// Spoiler & trigger warning //
My mother and I have a great reputation for going to see dark-as-hell movies on Christmas and Easter. Did you even know the movie theaters are open on those days? They are, and this year my mother and I went to see The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.
It was an incredible constructed movie, Rooney Mara is a force to be reckoned with and you could just feel the Fincherism seeping through the theater as you watched. It was excellent.
I haven’t read the novel of the same name, but I’m going to make the assumption that many of you have. And therefore you knew (unlike me) that there are a series of very graphic rape scenes that take place over the course of the movie. This movie needed a trigger warning like nothing I have ever seen before. Forced oral penetration, sexual assault, violent sex, anal rape. Not to mention some asexual abuse-of-power scenarios which in themselves can be triggering. So if you haven’t seen the movie, be careful. Consider this the missing trigger warning.
Lisbeth Salander, the titular character, is a bisexual hacker-sociopath with an incredible amount of androgynous sex appeal. But Lisbeth, for reasons only briefly touched on in the movie, is a ward of the state, subject to the whims of a hideous and manipulative rapist caseworker. At first he demands oral sex in exchange for access to her own money, and then later, he incapacitates her, ties her down, and forcibly sodomizes her. The rape is loud,violent, horrible, and completely unflinching. It’s quite a long scene and then you’re asked to watch as Lisbeth limps her way out of his apartment and returns home to recover from her substantially bloody injuries.
I’ve been thinking about how films approach rape lately, my thought process triggered by a recent post by Joey Comeau in which he noted that “There is way more rape in horror movies than there are rapists. It is so often cartoonish monsters, or bad guys so evil that anyone can look at them with disgust. I think there is a place in horror for depictions of rapists that are a little closer to the truth.” While Joey was speaking about horror as a specific genre, I think there’s a lot to be expanded to other genres as well.
Lisbeth’s rapist, Bjurman, is gross. He is bloated, sweaty, unkempt. His apartment is dark and empty. His behavior is power hungry, manipulative. He is, for reasons beyond the actual sexual assault, one of the monsters of the film. He is not attractive. He is much older than Lisbeth, and spends a good portion of his time insulting her. We are not supposed to like him. We don’t.
For some reason,we are still at a point where portrayed rapists can’t be attractive, in shape, or “normal.” That might hit too close to home. But in reality, rapists aren’t always the kind of person who gives you the creeps when you look at them. Sometimes rapists are attractive, or wealthy, or charming. Sometimes they are trusted friends. If this film was so determined to showing us an unflinching look at the rape itself, why not go a step further and commit to admitting that not only the most obvious monsters rape? Why are we willing to concede that rape exists and is a horrible, atrocious thing, but we still can’t fully accept that it happens to all of us, not just the disenfranchised or vulnerable, and the perpetrators aren’t just the predators lurking in dark alleys? Are we worried about making our audiences uncomfortable? Weren’t we already?
Tags: david fincher, film, rooney mara, the girl with the dragon tattoo
