Cowboy Justice: Rape Revenge in Mainstream Cinema and TV

This guest post by Morgan Faust appears as part of our theme week on Rape Revenge Fantasies.

When I set out to research and write this article, I assumed (can you make an ass out of me and you when it’s just one person?) I would be writing a piece on how American cinema has let down women when it comes to reflecting and portraying a constructive image of rape and it’s aftermath. The rape revenge fantasy genre of exploitation films a la  I Spit on Your Grave certainly did, striking me as cinematic renderings of discomfort and titillation wrapped in the guise of catharsis (I mean….look at the poster art). However, only a niche audience seeks these out, so while these films certainly have their fans and detractors, most people have never seen them.

What I wanted to know was how is mainstream cinema and tv presenting the topic? Outside of afterschool specials and the life and times Kelly Taylor? What I found  was a trend of well-drawn female heroines,  marginalized by society, who in the aftermath of being raped, had become, to some degree, vigilantes. OK, not terrible, but why were these survivors all presented as isolated loners? Usually viewed as crazy? And then I realized something: in its own limited way, American cinema has tried to comprehend the complexity and challenge of dealing with the issue of rape, an issue that brings up deep feelings of anger, shame, guilt, arousal, questions about gender and power dynamics, the woeful reality that only 3 percent of rapists ever spend a day in jail, by forcing these storylines into our most American of male hero molds: the lone cowboy.

 

 

Thelma and Louise—the most critically acclaimed, mainstream of all the rape revenge movies–seemed like a great starting point. This is a movie about a rape survivor (Louise) and a woman who was almost raped (Thelma) evolving from, respectfully, a repressed waitress and a subservient housewife into a pair of vigilante outlaws with an aim to better the world by  teaching men how to treat women better.

 

 

The near rape of Thelma is the inciting incident that gets this story rolling; however, the roots of their cowboy nature run much deeper with Louise, which is why she is the mentor figure of the duo.  Louise’s entire character is built out of her rape: she is a highly controlled individual (look at that hairdo at the beginning of the movie), unwilling to trust others, completely self-reliant, and since she uprooted herself and fled her home in Texas (in an attempt to get as far from her rapist as possible), she has little in way of a family or community outside of Thelma and boyfriend Jimmy, both of whom she keeps at a safe distance.  In the first few minutes of the movie we’re told that Darryl (Thelma’s husband) thinks Louise is “out of her mind.”  In a different movie this could simply seem like an insult a controlling husband uses against his wife’s friend, but in this movie the women have reclaimed the word crazy to mean self-actualized, truly yourself, truly a woman, truly a cowboy.

 

 

 

See what I mean (this is taken from the cop chase near the end of the movie):

 

THELMA

    I guess I went a little crazy, huh?

LOUISE

  No… You’ve always been crazy.
This is just the first chance you’ve
had to really express yourself.

Thelma and Louise serves as a kind of origin story for many of the women in other rape revenge movies. Louise’s rape, and the near-rape of Thelma sever them from society, forcing them into a life where they must seek justice on their own.

Veronica Mars, another marginalized loner, despised  by her fellow classmates and working as an amateur PI, has a very similar backstory to Louise: once a naive, happy, student with a popular boyfriend, she was drugged and raped at a party, contributing to and the result in her ostracization from society. The private eye, of course, is the narrative twin of the cowboy: “The private-eye novel was a western that happened somewhere else,” William Reuhlmann says in Saint with a Gun. Veronica only becomes the strong, smart, dogged, lone gun vigilante we know and love in part as a result of the rape.

By keeping this secret inside of them, these women had been transformed. In rape revenge films, that transformation is from an open, trusting person to someone isolated, and alone, but damn tough.

But why were all these women alone? Why after so much discussion on college campuses of coming forward, not being ashamed, speaking out about what had happened, was I finding this pattern of women in cinema having to seek justice on their own rather than through their community? It just seemed to reinforce ideas that contradicted the messaging around rape I’d heard from crisis centers and abuse shelters. There is of course The Accused….but that actually is a movie that proves just how difficult it can be to get justice against rapists in the court of law (let’s look again at that disturbing statistic of only 3 percent of rapists serving time in jail).

 

 

Rape is an intensely personal violation, something you live with for the rest of your life. On cinematic terms, it is equivalent to murder–the kind of thing that John Wayne seems to be speaking about directly when he said in Stagecoach, “There’s some things a man just can’t run away from.” So if society isn’t providing women with the means to achieve justice, perhaps this cinematic response of the isolated vigilante made real sense. Veronica Mars explains her choice to seek vengeance on her own saying  that she didn’t tell her father because “no good would’ve come of it.”  For a recent reminder of just how difficult our society makes it for women to confront their rapists, look to the ongoing “Girl who Ratted” scandal unfolding at Vanderbilt University, where a woman reported a rape and was immediately torn to shreds on the University’s messaging boards. Thankfully, there is a support structure building around her; however, the culture of shaming, ridiculing and marginalizing rape victims is still going strong, giving Veronica’s comments a reality and weight more profound than most network TV programs care to touch.

 

 

Is  the cowboy actually a cathartic outlet for the “fantasies” of women who found society turning against them in their time of need, rather than offering support? America suffers from a schizophrenic sense of cinematic  self-identity: we should all be patriots and defend the American way of life to the death, yet a extremely high number of individuals are forced to take the law into their own hands when society lets them down. So maybe what had looked like a trend toward marginalizing rape survivors was actual a move toward bringing them into the fold of the American action hero? This is a move that discloses a terrible truth about the handling of rape cases in our legal system, but can be viewed as a genuine attempt to find a way to make the cowboy narrative, and the catharsis that comes with it, available and relevant to survivors of rape.

In most westerns or private eye movies our hero is tasked with saving a vulnerable person. Sometimes it’s a kid, but usually we are talking about a damsel in distress. With rape revenge stories, the damsel needing saving is the woman herself; in order to save herself, she must become the protector of other weak and vulnerable people.

 

 

Veronica Mars is an entire show about how she uses the skills she has honed in response to going through the crucible of tragedy that was her rape and the death of her best friend to serve the student body of Neptune High and right the wrongs inflicted upon them. Think of Thelma and Louise blowing up the rig of the dirty truck driver. Why? To teach him to stop harassing women. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’s Lisbeth Salander, a hacker–the modern version of the cowboy, policing uncharted virtual terrain, living by his/her own moral code–is a highly introverted woman, isolated and unwilling to conform to social norms,  the victim of sexual abuse and rape. She uses her power to solve the mystery of Harriet’s disappearance and uncover the culprit behind a number of murders of young women.

 

In one rare example, Hard Candy, we have a protagonist in Hayley Stark who is never identified as having had any sexual abuse in her own past, but has taken on the mantle of vigilant to make the men responsible for the rape and death of  a 14-year-old girl (and possibly others) pay for their crimes. Here we have a far more traditionally male hero set-up, as she is avenging  the death of a loved one.  She is presented as a wanderer, and since she is a con artist we can presume we know nothing about her past, except that she has killed before and is methodical in her approach to administering her own form of justice against these pedophiles and killers. She is, in a way, our Man without a Name.

 

I was feeling fairly positive about this new spin I had found. I was a little frustrated that so few action-oriented female characters exist without the rape back story, but intrigued to discover that the isolated vigilante trope was actually aligning these women with a strong American tradition of self-reliance and cowboy caretakers. And then I looked at a few films where the victims of rape are men. Outside of  Sleepers, I had a hard time finding films that fit the rape revenge model, so I expanded to films that contained significant rape sequences–Pulp Fiction, Deliverance,  American History X–and you know what I found? A whole different set of storylines–no isolated, marginalized characters. In fact, quite the opposite. I saw men working together to help each other deal with both the rapists and the aftermath of the act. I saw men transformed into more understanding, caring individuals in the aftermath of being raped. What the hell?

 

One takeaway here is the very likely possibility that filmmakers are even less comfortable with exploring the psychological effects of being raped when the victim is man so they treat it lightly; however, I can’t help but ask what it says about us if the stories we tell about female  rape victims continue to be ones of trauma and marginalization, while men remain well-adjusted members of their community?

I think what it says is that we (and when I say we I am making the assumption here that cinema reflects us) still don’t know how to respond to incidences of rape.We still have difficulty talking about it, and are unsure how to understand the nuances of each case and how it differs when it is a stranger, or a friend, or a spouse, or a relative, or when the victim is  a child, or an elderly person, or when the victim is drunk or high. Choosing to make these women into cowboys is ultimately a safe choice. The women are presented as brave and strong; the catharsis is satisfying–there are good guys and bad guys, and no outside forces (like police or lawyers) have to get mixed up in it, confusing the issues, bringing up unwanted questions. I am eager to see more films that tackle this subject with a new perspective (Black Rock gave it a shot, with limited success), films that don’t reinforce the notion that female victims of rape have no place in common society. But I have to admit that I have found a greater respect for the existing canon.

 

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Morgan Faust started working in film as an intern for the Squigglevision classic Dr. Katz and never looked back. A graduate of Columbia University’s MFA program, she now works as half of BroSis, a brother/sister writing and directing team with brother Max Isaacson in Los Angeles, where they are finishing up their first feature script (a female-helmed actioner), and ramping up to direct a pair of films in 2014. Her short film Tick Tock Time Emporium won numerous film festivals and is distributed in the US, India, Greenland, Denmark, the Faroe Islands and is available online at Seed & Spark. Her other credits include Gimme the Loot (editor), 3 Backyards (editor) and Mutual Appreciation (producer).