not only will i stare

{embed Flickr image: '<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/193920705@N05/51477571204/in/dateposted-public/" title="timeline draft 1"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/51477571204_340443b13f_k.jpg" width="2048" height="826" alt="timeline draft 1"></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script>'} [[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]]'} [continue] 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, 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. {embed Flickr image: '<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/193920705@N05/51477797695/in/dateposted-public/" title="i spit on your grave"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/51477797695_857a025213_k.jpg" width="2048" height="1280" alt="i spit on your grave"></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script>'} [note: specify what note is on] [align center] {reveal link: 'Note', text: '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. None of the available clips show the scene in its entirety, but rather separate each individual rape.'} [continue] 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: [[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]]

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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.

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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. [align center] [[go back->The Virgin Spring]]