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I Spit on Your Quietism

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This piece first ran on Splice Today. I’m reprinting it here as part of the Juxtaposition Blogathon at Pussy Goes Grrr.

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If I were going to remake I Spit on Your Grave, the notorious 1978 rape/revenge thriller, I’d add more women. Not necessarily to the rape, but definitely to the revenge. The reason’s fairly simple: I think it would make the movie more feminist.

This is hardly at odds with the intent of the original. Director Meir Zarchi has said that he made the film after encountering a young rape victim and attempting to aid her despite police indifference. The film’s infamous 25 minute rape scene captures that sense of blunt, hopeless outrage — it has to be one of the most harrowing depictions of violence in film. Jennifer (Camille Keaton) attempts again and again to escape, only to be captured and recaptured, humiliated and brutalized until she’s little but a traumatized, naked slab of blood and terror. Meanwhile, the four rapists talk and joke among themselves, urging each other on with taunts or threats. It’s clear throughout that they’re much more interested in each other than they are in their victim. She’s just the excuse for extended male bonding and one-upmanship, a convenient non-person onto whom to safely displace and act out the real male-male passions. As Carol Clover writes in Men, Women, and Chainsaws, “the rapes are presented as almost sexless acts of cruelty that the men seem to commit more for each other’s edification than for their own physical pleasure.” Clover also notes that one of her male friends “found it such a devastating commentary on male rape fantasies and also on the way male group dynamics engender violence that he thought it should be compulsory viewing for high school boys.”

While I Spit on Your Grave is very aware of how men relate to each other, however, it has virtually nothing to say about how women interact. Its vision of female, and, indeed, feminist empowerment is entirely individual. Jennifer fights the patriarchy herself — abetted by the abject stupidity inflicted upon men by their own hierarchical obtuseness and sexism. Jennifer avoids death because the rapists deputize the mentally retarded Matthew (Richard Pace) to do the dirty work of killing her, and he wimps out. Weeks later, after she recovers, she is able to murder her assailants in large part because they are ideologically incapable of believing (a) that she is able to kill them, and (b) that she didn’t want to be raped in the first place. She seduces Matthew, fucks him, and as he cums she slips a noose around his neck and strangles him. She then finds Johnny (Eron Tabor) at the gas station, convinces him to get in a car with her by flipping her hair winsomely, and then drives him out to the middle of nowhere and forces him to take off his clothes and kneel at gunpoint. He starts to explain himself…and he’s so stubbornly obtuse that he thinks he’s swayed her, and actually allows her to seduce him again. So Jennifer takes him home with her, maneuvers him into a tub, tells him she killed Matthew (he doesn’t believe her) and then, under pretense of giving him a handjob, cuts off his dick.

Finally, she climbs aboard a motorboat with Stanley (Anthony Nichols), fools him into thinking she’s going to kiss him, then pushes him into the water and disembowels him with the motor blades. (The final rapist is the only one who doesn’t get seduced; he’s so upset at seeing his pal menaced with the motorboat that he rushes into the water, where Jennifer kills him from the boat with an ax.)

There’s obviously some satisfaction in seeing the men hoisted by their own…bits. But it’s a bitter pleasure. To get her revenge, Jennifer has to turn herself into the sexual thing the men imagine her to be. It’s notable that while the rape itself is probably about the least arousing half hour ever filmed, the seduction scenes have a queasy erotic charge. Jennifer caters to men’s desires only to cut them off, but she’s still catering. It is, then, not the men, but Jennifer who completes her degradation. The loss of her self is the price of her victory — though it’s not clear what other option she has. Men are despicable — and they are also, in this world, effectively all there is. Jennifer wins, but it’s man’s game she wins at. There isn’t any other.

Of course, feminism offers some other options — most notably sisterhood. Nor is it unheard of for rape-revenge (or rape-revenge inspired films like Tarantino’s Death Proof) to explore female relationships . So if you had to do a remake, and you wanted to throw in some clever plot twists for the jaded exploitation viewer, adding female relationships to the plot seems like it would be an unexpected but not unprecedented tack. Why not see what happens if, say, you had Johnny’s wife (who gets a notable ball-busting walk-on in the original) find Jennifer after the rape and take her side? Or perhaps more realistically, you could have Jennifer come out to the cabin with her sister, her mother — or perhaps with a girlfriend? Certainly, gay rights would have some of the polarizing power today that feminism has in the ‘70s. As such, including lesbian themes in order to ramp up both the exploitation and the political edge would be perhaps the best way to stay true to the spirit, if not the letter, of Zarchi’s original.

It probably goes without saying, but this was not the path taken by the actual 2010 remake of I Spit on Your Grave.

In fact, the remake takes the opposite approach; instead of an additional revenger, it adds an additional rapist. At one point in the remake Jennifer (Sarah Butler) maces one of her four attackers and manages to escape into the forest. She runs into the town’s sheriff (Andrew Howard), who takes her back to her cabin…where the other rapists reappear. Instead of running them in, the sheriff rather inexplicably joins them.

As I noted above, the original film took some care to show that male bonding and rivalry were central to the rape. The men’s mean-spiritedly jovial desire to “help out” sad sack Matthew by using Jennifer to deflower him; their need to impress Johnny, the way they only expressed their emotions for each other (whether affection, dislike, or envy) through aggression and humiliation — it’s those interactions which powered their misogyny and violence. And the film also took pains to show these impulses as unremarkable. In a scene before the rape, where the men chatted with each other, they didn’t appear dangerous.. Indeed, they seemed like naïve adolescents, wondering (mostly, but not entirely in jest) whether really sexy women shit or boasting about their plans to visit New York or Los Angeles. It was only in retrospect later in the film that their casual abuse of one another and their casual jibes at women appeared ominous.

The remake follows through on the group dynamics to some extent — the guys egg each other on; they bring Matthew along to lose his virginity, etc. etc. But it abandons the effort to make the men appear like just folks. Ironically, the director Steven R. Monroe gives one of his characters a video camera, and we see some of the rape through the lens. This is an obvious effort to implicate the viewer — but in fact, this version of the story is much less accusatory than Zarchi’s original.

That’s because, instead of seeing the rape as a result of standard male group dynamics, Monroe tries hard to decollectivize the guilt. In Zarchi’s version, the men were typical guys, and the rape, too, was therefore typical — a possibility for any man. In Monroe’s version, on the other hand, the rapists are individual monsters — a much less frightening idea.

In the original (top), the rape is about the interactions between the men. In the remake (bottom) it’s about individual sadism.

Thus, for example, in the first film, when Jennifer first meets Johnny at the gas station where he’s an attendant, he’s nondescriptly polite with the distant friendliness of the perfect service employee. In the remake, on the other hand Johnny (Jeff Branson) is a lecherous jerk right from the get-go. Monroe even makes sure Jennifer (Sarah Butler) humiliates him explicitly (though accidentally) to add an additional personal motivation. This is carried through into the rape itself, in which Johnny devises elaborate humiliations for Jennifer — humiliations which are predicated on his commanding her to, for example, drink booze or show her teeth like a racehorse. There are no such commands in the original, and, indeed, there can’t be, since the rapists barely talk to their victim.. The rape, in other words, becomes about Johnny’s wounded vanity and his investment in elaborate sadistic games, rather than about the way the men perform for each other. In fact, in the first film, when Stanley starts to yell personal insults at Jennifer and generally to treat her as if she’s a person to be dominated rather than a piece of meat to be used, the rest of the men get more and more disturbed, and finally pull him away.

The remake turns Johnny into a sociopath; Matthew (Chad Lindberg), on the other hand, is given a conscience. His mental deficiency, the fact that he isn’t as much man, is, in Monroe’s version, a sign that he is not as evil or irredeemable as the others. There was no such shilly-shallying in the first film; there, Matthew’s incapacity simply made him less able to rape, not less eager to do so. When confronted by Jennifer in the second half of Zarchi’s film, Matthew does apologize and claim that the assault was not his idea…but Johnny and Stanley do the exact same thing when Jennifer comes for them.

Again, for Zarchi, the culprit is all the men and the way they interact, suggesting that violence against women is a systemic, social sin. For Monroe, though, Matthew really is sorry, while Johnny, even up to the moment of his gruesome demise, expresses no sorrow, feigned or otherwise. In the remake, the crime is a crime of individuals, which means some are more guilty than others and some (like Matthew or, the men in the audience) are less guilty.

Where the group dynamics completely come apart, though, is with the introduction of the sheriff. As I said above, his actions are inexplicable. We never even see him with the other men before the rape. He does mention that he’s known them since they were boys — but he’s in no sense their peer. We quickly learn (through a cell-phone call mid-rape) that he has a loving pregnant wife and a daughter in the honors program. He’s got, in other words, a lot to lose — and he’s willing to throw it all away for what? To have sex with some random city girl? To impress some subordinates?

In the first film, where it’s Johnny who has a wife and kids, Zarchi confronts this issue directly: Jennifer actually asks Johnny if he loves his wife while she’s seducing him. In response he says, “She’s okay. You get used to a wife after awhile, you know?” His family is a routine; it doesn’t particularly touch his inner life, to which, in any case, he seems to be only tangentially connected. The sheriff, on the other hand, is shown to be deeply invested in his child and his wife — he’s a doting middle-class family man. The idea that his spouse or daughter might find out about the rape sends him into a panicked rage. So what could possibly have led him to participate in a felony with a number of extremely untrustworthy accomplices?

We don’t know the answer to that question because the movie doesn’t tell us. And it doesn’t tell us because it doesn’t really care what his motives are. He joins in the rape because he’s the villain and, more, because it’s surprising. The sheriff is a plot device — a contrivance. Which means the real fifth rapist here is, in some sense, the director, who throws logic and coherence to the wind for the sheer pleasure of a cheap thrill.

Cheap thrills are what exploitation is supposed to be about, of course. But, while you certainly couldn’t say that Zarchi had a light touch, you also never felt that his hands were on the scales. This is part of the reason that the first I Spit on Your Grave had such an indelible, inevitable power. There weren’t plot twists or clever reversals; there was just sex and violence and their remorseless attendants, rape and revenge. Zarchi’s world fit together. Men were rapists. Rapists destroy women, and also themselves. QED.

Monroe, on the other hand, doesn’t believe any of that. His men don’t die because they’re rapists; they die because they’re in a movie and Monroe can do whatever he wants, damn it. In the remake, Jennifer doesn’t outthink the men because they’re sexist idiots and then dispatch them efficiently. Instead, she kills them because the script calls for her to turn into an avenging, unstoppable force of destruction — a petite Jason. From the moment she escapes her assailants by diving into a river and improbably disappearing, she ceases to be an actual person and becomes, like the Sheriff, a contrivance. Her revenges are much more elaborate than in the first film, but the rituals of torture aren’t her triumphs (or her degradations): they’re the directors’. A vision of essentially communal, and therefore political, justice has been replaced by individual punishment. Karma becomes deus ex machina.

It’s not really a surprise that a 2010 remake lacks the political charge of its 1978 prototype. The last thirty years or so have been rough on radicals, and while feminism has certainly made advances, the vision of apocalyptic, violent gender justice which inspired the rape-revenge films now seems both naïve and distasteful. As Terry Eagleton put it in his 2003 book After Theory, “Over the dreary decades of post-1970s conservatism, the historical sense had grown increasingly blunted, as it suited those in power that we should be able to imagine no alternative to the present.”

Perhaps the best demonstration of why a 2010 I Spit on Your Grave was bound to suck can be seen in another movie; Michael Haneke’s Funny Games. This film (in both its 1997 Austrian original and its 2008 American shot-for-shot remake) does not suck. It’s also not technically a rape/revenge. Instead, it’s a negation of the genre.

The brutality in Funny Games is flagrantly, explicitly unmotivated. In I Spit on Your Grave, humiliation and aggression is linked to gender politics — and also to class. The men in I Spit on Your Grave are hillbillies who resent Jennifer’s affluence, freedom, and economic power. This is shown most clearly in the 1978 film when the rapists, as part of their abuse, read sections of Jennifer’s novel-in-progress out loud, mock it, and then destroy it. Her work is, to them, not work at all, but a ludicrous affectation. (“I really despise people that don’t work,” Johnny says at one point, “they get into trouble too easily, you know?”) The movie does not suggest that these class antagonisms justify the rape, but it does show that they facilitate it. Economic imbalances, as any Marxist knows, are linked to violence.

In Funny Games, on the other hand, there are no economic gaps. At the beginning of the film, a comfortably upper-class family arrives at its lakeside vacation home. There, mom, dad, and son (Anna, Georg, and Georgie in the original) are trapped and systematically tortured by Paul and Peter two well-scrubbed young men with a passion for golf and sadism. The two torturers refuse to say why they are brutalizing their victims; when asked, they propound a series of more or less ridiculous scenarios (I was a poor child! I had sex with my mother!) which are clearly supposed to be bullshit.

Just as the film teases the viewer with reasons, it also teases them with rape — the two sadists force Anna to strip to her underwear, but never precede any farther than that. Most of all, though, it teases with revenge. Anna makes repeated attempts to escape and to turn weapons against her assailant. In the most startling of these moments, she actually manages to grab hold of a rifle and shoot Peter dead. At which point Paul finds a remote control and uses it to rewind the film to the moment before Anna shot his companion. He then casually takes the gun away from her

This flagrant breaking of the fourth wall can, of course, be seen as a way of (here it is again) implicating the viewer in the onscreen violence — of exposing our own sadistic and/or masochistic investment in tales of torture and brutality. And it does, certainly, show very nakedly the kind of narrative contrivance epitomized by the sheriff in the 2010 I Spit on Your Grave. Diagetically, it is the evil characters doing these things to these people we care about. But really it’s the director doing it for our amusement, which calls into question whether we in fact care about anything.

The use of the remote control is, though, not primarily an accusation of complicity. It’s an accusation of naivete. We in the audience are hoping the rape-revenge narrative will play out; that justice will be done. And the film mocks us for that — or (what is effectively the same thing) pats us on the back for knowing that such narrative justice is only a convention, not the truth.

Paul (Arno Frisch) knows the score in the original Funny Games

My hope that I Spit on Your Grave might have more of a feminist consciousness in a remade version was, then, clearly idiotic. The climate even for a film as vacillatingly feminist as the original I Spit on Your Grave has, it seems, evaporated. In current iterations of rape-revenge, violence is disconnected from causality, which means that it can call forth no real retribution. Some random God-surrogate pulls the strings and people suffer and that’s that. The best that can be offered as a political vision is a land in which people turn off their televisions to avoid political visions. Only suckers still believe that you can rise up against your oppressors and disembowel them with an outboard motor.

Oedipus Supes

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So can you guess? Who drew that?

Probably many of you know the answer. The clean perfection of it is a giveaway — but the fantasy touch, the almost flamboyant horror of it could maybe throw you off. The evocation of a too-brilliant gothic under some strange sun — this looks like it should be Herge, perhaps, not Chris Ware.

But Ware it is, from way back in Acme Novelty Library #10, before Jimmy was Jimmy Corrigan and before Ware had quite, quite decided that he wanted to become the poet of antiseptic blocks and middle-american repression. Those proclivities are there, of course, in the elegaic emptiness of Jimmy’s room:

or of his town and world:

The cleanness here, though, is somewhat deceptive. It’s not the slack nothingness of ennui, but the overly perfect, charged landscape of surrealism. Ware’s later work often seems to fit most comfortably within literary fiction, but Acme #10 is closer to David Lynch…or even to Nightmare on Elm Street. Jimmy’s story is an Oedipal fever-dream; one of the few narratives to successfully meld superhero tropes with horror.

As in horror films, the plot is less a linear progression than a series of compulsive repetitions. Jimmy is repeatedly, sadistically betrayed and humiliated by father figures; his mother’s boyfriend, Nelson, and Superman. The reiteration of this trope starts out on a small scale — Nelson, playing with Jimmy, accidentally injures his arm. Soon, though, the pattern escalates:

Superman is both uberdad and castrating ogre; he’s the deranged and arbitrary law, sweating in his underwear, framed by ominous black clouds. The superhero is the monster; they’re not mirror images, but the same guy, the only father you get. Jimmy’s function, then, is to fail and be punished, over and over, for failing to live up to expectations and for trying to live up to them.

Ware’s even lines and bright colors, even the repetition of his perfect blocks, flatten anxiety and reality into a single seamless nightmare.

In this page, Ware starts out with a fun boy’s activity sequence. Jimmy’s head switches places with his mothers and then back again as Nelson describes the fisherman’s knot — starting with the three basic parts of the rope, a tripartite Oedipal snarl. Jimmy, goaded beyond endurance by Nelson’s condescension (forcing Jimmy in the fourth panel into a panel within a panel, dwindling into nothing) — does his Oedipal thing, and kills his (step father with the same rope. Punishment follows immediately; killing Nelson makes Jimmy an outcast, floating in nowhere, calling for the mother he was supposed to win and has instead lost. And then Superman appears to make everything better, or, rather worse. Again, the whole sequence — lesson, murder, punishment, Superman — slides one panel into another. I’m fairly sure Jimmy isn’t really supposed to have killed Nelson, and Superman does really show up, but the diegetic “reality” is less important than the fact that it all feels like it has the same oppressive weight. Symbols and dreams don’t so much blur together at sit up next to each other, each as hyper-real as the next, all pointing to the same overdetermined outcome:

The first sequence there is a “dream” in which Jimmy imagines himself sucking on the hair of his (non-existent) sister. The second occurs a couple of pages later, when Jimmy is forced to watch through a slit in a cave wall as his boat (named Mom) sails away from the island on which Superman has left him. Shortly thereafter, Superman returns and reveals that the movie machine that Jimmy has spent his days and nights dreaming about, waiting for the moment when he might use his sole penny to watch it and relieve his boredom — that movie machine shows a pornographic film strip of Jimmy’s mother.

Jimmy is being punished, in other words, for the his desire, even if he won’t let himself know what that desire is. He wanted to see what was in that machine; he wants to reach through that slit in the wall, or suck his sister’s hair. He deserves what he gets; Superman is dispensing justice, just as he is supposed to.

The book, then, is shot through with compulsive sadism and perhaps even more compulsive masochism. It’s difficult even to know how the two could be separated. The whole point of the Oedipal triangle is that the son replaces the father, which means the son is the father, and so the castration of the son is ultimately performed by the son himself. Here, too, Superman is the father, but he’s also Jimmy — the childhood power fantasy. Superman sweating and declaring “we’re adults after all” — you don’t say that if you’re actually an adult and confident of it. Superman is Jimmy’s imaginary friend come to life, which means he’s Jimmy. And if he tortures Jimmy, it’s in part because Jimmy wants to be tortured — because he deserves to be punished, and because his torture is the way we (reader, author) identify with him and so enter the story.

Thus, the bitter pleasure when the comic’s narrative taunts Jimmy at various points:

That’s perhaps the most claustrophobic moment of this entire claustrophobic comic. The power fantasy becomes a fantasy of utter disempowerment; the adventure book expectations nail home the impotence.

This sequence, in particular, reminded me on this time through of Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games.” As with Ware, Haneke stacks the deck against his characters; his torturer is able to speak directly to the audience, somewhat as Ware’s (apparently complicit) narrator does. Like Ware, too, Haneke’s world is one of antiseptic bleakness. Particularly the scene immediately after the couple’s son has been killed, when the murderers leave the husband and wife alone in the empty house with the TV blaring — there’s a blank beauty there, an absolute devastation as the emptiness of the room becomes an unendurable weight.

Surely that’s what Ware is reaching for too in those sparse panels where Jimmy is isolated on one side, as if shoved to one side of the world.

“Funny Games”, though, compromises these moments precisely because they are moments. The perfect stillness should be there forever, but “Funny Games” has to go on, revving up its plot again and its series of more or less entertaining, and more or less tiresome, reversals. “Funny Games” is clever, but that cleverness often seems at war with the most striking aspects of his vision. (I think this is part of what Charles Reece is saying in this review.)

Ware is clever too. Consider, for example, this sequence again:

Notice we have Nelson stating “Every last penny!” two panels before we see Jimmy’s mom in what seems to be a state of semi-nudity, with Nelson waiting outside the door. On the island, Jimmy’s holds onto a sole penny in anticipation of looking in the movie machine…where, if he only knew, he could see his mother naked. The flickering recurrence of penny’s and nudity — or of father’s and arms…or indeed, the sadistic invention of Superman’s movie machine revelation — I’m sure Haneke would have liked to have come up with any of those.

The difference, though, I think, is precisely the way Ware divorces cause and effect. “Funny Games” is a game; it fits together like a puzzle. Acme #10 has puzzle-like aspects, but the pieces don’t actually go together — or at least not one after the other, in a sequence. Obviously you can read it straight through and you get a story of sorts. But there’s no satisfying resolution like, “everyone’s dead, start over.” Instead you’re left with images, themes, repetitions, blank spaces. Acme #10’s lack of narrative bloody-mindedness, the fact that Jimmy isn’t finished off, is why this isn’t really horror — and at the same time, perhaps, it’s the reason that it functions as a kind of distillation of horror. There’s no resolution here, no escape. He’s in hell — and not hell as metaphorical meaninglessness, but hell as intolerable meaning. Jimmy is always being punished, always deserving of punishment. He’s always on that island looking into that vulture’s beautiful, terrible maw.

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A couple days ago, Matthias Wivel said this in his reevaluation of Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan.

There is a narcissistic aspect to it; the archetypical distillation of certain emotions inflicts the story with a crippling myopia that has consequences for its believability as a realistic narrative.

I would say that that’s right. And I would further say, in Acme #10, Ware got around this problem not by jettisoning the myopia, but rather by avoiding the realistic narrative. Acme #10 is narcissistic and monomaniacal as anything Ware has ever written. But that’s a strength, not a weakness, when you go for a cloistered dreamscape rather than for humanistic insight with occasional epiphany. Ware understands the inside of his own neurotic skull and he’s able, like Kafka, to give that interior the dread (and very funny) force of universal truth. Ware’s efforts to imagine real characters and real relationships, however, seem to me much less successful — and, ironically, much more solipsistic. I don’t follow Wareclosely anymore, but when I do check in, I only end up more convinced that Acme #10 will always be my favorite of his comics.