**Just: trigger alert. Like, for this whole series. It's pretty awesome, but sometimes you don't need to put this stuff in your mind, so please go look at
a baby giraffe instead.**
Alternate movie title: Hang 'Em High for the Ladies (Now with 95% more rape!)
The last person I fucked was an intriguing but irredeemable straight cisgendered boy. We had a lot of conversations about sexuality, mostly because we approached the subject so differently (something that became an increasing concern to me during the times we spent not fucking). He talked of achieving a moment in every encounter, in which a woman lets him in, describing a yielding, almost akin to submission. We have some common ground there; the pleasure I take bodies comes together with someone else involves all sorts of sexy yielding. However, as an omnisexual kinky queer feminist survivor person, who seizes both "masculine" and "feminine" roles in sex, I felt an inarticulate sense that the poor man was missing out on something critical: that what makes sex so tasty is a
mutual yielding. Not this dichotomy of "Doer" and "Done," of inside and out. My experience, my tastes, if you will, involve something more fluid. Sometimes my experience is to go inward, and to find I go further in in in in in in. Sometimes I achieve the ecstatic selflessness of taking someone else to that place: to paraphrase Rilke, that the highest form of love is being the guardian of another person's pleasure (Rilke said "silence," not pleasure, but he's dead). I seek not only to be fucked senseless but to fuck my fuckpals and lovers beyond their senses.
His model of sexuality is certainly the one that sells, but needless to say, I was too queer for this poor fellow: he had learned to fuck, but never to be fucked. If you're asking me, that's missing quite a big piece of the human experience. His way of thinking about gender and sex seemed to me to follow an antiquated, almost Freudian notion of men as active and women as passive. The heady scholars I so love, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigrarary, you know, that party, posit that how we live as a culture, the social order, depends on this antiquated model of gender. Which means that in order to define masculinity as strength, femininity must be designated reciprocally passive, powerless. It's not
true, but it's the functional social construct for an alarming number of people in strategic positions of power, and an alarming number of people are ok with that.
This is how the gender trap works:
women are
heavily policed by a
virgin/whore dichotomy, men are taught that no emotional expression other than anger is permitted, lest he be a pansy, feminine, and therefore less than male.
Many of the great female monsters play with and challenge the idea of the passive feminine, from Medusa to Reagan (I speak of Reagan from The Excorcist, not the much more alarming, "ketchup is a vegetable" Reagan). We see this explicitly in rape revenge movies: the "Doer" gets "done," the roles of victim and perpetrator reverse. When the woman is a monster, the horror often comes from the twisting of gender roles.
The rape revenge movie has any number of variations, but let us take I Spit on Your Grave (2010) as a template. Sorry, superbuffs, but I reserve the right to treat myself to not watching the 1978 version on which this film is based; at least for now. Between Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring and its two US homages, The Last House on the Left (1972, 2009), we will have plenty of material to consider as the narrative of rape and revenge moves through time:
it is a story we tell ourselves, as a culture, over and over.
*
I Spit on You Grave opens with a luscious country road, revealing a stereotypically beautiful (read: feminine, young, thin, white, etc.) woman driving, suggesting all the promise and possibility that lie before her. The protagonist, Jennifer, stops at a gas station where she encounters three hillbilly stereotypes, all men roughly her peers. She interacts with the most confident of them, a sort of cocky/"I get all the girls at the Dairy Queen/big stud in a small pond. In the background, as if to nail in the hillbilly stereotype, one of the men on the porch ominously plays a harmonica. The "studly" dude has a sort of B-movie Liev Schrieber/Sam Worthington matched build-and-buzzcut. He immediately hits on Jennifer with a tired automobile insinuation, and the more cosmopolitan Jennifer quickly rejects him with a laugh, humiliating him in front of Thing Two and Thing Three.
Jennifer settles in at her rented cabin and beings the work of writing her second book, but not before asking the hicksville studmuffin for the directions that will lead him and his cohorts right to her door. Almost immediately, the insinuations that she is being watched begin: birds are disrupted across the pond as she takes in the view. Jennifer has about three minutes of film time to show off her midriff and enjoy the peace and quiet of writing undisturbed, while the tension, amplified by minimal minor key tones, begins to mount in earnest. She meets Thing Four, (think Ryan Gosling with no makeup and a developmental delay), who repairs her cabin's plumbing issues. She inevitably fucks up her cellphone (perhaps she wanted to instagram her repaired toilet?), leaving her further isolated, alone in the woods.
The three men from the gas station who attack Jennifer are seen as carnage-loving sociopaths, and the fourth, the mentally handicapped young man, is in some ways portrayed as the more human, or the least abhorrent (Not that he doesn't rape her. He's just the only character who seems to, you know, experience either hesitation or remorse about it.)
So next we clock in at a tidy 35 minutes of abject sexual torture and terrorism. Jennifer is videotaped as she is orally raped with a gun, and that's just the jolly beginning of her experience being sexually menaced and raped by the four men. For a brief moment, she earns a reprieve, escaping her cabin, running face-first into the chest of the town sherriff, who is, (surprise!) also a rapist.
This actually strikes me as one of the more realistic, if symbolic, moments in the film:
often real victims turn to people in power, only to find that they are in collusion with the perpetrators, if not perpetrators themselves. Jennifer is terrorized, raped, and tortured some more. The movie spends between a third and a half of its screen time enumerating oral, vaginal, and anal assault at the hands of the (now five) men.
The camera seems to identify with the victim: we see her dazed and horrified eyes, and then we see from her perspective: the sky and earth drain of color, a sort of subtle reversal of the technicolor debut in The Wizard of Oz. The absence of soundtrack (minor chords, some ominous noise, and a touch of hillbilly harmonica) seems to encourage the audience to identify with Jennifer as she is repeatedly victimized. Finally, stripped, covered in dirt, she stumbles to an old bridge and submerges into the murky water of the swamp as the sheriff fires off a bullet (take note; we're going to see this exact scenario a few more times). Jennifer is seemingly dead, or perhaps she has just dissipated.
When she reappears, she is transformed from victim to monster, a far cry from the young woman with her future twinkling in the sun on the road before her. Her murky immersion was not a disappearance but a reverse-baptism. Pale and gaunt, she is imbued with a witch-y vibe that allows her to appear silently and disappear at will, much as her attackers did in the first half of the film. The camera flashes to her face: her eyes are an unnatural pale blue: the hunt is on. It becomes clear that if the movie will restore any real color, it will start with a blood red.
Jennifer begins with the easiest target, the most ambivalent rapist. (When I talk about this character, I tend to characterize him as more human, more feeling than the other characters, but it is also highly likely that the film sought to capitalize on the horror of being raped by a developmentally delayed man, the difference of his mannerisms and handicap made to amplify the monstrosity of Jennifer's experience.) As he expresses remorse, she pacifies him into a cold sort of forgiveness, trapping him with a noose. From what I understand, in the 1970's version, she utilizes her sexuality as a ploy to subdue him, killing him at orgasmic peak. The castrating seductress is an interesting figure, secure in film and literature; don't worry, we can always come back to her later. Suffice it to say, this begins the forty-five minutes of woman turned victim turned monster, hunting down each man, saving the particularly sadistic sheriff for last.
Her affect switches between dead calm and unbridled rage. She doles out revenge perfectly calculated for each perpetrator: the bird-smashing, amateur cinematogapher is forced to watch himself on his own camera as she lures crows to peck out his eyes (a little self-defeating, but we'll give her points for taking that symbol and making it her own). She suspends Thing Three (he of the ominous harmonica) face first over a tub of lye, so that he is forced to resist gravity until his face, and, symbolically, what little personality he had, is fully erased.
She takes lesser Liev Schreiber and re-enacts the tortures he perpetuated against her, and then pulls out a few of his teeth, which produced, for me, the most cringe-worthy act of violence in the whole film. It is interesting to me that frequently the the violence against the perpetrator is in some ways more grotesque to me than the initial acts of violence against the protagonist (also I'm squeamish about teeth). At this point, the film makes it possible to identify with both Jennifer and her attackers, or to move between identification.
Not satisfied with the symbolic castration, she proceeds to castrate the man in earnest, waiting emotionlessly outside the cabin where he bleeds out from his wounds. Continuity junkie that I am, I cannot but wonder how she got new clothes and such shiny, hair commercial hair after the men both demolished her physically and burned all of her personal items; we can only assume she found a Target in the wilderness and stole away some beauty supplies and a quick freshen-up at the bathroom sink before taking her final revenge.
The sheriff is established as two-sided: he is a sadist in earnest, but also a seemingly loving family man. Jennifer comes for him by way of his clueless wife and daughter (the ironically named "Chastity"). Not satisfied even with the Freudian tortures of castration, she comes as close as possible to re-creating the physical abuse she experienced at the hands of the sheriff. Using a rifle, she anally penetrates the self-described "ass-man," whom she has also rigged in an elaborate R-rated version of Mousetrap. He is killed, crying for mercy, as the gun penetrates him a second time, now with a bullet. Jennifer listens to this last death, her face dark yet blank and her head cocked to one side: roll them credits.
In short, five men rape a woman, and the woman kills the five men. Approximately equal time is devoted to both. None of the characters are developed, and almost all of them are unsympathetic.
It's a bizarre equation, not without it's niche.
An optimist (or, you know, a dude) might look at this film and say it is a way to create a culture of terror for rapists. One problem I have with that is that for me, the initial violence against the victim stayed with me much longer than the revenge portion, which in this case was a little contrived with its contraption-heavy appeal to die-hard gore lovers. Watching this movie doesn't make me in any way feel more safe as a woman, and contributes to a sense that I can only describe as "am I on sneaking-up-from-behind cam?" The rape revenge flick simultaneously justifies and undermines its own "violence merits violence" formula by overexposing the audience (in this case, me) to some of the longest, most explicit assaults on film in popular culture. Sure, it is a cautionary tale, but for whom? At the end of the film, Jennifer remains completely transformed by her experience, and, while she certainly demonstrated resourcefulness in enacting revenge, it is doubtful that she will now skip on home to play with her new puppy. Rape has transformed Jennifer into an avenging fury, and it seems obvious to me that she will never revert to the woman at the beginning of the film, with that lush road ahead of her. What, then, has she accomplished, other than survival?
Has she survived?
Supposedly by escalating the violence, the woman is able to create a situation in which her attackers are equally victimized: I object to this formula for a number of reasons. I'm willing to suspend disbelief to go along with the trope that an incredibly traumatized person can immediately calculate several elaborate stalkings, killings, as well as tie some exceptional boy scout knots with steady hands, but I am not left with the belief that she has reversed roles with her perpetrators. The idea that the movie portrays tit-for-tat violence mimics the same twisted logic of
that term favored by bigots everywhere: "reverse racism." The victim may be able to physically injure, to torture, to terrorize her perpetrators, but she doesn't have the cultural clout of the centuries of misogyny that really perfects the formula. She can even rape the man or men back, but he/they still will not have lived in a culture saturated with threats based on their gender, a culture which seeks to control their every behavior through sexual terrorism for every day of their lives. And that is a key element of why and how rape functions all over the world: to police women to act "good," "passive," and all that crap. She can harm her attacker, but she cannot duplicate for him the conditions for women-at-large, which,
in case you haven't noticed, are not terribly awesome.
This is also true of the sexual humiliation that Jennifer faces. This is not mutual either. If the argument is "now we're all even," I remain skeptical. It is tricky for me: I'm not a pacifist, nor do I believe in the healing powers of revenge.
When I step back and think about rape, one of the biggest things that stands out, that we are missing in our conversations, whether at the personal level, media, film, legislature, law enforcement, or the so-called justice system, is that
the average perpetrator uses the absolute minimum of force needed in order to convince the victim that the victim is going to die. It can be as simple as an arm across the throat, a threat to one's family, one's status as a citizen, or speech that is simply paralyzing by nature of its foulness. There are terrible, worse-than-movies rapes that happen (there are, Sweet Mother of Destruction, there are, and the vicarious trauma I have simply from knowing some of what I know about other people's histories' is enough to make me never want to leave my house). But your garden variety "normal" rapist uses minimal force. Normally he (and, seeing as men commit 90% of violent crimes, it is normally a he) is a serial predator who is either known to or a family member of the victim. Most rapists do not think of themselves as rapists, and many, if not the vast majority of rape victims don't fit the stranger-danger stereotype: torn clothes, contusions, and other such hard evidence: yet
this kind of rape is no less a rape. Every survivor is a special individual snowflake of grief and rage, and it doesn't take an exceptional five-man team to reverse-baptize, or permanently alter the reality of the survivor. Many survivors wear our wounds on the inside, where they are complex, and hard to get at, and often inconveniently invisible.
I don't know of a single rape-revenge movie in which the monstrous victim avenges herself against date rape, incest, or other acquaintance rape (with the exception of scenarios of sexual exploitation/forced prostitution). For these films to function, the victim-monster cannot have any prior relationship with her perpetrators, and the rape(s) must be as violent and exceptional as the MPAA will allow. The rape must be morally clean, "legitimate," if you will. While the devastation and trauma of stranger rape can impact victims in similar ways to acquaintance rape and incest, the perpetrators are not held to the same standards of guilt to which strangers are held.
I just love the logic of that; it's so crisp, so mythological, so... Republican: If we've never met and I rape you, I'm the heathen devil, but if I am your mailman or your father or your ex, good luck even getting me arrested!
It is much easier and much less interesting to write rapists who are obvious monsters, rather than to write them as manipulative and opportunistic. After all, most rape is not, "Oh, damn, I shouldn't have secluded myself in this cabin to write my novel in a town I've never seen before today because now there are hillbillies trying to get up in my shit." Putting aside for a moment the love of thrills and theatrics, rape revenge movies do not make the leap to challenging rape culture; it is simply not a conversation at that level. To make a movie that is truly challenging to people who rape, and to people who are complicit with rape culture, one would have to examine a more morally and emotionally complex perpetrator and his environment.
Cherrypicking a stranger-in-the-bushes scenario is not a progressive depiction of sexual assault. It functions in a gritty polemic horror to argue that people deserve to suffer, and die, and die suffering. The supersaturated rape is used here, not to foster awareness, or scare off would-be perpetrators, but to wrench, to torque both victim and perpetrator of their respective humanity, peeling them down to a single dark streak of emotion, be it sadism or wrath.
When it comes to rape victims, I know personally a harrowing number of women who, sexually assaulted in childhood, were so physically damaged that they now experience infertility. If we can make The Virgin Spring, and both I Spit on Your Graves, and Both Last Houses on the Left, what is to stop us from telling a story in which a different kind of victim avenges the losses she has suffered? Survivors who are assaulted early in life have to make interesting decisions about virginity: some feel as though they simply never had it, some cannot describe a precise time when they first gave unequivocal consent, and some, perhaps most, suppress the hell out of that shit. If the rape revenge movie explores the loss of innocence, the malevolent damage of rape, why must that innocence always be symbolized by a conventionally attractive, middle-class white girl who gets gangbanged by strangers?
The answer is that in this society, we have multiple ways to
write off every single form of rape.
Remember that these movies are man-made, with emphasis on the "man." It's not as much a revenge tale as it is a sort of nightmare inevitable to the social order that privileges male over female. It's a way of playing with the dynamics of man = aggressive, therefore woman = passive. It's a trope that actually capitalizes on men's fear of women, fear that women will not remain passive. Remember, within the first five minutes of the film, Jennifer sexually rejects the "studly" guy, causing him to experience a cultural shaming via his peers. In a civilization constructed on elevating the masculine and eschewing the feminine, the "bad" woman, the aggressive woman, the woman who can sexually negate a man, will always be there to haunt, to agitate, to resist the story of gender. The monstrous woman demonstrates a structural flaw in Western culture that goes back to Genesis.
There is one last thing that nags at me about I Spit on Your Grave, and the genre in general, and it applies to almost all of the material I'm going to cover in this series: it is straight up offensive to spit out endless victims that are five out of six, if not all, of the following: young, hetero, white, cisgendered, middle-to-owning class, and able-bodied. By doing so, the filmmakers gloss over the intersections of power that make a victim more likely to be targeted. Rapists capitalize on the pre-existing system of priviledge, of cultural currency, of power over. Just as, say, a victim's drug habit, or a history of abuse, makes her less credible in the eyes of the law, a perpetrator knows to target such a person, precisely because she is less likely to be believed. So we do not tell the story, then, of a queer woman, a woman of color, a drug user, or a sex worker who is raped. For the purpose of these movies, the rape must be atrocious enough to merit a death sentence, and this means no complications in a society with strong sexist/homophobic/transphobic/white supremacist/ageist/ableist leanings. If she is Black or in a wheelchair or trans (or, god forbid, all three), this is somehow a lesser story; this victim has less entitlement to address the crimes committed against her. When in reality, she is a more likely target for sexual violence.
When it is only pretty little white girls who get assaulted, the insidious message is that the rest of us are fair game.
Which is too fucking bad, because if there were a rape revenge movie about a trans woman of color in a wheelchair who exacts unequivocal revenge upon her attacker/s, I would watch the shit out of that: if only because it would be a more difficult, and therefore more interesting story to tell.
I'm sure they would fuck it up terribly, but still.
