Her Body, Herself: Rape-Revenge and the Desire for Catharsis
Note: this article contains spoilers for A Promising Young Woman and Violation.
Trigger warning: rape, sexual assault
“Rape—real, threatened, or implied—has been a staple of American cinema more or less from the beginning.” This statement opens the section ‘Rape Revenge’ in Carol J. Clover’s ground-breaking book Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992). In the thirty years since its release much has happened, including the #MeToo movement and reckoning in Hollywood that has challenged and changed the ways women’s bodies and violence towards them is portrayed.
Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave shocked and appalled audiences in 1978. Jennifer (Camille Keaton) is a young creative writer who moves from New York City to an isolated cabin to complete writing her novel. Luminous blonde hair cascading around a willowy frame draped in a red summer dress signal her desirability to local men, who gawk at her from the moment she arrives. Over a few days, these attentions escalate from catcalling and stalking, to capture, wherein a bikini-clad sunbathing session ends in violent group rape as the men force Jennifer downriver to humiliate, abuse, and sexually violate her.
I Spit on Your Grave accentuates the brutality of rape. In stretched-out, disturbing scenes, the camera’s focuses on the attacker’s face, distorted and bestial. Scenes sadistically linger on Jennifer’s body as she runs through the woods screaming and crying like a modern-day nymph, bloody face and legs only stoking the revenge fire, burning high and hot when we reach the point of retaliation. A recovered Jennifer proceeds to track her rapists down one-by-one and exact delicious revenge on toxic masculinity. Jennifer commands ringleader Johnny (Eron Tabor) to his knees, gun pointed at his genitals. He attempts to defend himself: “You coax a man into it [rape]… A man is just a man!”. Feigning concession, Jennifer brings Johnny back to her cabin and runs him a warm bath. Mid mock-conciliatory hand-job, she chops his penis off with a hunting knife. As he slowly bleeds to death, she puts Puccini’s ‘Sola Perduta Abbandonata’ from the opera ‘Manon Lescaut’ (1893) on the record player, notably the only music in the film.
Even though I Spit on Your Grave was written primarily to scare male audiences, it has come to be (rightly) viewed as a feminist film. Jennifer is not solely monstrous. Alone and outnumbered, she is a model for female self-sufficiency because she castrates, garrottes, hacks and obliterates her rapists. Jennifer is skilful not only in tricking her adversaries, but also in rigging a spring noose, driving a boat, throwing an axe, and disposing of bodies. Her vengeance is not through the law as in rape-revenge films like The Accused (1988), but through her own vigilante justice. Although Jennifer is not the first female victim-hero of the rape-revenge genre, her legacy lasts. From the ashes of harrowing violation, she rises to exact sadistic and satisfactory vengeance.
A next generation Jennifer arrives on the scene in Jennifer’s Body. While I Spit on Your Grave deals in harrowing, exploitative detail, Jennifer’s Body tackles toxic masculinity through dark comedy and teenage tropes. Helmed by director Karyn Kusama and written by Diablo Cody, Jennifer’s Body playfully criticises the male gaze. Unlike Juno, Jennifer’s Body was poorly received but a decade later, post #MeToo era, Jennifer’s Body has experienced a revival as a cult film favourite, especially among female viewers.
Beautiful teenager Jennifer (Megan Fox) is viciously sacrificed in a Satanic ritual by indie band wannabes Low Shoulder to achieve indie rock fame, her body repeatedly penetrated by a bowie knife in evoking the most brutal of rapes. However, due to the band’s wrongful assumption that Jennifer’s a virgin (“Always a girl that likes to show it off but never give it”, Adam Brody’s smeared eyeliner villain Nikolai murmurs) she is doomed to become a mean girl possessed by a demon who has to feed on human flesh to sustain herself.
When Jennifer’s Body was first released, it was mocked as a failed horror film. But those who argue this are clearly missing the point. Jennifer’s Body is about Jennifer the person coping with her extreme violation by using her sexuality to trap and consume those who once ‘consumed’ or objectified her body.
And although Jennifer never enacts revenge on her attackers, she is indeed avenged by her friend Needy. Contaminated by Jennifer’s demonic essence, it is a transformed, matured Needy who ultimately massacres Jennifer’s violators. The rape may be implicit, but the revenge is starkly visible.
Emerald Fennell’s debut feature Promising Young Woman is a beautiful, high-femme film that brazenly critiques rape culture and its ubiquity in society. Beneath the bubble-gum and candy-shop coloured set design and playful soundtrack is a film about trauma, forgiveness, grief and revenge. Aptly named Cassandra “Cassie” (Carey Mulligan) dropped out of medical school seven years earlier after her friend Nina’s rape and suicide and works at a cutesy coffee shop by day. By night, she transforms into a vamp appearing blackout drunk, luring in ‘nice guys’ at bars. They offer to take her home but seldom fail to reveal their true colours once they are with Cassie.
Promising Young Woman has its flaws but the film is an important step in discussions about rape culture, no mean feat as the words ‘rape’ and ‘sexual assault’ are never spoken in the film, and the act of rape only indirectly related through a phone recording. Cassie acts in Nina’s name, but without her blessing. Her destructive and self-sacrificial actions as a self-appointed avenging angel solve nothing. Neither woman’s promise is restored to herself. But in veering away from the assailant’s specific case, Cassie takes on rape culture as a whole.
As a revenge-film centred around avenging past wrongs, Cassie does not participate in violence like the heroines of I Spit on Your Grave or Jennifer’s Body. Instead, she seeks recognition of the ugly truth that we may not be as good as we think we are.
Violation is the debut of filmmaking duo Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli. It takes inspiration from the rape-revenge genre films before it. Unlike its feature film debut sister Promising Young Woman, Violation is haunting and raw, its brooding atmosphere established by cinematographer Adam Crosby’s nature shots saturated with caliginous hues of blue and rustic earth tones. The story, unravelled in loosely tangled chapter instalments that, laboriously, reveal a single thread, is about Miriam (Madeleine Sims-Fewer), who is stuck in a failing marriage to Caleb (Obi Abili), and her younger sister Greta (Anna Maguire), who is married to the ideal ‘nice guy’ Dylan (Jesse LaVercombe).
The rape scene in Violation is executed elliptically, the act itself obvious yet simultaneously obscured. The camera, which throughout the film attempts to subvert the dominating, scopophilic male gaze in rape-revenge films, focuses on disorienting close-ups of Miriam’s face and a bug crawling across her thumb.
The gruesome details of Miriam’s revenge are baroque in nature, parallel to the sombre soundtrack highlighted by Pergolesi’s rendering of the 13th century hymn ‘Stabat Mater Dolorosa’ (1732). But her revenge does not bring catharsis. Sitting on the back-porch tears well into Miriam’s eyes as she becomes further alienated. We are left with a melancholy tension that seems to crescendo the moment the screen cuts to black.
Violation’s grisly revenge sequence features body horror more intimately and personally than I Spit on Your Grave or Jennifer’s Body. Miriam’s rape is experienced as the utmost humiliation and personal violation, the film’s up-close camera work insisting on discomfort and audience identification.
Modern thriller author Gillian Flynn, in a conversation about feminism and perceived misogyny regarding the sexual politics in her work, argues “the one thing that really frustrates me [Flynn] is this idea that women are innately good, innately nurturing.” Flynn’s statement is a contemporary metamorphosis of Clover’s rape-revenge victim-hero and female power that been evolving over the last thirty years.
Cassie from Promising Young Woman is not nurturing nor ‘good’ but trapped in her grief. Both Jennifer’s are forced to embrace their ugly and demonic, yet powerful selves. And Miriam isn’t the ‘brave rape-victim’ but rather someone who unravels and, in her unravelling, potentially causes more harm than good. Building from Clover, each of these women declare it is not “Her Body, Himself” but instead “Her Body, Herself”.
Meaghan Allen recently began her PhD in English Literature & American Studies at the University of Manchester. Her research project aims to consider the relationship(s) between the tormented female body in medieval hagiography (especially virgin martyr legends) and the ‘Final Girl’ in Contemporary Gothic/Horror texts. In her spare time, she enjoys walking through cemeteries, snuggling with her cat Bowie, and casually exploring the intersections of the modern and medieval at Modern Medieval: The Podcast.
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