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[[The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan)->The Virgin Spring]]
[[Last House on the Left->Last House on the Left]]
[[I Spit On Your Grave (Day of the Woman)->I Spit on Your Grave]]
[[Ms .45 (Angel of Vengeance)->Ms .45]]
[[Thelma & Louise->Thelma and Louise]]
[[Law & Order SVU->SVU]]
[[The Keepers->The Keepers]]
[[Promising Young Woman->Promising Young Woman]][align center]
{reveal link: 'content warning', text: 'this page contains graphic images of rape. [[go back->start]]'}
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The crux of the persistent controversy surrounding Meir Zarchi’s 1978 low-budget exploitation film _I Spit on Your Grave lies_ in the need to evaluate and re-evaluate the ethics of the rape scene, which is unique even in the context of exploitation films for its brutality. The scene occupies a substantial portion of the film, roughly 40 of the 102 minute runtime, which in most available cuts has been abbreviated to 96 minutes. In it, protagonist Jennifer Hills is abducted while sunbathing by a group of four men. Over the course of an afternoon into an evening, each of them take turns raping her, encouraging each other and assisting in physically restraining her. In between several of the rapes, she makes escape attempts: the audience is allowed brief moments of reprieve that are repeatedly shattered, placing each subsequent rape in a liminal space between inevitability and shock.
The sound throughout the course of the scene is entirely diegetic, silent but for the attacker’s encouragement of each other and Jennifer’s screams. Because the rapes are spectatorial and collaborative, the external perspective continually implicates the viewer, with the camera spending most of its time moving between the point of view of different participants. In the following [[four-shot sequence->rapelust note]], we first embody Matthew, who is being encouraged to join in; then Johnny, who is actively raping her; then Jennifer herself, in the briefest shot in the sequence; finally, an ambiguous shot that could be from the perspective of either Matthew or Andy, both of whom are restraining her at this point. Throughout this sequence, the sound remains the same: Jennifer struggling, and Johnny making sounds of enjoyment.
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In his 2018 book on the film’s legacy, David Maguire repeatedly praises Zarchi’s commitment to diegesis as a refusal to give the audience an out. His amateur, almost anti-aesthetic-aesthetic, implies that mainstream cinematic aesthetics fail to either accurately or adequately convey whatever makes rape “true rape”. Quoting Henry, Maguire argues that “The failure to either induce or convey the horror of rape is both a generic and feminist political failure”, implying that a feminist politic would demand an explicit representation that is alienating to and uncomfortable for the audience. A cinematic rape that is insufficiently brutal “fails to motivate and justify the protagonist’s brutal retribution”. He is making a series of important propositions here: first, that in order for audience to be on the victim’s side they need to see violence enacted to a sufficiently extreme degree. Second, that a film that is ethically representing rape must place the audience on the side of the victim regardless of their subsequent actions. Third, crucially: that there is a type of rape that justifies (or is perceived to justify) revenge and a type that doesn’t.
Filming something changes it - you want the camera to feel like part of the violation. You want to feel like you are witnessing something you were never intended to see. What does it mean to seek out that experience - even under the guise of seeking to understand it? What does it mean to work to create that experience for an audience - even under the guise of fostering greater understanding of it - is the only adequate way to represent a violation to violate your audience? And yet, there is further debate about even framing it in these terms.
_Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU)_ is the all time longest-running primetime scripted live-action series in the United States. It has run on NBC since 1999, currently standing at 494 episodes, and has been renewed through its 24th season. It follows a straightforward procedural structure: in each episode, the NYPD’s sex crimes division investigates, catches, and justly prosecutes a criminal, heroically removing them from the mean streets of New York City. SVU exists in a world where rape is a fundamentally solvable problem: clues can be followed to a perpetrator, the perpetrator can be taken to court, the court can convict. But the show continually undermines its own assertion through this consistent repetitive structure: time is always looping back on itself. There is always another case. There is always another victim.
There are three main conflicts that persist over the course of the show: the uncooperative victim, the detectives’ internal conflict, and the systemic barriers to conviction. One of the most striking elements of the show is the extent to which the victims are presented as problems to be solved: they are by and large not sympathetic characters. Their reluctance to testify or make intimate details of their lives and assaults fully available as they are demanded is presented as a betrayal to themselves and to justice: the primary job of the detectives, parallel to their investigation, is to convince the survivors that this is the best path to healing. This healing process, however, is beyond the purview of the show: after the conviction is secured, the victim disappears and is replaced.
Captain Olivia Benson, the central character, acts as the primary representation of internal conflict and lasting impacts of trauma. Her motivation in becoming a detective is her own birth as a result of her mother’s rape: in season 9 she is assaulted by a correctional officer while undercover in a prison and in season 10 she is shown to have PTSD as a result. Benson frequently acts as the most empathetic officer, whose capability to connect with victims allows for better testimony and greater success. As a survivor, she is aware of the retraumatizing nature of the system and the damage she is asking the victims to do to themselves by testifying, even as she is the driving force in convincing them that it will undo the damage of abuse. As an officer, she is aware of the necessity of this testimony in securing a conviction, which she believes to be a matter of both potential healing for the survivor and increased safety for potential future victims.
The burden of proof is presented as just that - a burden. Due process comes up frequently as an issue, with victims often acting as mouthpieces, questioning why their abusers haven’t been arrested, and forcing the detectives to explain that lived experience isn’t enough evidence to arrest or convict: this problem persists despite the consistently stated importance of survivor cooperation and testimony. The characters, and by extension the show itself, can never fully resolve its relationship to the legal system it portrays. The closest it gets to a conclusion is in the implied decision that the detectives, and the audience, make: we keep coming back to watch the same thing happen over again. Even as the system is presented as coercive, damaging, and inadequate, it is also presented as the only viable path to justice.
Ingmar Bergman’s 1960 historical drama _The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan)_ is frequently cited as one of the earliest and most influential examples of the rape-revenge genre. The film demonstrated the mainstream artistic potential of rape: it was screened at Cannes and won the 1960 foreign language Oscar despite censorship of elements of the rape scene for American audiences. It is not a film that could have, at that time, been made in an American production context, but became incredibly influential when the end of the Hays code allowed for more direct portrayals of violence and morally complex narratives. It introduces the [[narrative structure->VS Narrative Structure]] maintained through to the start of the exploitation era, and served as inspiration for other paradigmatic examples of the genre: _[[The Last House on the Left->Last House on the Left]]_ is a direct adaptation. It also [[engendered controversy->VS Critical Response]] for its explicit portrayal of rape.
>[[narrative structure->VS Narrative Structure]]
>[[critical response->VS Critical Response]] Wes Craven’s 1972 exploitation film _The Last House on the Left (LHOTL)_ opens with an assertion that the story you are about to see is real: “Names and locations have been changed to protect those individuals still living.” This assertion, which is completely false, asks the viewer to situate the film in the context of the real, playing on cultural fears about the ever-present possibility of sexual violence. It took the generic tropes established in Bergman’s critically acclaimed 1960 film, _[[The Virgin Spring]]_, and paired a conservative political sensibility with low-budget exploitation aesthetics, which included far more violence than had previously appeared in the genre.
The film was initially conceived and written by Craven as a pornographic horror film, but the script underwent edits during shooting to remove some of the more sensationalistic scenes and redirect focus onto the story. This was ultimately completely ineffective in terms of audience reaction: the film was hugely controversial on release, where it was banned in a number of countries and many cinemas chose to destroy or re-edit reels because of negative audience response, leading to a number of competing cuts and lost scenes.
The film follows Mari and Phyllis, teenage girls who are going to a concert in a city for Mari’s 17th birthday. When they attempt to buy marijuana, they are held hostage by a gang of criminals, led by Krug, who has newly escaped prison. The gang puts them in the trunk of their car, drives out of the city, and playfully abuses and murders them. Krug’s gang then accidentally stays in Mari’s parents house: when her parents realize what they have done, they murder them.
Throughout the film, violent scenes are counterbalanced by comedic ones. Footage of Mari’s parents preparing her birthday cake and flirting with each other, complete with lighthearted slapstick music, is intercut with Phyllis pleading for her and Mari’s release, after which she is gang raped. This rape is not shown: instead, we hear it, while the camera zooms in on Mari as she watches. The criminals constantly bicker with each other, separated from and disinterested in the violence they are perpetrating. Their violence is cartoonish and arbitrary in its extremity: they are playing a game, without clear motivations or benefits. While the film clearly condemns their actions, it also luxuriates in them.
Mari’s rape occurs as the culmination of a sequence of torture and abduction: it only begins at 46:22, well over halfway through the film’s runtime.By the time Krug gets to the point of raping Mari, he has already carved his name into her chest: the rape is his final act of domination before her death. It is for Mari specifically that rape holds this level of significance: the film treats Phyllis’ abuse as a precursor to Mari’s. While there is no outright victim blaming, Mari’s parents do worry at the start of the film about the corrupting influence of Phyllis and the city, and the abduction happens as a direct result of the girls’ attempt to buy drugs. Phyllis is already corrupted at the outset: the film therefore argues that rape is a more significant crime depending on the innocence of the victim.
Craven argued that his intention in making the film was to depict violence without valorizing it, as a response to both the Vietnam war and the general rise in ultraviolent aesthetics in film. The violence in _LHOTL_ can be separated into two types, a separation that carries forward into other rape-revenge films that it influenced. There is violence enacted upon the victims by the villains, and what is enacted upon the villains by the avengers, in this case Mari’s parents- in later cases, more often by a combined victim-avenger figure. In many rape-revenge films, the former justifies the latter, and they are marked by visual and tonal differences. Craven’s perception of his own film as antiviolent and antirape is undercut by a number of factors: that the film was originally conceived as pornographic; that among the “lost scenes” are multiple additional lesbian rape scenes, as well as a scene of Mari naked in her bedroom; but perhaps most notably that the tone does not shift significantly in terms of the revenge violence. Mari’s parents match Krug and the gang in terms of creative, humorous, humiliating violence, including Mari’s mother seducing Weasel in order to bite off his penis. At the core of the film is a sense that violence is fun: to enact, and to watch. Mari and Phyllis don’t feel like motivating factors in the violence, merely objects of it, and ultimately excuses for it to continue. _Ms .45_ is not technically a genre-defining moment, nor could it be said to be particularly influential, or even exceptionally good. Abel Ferrara’s 1981 exploitation film follows Thana, a mute seamstress who begins to murder men after being raped twice in an afternoon. _Ms .45_ is significant to this project primarily because it is significant to me: it is far and away my favorite rape-revenge film, and anchored me to my love of the genre through my exploration of its (many, many) problems.
The film gets to the point extremely efficiently: Thana’s second rapist appears in her apartment 4 minutes and 56 seconds into the film: her first rapist appears less than thirty seconds later, at 5 minutes and 23 seconds. The first rape is over by 6:30; the second, and final, by 11:40, when she kills the rapist. The rest of the hour and 20 minute runtime is occupied by a sequence of murders, the frequency increasing until the film culminates with a mass shooting at a halloween party. Her first murder is to prevent what she believes will be another rape: each successive murder is increasingly sought out, with Thana intentionally putting herself into situations where opportunities for men to abuse women will arise, before murdering them if they take the opportunity.
In _Ms .45_, Thana’s transformation is complete not when she makes her final kill but when she prepares to make it. She is shown alone, in her room, loading her gun in costume for the Halloween party where she will kill her abusive boss. As she admires herself in the mirror, she begins to playact shooting imaginary enemies. 
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To allow Thana not only a moment of post-rape happiness but of genuine joy and freedom, one that is not intercut with flashbacks but allowed to stand entirely on its own, is at the core of what makes this film (and the rape-revenge genre more broadly) so cathartic as a survivor. When rape acts as a narrative engine to question the nature of revenge, especially when that revenge is coming from people other than the survivor (as in _[[VS->The Virgin Spring]]_ or _[[LHOTL->Last House on the Left]]_), there is a necessary questioning of the severity of the initial crime and proportion of revenge.
_Ms .45_ is simple: Thana’s rage is not only reasonable, but consequential. There is no prevarication about whether her response is proportional: she shows no internal sense of guilt. Her rapes allow her to come into a sense of herself. This acknowledges what all survivors know: that rape is transformative. You are forced to confront changes in yourself that you did not consent to being made, a constant redoubling of the initial violation. What has always drawn me to the rape-revenge genre is its existence as a space that valorizes these changes. Survivors are not expected to recover a sense of self, but rather to forge a new one through embodied rage. The new one is not abhorrent or foreign, but empowering. Not only empowering, but cool. Watching Thana makes me feel like my rage can destroy the world - that feels much better than the fear that my rage will destroy myself.
This is not to say that the film is without its [[problems->Ms .45 A]]. It is not to say, either, that rape is or should be seen as a [[productive, transformative experience->Ms .45 B]].
Ridley Scott’s 1991 _Thelma and Louise_ is far and away the most successful rape revenge film of all time. Both a critical and box-office success, it grossed 45.4 million dollars in its initial run, and received 6 Oscar nominations, winning for original screenplay. The film has become a cultural touchstone, with the final scene in particular ripe for reference and parody. This icon status in the canon of feminist film - or even just films about women - makes it difficult to write about in a way that isn’t overdetermined or reactionary.
Importantly, however, while the film has become diversely canonized within multiple genres— feminist, buddy comedy, crime, and road film— it is far less frequently identified with rape. Reviews on initial release set the trend that largely continues in discourse to this day, to identify and dismiss the presence of rape as an inciting event before focusing on the latter half of the film, particularly Thelma’s sexual relationship with J.D. Roger Ebert’s review describes the scene as:
<blockquote>“They’re almost looking to get into trouble, in a way; they wind up in a saloon not too many miles down the road, and Thelma, a wild woman after a couple of margueritas, begins to get caught up in lust after a couple of dances with an urban cowboy. That leads, as such flirtations sometimes tragically do, to an attempted rape in the parking lot.”</blockquote>
Janet Maslin, in the New York Times, makes a similar rhetorical move, if less blatant:
<blockquote>“Thelma insists on stopping at a honky-tonk bar despite Louise's protestations, the gun comes in handy. It is used, by Louise, to settle a dispute between Thelma and a would-be rapist (Timothy Carhart) in the parking lot, and it forever changes the complexion of Thelma and Louise's innocent little jaunt.” </blockquote>
Both reviewers engage in precisely the kind of victim-blaming that the film is working to indict, not only through the women’s belief that the cops won’t recognize that they were acting in self-defense, but also through Louise’s initial anger and blame of Thelma for what she’s experienced. While they praise Louise’s eventual character development into a “much more moving and thoughtful figure” (Maslin), they miss that this development centers on Louise’s increasing willingness to be vulnerable and empathetic with Thelma. In the final chase scene, as they drive towards the Grand Canyon and begin to realize that their fate is sealed, Louise clarifies her position when Thelma tries to apologize for the situation: “Damn it Thelma, if there’s one thing you should know by now it isn’t your fault.”
In the same scene, Thelma identifies herself as better off on the run or dead than facing a system that would not have believed her: “My life would have been ruined a whole lot worse than it is now. At least now I’m having some fun.” Sarah Projansky, in _Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture_, identifies this final scene as “oscillating between tragedy and utopic fantasy, both precipitated by rape”- not attempted rape, as is implied by reviewers that would lead you to believe the scene is ambiguous, but actual rape, not less traumatic for having been cut short. The rape at the bar that is shown onscreen is not the only rape that underlies the narrative: the pair’s ability to escape is undercut by Louise’s refusal to drive through Texas, a state where she has previously been raped, although she is unwilling and unable to say this out loud even when Thelma asks directly.
_Thelma & Louise_ is emblematic of a complicated moment of change in representation of rape and its aftermath throughout the late 80’s and into the early 90’s. The rape-revenge genre, or perhaps more accurately the graphic representations it portends, had definitively moved out of the grindhouse and into the mainstream through a diverse set of genres: notable film examples include _The Accused_ (1998) and _Showgirls_ (1995), while notable television includes _Twin Peaks_ (1990) and the made-for-TV movie genre of “women in jep”. Increasingly, media about women’s revenge against misogyny, even if it was framed textually by rape, was reframed by viewers and critics as primarily about revenge, as in the case of _Thelma & Louise_. Alternatively, media framed as centered on rape became much less likely to include revenge in the vigilante sense, but rather turned towards a hopeless sense of reliance on a failing system.
_Thelma & Louise_, in the text of the film itself, sits somewhere between the two impulses that some contemporaneous and particularly later media tend to side more definitively with. The freeze frame ending is utopic in its absolute joy: the film is hugely unusual for its dual victim-avengers, who exist in a community of two. Even their limited agency - they choose suicide over death by police fire or imprisonment - feels expansive because they choose it together. The film is tragic in its refusal to provide hope: the best it can offer is the ambiguity of frozen time - we see them choose to fall, but we never see them crash. _The Keepers_ represents a different outcropping of the same post-revenge paternalism, this time in the form of the true crime genre. Like _[[SVU]]_, true crime is predicated on a demand for performed victimhood in exchange for access to the dangling possibility of justice. Unlike _SVU_, true crime has much greater stakes: the victims are real, and the effects of the performance on their lives is material.
_The Keepers_ is a Netflix limited series that initially presents itself as an investigation of the unsolved murder of a Baltimore nun in the 1960s but quickly expands its scope to examining the extreme sexual abuse occurring at the school where she worked and its potential relation to her death. This switch is teased at the end of the first episode, where Jane Doe, the first survivor, is mentioned immediately before it ends. At the start of the second episode, she is introduced in disjointed fragments (her voice, her hands), before switching back to the context of the Baltimore diocese and the school. This move, in which the survivor’s testimony is teased as a reward for engaging with context, is common in abuse documentaries (it was also used in _Allen V. Farrow_): it communicates the filmmaker’s knowledge of exactly what the audience wants to see. The language directors use when discussing the production of abuse documentaries is similarly uniform: they are “providing a platform” for the survivor to “tell their story”.
While I am sure that this is not technically untrue, positive intentions are frequently undermined by sensationalizing narrative structures. _The Keepers_ actually does a better job than most true crime at giving the survivors narrative primacy as more than fuel for an investigation. Director Ryan White interviewed about 40 survivors over the course of his research: only 5 appear. He encountered the story through his mother, who had been close friends with Jane Doe during the period that the abuse occurred, and met with her for three years before production started. What was most compelling to me about this documentary is the time that it spent placing the survivors in relation to one another, asking questions about what it meant to come forward anonymously, to enter the legal system, and to enter mediation with the church. The survivors do not present a unified front on these issues, and have difficult questions and expectations for each other regarding whether they can or want to exist in community with each other now, and whether they could or should have protected each other or come forward when the abuse was occurring.
Emerald Fennell’s 2020 film _Promising Young Woman_ bills itself as an update to the rape-revenge genre: a rape-revenge film that does not need to be reclaimed but is truly feminist in a textual sense rather than an interpretive one. The title references the 2018 People V. Turner rape case, during which Judge Aaron Persky famously referred to rapist Brock Turner as a “promising young man” before sentencing him to six months in prison: the posters carry the slogan “revenge never looked so promising”. The film was near-universally critically acclaimed upon release, and was nominated for 5 Oscars, winning for original screenplay. It follows Cassie, a medical school dropout who is in emotional limbo, working a low-wage job and leading a double life. At night, she goes to bars and pretends to be severely inebriated, allows a man to take her home with the intention of having sex with her, and then reveals her sobriety and forces them to confront their behavior.
(This mode of revenge, to intentionally put oneself in situations that have the potential for violence with the aim of punishing the (potential) perpetrator recalls Thana’s modus operandi in _[[Ms .45]]_)
If the core appeal of a rape-revenge film lies with witnessing transformative rage - and this is a big, generous if- then Cassie’s transformation is missing. She is not, directly, the victim: it is implied (though never outright stated) that her childhood best friend, Nina, was gang-raped by other students in their medical program. Nina never appears: the film picks up Cassie’s narrative several years later, focusing on her inability to move forward and her cyclical attempts at half-revenge. Spending time with former classmate Ryan allows her to come out of herself, breaking this routine and engaging more fully with her life.
When Cassie receives the video and undergoes her final transformation, it does not feel like catharsis so much as regression. Falling in love with Ryan has allowed her to begin to move on: hearing his voice on the video, realizing that he was complicit, prepares her to burn everything down. The question is not whether we are meant to believe that the rapists deserve the revenge she plans to enact, but rather whether the revenge is worth its cost to her. If justice is impossible through traditional avenues, the film argues, isn’t the healthiest thing just to move on?
In an interview with Collider, director Fennell repeatedly describes Cassie’s revenge as impossible to complete:
<blockquote>“… if I wanted to make a revenge thriller that felt like it was from a real woman's perspective who was acting in a way that I thought maybe a real woman might, a big and important part of that was that I don't believe that women resort to violence very often… maybe we are less violent by nature... But also it's because…when we do, we don't win… There was no happy ending to this movie. All there is, is somebody who needs to show people, to deliver justice. And she does do that, but at a very, very heavy price. I didn't believe that a woman of Cassie's size would be able to physically overpower a very strong man. All of that stuff. And it was important that it interrogated the myth of the revenge journey.” </blockquote>
This quote is illuminating: I would argue that the cathartic feminist appeal of the genre lies in the mythologizing of revenge. Rape-revenge is frequently extremely bleak in its presentation of rape as inevitable and institutional justice as impossible to obtain: this is balanced by the fantasy of successful revenge . To not only defang the revenge but assert that the nature of womanhood makes it impossible to successfully obtain is, perhaps, meeting its intention of mounting a critique of rape culture, but to reinforce and enshrine this impossibility is just another mythologization.
Also undercutting this intention is the presence of the twist ending: after Cassie is overpowered and killed by Nina’s rapist, it is revealed that she has ensured in the case of her death that the police will receive evidence that allows them to convict the rapists, including the video that drove her to attempt her final revenge. Not only is her vigilante justice shown to fail, but the institutional justice that the film has attempted to critique is shown to be the only possible avenue, albeit requiring her assistance. If this is an update to the rape-revenge genre, it is an update that assimilates revenge into legal structures even as it acknowledges that they are largely failures that demand extreme sacrifice and retraumatization on behalf of the victim.
This is the same post-revenge paternalistic impulse that appears across contemporary rape media, particularly in crime television such as _[[Law & Order: SVU->SVU]]_ or _[[The Keepers]]_. To see this film receive the level of effusive praise for it’s perceived reinvigoration of the revenge element of the genre demonstrates the extent to which expressions of unfiltered revenge have become absent. _Promising Young Woman_ identified accurately this vacuum that audiences are looking to fill - even to the point of watching past the text of the film to fill it - but it fails to do so of its own merit, choosing instead to undercut any hope of catharsis. Baer, Hannah. _Trans Girl Suicide Museum_. Los Angeles: Hesse, 2019. Print.
Bazin, André. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” In _What is Cinema Vol. 1_, translated by Hugh Gray, 9-16. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1945/2004.
_Big Little Lies_. Prod. David E. Kelley. _Home Box Office_. 2017. Web. 2021.
“But, How Is That Sexy?: THE FAN FICTION KINK MEME.” _Squee from the Margins: Fandom and Race_, by RUKMINI PANDE, University of Iowa Press, IOWA CITY, 2018, pp. 145–184. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv7r43q4.10. Accessed 3 Dec. 2020.
Bogost, Ian. Excerpts from “Preface,” “Procedural Rhetoric,” “Political Processes.” In _Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames_, vii-xi, 1- 3, 82-89. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010.
[[Clover, Carol J. _Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film_. Princeton UP, 1992. Print.->Last House on the Left]]
Cherchi Usai, Paolo. _The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory, and the Digital Dark Age_. London: British Film Institute, 2001.
introduction
[[timeline->timeline]]
[[works cited->works cited]]he is my enemy.Produced in Sweden, its export to America was met with mixed critical responses and required censorship: frames were cut from the rape scene showing the victim’s naked legs around the body of the rapists. In his review for the New York Times, critic [[Bosley Crowther]] describes
<blockquote>
“scenes of brutality that, for sheer unrestrained realism, may leave one sickened and stunned. As much as they may contribute to the forcefulness of the theme, they tend to disturb the senses out of proportion to the dramatic good they do… when they ravish her, the act is imaged — well, almost too candidly… The response of the father to this violence, when he learns of it, is of equal ugliness and terror”
</blockquote>
Crowther argues that the choice to depict violence explicitly must be justified through clear intention, with the filmmaker’s responsibility lying in striking a balance between provoking productive discomfort and causing distress. Central to this analysis is the belief that viewing violence has the potential to cause harm. Crowther views the film as narratively “direct and uncomplicated”: the rape scene acts, in his understanding, as an aesthetic tool to underscore a point that is already made by the plot more appropriately and successfully.
Bergman’s response to Crowther’s and other similar critiques was to argue that
<blockquote>“We must not hesitate in our portrayal of human degradation, even if, in our demand for truth, we must violate certain taboos.” </blockquote>
The explicit depiction of rape is central to the project of the film: it would not be possible to adequately portray its brutality in an indirect manner.
[align center]
[[go back->The Virgin Spring]]
_The Virgin Spring (VS)_ introduces the basic narrative structure that defined rape-revenge into the exploitation era. A (young, beautiful) woman is introduced; her virtue is demonstrated; she is raped and killed; a loved one mourns, then takes revenge. The victim is not the avenger - while there is what could be read as a protofeminist message (that rape warrants revenge) - there is always the caveat that the virtue of the heroine must be unimpeachably demonstrated.
_VS_ constructs a straightforward oppositional relationship between Karin and Ingeri, with the former as virtuous and the latter as “spoiled” by virtue of her pregnancy. This relationship is directly hierarchical and class-based: Ingeri is Karin’s servant, and is not allowed to deliver the candles to the church due to her non-virgin status. In conversation, Ingeri states that a man will “take” Karin before marriage, and they argue about whether or not she will be able to resist. Rape is presented as a backdrop: an inevitability if one doesn’t consent to or seek out sex. It is unclear if Ingeri’s pregnancy is a result of rape.
The film, which is based on a 13th-century ballad (_Töres döttrar i Wänge/Töre's daughters in Vänge_) - does not necessarily make a statement on the contemporary acceptability of rape. Rather, the medieval setting allows the audience a layer of distance, and the frank discussion of sex and rape becomes a reflection of harsh historical realities. The revenge, enacted by the father with assistance from the mother, is instantly regretted: rather than ending the film after the revenge, the family return to the site of the rape to retrieve Karin’s body, and the father prostrates himself to god, promising to build a church on the site as penance for his murder of the rapists. While the portrayal of the revenge is justified by the portrayal of the rape, neither depiction of violence is pleasurable for the audience. The film is an [[intentionally provocative->VS Critical Response]] indictment not of rape, but of revenge: rape serves as a narrative locus through which questions of religion, class, revenge, and human nature are examined. Karin has to die, because her experience is not relevant to the questions Bergman wants to ask: the victim becomes redundant once her victimhood has been demonstrated.
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[[go back->The Virgin Spring]] The development of the rape-revenge genre into the exploitation era sees more control placed in the hands of the victims: this is paralleled by fewer questions being asked about the ethics of doing violence. What does it mean that once the victims get revenge the ethics are less interesting to the directors?
American post-code ultraviolent aesthetics and increased focus on killing mean that revenge aesthetics become more central - by the point of _Ms .45_, the rape is coming right at the beginning and instead of the revenge being a singular act it becomes an encompassing worldview - at that point, I wonder, is the rape even part of the violence? What has been lost by the 80s where the ultraviolence reaches a point where the focus is neither the victim nor the villain - when violence becomes a character in itself, with its own ends. There are certain social scripts that as a survivor you are supposed to follow in order to “heal”, or perhaps more accurately to perform healing. To discuss the ways that rape has changed you for the better is taboo, perceived as apologia for your own pain. To say that I have a different perspective for having been raped, and that I believe that perspective to be worthwhile, is not to say that it was worthwhile to have been raped.
Ann Cvetkovich’s _An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures_ begins to theorize the ways that sexual trauma has been represented and those representations have contributed to personal and community identity formation. Cvetkovich’s identification of “trauma cultures” and of trauma as something most effectively represented as a collective comes out of nonhegemonic understandings of rape and recovery as both individual events and collective gendered trauma.
In her conclusion, she discusses “feelings materialized in and around objects and performances, feelings that are often incommensurate with what we customarily consider to be traumatic experiences.” (279) This is a different kind of identification and catharsis: through the process of identifying with a representation of an experience, the survivor comes to process their own and thus re-identify with themselves. A crucial element of this is the “incommensurate” feelings: elements of the experience that are inconvenient to hegemonic narratives of rape must also be represented. Difficult, ambivalent, or imperfect representations of rape are particularly important in their specificity.
Thana’s response to being raped is decidedly imperfect: true and absolute fantasy. The film’s tagline, “It will never happen again” speaks to both her goal of self and community protection and the impossibility of achieving it. Rape and abuse are endemic to the society represented: removing any one rapist will not end rape - it just might make you feel a little bit safer.
The film is not readily available online: the easiest way to access clips is through fetish sites such as rapelust.com. The screenshots of the above scene are taken from a clip that has been retitled “Beautiful Girl Raped In The Forest” and tagged with the title of the film. It currently sits at 123.3K views, and is the second most popular clip: the most popular has 159.3K views. None of the available clips show the scene in its entirety, but rather separate each individual rape. Even more popular are the clipped scenes from the 2013 sequel, where the most popular one has almost 300K views, and is titled “Girl Tied and Anal Forced Violently While Screaming in Pain”. Unrelated clips from pornography are also tagged with the title of the film, which assumes that the title is a popular enough search term that the uploaders believe it will get their videos more traffic.
The site bills itself as the “Best Forced Porn Videos & Movie Rape Scenes”, flattening the context of the films to parallel them with pornography. This is strikingly similar to the [[arguments made by many critics of rape-revenge films->VS Critical Response]], particularly in the exploitation era, that explicit depictions of rape glorify and sexualize it. Given this context, it is difficult to argue that, even if it runs contrary to the filmmaker’s intentions, a significant portion of their contemporary audience is not watching it for that reason. The explicit visual portrayal and diegetic sound, which Zarchi argued would function as a condemnation of rape due to the difficulty of watching, is at the very center of the appeal in a fetish context.
In a very real sense, directors do not have control over whether or not their rape scenes will reappear in a fetishistic context: the only way to truly ensure that this does not happen is to not portray rape. The question that remains, then, is whether the project of portraying rape is important enough to outweigh the ways these portrayals get repurposed. This question is further complicated by the assumption of antirape intent on the filmmaker’s behalf: is it reasonable to accept Zarchi’s stated antirape politic at face value given the explicitness of his portrayal and the wider context of exploitation films as celebrating and sexualizing violence?