Showgirls (1995): A Movie of Two Extremes: Pure Ambition and Pure Crap

Showgirls (1995)
dir: Paul Verhoeven

[taken and slightly expanded from my comments originally posted at The Dissolve]

[Trigger Warning]

Showgirls is a special failure. Very special. Verhoeven has the highest aspirations and, with Joe Esterhasz, created a plot that drives home his points about the sordid underbelly of Las Vegas. Yes, it uses the framework of All About Eve, but Showgirls isn't All About Eve, and Elizabeth Berkeley is no Anne Baxter.

There are two major faults with Showgirls that no movie can overcome: a terrible actress, and a terrible screenplay. In other words, Elizabeth Berkeley and Joe Esterhasz. Berkeley cannot act. That's a statement of fact. She never could. Growing up with Saved By the Bell, none of those kids could really act. None of them realized it. And, sadly, none of them ever would learn. Which was sad for those of us who hoped for more speedo clad movies with Mario Lopez going further down the gay movie pole. But, I digress. Berkeley's shining moment of Saved by the Bell was Jessie's Song, which had the era-defining "I'm So Excited...I'm So Scared" moment after a whole episode dedicated to caffeine pills. That one scene would define her whole acting presence in Showgirls.

Most reclamations gloss over most of the offensively bad parts that feature Berkeley and Esterhasz. Where she pulls out a switchblade on the driver, then stabs the radio playing Garth Brooks. The driver then swerves the truck to the shoulder, almost hitting a semi, then swerves back to the road once she puts it away, almost hitting the semi again. These people are histrionic.

Even when the terrible parts are mentioned by these revisionists, they gloss over Nomi's inexplicable attitude problems. How, in the initial meeting with Molly, Nomi goes from attacking a car, the pavement, soda, ketchup, and then the fries themselves...to suddenly moving into seductress mode without even a pause. And, Molly who sees a girl who is as violent as she is scared and refuses to answer her questions about identity and even mindless chit-chat, after knowing this girl for 10 minutes, offers her a place to live in her trailer. WHAT THE HELL?! This offer wasn't just unexpected to Nomi Malone, it was unbelievable to the audience.

The screenplay continues on with passages of dialogue that is frequently bad, but sometimes transcends to truly awful. The primary example of this would be:

"You fucked him AND her."
"Were you following me?! I didn't fuck anybody!!"
"I saw you! Man everybody got AIDS and shit. You know, what is it that you think you do? You fuck 'em without fucking them, that's what you do!" 

There's all kinds of wrong in this dialogue, not even talking about the logistics of getting AIDS without having sex. This dialogue isn't about a threesome, or even oral sex. This is about the infamous lap dance sequence where Nomi Malone gives Kyle MacLachlan a lapdance. This terrible dialogue would frequently transcend the realm of awful into the realm of ridiculous.

Somewhere in Showgirls is a morality movie that is essential and needed to be made. A story of power struggles, exploitation, and the perception of dancing vs stripping. Plus, who holds the money, money as power, and what money, power, and success can buy you. Unfortunately, that got piled full of shit like Edna Bazoom and her honking dress as a mother figure, or Nomi's washing machine antics of sex.

Verhoeven doesn't realize how terrible it is. Because, he tries. And he succeeds in polishing the turd. There is some amazing cinematography, set ups, themes, and everything technical. It's an astounding movie in terms of its visuals and its pacing. Even as an unintentional comedy. Verhoeven isn't really to fault...except he chose the actress and helped write the script.

[More after Jump, including discussion and image of the rape scene and its presence in the film]

Barrio Tales (2012): SNICK for adults

Barrio Tales (2012)
dir: Jarret Tarnol

For a certain subsection of my age group, especially those immediately younger than I am, there was a very defining and important Saturday night television block called SNICK.  While the line up changed, its influence stuck around. The first block was anchored with the continuation of Clarissa Explains it All and The Ren & Stimpy Show, both of which skewed slightly older than Nick, but younger than MTV.  In between was Roundhouse and the seeming inspiration for this movie, Are You Afraid of the Dark?  Snick was a ritual when you were 11 or under.  Even if you were having a party, you still watched it with friends because you shouldn't be out at night in the cold snow.

3 of the 4 SNICK shows had commitment to a certain tonality.  It was campy, winking, somewhat post-modern, and always light.  Are You Afraid of the Dark? was a kiddie version of Tales from the Crypt, as it was an anthology horror story series told by teenagers around a campfire.  It didn't feature themes of hardcore sex, drug use, or out and outright violence, but it did have campy creepy horror stories that were easy to laugh off the boogie monster.  Are You Afraid of the Dark? maintained the tonality of television that felt like it was made by kids for kids.  It wasn't a cheap look or feel, but always had that sort of ultra fake-y sense.

It seems fitting that it would inspire Barrio Tales, especially when you realize that one of the writers and producers of Barrio Tales, Brent Tarnol, had appeared as a guest on All That, a later SNICK show that ran concurrently with Are You Afraid of the Dark? And, if SNICK's tonality didn't inspire Barrio Tales, then Barrio Tales certain stole enough from the shows.

Barrio Tales plays like a racially motivated, and rather adult, version of Are You Afraid of the Dark?.  The framing device is 2 white kids from the suburbs are looking for drugs, and cross the Mexican border to score something.  They're looking for Pedro, but meet this Mexican dude who has them sit around a campfire to wait for Pedro, and tells them horror stories about racial inequalities.

The first story concerns a maid named Maria who was recently hired by a rich family to take care of the house, do the laundry, make sandwiches, whatever.  The son of the family comes home early to find his parents have gone to Turks & Caicos for vacation, so he invites three of his druggy friends over.  Three of the four characters are rich bitch caricatures and are assholes to the Maria, to the point of sexual harassment, while the fourth is nice and sympathetic.  As this is a horror movie, the play gets a little rough and there is much revenge to be had.

The second story concerns a taco truck where there is a secret ingredient that makes the tacos tastes so good.  I'm not giving you the spoiler alert because that's how the whole story is introduced before the title even gets put on screen.  The first thing that happens is that the kids wandering around the neighborhood realize there are a bunch of kidnappings and disappearances around the neighborhood. If this were a better movie, we would be fixated on the taco truck and how it's doing what it's doing.  But, instead, we're laden with the mystery crime solvers and their usual camp value.

The third is the most racially motivated of the three.  It concerns a group of rednecks who kidnap a bunch of migrant workers and torture, rape, and kill them. Until one guy escapes and then exacts bloody revenge on the rednecks.  It's totally steeped in stereotypes, as a SNICK venture would be, but it is also mildly gruesome, and has a lot of sex in it.

The main problem with the movie is that it is a SNICK movie for the people who outgrew SNICK.  It's campy, jovial, obvious, and silly.  But, on the other hand, there are drugs galore, brutal murders, rape, and excessively foul language that seem to belie its kiddie television nature.  I'd almost say that was a commentary on the state of the kids today.  Kids in the inner city are subjected to drugs and murder every day.  Just listen to the This American Life segment on a high school in inner city Chicago.  It's far more soul searing than watching a bunch of idiots go killing each other.

In light of that, Barrio Tales is a relatively light-hearted half-horror movie that is alternately gruesome and slightly brutal.  Barrio Tales is an after-school horror movie where the message is "treat other races well."  It has a very VERY select audience given its mixed tonality.  I didn't connect with it, but I can imagine that there might be some who would.  A very few some, but some nonetheless.:

Descent (2007): Rape-Revenge as a tone poem

Descent (2007)
dir: Talia Lugacy

Recently, I went off looking for horror movies directed by women.  Reel Grrls recommends Pet Semetary, which leads to the catalog of Mary Lambert films.  There is Stephanie Rothman, whose pre-1980 catalog will certainly get looked at here as I find copies of the movies.  Mary Harron has a couple under her belt, including last week's review American Psycho.  The Soska twins who directed American Mary, a rape-revenge movie crossed with body horror.  And, then I stumble upon Talia Lugacy's Descent.

Descent is as much a tone poem as it is a horror movie.  It attempts to explore the depths of the emotional devastation a woman suffers when she is raped and the distance she'll go through to get revenge.  Yeah, guys, this is yet another rape revenge movie...but this one is quite different.

The story of Descent is a bit different to begin with.  It's the story of Maya (Rosario Dawson), a college girl who swings both ways.  She's experimental and intellectual.  She's aloof and a little bit pointy when she talks with men.  She has men run the gamut of her brain through trials in order just to go on a date with her, nevertheless to hook up with her.  She also lets down her walls with women a lot easier than she does with men.

While at a house party, Jared (Chad Faust) forcibly hits on her until she gives in and chats with him at the party.  They hit it off enough to go on a separate date.  The date is nice, though it is a bit of an intellectual ping pong game.  Maya goes home with Jared.  He lights candles.  Puts on subtly sexy music.  And, they start making out.  Until Maya decides that she doesn't want to go all the way, and Jared date rapes her because he is too far gone.  This isn't the explicitly anti-woman rape of American Mary or I Spit On Your Grave or Victim.  Nor is this the drug-clouded crossing the line of The Skin I Live In.  This is a date rape where the lines weren't explicitly drawn prior to making out by 2 adults, and then 1 adult draws the line as the other is charging right over it.  It's still just as violating, but the situation is much more common, and risky to report.  It is all the more violating when the date rapist knows he is forcing himself on the woman and is whispering all sorts of misogynistic and racist epithets in her ear.

After Jared violates Maya, she dives into a hazy world of distanced depression, alcohol, and drugs in a hip hop club that may be kind of underground.  The details of this fall are left intentionally vague to make a more poetic universal representation of depression instead of something more explicitly plot laden.  Through this, she connects with Adrian, a DJ at the club who takes in the helpless.  Adrian is also a powerful force, as shown by some guy who worships him enough to smoke a cigarette from between his toes?  Yeah, the movie is going into D/s land here.

The movie is also exploring the racial reclamation of Maya.  In the first act, she had been the usual college girl, generally reserved to doing average white college girl things like going to white college house parties.  Or, so the Talia Lugacy wants you to think.  Apparently, house parties are only the domain of whiteness while the underground hip hop club is the essence of blackness?  Lugacy's racial politics here are exceedingly amateur, especially compared to the loving care that she puts on the feminist touches of the rape revenge portion.

During the second act, in a vague sense, Maya and Jared concoct a revenge plan on Jared, which provides the third act of the movie.  The revenge has Maya making Jared strip naked, tying him up, then violating him...and then has Adrian violate Jared as well.  This rape scene finale is over 20 minutes from strip to to end in the NC-17 edition.  Just to contrast, the rape scene in Irreversible is 9 minutes. To further contrast, Descent's first rape scene is about 10 minutes from basement wine to end, with only 3 of those being the actual rape portion.

Descent works and it doesn't.  And it doesn't work for the same reason it does.  The whole film is practically tonally flat.  From the opening scene all the way up to the strip scene, the tone and pacing of Descent remains remarkably cold and distancing.  For the middle portion of the film, this makes sense as it matches Maya's descent into depression, but the opening of the film is tonally exactly the same as the post-rape sequences, leaving an similarity that shouldn't exist.  We should feel like Maya is more in love with life before the rape than after.  Instead, it feels like she's as disaffected as she always was.

The second act also stalls almost.  The emotional descent is more of a meander in a vaguely downward direction.  Maya wanders into this club life and becomes infatuated with Adrian for some reason or another.  But, its all so vague and hazy and then there's school and work.  This feels exactly like life. The dialogue really doesn't even need to exist in this film for it to work.  You could watch this movie on mute, and it would be an even better film.  In that manner, it is a much more emotional film that tries grasping at the depression.  While the second act of the movie totally achieves the distancing emotion of post-trauma, the first act is so similar that the impact just isn't there.

Where the movie really really differs from the other rape revenge movies is that there is hardly any sexualizing of Rosario Dawson's body.  She never gets naked.  She isn't wearing slutty clothes.  She is just a woman.  Even in American Mary, Mary is frequently traipsing around in more revealing fetishwear for the camera to linger over. However, in the NC-17 edition of Descent, which is (surprisingly) streaming on Netflix, Chad Faust gets fully naked.  Fully frontal nudity.  And, Adrian is stripped halfway down his ass.  Descent allows for the sexualizing of the male body while denying the men the pleasure of sexualizing the female body.

Through the eyes of Descent, this is the first feminist rape-revenge movie that truly doesn't pander to an assumed male audience.  It violates the male, and also sexualizes the male completely.  It provides a completely different experience to the other rape-revenge movies with those changes.  But, that doesn't mean that it isn't problematic.

The main moral problem is that the movie uses homosexual acts as a punishment, thus othering the gay act even as Adrian is exclaiming that he's not a "faggot" and that he's just raping Jared as revenge. Basically, Tulia Lugacy thinks it is more OK to use homophobic epithets than it is to use racist epithets, which...ugh. Adding on top of that the D/s relationship of the foot smoker in the club, it really makes for a disappointment in the edges of the message.  Considering the innovation that Talia uses for the rest of the movie and the great pains she goes to in order to successfully desexualize the female, and exploit the male, I can't help but feel a bit hurt that she couldn't have innovated a way to not make the rape scene use so much homosexual action.

However, Descent gets the tone of the finale correct.  Even though we're not given the explicit build up, nor even an honest feeling of how Maya turns from depressed victim into vengeance seeker, the climax is astounding.  It's intimate.  Maya is excited despite herself.  Adrian, the tool of the vengeance, is eager to violate the man that violated his friend.  But, Maya has no satisfaction from the revenge.  In the end, she still is violated and has now participated in and perpetrated the violation of another human being even if that human was her violator.  With just one look, Descent calls into question the revenge based justice system that people frequently tout.  Is revenge justification enough to completely punish offenders?  Will it actually bring closure and satisfaction to the families of the victims?  Will it just compound the hurt and the anger?  Descent doesn't answer these questions, it just brings up the idea that revenge does not make everything whole again.  This same final shot is used as the final shot in Zero Dark Thirty to call into question the moral toll of torture.

Descent isn't a pleasant movie to watch, but it also isn't as raw and disturbing as other rape/revenge movies reviewed here.  It is more harrowing, and more of a tone poem than a horror movie, though it is quite horrific.  Make no mistake, it is quite explicit in the finale (though it doesn't go so far to feature actual penetration if you're looking to get your kinky jollies out on the screen).  But, the feminist changes in Descent make it an intriguing and different addition to the rape/revenge genre.

American Mary (2012): Feminism through Independence

American Mary (2012)
dir: Jen and Sylvia Soska

Last month, we had a variety of rape-revenge movies directed by men.  There was The Woman by Lucky McKee, I Spit On Your Grave by Mier Zarchi, and Ticked-Off Trannies With Knives by Israel Luna.  Ticked-Off Trannies had men either in drag or identifying as women getting raped, but the other two are women getting raped.  We explored the differences between them, and how the point of view of The Woman makes it much more problematic than I Spit On Your Grave, even if it shies away from the actual acts.

In 2012, Jen and Sylvia Soska made their second horror movie, American Mary, a rape-revenge horror movie they combined with the body horror genre, the Giallo genre, and the coming of age genre.  While the end result of this genre mashing isn't disturbing, scary or intense, it is moody, gothy, tense at times, and wholly fascinating.

American Mary refers to Mary Mason, a young medical student studying to be a surgeon of some kind. She has financial difficulties, and is targeted by her professor for various minor indiscretions, such as a phone ringing in class or missing a lecture. While the audience may think that some sort of reprimand is justified (letting your phone ring in class is just plain rude), Dr Grant seems to take special delight in making the reprimand seem personal and harsh.

In order to make ends meet, Mary applies to become a stripper, but due to a last minute circumstance, ends up performing surgery on a guy who has been tortured for whatever reason.  The motivations of a strip club owner torturing guys and removing their eyeballs is never made completely clear, but the owner says "no questions" and the movie just lets it flow.

Following this surgery, she is contacted by a stripper named Beatress, who has been getting plastic surgery to make her look like Betty Boop (if you squint your eyes).  Beatress has a friend, Ruby, who wants to be turned into a doll.  And, by "turned into a doll," Ruby wants to have her nipples and labia removed, and her vagina closed up as much as possible.  This is because Ruby wants to be idealized and not sexualized.

Meanwhile, at her residency, Mary is noted for her professional bedside manner, and is invited to a late-night after-hours party by Dr. Walsh...where she is drugged and raped (onscreen, briefly, but clothed) by Dr. Grant.  For whatever reason, she doesn't go to the cops, but drops out of med school, and decides to go into underground body modification surgery, where she eventually develops a good reputation under the name Bloody Mary.

But, first, she must exact revenge on Dr. Grant by performing her first BME surgeries (without anesthetic), including teeth filing, genital mutilation, tongue splitting, and amputation.  Weirdly, this series of surgeries happens offscreen, with a flourish of a body-mod hand drawing.

Bloody Mary becomes a bigger and bigger success in the BME community as time goes by.  She earns a reputation, and puts together a website, as well as does a series of surgeries on a pair of twins who run an influential website, or something.  The cops come snooping around the missing Dr. Grant.  But, they find nothing.

At some point, the movie mildly treads water in a reverse CSI mode, where we think the cops keep getting closer. When the movie has padded it's running time enough, it decides to kick in the finale. Finally, after all this time (which seems like weeks, if not months...especially since her reputation needed to develop), Ruby's husband sees the surgery she had, and kills Ruby, beats Beatress, and then attacks Mary, stabbing her.  But, Mary sews herself up to die of internal bleeding. Yeah, it is a bit out of the blue.

Outside of the completely left field ending, the movie is well executed and just plain moody.  It may be disturbing to people not into BME, but to those used to it, it is mainly just a picture about a girl who does surgery for awhile, with some detectives following her.  It's almost Giallo-esque, but it doesn't have the blood and gore scenes to back that up.  It's very body horror, but it rarely gets close to the surgeries to be in that horrific.  But, what it is is political.

In interviews, the Soska sisters have said that they started out as actresses where they would end up with bit parts that sounded like a Vivid resume.  Hooker #2 this, or Call Girl that. And, they wrote Dead Hooker in a Trunk to mock that.  Then, they wrote American Mary as a response to the idea that there really was no big named horror villain that was a female.  There was no real female equivalent of Jason or Freddy. And, in the vein of American Psycho, they chose to make the whole movie about the villain.

As such, they've made a movie about rape, rape culture, and feminine power in the face of it all.  While there are 5 speaking male characters, 3 are rather rapey (Billy Barker, Dr Grant and Dr Walsh) while 2 are rather nice.  And, Mary's only 2 "victims" are Dr. Grant and a security guard who comes across her and her post-surgery Dr. Grant.  Mary isn't a psychotic serial killer.  She just does body mods, and she is doing things her way.

The movie is also notable for its female point of view.  Some of the strippers who are at the club want to be strippers.  Beatress, looking like Betty Boop, seems to be making shittons of money stripping.  She is able to just randomly throw thousands of dollars on her friend's surgery ($12,200 to be exact) and provide some cocaine on top of it.  How?  I dunno!  And, the camera looks at female bodies, but is only lingering when a man is in the room.

It is all about the female perspective.

Ticked Off Trannies With Knives (2010): Tranny as Victim and Victor

Ticked Off Trannies With Knives (2010)
dir: Israel Luna

This could also be better known as Day of the Tranny.  While Ticked Off Trannies With Knives is an amazing exploitation title, Day of the Tranny would be better because a) it acknowledges the deep deep debt it owes to I Spit On Your Grave, originally titled Day of the Woman and b) it doesn't reduce the victims to mere exploitation punch-lines. While the title is certainly sensational, it also belies the actual subject of the movie, which is a rape/murder-revenge fantasy that mirrors I Spit On Your Grave in terms of its harrowing nature and its possible empowerment messaging.

I could basically just write ditto on yesterday's I Spit On Your Grave review, and it would be completely accurate.  Well, not completely.  This has a bit more style, pizzazz, and personality than I Spit On Your Grave, which works to simultaneously humanize the victims, and actually be a better movie.  Oh, and I would have to replace Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel with GLAAD.

Ticked-Off Trannies is about a group of trannies - drag queens, transvestites, or transgendered people; in this movie, its more the first two - who go off on dates with a group of bio-gendered men, only to be drugged, beaten, raped and murdered, leaving one survivor.  This survivor and two more of her friends set traps for the rapist-murderers in order to exact bloody revenge.  Much like I Spit On Your Grave, that's the thick and thin of the plot.

Because of the title, Ticked-Off Trannies With Knives received a LOT of undeserved attention for being reductive of the perils that come with being a drag queen, transvestite or transgendered person.  In real life, they usually sit on the outsides of life, and are the target of bigoted attacks or murders.  One prominent example was in the movie Paris is Burning, a documentary about the Harlem ball culture of the underground LGBTQ scene, where one of the prime subjects of the movie, Venus Xtravaganza, was found strangled underneath a bed four days after she was murdered.  This is not a punchline.

And, Ticked-Off Trannies, despite its title, does not treat this situation like a punchline.  Much like I Spit On Your Grave, this is a harrowing, gut-wrenching experience which scars your soul.  It brings attention to the situation of violence against trans people, and also alludes to the idea that there is no justice for the outsiders of the world.  Much like I Spit On Your Grave, Ticked-Off Trannies alludes to the idea that the best justice is your own justice.

Luna acknowledges his owing to the movies of the '70s, as well as his inspiration from the Rodriguez/Tarantino movie Grindhouse. He rips through this classic exploitation flick and stylizes it like it came out of the grindhouse of the '70s.  Luna does have some gags to speed the movie up, like a missing reel gag, which brings a bit of humor to make the harrowing experience a less bitter pill to swallow and make it slightly more appealing to the masses.  Slightly.

Also, like I Spit On Your Grave, the rape/murder is excruciating, but it also comes back to identity.  As a member of the LGBTQ community, I found it harrowing and easier to identify with the victims.  And, it is the victims' story.  Luna doesn't allow the rape/murder to be intentionally vicariously enjoyed. He makes it as brutal as tense as one can in a horror movie.  But, that doesn't mean it can't be enjoyed by the sick portion of the population who are determined to enjoy the torture and rape of another human being.

Is this problematic?  Again, it's up to you to decide that.  This is decidedly not a movie to encourage or make light of the violence the Ts face in everyday life.  This is a movie that brings this to attention, and doesn't even give the pat justifications of a movie like Boys Don't Cry, where the FTM transgendered person lied to everybody around her.  Ticked-Off Trannies gives a full-on exploitation experience that brings attention to the issue, and also gives a revenge fantasy when it could be needed.

And, I repeat, due to its stylization, it is less soul searing than I Spit On Your Grave, but not much isn't really.

I Spit On Your Grave (1978): Woman as Victim and Victor

I Spit On Your Grave (1978)
dir: Mier Zarchi

In 1978, a movie was self-distributed titled Day of the Woman.  Later, it was picked up for slightly wider distribution, and re-released as I Spit On Your Grave. The impact of this film was both solid and null, thanks in large part to its graphic nature. Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel rallied against this movie, calling it depraved, and immoral.  They considered the violence to be purely exploitative, and just as damaging to women due to their perception of the exploitative nature of the rape.  They were wrong. Maybe.

I Spit On Your Grave is one of the most disturbing and harrowing movie experiences one could find.  I remember the first time I encountered the movie.  In my film class, we had just finished watching Last House on the Left, the old Wes Craven rape-revenge movie that Americanized and politicized Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring.  I had commented that Last House wasn't as shocking or brutal as I had been expecting, and was softened by the comic relief of the police, the hick music, and that the torture was way more psychological than I had been expecting; the result of the politicization of the subject matter.  My professor handed me a semi-bootleg of I Spit On Your Grave, and this had been the movie I had been expecting.

I Spit On Your Grave is a raw, amateur rape-revenge movie that does not flinch from nor does it glorify the act of rape.  It is a 100-minute movie, but it has no plot development beyond big city female author comes to backwoods, gets gang raped, and exacts bloody revenge.  But, the tonality of the film sets it apart from other files of its ilk, like Last House on the Left, The Accused, and Ms. 45.  

I Spit On Your Grave features a grueling and excruciating 24 minute sequence of Jennifer, the main woman, being repeatedly trapped, raped, and freed by a group of four men.  There is no soundtrack.  There is no joy in this sequence.  There are amplified volumes of the woman screaming.  There is no silly thwaping sound that would reduce the horror, or hint at any eroticism, on screen.  There are distorted close-ups of the faces of the male rapists, not distorted enough to be cartoonish, but enough to be frightening.  It is a harrowing experience from the victim's point of view.

Then, we get a bit of downtime before we get a 30 minute sequence of Jennifer ensnaring the men and then brutally murdering them.  Unlike the rape scenes, this is filled with semi-heroic imagery and are primarily from the perpetrator's point of view: that of the woman.  These are much more filled with victory and resolution than the rape, which is filled with horror and dread.

As such, I Spit On Your Grave is intended to be almost a feminist fantasy tract where it shows how brutal men are to women, and it also shows that a woman is perfectly capable of extracting her own revenge.

It's problematic in its text, but it isn't nearly as problematic as Lucky McKee's The Woman.  In The Woman, McKee is attempting to take a point of view of a judgmental third party, but mainly focuses on the "civilized" family.  We have a lot of point of view shots from both victim and aggressor.  It becomes seriously problematic in terms of how to process the crimes we are seeing on screen.  Are we supposed to be encouraging the misogynist?  Are we supposed to be empathizing with one party over another?  Only by going over the top has Lucky McKee achieved any level of distance between the viewer and the aggressor.

In I Spit On Your Grave, Zarchi never gives us the point of view of the rapist.  We never lust over Jennifer's body.  There aren't long lingering shots that romanticize the woman's body during any of the rape sequences.  These are raw and brutal acts that pierce your soul, if you're watching it right.  On the other hand, due to the nature of film, it is often a third-party camera.  There is a way, if you're sick enough, to enjoy this rape sequence for the act of rape itself.  I'm sure there are people who watch it and say "yeah, that's how it should be done" even though it is another person suffering.

Therein lies a rub.  Should an act be depicted if somebody else can get vicarious pleasure from it?  Should the depictions be more like Natural Born Killers, where we can take the viewpoint of the killers, even as Oliver Stone is trying to condemn our consumption of the act? As in Irreversible, should these brutal acts be depicted in an distant way?  Should it be more like Fight Club's final edit of Angel's face breaking, where the act happens mainly off-screen, denying the viewer any vicarious thrill from it, and leaving it to the imagination?

These are actual questions that will always be up for debate, and have answers that probably differ between people, and between acts, and between movies and intent.  But, in the case of I Spit On Your Grave, Zarchi didn't make this movie for the pleasure of showing rape.  He made it to depict a revenge fantasy.  He wanted a strong woman in it to exact her own revenge.  And, once the revenge is done, the credits roll.

The Woman (2011): Text vs Subtext

The Woman (2011)

dir: Lucky McKee

The problem with indulging in the text as you're condemning in the subtext, is that sometimes the condemnation message is lost in the actual commentary.  Spring Breakers suffers from that a little.  Natural Born Killers suffered from the rampant indulgence in lurid violence while trying to condemn it.  And, then, there's The Woman.

Given that the majority of movie goers, especially horror watchers, will rarely indulge in seeking out the back history of a writer or director of certain movies, it is necessary to take movies out of their authorial context, and analyze it on its own merits.  Lucky McKee is a writer and director of many movies that have affinities for women.  May, for instance, is a movie about a girl who is strange, and can't deal with the friends who have masks. If we lean on McKee's strong feminist tendencies, then we have an obvious answer about what the movie is trying to say, but it still requires parsing out whether the subtext of the condemnation supercedes the actual text of the movie.

The title character of The Woman is a feral girl who is found in the woods by Chris Cleek, a family man and lawyer, who is also very controlling and demanding of his family of 2 daughters and a son.  Cleek sets up his backyard cellar to hold The Woman hostage, under the auspices of "civilizing" her.  As per this formula, Cleek sets upon destroying The Woman to try to bring her to his idea of womanhood, which is passive towards men and everybody.

From the outset, Cleek is a raging misogynist, while his wife and teenage daughter are living in mental prisons of passivity.  His littlest daughter is still in the formulation stage, and his tween/teen son has already picked up Dad's bad habits towards humanity.  

And, as we watch the movie, we watch Chris chain The Woman, shoot her, strip her, power wash her, rape her, and otherwise abuse her.  Later, we see the aftermath of his son torturing The Woman with a pair of needlenose pliers while pleasuring himself.  We also see Chris beat women left and right, and his son do petty pains against girls for little reason.  Textually, The Woman is a movie that consistently indulges in men beating or raping girls or women.  It's always presented in a "horrific" tone, but it does little to diminish that almost all of the abuse and violence, except for the final scene of the climax, was perpetuated by a man.

Above, I put two videos of what happened at a Sundance screening in 2011.  I had not heard this before I watched the movie, but watched the movie because I find Lucky McKee fascinating as a filmmaker.  The first video has an introduction by Lucky McKee, an audience member bursting into a rage after the movie ended, and then parts of the Q&A after the outbursting man had been escorted out. The second video is the conversation that happened with the upset man after he had been escorted out of the theater, and he further explains his views to an disinterested third party. Other walkouts had happened during the movie, but this was the most captured and commented on.

The man's visceral reaction to the movie, especially at the end, was based exclusively on the text of this movie.  This man's reaction was all about how the movie was nothing but a vehicle for the steady and systematic abuse of women to be enjoyed by an audience.  And, to a point, he's not wrong.  On the surface, this movie only has two strong women, The Woman and the teacher of the teenage daughter, and even the teacher is destroyed by the masculine forces in the movie.

The subtext is what we're supposed to be reading into it.  The subtext is that men can be, or are, raging misogynists and that this is not OK, and that is why it is a horror movie instead of a comedy.  It is showing us that men can be completely evil, and exposes the masking that people wear to pass through life.  This isn't exactly a new concept.  It almost reminds me of the story of Jaycee Lee Dugard, a girl who had been kidnapped for 18 years, and even worked at the print shop of her kidnapper.  This man was a raging misogynistic control freak, and it was definitely a horror to her.  And, his wife had either been passively accepting of the kidnapping or actively involved in it.

In the subtext, this is a radical feminist film about the evils men do to women, especially since the only two male characters are the ones doing evil and providing the horrors.  This is a film that punishes women for existing.  The teacher is an aggressive but polite woman, and she is punished.  The wife is a passive woman, and she is punished.  The Woman is punished for being an aggressive woman, though at least she survives.  The daughter is the only one who has been spared any punishment, except for the pregnancy she has which may or may not be due to incest.

So, what does this actually say, beyond "men are assholes?"  I can't tell.  It revels too much in the torturing of women, especially since it was written by two men and directed by one of them, in order to make a clear case for its feminist trappings.  It does make a stronger case for a meditation on civility vs feral.  But, it's point, other than to shock, seems to have been lost even on the filmmaker.

In the end, The Woman is a grotesque and offensive film which is well made.  If you're watching to have your stomach churned and your morality challenged, this is a movie that was made for your night.  But, if you want to watch and have an understanding of its commentary, you may be in for more of a challenge.