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. 😅
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.
Next up in my #FemRevengeFlick hyperfocus marathon: Tamara (2005).
Okay, I have never heard of this movie but the description says a girl who is a witch comes back from the dead to take vengeance on those that wronged her - and it looks low budget and like it probably is going to be a mess!
Surprisingly, it is a Lionsgate production…did not see that coming. Maybe slightly bigger budget than expected. 😅
Anyway, first thought on the credits: Buffy Font! What is this, the Pink Opaque?!
Through out Ebert's review of the movie, he often emphasizes his sense of disgust, by talking about how the audience that enjoys the film are being invited to be "vicarious rapists." He talks a lot about how men in the audience reacted. And he fails to process and register the development of Jennifer.
This was not my experience of watching the film at all. Okay, to give Ebert some grace, if I first saw the film in an audience where I heard men celebrating the rape, my experience might be so soured that I couldn't see beyond it either. But the thing is, I *identified* with Jennifer and felt like I knew her within the first 20 minutes of the film. I never once felt like I was being asked to identify with the rapists, and always felt like I was watching through the survivor's eyes.
And when I look at random reviews of the film that I find on reddit and elsewhere, I see many people with masculine-coded usernames talking about the movie being awful and disgusting....is it just me or might their disgust come from their own discomfort at identifying too closely with the men who commit sexual assault and the experience of being forced to confront that?
I'm not saying these men all are secretly desiring to be rapists, but rather, the men that commit these acts are depicted as normal, straight, white men. One is a breadwinner and family man, with wife and children. In another film, maybe they would be protagonists. But they are not in this film, they are the monsters. And their monstrosity is merely an extension of a toxic masculinity that soooo many men either already embody or at least tolerate in their friends and acquaintances. This movie forces you to look on the violence these behaviors, beliefs, and complicity are capable of enabling.
And I think this an important compass to the whole genre of #FemRevenge (and Rape-Revenge films): who does the movie ask us to identify with, who do we actually identify with a audience members, and what is it saying to the two potential audiences, those that identify with the survivor, and those that have the capacity to identify with the perpetrators.
All in all, I think one of the fulcrums of a person's reaction to "I Spit On Your Grave" (1978), and the genre as a whole, is a question of who one is identifying with and whose eyes one is vicariously experiencing the story through.
I find Roger Ebert's review of the movie actually quite interesting on this (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/i-spit-on-your-grave-1980). I often find Ebert misses the mark in a huge way on horror films, but this one is interesting in a lot of ways.
One of the things he notes is how different members of the audience reacted. He described how many middle-aged men were vocally celebrating the depiction of SA in a way that was disturbing (fair, that's creepy as fuck), and how this switched when Jennifer goes on her revenge spree, with a woman in the audience celebrating and cheering her on (which Ebert is actually curious about, to his credit).
Ebert talks about leaving the film feeling "unclean, ashamed, and depressed." He earlier describes the heroin as "simply a girl" with no character development, which is weird because we learn she is writer from NYC, we see her working hard and also taking pleasure in her peaceful breaks, and we find out she is a religious Catholic when she visits a church to ask for forgiveness for the revenge she plans to carry out. We also see development in her attitudes towards violence, as she first encounters a gun in a drawer in the cabin, quickly closing the drawer in discomfort towards the idea of violence it implies, and later see her pick up the gun when her attitude towards violence develops, justifiably so.
Part of Ebert's discomfort seems to come from the lack of an explicit editorial voice clearly passing judgment on these things, since we are often presented these scenes without dialogue or exposition. He is not a fan of ambiguity in film, or relying primarily on show don't tell.
But there's more to it than that in my opinion...
Lastly, I want to look at the ending of the film.
After killing the last two rapists, Jennifer rides in the motorboat she stole from them into some unseen distance and the credits roll. This evokes the "riding off into the horizon" motif that so often follows a hero at the end of a movie. This conclusion declares she is a hero, like punctuation on a sentence.
But it is interesting that we aren't watching her from a distance as she disappears into the horizon. Instead, our gaze is fixed on her face. Her expression is ambiguous, but does suggest resolution and closure for her. One might also read some sense in which she had been changed and a loss of innocence, as she is no longer carrying what was once a carefree smile from the beginning of the film.
We are also literally being asked to look the survivor, and figuratively what she has been through, in the eyes. Much of this film demands a confrontation with the horrors of sexual violence and the recovery of survivors. And this does that too, not letting us being able to let it go and sail into the distance.
I think it also says something about the shape of her journey. She begins the film as a pretty, young woman, unmarked and unblemished. Following the sexual assault, she is injured, bloody, and covered in mud. During her recovery, we see her visually recovering too, with scars that take weeks to heal. But in this final scene, she is restored to wholeness and herself.
There is something ableist one can critique in this regarding what scarring and appearance is used to imply in cinema, but it does provide a certain visual symmetry: whole and independent --> injured, scarred, and having had her agency stripped from her --> once more whole and independent.
Her victory over these men is healing and restorative. And we as an audience who has followed the camera's demand to identify with her ride out on that boat too from this harrowing journey, powerful and restored.
Another aspect of this film that I find fascinating is the gaze that is employed by the camera. Many of the most famous horror movies of the 70s and 80s, as pointed out in "Men, Women, and Chainsaws," start with a male gaze (often that of a man who is a killer) and switch somewhere in middle to a female gaze (the final girl fighting to survive).
Think of "Halloween" (1978). In many parts of the first half of the movie, we find ourselves looking from the perspective of Michael Myers as he stalks his victims. Then we switch to being almost solely in the perspective of Laurie Strode as she is hunted and fights to survive his violence.
In "I Spit on Your Grave" (1978 - same year!), things are different. The camera is often looking at these perpetrators from Jennifer's perspective from the beginning. Before the SA, we first meet one of the men when he drops off a grocery order at the cabin for Jennifer. We see him from her perspective, leaning in just a bit too close at times, creating a sense of unease and discomfort. I think some people misinterpret these shots as being bad cinematography, but it honestly works really well for me. It visually represents to me the experience of being a woman with a man who is obliviously leaning in way too close and talking in ways that make me uncomfortable (the problematic aspect that it is the intellectually disabled character aside).
And many of the shots of Jennifer that take on a male gaze, like when the two men in the motorboat pass by and leer at her in a bikini, are actually contextualized in a way that I think makes it an indirect male gaze. Sometimes, she is looking at them first, and then we see how she might be seeing their gaze upon her. Or the shot of her from the male gaze is immediately followed by her looking at the man, almost like she suddenly realized how they might be seeing her. This is a technique that is not used often enough when dealing with the male gaze in film, and did not immediately occur to me until reflection on this film.
By playing into the rape culture and misogyny of these perpetrators to kill them, the poetic justice of it all is even more pronounced. Their fatal flaw - their toxic masculinity and rape culture way of thinking - is what she uses to kill them.
It's worth noting that there is also an interesting difference here in this film versus many other women survivors in horror films. Often, the final girl or survivor takes their power and fights back by using a phallic symbol - a knife, a gun, a chainsaw, etc. Jennifer doesn't really. Heck, her tools are almost yonic (vulva-like).
Her first kill is done using a noose and hanging the perpetrator. A noose is literally a yonic shaped hole that she sticks the man's head through...very on point. 😅
The second man, while technically killed by a knife, is literally emasculated in a bathtub (which is yonic shaped) and bleeds out from his groin...almost a simile to bleeding during menstruation.
The last two kills...okay, those are more phallic, as she uses an axe and a motorboat. But by then, she has already claimed her own power.
So she reclaims her autonomy and power by exploiting the rape culture that oppresses her and destroying these rapists with dangerous vulvas and emasculation. There is something sadistically and viscerally satisfying in this extreme and almost campy form of poetic justice.
Moving forward from all that, I want to talk about how Jennifer gets her revenge.
Often one of the most lasting impacts of sexual assault is that is an act that violates one's agency and autonomy over their own body and life. For those that support survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence, one of our biggest guiding principles is supporting the survivor in their own agency. Restoring that sense of agency and autonomy over oneself is vital.
Additionally, in most countries, the criminal justice system and legal authorities do not serve survivors in seeking justice, accountability, or security. In fact, police and government officials are often rapists themselves, or have been complicit in enabling it and protecting perpetrators. So for survivors, we often have to go outside legal authorities and systems to restore our sense of agency and security in our lives. Murderous, vigilante vengeance is, more or less, the logical extreme of that.
It probably goes without saying, but for many women, and just anyone who is not a cis man right now, we are currently enduring an active assault by those in power upon our bodily autonomy, personal agency, and sense of security. As a trans woman, it's especially terrifying to have many of the most publicly frothing transphobes actively criminalizing our lives and bodies. So a genre like Rape-Revenge stories can be a deeply cathartic metaphor making this experience more immediately concrete and visceral, supporting us in our own sense of power and agency again.
Now, for probably the two most problematic aspects of how the perpetrators are depicted:
1) One of the perpetrators is an intellectually disabled man who is often bullied by the others using slurs, and is bullied into participating in the sexual assault. I have really conflicting feelings about this, as it reinforces a lot of tropes where disabled and neurodiverse people are depicted as dangerous and violent threats in horror cinema. Not to mention, it's not really an accurate portrayal, in my eyes, of any particular disability and I'm assuming there were no intellectually disabled people involved in portraying this character.
I honestly think the plot would be better served by having someone who is not intellectually disabled be bullied into and eventually participating in the violence. That is the role the character serves, showing how some men might not necessarily be wanting to engage in sexual assault themselves, but are all too easily able to become complicit in it.
2) There is a clear dichotomy of rural, working class people as dangerous and urban, educated, middle-class people as vulnerable innocents. This is a trope in horror cinema broadly (e.g. Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, etc.). There is a certain verisimilitude to this depiction, as there really are creeps like this in the world, but this dichotomy is problematic as heck. Working class people are often more likely to victimized by violence and crime, as our criminal justice system is largely built to serve middle-class people, but it is far less common to see the reverse of this.
Mallie Sinn