Oh, thank goodness, Jason is out of the film after the first scene. My sweet boy is safe from becoming a villain, we can all breathe out now.
Okay, this movie is genuinely really well made and grabs me from the get go. Definitely faster paced, and has fun witty dialogue that can almost be Whedon or Tarantino-esque at times, which I am a sucker for.
Had to pause to run an errand and was genuinely hard to walk away from, despite the harrowing content.
Next up for the #FemRevengeFlick marathon is “Even Lambs Have Teeth” (2015).
Again, I know almost nothing about this film, so let’s see what happens!
Anywho…movie starting, friends hanging out in rural area….wait, is that….it’s Jason from the Good Place! Oh Jason, please don’t do something horrible. I don’t know what I’ll do if my precious, naive Molotov cocktail thrower does something evil. 😅
Oh, and before I forget, in case someone comes across this who actually enjoys or loves the movie Tamara (2005), or got something positive out of it, that's not bad or invalid or something one should feel guilty of. There is enough ambiguity here that I can imagine experiences of this movie that aren't horrible, especially for a teen girl who might have watched it in 2005.
So place all of the above analysis in frame of this being my personal map of the #FemRevenge genre and how I read these films. There are some things in all of these movies that are probably just straightforwardly problematic (e.g. gayness as punishment, rural and working class people as threat to the urban middle class), but that doesn't mean one is awful for enjoying or taking something important from movies like these.
So, the first two films of this #FemRevenge horror hyperfocus movie marathon really map out a contrast of different possibilities in the genre.
"I Spit On Your Grave" (1978) primarily places us in the gaze of the survivor, it portrays SA as violent and horrible, and the revenge is not equated to the original violence, but is a method for catharsis and restoration on the part of the survivor.
"Tamara" places us mostly in the gaze of the perpetrators, it plays the potential statutory rape of a child like she is an aggressor and rival, the violence done to her is minimized, and the violence she does is equated to the violence done to her. The only people restored in the end are those that the film deems "innocent" and representing status quo norms more or less.
So, when it feels helpful going forward, I'll probably use these two as guideposts or cardinal directions for discussing how movies handle key areas in the Fem Revenge genre, since they map the territory so well.
Lastly, the structure is conflicting and messy when one lays it out.
The story starts with everyone but Tamara feeling safe and normal in a status quo white suburbia. We are asked to empathize with Tamara's experience of not being safe in that setting, but she's also partially blamed for it by being attracted to her teacher. And it's normal for many teenagers to sometimes develop a crush or attraction to an adult in their lives like a teacher, and she shouldn't be blamed for that in my opinion (though it is not excusable for the adults to not treat it as clearly SA at the idea of a teacher taking advantage of that crush...ick ick ick).
The violence is perpetrated by the middle-class, mostly white popular kids. If Tamara was really our protagonist, then this would be more like new horror cinema by framing the familiar as dangerous and monstrous. Instead, from there on the bullies, the teacher, and his wife become the protagonists, and Tamara is the monster. The person who was different and didn't belong in the familiar and status quo was the threat and monstrosity all along. So...we're leaning back towards the old horror structure.
Finally, the heroes of the movie are Chloe, the superego of the film representing the voice of social norms, and the teacher + wife who basically signify the aspiration to nuclear family (since them wanting to have a kid is almost their only personality in the movie). In the end, while one member of the nuclear family dies by sacrificing himself, the superego and half the nuclear family survive, as the magic is ended and the status quo is restored in the familiar world.
This is, basically, a deeply conservative message compared to the Fem Revenge movies that I would argue handle these tropes and criteria better.
To drive the point home, the weapon used by Tamara as a slasher is a teenage girl's sexuality. Basically, it ends almost explicitly stating that feminine sexuality is dangerous and manipulative and must be stopped. And that's it. Ugh.
Oh, I forgot, there was another messed up punishment on a character I forgot to mention because she is so underdeveloped. Literally, I don't think she has a single page of lines in the entire film. Her role is "head mean girl dating jock"...and she is just kind of there for most of the movie, rarely saying or doing anything. She is also the only Black woman in the movie, which makes it doubly messed up that she is characterized this way.
Anywho, Tamara reveals that the mean girl has bulemia, and it's shown as a shameful individual failure out of vanity. She then "punishes" Tamara by making her vomit and then binge eat until she starts chewing on her own fingers. That's right, this time she victim blames some with an eating disorder and then punishes her with the eating disorder.
This is right up there with punishment by gayness as something that is portrayed in a way that is very bad way that has aged poorly as fuck.
There is one kill that is done better overall on these criteria I've laid out.
At one point, we are looking from Tamara's gaze in the mirror as she gets dressed, and her father walks up behind her, leering at her in a creepy way, and saying she looks pretty before asking for a hug. It's revealed at that point that he has done pervy and creeping things towards her in the past. And it is shown to be clearly his fault and something wrong he did. And we see the harm through Tamara's eyes, not her father's.
She then commands him to kill himself by eating all the glass beer bottles in the fridge. This leads to probably the only genuinely creative kill in the movie, with a definite visceral reaction when the result is shown after his body is discovered.
So yeah, this one scene, actually not the worst!
It's also worth reflecting on the inciting incident. While the SA in "I Spit On Your Grave" is explicit and long, it is depicted as violent and puts a lie to any idea that "she was asking for it." The perpetrators clearly did an act of violence and there is nothing minimizing what they did (other than maybe the character who was bullied into participating).
In "Tamara," she is killed by accident during a fight after the "prank" the bullies pulled on her. Additionally, the fight started because she charged at Chloe, who didn't know about the prank until it happened and tried to stop it, implying Tamara acted wrongly and the fight was partially her fault. And no one person killed her, they all were caught up in the scuffle or prank, one way or another, and the leader of the bullies that demands they cover up her murder didn't do the final act. This minimizes and excuses the violence.
While what they did is shown as wrong, it is more like a mistake than an act of violence.
This then makes the violence done to them by Tamara to play more like "women are dangerous psychos" than like a woman who was wrong taking accountability and power into her own hands. At the end of the movie even, Tamara says sadly, "I've become just like them," suggesting a moral equivalency. Jennifer's revenge, on the other hand, is never explicitly or directly equated like that.
And Jennifer doesn't sexually assault her perpetrators, whereas Tamara does. The jock and the party dude are both seduced by the magic of Tamara's touch, and then she forces them by the spell to have sex with each other. That's right, the punishment Tamara does is to make two men gay. And what is emphasized as the punishment and shameful is the being gay, by the reactions of other characters, rather than the SA taking place.
So yeah...Tamara, girl, you on the wrong side of this overton window. 😬
Additionally, the way her crush on him is handled, it often feels like they are aiming more for an erotic thriller like "Fatal Attraction" than a story about an adult SAing his student who is a child.
This is reinforced by the teacher's wife. She often speaks about Tamara more like a rival for her man than as a child and one of the students she works a counselor serving. The teacher's wife talk about how she is hotter than Tamara, how he loves her more than Tamara, and how he is loyal to her...not, "um, hey, don't sexually assault that child, dear."
Just...icks me to the gills.
Also, you might wonder why I just call her "Teacher's wife" and that's because basically that's what the movie does. She's almost always referred to as just "Mrs." and the teacher's last name. She is also deeply deeply underdeveloped and we know nothing more than she is the teacher's wife, has the job of school counselor, and wants to have a kid....she' basically just the role "teacher's wife."
I think this is another useful contrast with "I Spit On Your Grave." Roger Ebert complained that those characters were underdeveloped, but there are things that are shown to you about many of their personalities, motivations, backgrounds, and more. But these characters....Tamara is the only one really given much development in the first act, until she becomes two-dimensional femme fatale slasher in the second and third act.
Otherwise, what do we know about the teacher? Um...he teaches English and is married. The teacher's wife? She is married to the teacher. Chloe, the ostensible final girl? She's basically just the film's superego saying "don't do that" and "do the right thing" but I literally can't tell you a single thing about her other than that really. The jock is a jock. Party dude is party dude. Nerdy AV guy is nerdy AV guy. That's it.
Also, the camera frequently treats Tamara's body with the cishet male gaze, looking at her body parts almost more than her as a person. This is, at times, done in an ambiguous way that feels like trying to have your cake and eat it too.
For example, when Tamara seduces different boys during her revenge, there is a way in which I can, as a girl, see a power fantasy of feeling desirable and in control. But at the same time, the shots are constructed such that a cishet man could also just imagine themselves being the men kissing a hot girl. The result is a mess and tends to err on the side of the male gaze. This is the wrong way to do that ambiguity, in my opinion.
Additionally, the way that Tamara's crush on her teacher is treated hits all the wrong notes for me. Her teacher, a man who looks like he's in his 30s, does reject her advances multiple times, but his reason for doing so is "I'm a happily married man." The grown-ass man says no because of monogamy, not because having sex with a child is sexual assault and pedophilia. Um...dude...what would you do if you weren't happily married? Ick ick ick!
Mallie Sinn