During his decades as a movie critic, Ebert periodically expressed belief that those who did not adhere to his specific interpretation of films were somehow mentally or morally bankrupt, but he was never more condescending than in this particular review. (He and his onscreen sparring partner, Gene Siskel, would go on to devote a full episode of their Sneak Previews shows to "women in danger" movies, which relied on selective recapping to sell the audience on why slasher movies like Friday the 13th, in which male and female characters are hacked up in virtually equal numbers, were misogynistic.)How did the audience react to all of this? Those who were vocal seemed to be eating it up. The middle-aged, white-haired man two seats down from me, for example, talked aloud, After the first rape: 'That was a good one!' After the second: 'That'll show her!' After the third: 'I've seen some good ones, but this is the best.' When the tables turned and the woman started her killing spree, a woman in the back row shouted: 'Cut him up, sister!' In several scenes, the other three men tried to force the retarded man to attack the girl. This inspired a lot of laughter and encouragement from the audience. I wanted to turn to the man next to me and tell him his remarks were disgusting, but I did not. To hold his opinions at his age, he must already have suffered a fundamental loss of decent human feelings. I would have liked to talk with the woman in the back row, the one with the feminist solidarity for the movie's heroine. I wanted to ask If she'd been appalled by the movie's hour of rape scenes. As it was, at the film's end I walked out of the theater quickly, feeling unclean, ashamed and depressed.
Perhaps the woman in the back would have responded to Ebert, "Because, for the first time in cinematic history, rape is actually being taken seriously as an issue." Academic Carol J. Clover, in her seminal and brilliant book of horror movie criticism, Men, Women, and Chain Saws, points out that the rise of the rape-revenge movie in the '70s coincided with rape being taken seriously as a social issue. No longer seen as a natural consequence of boys being boys, rape was finally being examined for what it was: a devastating, life-altering violation of humanity that had no place within civil society. Clover wrote that Grave "reduces the genre to its essence." Ebert called it a "vile bag of garbage." I Spit on Your Grave actor Camille Keaton, whose Jennifer character endures about 21 minutes of onscreen gang rape and then exacts her revenge on the men who assaulted her for the movie's final 45-minute stretch, reported (via Clover) that Grave "made males in our audience singularly uncomfortable."Read More: Helping Rape Victims Get Justice
Brutal depictions of rape should make people uncomfortable, as any atrocity should. That discomfort, though, often extends beyond the fact of physically sitting through a representation of rape and into the question of what it means for rape to be shown, at times in pornographic detail, in entertainment. Could rape be entertainment? Should rape be entertainment? What if people like it too much? There aren't easy answers here, especially given the realism people expect in movies and the complicated nature of rape-revenge movies themselves.No longer seen as a natural consequence of boys being boys, rape was finally being examined for what it was.
One would have to twist his or her intellect in to knots to come up with a feminist reading for a movie in which a damsel in peak distress (that which comes from sexual violation) is redeemed by a man's handiwork. At least movies in which a woman or women are raped and reclaim their power through revenge could be feminist. That possibility alone is what makes them so debated, so pondered, and, ultimately, so important. The best rape revenge movies will make nothing easy for you. "We weren't influenced by feminism, we were influenced by women," wildman director Abel Ferrara is quoted as saying in Brad Stevens's book Abel Ferrara: The Moral Vision regarding his 1981 rape-revenge movie Ms. 45.In it, an already mute woman named Thana (Zoë Tamerlis Lund) is raped twice in one day. She survives and goes on a killing spree—first it takes the form of self-defense (she attacks men who harass her), then vigilantism (she attacks men who attack other women), and then flat-out misandry as she attacks anything with a dick. Ferrara's vision is one of extremes—what cures total helplessness is absolute power (though even absolute power has its limits—Thana is ultimately killed by being stabbed in the back by a feminist co-worker). What is it saying (besides nobody could captured the grit underneath New York's fingernails in the early '80s like Ferrara)? That question is not the question but the point. As Steven writes, "Ms. 45 draws no conclusions, contains no didactic statements on gender, and rejects that either/or mentality permeating virtually all American films which tackle 'serious' issues."We weren't influenced by feminism, we were influenced by women.
That's a question well worth asking when you consider how male-dominated this genre is, and the medium of film as a whole—in 2013 an IndieWire piece reported that "when looking at women directors over the last decade, only 41 women have made films in the top 100 released films every year across the decade, compared to 625 men." All of the films mentioned so far have been directed and written by men, and so much of the defining mainstream discourse—that these movies are garbage and possibly dangerous—is via men, too. Men speaking to men about women's issues—the film industry might as well be the government. Some of these men talk the talk—Quentin Tarantino called Kill Bill a "feminist statement" (note that Beatrix Kiddo is avenging more than just her string of comatose rapes, but it is a rape on her hospital bed that provides the catalyst for her slicing and dicing through four hours of cinema). But it's just as much political as it is pop cultural—Tarantino wears his references on his sleeve, and here the discernible source of inspiration includes Bo Arne Vibenius's 1973 Swedish exploitation flick Thriller – A Cruel Picture. The Kill Bill movies may provide the catharsis that any rape-revenge movie is capable of doing, but also keep in mind that Tarantino invoked Spice Girls rhetoric when following up on his "feminist statement" statement: He said he made "a film about girl power." Take him seriously at your own risk.Women do have, on occasion, a hand in making these things. Callie Khouri wrote Thelma & Louise, in which no rape takes place but its threat and grip from the past provides the inspiration for the titular characters' Western rampage. Janet Greek's 1986 movie The Ladies Club opens with a rape (via home invasion) but soon settles into a narrative about female solidarity—after a cop's rapists walk free, she forms a support group with other survivors, along with some friends and family members of survivors. The message is that rape isn't a survivor issue—it's a women's issue, period. The system is fucked up and it's only through the systematic castration of men that our heroes can feel safe to walk the world.All of the films mentioned so far have been directed and written by men, and so much of the defining mainstream discourse is via men, too.
The format of rape-revenge movies is fairly consistent throughout the subgenre (there is rape, and then there is revenge), which makes Gaspar Noe's 2002 movie Irréversible completely subversive. Its scenes are shown in reverse order so that the rape catalyst to the frenzied vengeance isn't seen until well into the movie. Irréversible is singularly miserable—it's particularly punishing to viewers in requiring more than one viewing given its storytelling device. The movie achieves chaos reminiscent of another French movie from the early 2000's, Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi's Baise-moi (Fuck Me), which is like Thelma & Louise with real balls (literally—there's hardcore sex in the movie). The rape that occurs in Baise-moi's first act seems almost beside the point to the greater liberation its characters achieve as they fuck and rob their way through France ("They could have done worse—we're still alive right?" says one character to another after they've both been violated). Baise-moi, to some extent, and Irréversible, to a greater one, suggest that all violence is senseless, that a rational approach to devastation is foolhardy. Given the way so many of the movies described here have been cut and thrown up on YouTube, their scenes disembodied from their context, it's easier than ever to lose the point, to get only the rape or only the revenge, depending on your taste. Senseless chaos, it turns out, could be the most modern of interpretations of the rape-revenge subgenre.