Tag Archives: rape/revenge

Patriarchy in You

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According to Andrew Cooper, you can read the Stendahl Syndrome as a winking parody of critical fears of horror movies. In the film, Detective Anna Manni (Asia Argento) is violently raped by a serial predator. The rapist manages to capture her because she suffers from Stendahl Syndrome—a psychological condition which causes her to be overcome, and even experience hallucinations, when viewing art. Anna, then, is the incredibly overly receptive viewer of critics’ nightmares; her whole view of reality is transformed by aesthetic experience. Little wonder, then, that the rape/revenge plot of the film she is in leads her to perdition. Morally censorious critics imagine that watching films causes violence; Anna, the overly sensitive viewer, observes her rapist and becomes him. She does manage to take her revenge, but after doing so, she becomes psychotic herself. Through the power of art, the detective changes to the murderer. End of joke.

There’s another, less ironic way to take the film, though. Most rape/revenge films are narratively linear, and set. You start out with a healthy, unmarked woman; she is abused, suffers, strikes back, and destroys her tormenter.

The Stendahl Syndrome scrambles this—not with the rather obvious chronological trickery of Irreversible, but through more subtly letting the emotional and narrative components of the story shift out of true. Anna begins to experience trauma when she goes to an art gallery, before she is raped. And rather than a singular event, the rape is reenacted; first by Anna, who begins to dress as a man, and then molests her boyfriend, and then by the rapist, who attacks other women, and then re-kidnaps Anna. Finally, Anna murders the rapist in revenge—but that doesn’t end the story. Instead, the narrative grinds on, with the rapist apparently back from the dead—until it turns out it’s not the rapist, but Anna herself who is murdering her own lovers and friends. The rapist is inside her, she says; being violated, and then enacting violence herself, has turned her into him. She becomes the abusive patriarch who assaulted her.

Psycho, and Hitchcock in general, seem like an obvious touchstone here; as in Hitchcock’s films, the movie world seems to gleefully conspire against the beautiful protagonist, creating switchback complications to destroy and humiliate her. But unlike in Hitchcock, the film affect is always, firmly with Anna, which means the complications don’t seem like trickery, but like grotesque unfairness. The movie even says, just about outright, that it is rigged against Anna; it is art itself which disorients her and traumatizes her before the rapist can.

Again, Anna’s susceptibility to art could be a meta-comment that art doesn’t actually work like this; a painting doesn’t make you hallucinate, a film doesn’t make you a murderer. But the antipathy of art within the film could also be an acknowledgement of the antipathy of the film itself—and, metaphorically, of the antipathy of the world outside the film.

Sexual violence and patriarchy aren’t neatly contained in a narrative of (provisional) redemption. Instead, they leak out everywhere. Anna is traumatized before she is traumatized; her rapist continues to haunt her not only after the rape, but after his death. The violence to her is not only real, but symbolic—and is so overwhelming that she can’t even separate the violence from her self. Her relationship to her own sexuality, and her own violence, is inseparable from what has been done to her—and what has been done to her isn’t just the rape, but the vision in which the rape occurs, which precedes it and enables it.

One of many false climaxes in The Stendahl Syndrome occurs during Anna’s second rape. She has been tied down to a bed, and the rapist, having finished his work, leaves to amuse himself in some other way before coming back to finish her. There’s graffitti on the walls of the chamber, and her syndrome kicks in, causing her to hallucinate. Her powerful thrashing allows her to free herself. She kills her attacker when he returns in an extremely satisfying scene. Art serves as inspiration for empowerment — the message of many revenge films which seek to uplift, whether Fury Road or Ex Machina.

But Anna can’t get out of the film. Once she has tied herself to the tropes of suspense and violence and patriarchy, she can’t undo the knots. If Stendahl Syndrome is a parody of the idea that aesthetics can corrupt, it’s also a parody of the idea that aesthetics can save and liberate. Instead, in the Stendahl Syndrome, art and life collaborate together to create a hierarchy from which there is no escape, a dream of violence that doesn’t end.

Every Thing In Its Place

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Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible is one of those unusual rape/revenge films that has garnered more critical praise than condemnation. Roger Ebert, who typically is not a fan of exploitation sexual violence, gave the film four stars and actually called it “moral—at a structural level.”

What Ebert is referring to is the film’s high concept. Rather than the usual chronological treatment of rape/revenge—where the rape happens, precipitating vengeful violence—Irreversible turns things around. The film is presented in reverse chronological order; the last scene happens first, and the first scene last. Thus, you see the violent, bloody, confused (and as you later learn, mistaken) revenge first, scrolling backward through the exceedingly violent and horrible rape, and ending with a blissful morning as the loving protagonists awake, unaware of what the day holds in store.

The typical read on this seems to be that the film’s reversal undoes the immorality of the rape/revenge structure. Rape/revenge posits that violence is the natural, necessary response to sexual violence. Irreversible refutes that, by showing the horror of the murder first, without justification, and then the horror of the rape, which still occurs despite (inept) vengeance having been doled out. In fact, the vengeance seems to call the rape into being, as if violence echoes backwards, rather than forwards, in time.

There’s certainly a deliberate stance against violent retribution in Irreversible. The avenging boyfriend Marcus (Vincent Cassel) is presented (in the first structural half of the film at least) as a drugged up out of control idiot; he’s explicitly sneered at for imagining himself as a “B-movie hero.” And of course, he (and more effectively his friend Pierre (Albert Dupontel)) beat and perhaps kill the wrong dude.

But the claim that this is somehow pushing against rape/revenge tropes seems insufficiently attentive to the genre. It isn’t unusual for rape/revenge films to question the effectiveness of violence. It’s de rigeur. A Virgin Spring (1960), one of the genre’s founding texts, has the revenger kill an innocent child and then shout at God for his cruelty; there is no question of the vengeance being justified or beneficial. Deliverance, another important film in the genre’s development, uses the mistaken revenge trick itself, tied to a critique of machismo similar to Irreversible‘s. I Spit On Your Grave presents Jennifer as destroyed by her vengeance as much as by her rape; Ms. 45 presents its protagonist as a deranged killer, who has to be put down by another woman with a knife to the back for the good of everyone. Stendahl Syndrome has the revenge lead to further, helpless violence. And so forth. There are less ambivalent rape revenge films (like the sequence in Foxy Brown, for example) but based on the history of rape/revenge, you hardly need to run the plot in reverse to show that revenge isn’t especially fulfilling.

If the plot trick isn’t needed to tack on a moral (as Ebert suggests), then what precisely is it doing? Well, one thing it does is to foreground that this is not exploitation, but art cinema. The wildly lurching cinematography does the same, as does the insistently structureless and repetitive dialogue. In one sequence — which is as painful in its way as the rape— Pierre, who used to date Alex (Monica Bellucci), asks her over and over, as they catch a train, if she and Marcus orgasm during sex, and why she and he had less sexual success as a couple. It is an excruciating, endless discussion—made all the more gruesome when Alex explains to Pierre that his sexual problem is selflessness. He pays too much attention to his partner’s pleasure, she insists. Shortly before this, of course, we saw a rapist assault her. Hah hah, the film says. You think you like it when men don’t pay attention to your pleasure? You just wait.

Is that really what the film intends to be saying? Is it actually mocking Alex about her coming rape? It’s difficult to say—but this sort of intentional irony comes up again and again throughout the second structural half of the film. Alex tells Marcus that no one owns her, for example, which again seems like an ironized reference to her earlier/subsequent violation. And then there’s the moment where Marcus jokingly tells her he wants to fuck her ass, echoing the anal rape we saw half an hour before.

The reversal of time doesn’t so much add a moral dimension, then, as it allows the filmmakers to show their cleverness—not least through the manipulation of, and mocking of the characters who enact their trauma first as tragedy, then as farce. Breaking up the narrative also fractures the masochistic identification; usually in rape/revenge, you learn who the protagonist is, and then identify with her as she is raped. But in Irreversible, you meet Alex only with the rape, like her rapist (who is a complete stranger to her.) The fragmentation gives you a sense of control and power; you start off confused, perhaps, but soon you know more than the characters do; you are in a position of superiority. You are the director, the God, the one in control. The filmmakers call the ending into being, and then imposes it on the characters. Nor is it an accident that the ending/beginning is set in a gay BDSM club called the Rectum. The filmmakers couldn’t state much more clearly that they’re investment is sadistic.

The sadism most directly inflects, and infects, the critique of machismo. Again, Marcus is specifically upbraided for his obsession with the revenge narrative, and for his need to avenge “his” woman, rather than going to the hospital to be with her.

But how does the film criticize his machismo? By mocking his manliness. Through the first structural half of the film Marcus wanders around asking people to direct him to the Rectum, and desperately denying that he is gay. In the Rectum, itself, he is almost anally raped. The sexual assault on him then (via reverse chronology) foreshadows Alex’s anal rape at the hands of a gay man. More, Alex’s anal rape becomes Marcus’ fantasy/nightmare; she is a stand in for him and his terrorized masculinity. It’s significant too that the rapist’s previous victim is a trans woman; we see a glimpse of her penis as Marcus and Pierre interrogate her about the rapist’s whereabouts. That’s the only penis shown in the film, revealed like a secret key. The woman is the man, the man is the woman. Are Marcus and Pierre being chastised for their investment in machismo? Or is the film an elaborate sneer at them for being too effete?

Again, the ur-text here is Deliverance, which both critiqued urban dreams of machismo and set up elaborate humiliations to demonstrate that those urbanites were in fact sissy-boys. Noé has undoubtedly seen Deliverance, and he’s probably also read Carol Clover, whose Men, Women, and Chainsaws argues that in rape/revenge narratives, male viewers are encouraged to identify with the female victims, often via intertextual reference to Deliverance. The central rape in Irreversible, in which a gay man beats a trans woman, then anally rapes a cis woman while cursing her out for her wealth, in this context comes across as a deliberate, smug wink to theory heads.

In my discussion of Virgin Spring, I argued that Bergman’s art cinema profundities about faith and God, as expressed by Max Von Sydow, effectively erased the experience of the woman whose rape was the ostensible center of the story. Of course, a contemporary French art filmmaker isn’t going to present a disquisition on faith—but still, Noé’s film parallels Bergman’s in a number of respects. Most notably, they both foreground film style. And in doing so, they both perform different kinds of aesthetic masculine swagger in a way that resonates uncomfortably with the phallic content of their films.

In Noé’s case, the reverse chronology, the hand-held camera jerking, and the various portentous declarations about time (including a preposterous, clumsy reference to 2001) all tie the filmmaker, and the film, to the main character’s masculine panic—a panic triggered perhaps by Alex’s revelation (at the end/beginning) that she’s pregnant. The irony of the title is that time and generation are not set. Noé manipulates them, demonstrating his power as he illustrates the powerlessness, and cluelessness, of his characters. The words “Time destroys everything” appear at the beginning/end and end/beginning, a vaunting koan. For who, here, is master of time but Noé,the avant-garde daddy, whose moral structure knows all?

Rape, Revenge, and Race

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Foxy Brown acquires a razor on her way to her revenge.

Jack Hill loved to interpolate other exploitation genres in his exploitation films. So while the 1974 blaxploitation classic Foxy Brown isn’t exactly a rape/revenge, it does have a rape/revenge set piece tucked away in the middle. Foxy Brown (Pam Grier) is caught by the evil drug pushers, and sent out to the Ranch. There, two beefy, chuckling white trash hillbillies hook her on heroin and rape her repeatedly—until (of course) she frees herself and inflicts a terrible revenge involving coat hangers, gasoline, and charred corpses.

Hill’s rape/revenge riff — like many a rape/revenge riff—is indebted to deliverance. The white trash rapists in the context of a blaxploitation film take on additional relevance, as they spit racial epithets and even use a whip on Foxy, nodding to slavery and the history of sexual violence against black women. In Deliverance, poor whites are presented as a debased, violent, but also victimized racial other, locked in conflict with effete urban gentrifiers. Foxy Brown deliberately reminds viewers that rural whites and urban whites aren’t always at each other throats, but have often made common cause against people who look like Pam Grier.

The Deliverance reference isn’t just about race, though. It’s also about gender. In Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Carol Clover points out that the male rape in Deliverance serves as a prototype for many of the female rapes in exploitation cinema. That means that male viewers are not (or not just) supposed to identify with the male rapists; they’re supposed to identify (as they do in Deliverance) with the person being raped. In Foxy Brown, the imagined viewer is certainly mainly black. The Deliverance reference inscribes that viewer as not just black women, but black men as well, both of whom are encouraged to identify with Foxy as she is violated, and then takes violent revenge.

There are other indications in the film that rape in the film is about violation of black men, as well as violation of black women. In particular, the fate of the lead dope pusher Steve (Peter Brown) at the conclusion of the film is a collaborative male/female endeavor. Foxy allies herself with a black anti-drug, neighborhood watch coalition, and together they kill Steve’s bodyguards and capture Steve himself. The men hold Steve, and pull off his pants. Then they look to Foxy for the final order, and their leader castrates him. Finally, Foxy puts his genitals in a pickle jar and takes them to show his girlfriend, the evil Kathleen Wall (Kathryn Loder). Rape/revenge stereotypically uses castration as the recompense for rape—but in this case, that castration functions both as revenge for the sexual violence against Foxy, and as revenge for the way the heroin dealers have exploited the black community as a whole (and black men in particular.)

Even though the rape/revenge sequence only takes up 10-15 minutes in a 90 minute film, then, it is structurally and thematically central. First, it presents heroin pushing and sexual violence as parallel crimes, both used by white men (and white women) to humiliate and torture black people. Second, in doing so, and through the reference to Deliverance, it solidifies Foxy Brown’s position as a point of identification for black men as well as black women, both in her rape and in her revenge.

As Claire Henry points out, Foxy Brown, and other blaxploitation films, often aren’t included as part of the rape/revenge canon. Henry argues that this is because white society (and white critics) do not see black women’s rapes as important, or worthy of attention. Stephane Dunn notes, though, that the rape/revenge in Foxy Brown is in many ways downplayed; Foxy shows no ill-effects from sexual violence, nor for that matter from her forced heroin injections. Rape serves as a metaphor for white violence against blacks, but the specificity of the individual trauma of rape is lost — as well as the specificity of the historical sexual violence unleashed against black women.

The rape/revenge genre, then, focuses on white women, and has trouble thinking about the intersection of race and rape. Blaxploitation focuses on racial exploitation — and has trouble thinking about the intersection of race and rape. Foxy Brown doesn’t so much resolve the dialectic as illustrate it. Hill includes a rape/revenge skit in the middle of a blaxploitation revenge feature, and showing how the two parallel each other, but never, quite, manages to bring the two together into a whole that honors and sympathizes with black women’s historical, and ongoing, experience of sexual violence.
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One possible exception to the above is Talia Lugacy’s The Descent (2007). One of the few rape/revenge films with a female director, it also is unusual in featuring a woman of color; Rosario Dawson plays Maya, the lead.

As often happens with rape/revenge films, The Descent gets a worse rep than it deserves. This critic for example attacks it in part because he doesn’t understand why she refuses to go to the police (maybe women of color don’t share your faith in the cops, maybe?) and because the rape scene is insufficiently explicit (how can we care about sexual violence unless it’s really spectacular and gross?)

But while The Descent isn’t a disaster, it can’t be said to be a success, either. The film does confront race head on. Jared, the rapist football player jerk, uses racist insults as he date rapes Maya. More, his frat-boy persona and indeed the whole college milieu is figured as white; the best part of the film is the way that it functions as a kind of sickening send up of Dead Poets Society and the typical John Hughes rom com. Jared brags about seizing the day and takes Maya out to see the stars and keeps pushing at her and pushing at her boundaries, just the way you’re supposed to do, and isn’t that cute that he’s such a swoony deep romantic John Cusack lead— and then, whoops, it turns out that swoony deep romantic lead is in fact an awful priviliged racist raping shit.

The revenge part of the film seems to have racial overtones as well, though the handling of them is less sure. In reaction to the rape, Maya starts to take risks; she frequents a club where the clientele is black, Hispanic, and queer. Mya’s non-white identity becomes a kind of alternative to the square, college life with its hypocrisy and violence.

The solidarity in the face of oppression is never expressed unambituously as it is in Foxy Brown, though; instead of framing resistance to white supremacy as politics, it ends up being presented as titillating lifestyle choice, complete with BDSM games and foot fetishism. It’s not clear, either, what we’re to make of Maya in this setting. Has the rape degraded her and damaged her by pushing her into this more interracial milieu? Has the rape opened her up to sexual and communal possibilities (as she suggests at the end)? Neither of these seems like a very thoughtful takeaway, and, perhaps realizing as much, the film vacillates between them in confusion. As in Foxy Brown, rape/revenge doesn’t seem quite able to tie together its themes of sexual and racial violence. In these films not all women are white, and not all men are black, but while women of color exist, at least as far as rape/revenge has managed so far, their outlines remain blurry.

Suffering With a Purpose

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In the 70s, rape/revenge turned into a genre based on feministsploitation. Films like I Spit On Your Grave, Lipstick, and Ms. 45 presented rape as part of the structural oppression of women, and female revenge as a way to overthrow, and often literally castrate, the patriarchy. Even rape/revenge films that did not specifically use feminism as a lever, like Last House on the Left, spent significant time placing viewer identification with the women suffering violence. The film’s were certainly prurient and exploitive, but they also presented sexual violence as important,and its victims as not just sympathetic, but worthy of a privileged point of view and narrative place.

This is not the case for the Last House on the Left’s direct inspiration, The Virgin Spring. Ingmar Berman’s 1960 classic is a rape/revenge in terms of plot; set in medieval times, it is about a young girl who is raped and murdered by bandits on her way to church, and whose father then kills the murderers. But where the 70s rape/revenge films put feminism, Virgin Spring puts God.

Karin (Birgitta Pettersson) does get screentime in the first half of the film, it’s true—but her character amounts to little more than assurances that she is the perfect, perfectly innocent rape victim. She oversleeps and is a little spoiled, perhaps, but she is kind, loving, full of life, and trusting—she feeds the bandits her lunch because she wants to help strangers before she realizes they mean her ill.

All the depth, soul-searching, and internal conflict in the film is reserved for Karin’s friend and parents—and especially for her father, Tore, played by the even-then celebrated Max von Sydow. As far as the film is concerned, Karin’s assault is important less for its place in her life, than for its effect on her father and his relationship with God.

Since it’s a Bergman film, that relationship is fraught and dramatic. Tore chastises himself with branches before he goes forth to slay his daughter’s sleeping killers. In the final scene, after finding his child’s body, he staggers off to the side of the clearing, and looking away from the camera addresses the deity directly. “God, you saw it! God, you saw it!” he declares. An innocent died and God did nothing. Like Job’s, Tore’s loss is an object lesson in the problem of faith and evil. And then, after Tore pledges to build a church as expiation for his sin of violence, a spring miraculously begins to flow from the ground beneath Karin’s head. God did see, and Karin, we’re surely meant to believe, is in heaven. Karin’s death is first a dramatic moment in Tore’s internal life,and then a dramatic moment in God’s narrative of suffering and redemption.
 

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The cinematography throughout emphasizes the sense of a cold, but beautiful order beneath, and gazing upon, the tragedy. The dramatic image of Sydow standing beside, and then wrestling, with the tree serves as a metaphor for Tore’s isolation—and for the fact that God (the tree, the eye watching the tree) is there even in the bleakest landscape.

There’s no question that Virgin Spring is a striking film to look at. And it deals with big, important themes—God, justice, mercy, violence, the place of man in the cosmos. But still, the very elevation of theme and vision can start to seem unseemly, built as it is on the torture and death of a person whose suffering is decidedly tangential. When Sydow goes the full ham Shakespeare route and gazes at his hands to let us know that he’s disturbed about murdering the thugs the staginess becomes almost insupportable. We get it Mr. Bergman. We are watching something profound. How can Karin have suffered in vain if she lets us contemplate the beauty that is Sydow in full stricken emoting?

In comparison, the later rape/revenge exploitation, acknowledging its prurient investment in both sex and violence, seems relatively honest—and certainly less grandly distanced from the trauma. In the 70s rape/revenge, the camera is not at some perfect remove, but often chaotically close to the action, trying to keep up, or get out of the way (as in the still below from Ms. 45).
 

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Exploitation films are often criticized for having no higher purpose; for being exercises in sleaze, stimulation, and unpleasantness for their own sake. Virgin Spring makes me wonder, though, whether a higher purpose can in its own way be more indecent than sensationalism. Better to suffer for no reason, than so that God and dad and the filmmaker can be profound, and reconciled.
 

Nice Guys, Finished

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In his recent post on Audition, Bert Stabler points out that the film is essentially a rape-revenge genre story. And yet, something isn’t quite right. Normally, we should experience the humiliation (and the sadistic pleasure) of the rape first, and then experiencing the sadistic pleasure (and the humiliation) of the revenge. That is the the inevitable, brutal, giddy fulcrum of narrative works. Conflict/resolution; crime/justice; brutality/counter-brutality; rape-revenge. It is the engine of plot stripped down to a crude, pointed bone.

In Audition, as I said, this simple axis of event goes awry. The front half of the film is essentially a romantic-comedy buildup — evoking a different, and perhaps uncomfortably analogous narrative simplicity. Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) , a producer and widower devastated by the loss of his wife, decides, at the urging of his son, to find a girlfriend. A director friend offers to hold a false film audition so that Aoyama can pick/ask out the most appealing of the actresses. Aoyama chooses a striking young ballet dancer, Asami (Eihi Shiina), who reciprocates his interest.

Only towards the film’s end does the rape start to coalesce, not as event but as disjointed image and memory. Our friendly middle-aged protagonist Aoyama learns (or imagines?) that his lover, Asami , was brutally tortured by her middle-aged dance instructor, and that she cut off his feet in revenge. Eventually, in what may be a dream, Asami cuts off Aoyama’s foot, linking him to her brutalizer. Essentially, rape and revenge occur simultaneously, or apparently simultaneously. The punishment calls forth the crime, or identifies the criminal. The narrative doesn’t drive the film so much as appear frozen and flickering at the end, a slowly strobing cascade of horror and violence playing ambiguously in the interstices of a supposedly more innocent life. Former audition and later exploitation merge; the film’s second half infects its first, and both intentionally implicate the director as manipulator of rape, revenge, and narrative. Indeed, with sequence broken, character starts to come apart as well, the filmmaker merges not just with Aoyama and his skeevy evaluation of female pulchritude, but with Asami and her gleeful vivisection. Scopophilia and sadism burst out of their narrative bonds to revel in frozen tableau — abjection freed from the facade of justice.

The 1984 Clint Eastwood film Tightrope has an oddly similar trajectory. Here too, a rape-revenge narrative wanders vaguely off its well-marked track. Police detective Wes Block (Eastwood) is, like Aoyama, a single dad (divorced, in his case) who loves his children (daughters, here)…but who also has an unpleasant side. Block frequents prostitutes, and seems to have a general inability to keep his dick in his pants. This complicates things considerably, since Block is pursuing a mysterious killer who rapes and murders prostitutes. The killer starts to follow Block and murder the prostitutes he sleeps with, and finally we learn that he (the killer) was once a cop himself.

Block and the killer, then, are insistently linked and doubled — and the film clearly flirts with the idea that it is Block himself who is the murderer. The murderer uses handcuffs on his victims; Block, too, has a thing for handcuffs in bed. The murderer likes to use ribbons for strangulation. Block…uses his tie.
 

 
When Block’s daughter (played by Eastwood’s real-life daughter) is raped by the killer, it becomes, paradoxically and queasily both the rape and the revenge — it is the trauma which punishes Block for the same trauma that he (the killer) has inflicted.

So, just as in Audition, the confusion of the rape/revenge is tied to a blurring or scrambling of characters. And also as in Audition, the complication or confusion of that narrative tends to create a fetishistic stillness. In Tightrope, this occurs not through dream-like images, but instead through repetitive focus on significant objects. The killer is identified again and again by a slow pan down to his shoes; his trademark red ribbons appear repetitively at different crime scenes; and of course because the killer is following the cop and the cop is following the killer, locations and characters repeat themselves with more ominous meaning (and music) as the film circles around and around itself in a slow twisting effort to catch its own tail.

Tightrope ultimately turns its back on its art film impulses and scurries back to the safety of being a Hollywood piece of shit, complete with dunderheaded final chase scene and Block heroically redeemed by fisticuffs and a good woman, not necessarily in that order. But before that happens, it, like Audition, exchanges the brutal rush of narrative for the immobile despair of, as Bert puts it, “endless defeat.” In these films, rape and trauma are not so much crimes that can be punished as stains that you stare at, day in and day out, till you can’t tell the nice guys from the sinners, nor violation from revenge.

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.