Body Horror

by Anne Elizabeth Moore

  What I know, therefore, is that the shyness, reticence, fear, and humiliation Despentes points to—it needs to be stamped out. In myself and in others. Unlike Despentes, if I went back and slit the throats of everyone complicit in my rape, the bodies left open and bleeding would not only be those of men. That, in fact, is part of why it took so long for me to identify my experience as rape: because I did not understand that women are capable of misogyny. I thought my female friends by definition could not stand by and watch my bodily integrity be violated. Now I remember the time that they did.

  If I could borrow Despente’s carpet knife and cut the misogyny from my favorite female friends, I certainly would. The submissive reaction of women to the dominant, violent culture, the way that they—we—have conformed to and upheld a dynamic that stripped women of agency and which they—we—accepted without adjustment—if I could find it in their bodies I would carve it out. If I could locate it in myself I would remove it and watch it die.

  Film depictions of rape are diverse and telling. Take the classic rape-revenge fantasy I Spit on Your Grave. Originally released under the superior title Day of The Woman, Meir Zarchi’s 1977 film is brilliant, horror or no, rape-revenge fantasy or no. Although replete with unexamined class problems—spoiler alert: the idle rich win out over the struggling poor, in the end—there are few more accurate depictions of American culture than this little gem.

  What distressed American viewing audiences (and why you may never have heard of it) is that the film takes Despentes’ pronouncement—that rape may be controllable if women learn to defend themselves with violence—seriously. And because it does, both the critical reception and the viewership of the film have been curtailed. The lesson on offer is how deeply abiding misogyny is, and how intrinsic to capitalism.

  The film follows an urban transplant—a writer named Jennifer Hills—during her summer sojourn in the country by the lake. Her tranquility is broken, repeatedly, by four young men from town, and she grows agitated. Eventually, they nab her, bring her to a remote area of the forest, and rape her brutally and repeatedly. When they finally leave, we witness her struggle to stand and then slowly return home; there they are awaiting her and, again, attack. Three of the young men convince a fourth, who has some form of intellectual impairment, to kill her. He cannot, but claims that he did. Her recovery takes weeks, and when she reemerges, the group of rapists turn on each other in fury that she survived. United they may have been a threat, but once divided, she seduces each handily. Coitus Interruptus: she then kills each attacker in as brutal a manner as she can muster. It is remorseless and ever so slightly thrilling.

  Jennifer does this impassively, played by a sensibly stoic Camille Keaton, Buster’s granddaughter. That she was married to Zarchi at the time undercuts the force of the film a bit—onscreen she is a serenely composed, self-aware, independent woman, both before and then a while after the rape. Her stage presence is commanding: it alone is worth audiencefuls of appreciation. Yet can a woman be depicted as remorseless without a supportive, offscreen husband?

  Critics didn’t care, and panned it out of hand. (Inspiring a cult following, of course.) Roger Ebert gave it zero stars and called it a “vile bag of garbage . . . sick, reprehensible and contemptible,” getting the thrust of the film dead wrong overall but sprinkling in a muted, off-key cheer for “feminist solidarity.”3 (Barf.) Tasteless, irresponsible, and disturbing are common insults hurled by critics, and certain characters receive unfair portions of blame: namely the “retarded” rapist Ebert points to and the “sick”/“sadistic”/“degraded” female protagonist. Britain used the film to push for tighter control over film standards—censorship. Without the cult following the critical depreciation inspired, the film would have been effectively buried.

  Carol J. Clover attempted to set the record straight in her 1992 book Men, Women, and Chainsaws. Providing an overview of the film’s negative critical reception, she qualifies its inclusion in her tome on gender and horror by restating the purpose of the book: “To offer an account not just of the most but of the least presentable of horror,” nearly apologizing for the nod to the existence of the offensive garbage. She says that she does not “fully share” the negative views of the film—noting one interviewee’s suggestion that it be made compulsory viewing on high school campuses—and correctly identifies the film as not as shocking and less valueless than critics charged. She suggests that I Spit on Your Grave fails because it never adopted a masculist viewpoint, in which gang rape would be let off the hook as acceptable, and makes excellent points about individual culpability for violent actions—each rapist blames the others, at some point, or blames the victim, which begins to raise larger questions about how rape occurs. Yet whatever social value she may find in the film, Clover ultimately condemns it as artless.

  It’s not true—long ponderous scenes of tranquility and solitude effectively underscore the plotline of the film, which lend it quite an arty sense indeed—but more interesting is Clover’s point about the gendered POV of the film. If it is true that Zarchi’s film failed to adopt a masculist viewpoint, and that this caused bigger meltdowns in the reviews section and at the box-office, we can surmise quite a bit about how allegiant we expect culture to be to the logic of rape and misogyny.

  Strongly allegiant, it may be safe to say. Let’s take the subgenre of horror the film sits in as a first example. From a certain perspective, contextualizing a film as “rape-revenge fantasy” is a problem in itself. We do not have burglary-revenge fantasy films, although plenty of movies begin with a thieved item and continue under a plot dictated by its reacquisition. Movies in which kidnappers or terrorists are hunted down are not characterized as kidnapping- or terrorism-revenge fantasies. Kidnapping and terrorism are too correctly situated already as legitimate crimes to need to justify them as revenge-worthy. Too, films in which rapes occur in the first place are not termed woman-revenge fantasy flicks. In fact, sometimes they are just “fantasy,” if they are distinguished in any way at all. Rape, in fact, is the standard. In horror, in film, and in culture. Only retaliation against it is marked and unusual.

  This is not to say that rape is inevitable, or common, or necessary—only that we do not condemn it thoroughly when it occurs. I didn’t, when it happened to me. Untold numbers of women don’t, either, some under confusion of what does and does not constitute rape. Confusion is more common in some circles than others—as Missouri House Rep. Todd Akin’s more recent claims of the impossibility of pregnancy in the case of “legitimate” rape indicate. Cultural confusion allows for a legal one. As Despentes writes, “With rape, it’s always up to you to prove you didn’t really give your consent.” In I Spit on Your Grave, Jennifer doesn’t bother proving anything to anyone. She simply extracts revenge.

  I Spit on Your Grave allows for a cultural imaginary in which the domain of women is violence, both serene and justified, as Despentes suggests it should be. But culture has a way of enforcing adherence to norms, even if tiny pockets of resistance can be found; few know this as well as Despentes, who has also made films that were considered rape-revenge fantasies, and were censored. Her theory therefore holds, that “rape is a well defined political strategy: the bare bones of capitalism.”

  In the end, capitalism marked I Spit on Your Grave. The film was problematized by critics like Ebert, who labeled it a deviation from the standard and acceptable depiction of gender politics and culture. Then the film was censored, for those same reasons. The domino effect continued. The film developed a small, cult audience—perhaps the best capitalism can do for women, in the end.

  For fans of narrative diversity, as well as those who would prefer the eradication of misogyny, this presents a real problem. A truly great film, the fatal flaw of I Spit on Your Grave is that it fails to privilege a masculist worldview. This has kept it from wider distribution, critical acclaim, and audiences of all but the most dedicated enthusiasts. Could I Spit on Your Grave function as a social imaginary, allowing a
possible future in which more men refrain from forced sexual assault out of fear of getting their dicks cut off in bathtubs? We simply don’t know, under capitalism—people would have to see it, first.

  So we do not have Day of the Woman to look to, but we do have The Woman. The 2011 film somehow escapes the problematic rape-revenge framing—because Chris Cleek is given top billing?—but otherwise is set against this same sordid media history, and my theory is that what popular success McKee’s film has seen is due to its primary contention that women deserve the oppression they get. Most of the run time of the film, in fact, is obsessively devoted to its masculist viewpoint—the exact one lacking in I Spit on Your Grave.

  In McKee’s tale, every female character eventually cannibalizes, consuming herself or others due to starvation, mistreatment, or a fear that is misunderstood to be love. You can read this as a metaphor if you like, but some of these women straight-up eat people. It is a cultural mandate, yes: in this world dominated by a hateful lawyer and his shitty rapist asshole serial killer son, the only means of feminine survival is to sacrifice your body or that of the nearest replacement female. You may starve if you do not consume the flesh of another. Women onscreen hold equal responsibility to men onscreen for the oppression of women, no question. (One of the smart turns of the film is that certain bizarre leaps in plot are blamed on a female character’s unrelated medical condition, Anopthalmia, the absence of one or both eyes: literally, a lack of ability to see. Women in The Woman are horrible because they are incapable of adopting a feminine viewpoint.)

  Then McKee’s film takes a sharp turn. Until then a sheerly brilliant metaphor for present-day sexual politics, the narrative falters in its resolution. In the final moments of the film, the feminine returns to nature and nurture, and the masculine is left to rule society and culture: a false dichotomy based on a misguided assertion that gender is biological and cultural politics rooted therein. We will not know what Despentes may have taken from a world in which women make violence their permanent domain within an existing culture; McKee has women stepping back from society entirely, allowing it to remain the dominion of men.

  A truly radical narrative might have destroyed this false dichotomy, already breached, or supplanted each with each: What would a society look like if women simply protected themselves in the world into which they are born? Then again a truly radical film would have featured a soundtrack and production by people who are not men, thus creating an economic infrastructure to support non-male cast and crew (as, somewhat awkwardly, von Trier occasionally does). A visionary filmmaker might even have followed through on Despentes’ suggestion that men can learn to refrain from rape and women can learn to embrace the violence of self-protection, and given us a glimpse of what that might look like.

  The Woman isn’t, therefore, a radical feminist film. But by siting misogyny in women, it offers a glimpse of a future over which it can be controlled and eradicated.

  A portion of this essay was originally published on The Blog is Coming from Inside the House.

  1.Sit with a friend through cancer treatments because you love her, not because you believe she would do the same for you. She won’t. Cancer changes people, and it makes people vulnerable. If your friend survives, she will want to reinvent herself. She will need to reinvent herself. What I mean is: your friendship is probably over, once your friend beats cancer. You will help them do that—survive—but your only reward is likely to be that knowledge. You may, later, go through cancer treatments yourself. It is possible that you will do this alone. Even if you sit with three different friends through cancer treatments. What is important to realize is that you helped them survive because you are good at survival.

  2.Your best doctor is your body. Hopefully you will also find other doctors who have more training in and experience with illness than your body does, but I would not count on it. Weigh professional opinions and theories against how a medication feels in your palm, or what comes to mind while it digests in your stomach. Avoid processes that allow the administration of treatment to get too far away from your own hand. Not because you should not trust other people—you should—but because it matters if you shake before you give yourself an injection, or if your heart aches every time you go in for new lab tests.

  Another way to say what I mean: notice what makes you feel bad, and avoid it in the future. I have found that most people do not know when they feel bad. I personally did not learn how to tell when I feel bad until I turned forty-four.

  3.Many people will offer advice. No—everyone, in some way or another, will offer advice. Some will tell you to change the way you eat, or how to feel. They may suggest you find a better doctor, as if you do not live daily with the failures of modern medicine. Others will tell you how you can make it easier for them to understand what you are going through, or demand that you be patient with them. You must try not to laugh. If people grow annoyed at your behavior, they may repeatedly ask what is wrong with you, even after you have told them one million times that you are sick. Still others will believe resolutely that you have done something wrong. They will say, “a-ha,” at the wrong time when you relay an anecdote, or forward articles to you about smoking, yoga, or drinking tap water. They do this out of kindness, but what is being said is: you are failing to live up to my expectations of you.

  If you bother to listen to other people at all—although I can understand why you would not—you may wish to translate everything anyone tells you into the phrase, “I care about you more than I myself realize, more than I am currently capable of expressing.” Do this without speaking, inside your own head. It is only for you.

  4.This is important: do not hate your disease. If you can, try not to hate anything at all, but that may be too hard. You have a right to be angry. Still, hate is for people who feel they have nothing to lose, for people who are comfortable sitting in judgment of others. Most important: hate takes time and energy. Time you could be devoting to far more important pursuits, like laughing at jokes, or research. Hate only inspires more hate; what you need right now is love.

  5.When someone discovers you are sick, do not be surprised by their cruelty. For example, someone may say, “Oh, my grandmother committed suicide when she was diagnosed with that!” Or an acquaintance might give you false information about your disease. This will happen, surprisingly frequently, with doctors. Friends in media and entertainment will write you into stories as a character, taking your hard-won experience of survival from you without permission and using it to advance their careers. You may see yourself become a morality tale for hard living, dangerous choices, sexual promiscuity, eating meat, lack of religion. You may find your high school best friend does this, or your auntie. It is what people do: use what they come across for their own purposes. You cannot blame them, but you do not have to be around them.

  Another acquaintance, after a frank conversation about your illness, may comment, “Wow. It’s terrifying that such a thing could so easily happen to me!” Laugh at that person. Laugh at their narcissism, at a worldview that believes that illness picks and chooses victims for a moral or ethical reason, or any reason at all. Laugh at the fact that they feel safe when you know that they are not. Hope that they remain safe, because an unjust comeuppance for narcissism is illness. But do not trust that person. Do not trust anyone who takes from you in your moment of greatest need.

  6.Others will avoid you. Most will avoid you. They do not want to deal with mortality, yours or their own, or what strikes them as worse than death: frailty, weakness, disability. This will make you deeply sad for the world, and for yourself, that you may never speak to your best friend again, to any of your best friends again. If you ran a company or organized events in your neighborhood, those people—whose lives you worked hard to support—may not gather around you. Let me tell you this because no one else will: people are awful. I am sorry that you will feel alone much of the time. I am sorry for every doctor’s appointment and bad-news phone call that you have to endur
e by yourself. I am sorry about the time that pharmacist was flirting with you until he looked at the drug you came in to pick up, and paled. I am sorry that an insurance agent once called you to demand $986 to pay for the test result that indicated a $1,200 per-injection drug prescribed by your doctor had given you a new disease. I am sorry for the bitch on the bus who couldn’t see you were in pain so complained loudly for three miles that you wouldn’t give up your handicap seat for her shopping bag. I am sorry that the energy you once spent making others laugh or dressing up for parties or planning elaborate adventures is now used to fill weekly pill containers, do tai chi, visit specialists, or trying to stay awake.

  I am sorry it seems so easy for others to forget you are important.

  7.Another way people might react to your illness is by saying quite effortlessly: “What can we do, your community?” It may take a year to hear this question, or longer. You may think you will never hear it. In truth, you might never hear it. You will expect to hear it when you post on Facebook about a negative test result or mention to a small group of friends over coffee that your doctor is concerned. The crucial question will not come then. It may not come when you fail to show up for birthday parties, although it is clear that your absence has been noted. It may not even come after a week when you cannot answer the phone, or when you do not have the energy to respond to emails. When you effectively disappear from the face of the earth.