Bates Motel – Bitch Flicks

This guest post by Rachel Hock appears as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.

Conventionally, horror films punish women for their sexuality. This is particularly evident in the slasher films of the 70s and 80s such as Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But the grandaddy of them all is Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 Psycho. The classic suffered three sequels in the 80s and early 90s and an ill-received shot-for-shot-remake by Gus Van Sant in 1998. Most recently, proto-slasher Norman Bates has been reincarnated in the pre-Psycho A&E TV series Bates Motel.

Bates Motel is both prequel and reboot. Set in the present day, it depicts Norman’s violent psychosexual development. Norman’s formative years are alluded to in Hitchcock’s film – an uncomfortable codependency with his mother – but the show’s creators have free reign to imagine what happened to Norman Bates to make him Norman Bates.

The iconic shower scene from 'Psycho' — The iconic shower scene from *Psycho*

To put it lightly, there is plenty of fodder for a discussion of what is wrong with Bates Motel when viewed through a feminist lens. The series is garish in its use of sexual violence. There are instances of rape, sex slavery, and, as in its source material, women being punished for having sex. Even when there are consensual sex scenes, the narrative purpose is usually to forward the story or character arc of a male character. (Bitch Flicks writer Amanda Rodriguez explores the rape scene in the first episode of the series and its implications in her post “Rape Culture, Trigger, Warnings, and Bates Motel.”)

However, there exists an antidote of sorts in the character of Emma Decody (Olivia Cooke) – a 17-year-old with cystic fibrosis. In a show where sex is conflated with violence, male desire, and death, Emma is an oasis of sex positivity, female desire, and life.

Emma Decody played by Olivia Cooke — Emma Decody (played by Olivia Cooke)

After being friend-zoned (if you’ll excuse the expression) by Norman (Freddie Highmore) in favor of troubled popular girl Bradley (Nicola Peltz) in the first season, the second season presents a new love interest for Emma – small-time pot dealer Gunner (Keenan Tracey). When the beach-side memorial that Emma plans for ill-fated Bradley turns into a kegger, Emma gets drunk and asks Gunner to “make bad choices” with her.

What does it mean for Emma to want to “make bad choices”? By “bad choices,” she means doing those things that adults pretend teenagers don’t do: sex, drinking, and drugs. She is a level-headed character with good judgment and prone to doing the right thing; she is a Good Girl. For Emma to want to get a little bit wild, the valuable emphasis is on “choices.” The “bad” is coy and ironic. She doesn’t want to do bad things, she wants to make bad choices, or rather, she wants to make choices. She wants agency.

Drunk on the beach in this episode, Emma tells Gunner, “We’re not dead, OK. So we should live. But we’re going to die, y’know?” For her, with a stated life expectancy of 27, agency – and sexual agency in particular – is very much tied to the act of living.

Emma wakes up at the Bates Motel, which is more than can be said for its more famous occupant, who never made it out of the shower.

The next episode finds Emma waking up in Gunner’s bed the next morning, unsure what had transpired the night before. When she finally confronts him to ask if they had sex, she is relieved to find out that they did not. (Gunner’s response – “Not that I didn’t want to sleep with you, just I prefer when the girls are conscious. Besides, if we did sleep together, you’d remember.” – makes me wince. He’s a real charmer, this one. But at Emma’s age I would have eaten it up.) Emma does in fact want to have sex with Gunner, which he senses, so later he finds her to ask her why her reaction was one of relief. “I was relieved because it would have been my first time,” she reveals.

Despite his preference for girls who are conscious, it escapes him that having sex with a blotto Emma would have been rape. Although she does not recognize this directly, she does indicate that the significance of her first time having sex is not derived from antiquated and romanticized notions of virginity and purity. Her first time is important to her because having sex is proof of being alive: “Just think how much pressure people put on their first time knowing that they’re going to have like a million more. Mine could be my only time, so I just, I want to make it count. Or at least be something I can actually remember.” Her life has been given an expiration date, and she’s more than halfway there. Having sex, and having the opportunity to consent to it, is literally a vital experience.

Emma asks Norma for advice. "I tried googling it, but what I read just scared me." — Emma asks Norma for advice. “I tried Googling it, but what I read just scared me.”

But sex isn’t merely symbolic for Emma. She wants to have sex. As Gabrielle Moss points out in a piece for Bitch Magazine about Bob’s Burgers‘ Tina Belcher, “the teenage girls of TV are typically portrayed as only capable of responding to sexual overtures – with varying degrees of disinterest, disgust, or enthusiasm, sure, but their sexuality almost exclusively exists in response to the overtures of male characters.” Emma doesn’t entirely break this mold. She waits for Gunner to make the moves. But just because she doesn’t take action first doesn’t mean that she isn’t an active participant. In anticipation of a date with Gunner, Emma asks Norman’s mother Norma (Vera Farmiga) what it’s like having sex for the first time. Emma confides, “There’s someone that I met and every time I’m with him that’s pretty much all I think about.” By thinking about and preparing for sex, she is represented as being in control of her sexuality.

And so Emma and Gunner have sex. They laugh and joke together as they undress and it seems every bit as lovely as Emma had hoped it would be. She is not punished for it. In fact, nothing comes of her tryst with Gunner. (In the next episode she does have a scary experience jumping off of a rope swing into a river, but there is nothing to suggest that this would not have happened if she had not had sex.) The other characters are unaffected. The plotline stands independently; Emma’s sexuality remains her own.

Does Bates Motel deserve a pat on the back and a job-well-done for including one positive representation of female sexuality? Not really. But a character like Emma in a show like Bates Motel is worth paying attention to.

Rachel Hock is a theater producer and arts administrator in Boston. She received a BA in English from the University of Rochester in 2009, and dreams of someday going to grad school to continue studying film theory and racking up student debt. She tweets mostly about food and TV at @RachelCraves

"Bates Motel" Drawing — *Bates Motel* drawing

Written by Amanda Rodriguez
Trigger Warning: Rape, Sexual Assault

Since I really liked Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho when I was younger, I decided to give the A&E prequel series Bates Motel a try. Despite that the cinematography was rich, the actors were quality, and the atmosphere was a great mix of foreboding while paradoxically retro and contemporary, I was roughly halfway through the first episode when I turned it off and washed my hands of it. What makes me think I can give a worthwhile review of a series that I watched for only 20-30 minutes? A rape occurs in that first episode about halfway in, and I know enough about TV formulas, characterizations, and plotlines to safely determine that this rape was gratuitous. A lot of rapes that occur on film and TV are unnecessary and unrealistic while subtly serving to punish the rape victim, to pruriently show the dehumanization of victims (most frequently women), and to trigger audience members who are survivors. A show like Bates Motel that so cavalierly uses a tired and painful device in its first episode is definitely not worth my time.

I generally think rating systems, especially Hollywood’s, are for the birds (maybe even the Hitchcockian birds… har, har). The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) is a joke with its Catholic priest sitting in on viewings along with its hatred of all things involving female pleasure (check out the documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated to learn more about the secret society that is America’s rating board). I’ve been known to gleefully watch trailers, waiting for the rating description only to scoff, mock, and laugh. My personal favorite is still, “Some scenes of teen partying.” However, maybe I wouldn’t mind a system that cued its viewers in a way that, say, the new Swedish rating system does by integrating the now famous Bechdel Test to judge the level of female involvement in a film. If we’re going to be given a heads up about a film or TV show’s content prior to watching it, there should absolutely be a trigger warning system. The number of survivors of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) seems to be growing every day, so the compassionate, responsible thing to do would be to let viewers know if there are scenes of combat violence, sexual assault, child abuse, etc.

To give you an idea of the visceral response seeing certain triggering acts on film can cause in someone with PTSD, I’m going to describe to you what happened to me while watching the scene in Bates Motel where Norma Bates was attacked and raped in her home. The former owner of the Bates property, Keith Summers, breaks into the Bates house when Norma is home alone. He attacks her with a knife, brutally beats her, and rapes her. The familiar prickling of my skin and elevated heart rate kicked in when it became clear that Keith was planning to rape Norma. My thoughts were racing; I kept telling myself that she would get away, that she would fuck his shit up because she’s a manipulative murderess, but that didn’t happen. As Keith raped Norma, I found myself in a blind panic, yelling aloud, “STOP! STOP! STOP!” while crawling across the floor to get to the TV to turn it off because I no longer had the motor functions required to walk or use a remote control. After turning off the TV, I sat on the floor, breathing heavily, staring off in a daze. I did housework then, trying to calm down, trying to lift the feeling of dark ooze filling up inside me. After several hours of this, I was lucky enough to have a kind and perceptive friend call me, discern something was wrong, and let me vent about how upsetting and unnecessary the scene was.

I ask you, should anyone be forced to go through that? I’ve continued to be bothered by that scene days later and outraged enough to be compelled to write about it. If there had been a warning at the beginning of the episode that it contained scenes of sexual violence, I would’ve been prepared or, more likely, chosen to watch something else.

Despite the fact that I was triggered by this scene, I have thought and thought about it as objectively as possible to discern whether or not the scene did have value, and my conclusion is that Norma’s rape was, in fact, a broad application of a storytelling technique that is overkill. The scene is designed to render Norma helpless and to give justification to her future actions and neuroses. Guess what? Norma was already crazy before she was raped; she may or may not have murdered her husband, and he may or may not have been an abusive asshole. She already had an unhealthily sexual relationship with her son as evinced by her jealousy, possessiveness, and physicality with him. Not only that, but home invasions are traumatic events on their own. Having her home broken into and being beaten and knifed by a man are all enough to give Norma PTSD and to incite dysfunctionality. We already have all the justification for her behavior here without having Norma raped as a cheap plot device.

What is the function, then, of having Norma raped? Would this have happened if young Norman, instead, was home alone and Keith had attacked? It’s hard to see Norma’s rape as anything other than bringing a powerful woman low, turning her into an object that is acted upon, divesting her of her status as a subject. I also can’t help but see Norma’s rape as an intended lesson for Norman. After Norma told him he couldn’t go out, Norman climbed out of his window to hangout at a party with some cute girls. Knowing his mother was attacked and raped and he wasn’t around to stop it does more to service the forwarding of Norman’s feelings of responsibility and male protectiveness towards his mother, which I think still would’ve been possible if Norma suffered a home invasion and not a rape. This means Norma’s rape isn’t even about her. Talk about lack of subjectivity.

Norma’s rape is also problematic in the same way that many Hollywood depictions of rape are: they are intensely physically violent. Of course, rapes like that occur, and, of course, strangers rape people they’ve never met, but these things don’t happen with nearly the frequency their coverage by mainstream film and TV would lead us to believe. In addition to Bates Motel, some key examples of these physically brutal rapes are: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Downton Abbey, House of Cards (the rape is described by the survivor…not shown), Leaving Las Vegas, I Spit on Your Grave, and Straw Dogs (a Peckinpah film that caused massive controversy and was banned in the UK because the rape victim actually began to enjoy her rape). The list goes on and on. The problem with rape scenes like these are that they obscure and delegitimize rapes that are perpetuated without physical abuse. As far as the media is concerned, rapes where the victim is beaten are more cut-and-dry. The rape that occurs between friends or a married couple where the victim simply says “no” are apparently more questionable as to whether or not the victim “wanted it.” Depictions of such monstrous acts make it hard to see our fathers, brothers, husbands, and friends as rapists, but, most of the time, that’s who they are, not the psychotic strangers Hollywood would have use believe in.

This mentality and this refusal to show the true gamut of situations in which rape and sexual assault occur is harmful to survivors. Because their rape didn’t involve slapping and screaming, it takes a long time for many survivors to even acknowledge and accept that they were raped. Many survivors doubt that their claims will be believed. Many survivors’ claims aren’t believed. This allows many perpetrators to go free without any consequences, and because there was no kicking and crying, I suspect many perpetrators don’t even believe that they are rapists. Isn’t that a scary thought? We value nuance and realism in film and TV characterization; why don’t we place the same value on the varied experience of survivors? Rape culture insists that we only see a narrow representation of rape because if we admit that rape occurs in so many different contexts and with so many different circumstances, then we must admit that rape is a pandemic, that survivors are telling the truth, and that we need to do something about it.

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Amanda Rodriguez is an environmental activist living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a BA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and an MFA in fiction writing from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She writes all about food and drinking games on her blog Booze and Baking. Fun fact: while living in Kyoto, Japan, her house was attacked by monkeys.

Tag: Bates Motel

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