meaning of a story is how it’s read, and consistently, Don’t Make the Torment Nexus is read as a blueprint for new Nexuses.
Nor can Torment Nexus construction really said to be the provenance of tech billionaires. Mr. Beast is one obvious proof to the contrary. But besides him, there’s the obvious fact that enough people watched his Squid Game IRL video for Amazon to see a business opportunity. After all, a megacorp like Amazon doesn’t part with $100 million because it sees a social good in the show it’s commissioning. It does so because the story is a product.
Far from critiquing modernity, many 21st century Don’t Make the Torment Nexus novels exist in a cozy symbiosis with it. They are, after all, products. A movie is synthesized from intellectual property to be sold on a massive scale to pessimistic, individualistic audiences, who see in an individualistic dystopia only a chance to be badass. As Dr. Soltysik writes, “Ultimately while films can normalize, glamorize, or invest war with magic and meaning, they can only be as antiwar as their viewers already are.”10
There have been successful Don’t Create the Torment Nexus novels. Nineteen Eighty-Four was cited in a Supreme Court ruling against genuinely dystopian tech. But the novel ends with Winston alone and psychologically destroyed, not raising children in a post-Big Brother world. Plus, it appealed to the fears of a society that was already largely anti-surveillance. A writer of a similarly successful cautionary tale today would need to find a widely-held value that is genuinely emperiled by the march of technology – and good luck finding a widely-held value. We can’t even get everyone to agree vaccines are good.
Sci-fi has grown out of a lot of genres, and it might be time to admit that dystopia is one of them. If the U.S.’s production of dystopian fiction this century suggests anything, it’s that we’re not minting a Huxley or Wells any time soon. Perhaps we would be better served by stories with a hopeful vision for the future, which suggest ways society might get better instead of worse. If nothing else, that takes much more skill than abstracting the status quo.
If you enjoyed this essay, be sure to leave a comment.
And if you didn’t enjoy it, you won’t want to miss “Against Against the Torment Nexus,” DHP’s next post by our own J.M. Ransom.
With the partial exception of Singularity apocalypsemongerers, who are their own can of worms.
From here, via the Wikipedia article.
Now that our entire society is made up of amateur epidemiologists, it’s hilarious how unrealistic this disease spread is. The R0 is too damn high!
ibid., 1.
Agnieszka Soltysik, Is There Such Thing as an Anti-War Film?, page 8. (source)
Soltysik, Anti-War Film, 1.
Soltysik, Anti-War Film, 12.
Soltysik, Anti-War Film, 14.