Repulsion – Bitch Flicks

Violent Women: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts from our Violent Women Theme Week here.

The Violent Vagina: The Real Horror Behind the Teeth by Belle Artiquez

It’s a conundrum, one that Dawn faces head (or vagina) on. She is forced to confront these opposing views, and her body reacts the only way it knows how, it bites the penis of society, it castrates the men that want to turn her into something she doesn’t want to be: a sexual young woman.

Salt: A Refreshing Genderless Lens by Cameron Airen

Violent films with a female at their center tend to be viewed differently than violent films with a male lead. When a woman is in this role, it’s controversial. When a man is in the same type of role, it’s a part of who he is as a human being. We’ve become numb to the violence that men engage in onscreen. As a result, we don’t criticize it like we do when a woman is engaging in it.

Shieldmaidens: The Power and Pleasure of Women’s Violence on Vikings by Lisa Bolekaja

In Reel Knockouts: Violent Women in the Movies, Neal King and Martha McCaughey assert that “cultural standards still equate womanhood with kindness and nonviolence, manhood with strength and aggression.” Under the Victorian cult of true womanhood, womanly virtue was supposed to encompass piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. Thank goodness writer/producer Michael Hirst ignored those virtues by creating two dynamic women warriors with his historical drama Vikings.

Emotional Violence, Kink, and The Duke of Burgundy by Rushaa Louise Hamid

In much of feminist literature from the past, kink is seen an act driven by patriarchy, with submissive women reproducing their oppressions in the bedroom and capitulating to gendered norms of women as silent and subservient. Even nowadays as the tide gradually changes, there is still a large amount of ire reserved for those who practice BDSM.

Violence and Morality in The 100 by Esther Nassaris

This act of mercy killing is the first of many moments when Clarke is forced to be violent for the good of others. It not only prompts an important change within herself – she loses her idealistic ways – but it prompts a change in the group dynamics. After this moment, Clarke begins to pull away from the co-leadership she and Bellamy had operated in and moves toward becoming the sole leader of the delinquents.

The Rising “Tough” Women in AMC’s The Walking Dead Season Five by Brooke Bennett

This season seems to present a large change in representational issues by including complex characters of color that we actually know something about and care for, presenting the couple of Aaron and Eric from the Alexandria community and self-pronounced lesbian Tara, and doing away with the innate equation of vagina equals do the laundry while the men go kill all the zombies.

Nine Pretty Great Lesbian Vampire Movies by Sara Century

Almost unfailingly exploitative in its portrayal of queer women, this specific sub-genre of film stands alone in a few ways, not the least of which being that the vampires, while murderous and ultimately doomed, are powerful, lonely women, often living their lives outside of society’s rules.

The Real Mother Russia: Modernising Murder and Betrayal in The Americans by Dan Jordan

The ideological battle between the FBI and KGB is thus a gendered one, as the national characters of Uncle Sam and Mother Russia are pitted against each other on a more even world stage.

Monster: A Telling of the Real Life Consequences for Violent Women by Danika Kimball

Throughout her life, Wuornos experienced horrific instances of gendered abuse, which eventually lead to a violent outlash at her unfair circumstances. Monster vividly documents the life of a woman whose experiences under a dominant patriarchal culture racked with abuse, poverty, and desperation led to a life of crime, imprisonment, and eventually death.

Stoker–Family Secrets, Frozen Bodies, and Female Orgasms by Julie Mills

Her uncle’s imposing presence has awakened in her at the same time a lust for bloodshed and an intense sexual desire, and she promptly begins to experiment and seek out means with which to satisfy both.

Sons of Anarchy: Female Violence, Feminist Care by Leigh Kolb

At the end of season 6, Gemma violently clashes the spheres of power. She’s in the kitchen. She’s using an iron, and a carving fork. Using tools of the feminine sphere, she brutally murders Tara, because she fears that Tara is about to take control and dismantle the club—the life, the style of mothering and living—that she brought home with her so many years ago.

What’s in a Name: Anxiety About Violent Women in Monster, Teeth, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Colleen Clemens

The first college course I ever developed focuses on women and violence. Stemming from my interest in women who enact violence on and off the page, I wanted to ask students to think about our perceptions of women as “naturally” peaceful.

Hard Candy: The Razor Blade Hidden in an Apple-Cheeked Confection by Emma Kat Richardson

Hogtying and drugging Jeff is only the tip of Hayley’s sadistic iceberg: over the course of the next several hours, she subjects him to a series of tortures more at home in Guantanamo Bay than a sleepy suburban neighborhood, including spraying his screaming mouth with chemicals, temporarily suffocating him with cellophane, and attacking him with a taser in the shower.

High Tension: Rethinking Female Sexuality and Subjectivity Through Violence by Laura Minor

Rather than pander to the male gaze, Aja decides to reject these scopophilic pleasures in favour of championing female subjectivity, but he also chooses to reject heteronormativity by having the lesbian desires of Marie drive the plot of the film. Interestingly, it is these desires and subjective experiences that both initiate the use of violence and intensify the representation of violence throughout.

“It is not fitting for her to be so manly and terrifying”: Catharsis and Female Chaos in Pasolini’s Medea by Brigit McCone

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 film Medea was created in the aftermath of Italian fascism, another masculine cult of personal self-sacrifice in the interests of the state. Utilizing the operatic charisma of the legendary Maria Callas in a non-singing role, he harnesses the pitiless woman as an agent of chaos, rebelling against the dictates of the masculine state that urges her husband to discard her, in favor of a politically advantageous match.

Domestic Terrorism: Feminized Violence in Misery by Tessa Racked

Annie is a human being, dangerous not because of an evil supernatural force, but rather a severe and untreated mental illness. Although Annie is not given an official diagnosis in the film or the novel, an interview with a forensic psychologist on the special edition DVD characterizes her as displaying symptoms of several different conditions, including borderline personality disorder (BPD).

Girlhood: Observed But Not Seen by Ren Jender

Girlhood starts on a peak note: a slow-motion scene of what looks like Black men playing American tackle football on a field at night, wearing helmets, shoulder pads and mouth guards, so we don’t realize–until we notice the players’ breasts under their uniforms–that they are all girls.

Patty Jenkins’ Monster: Shouldering the Double Burden of Masculinity and Femininity by Katherine Parker-Hay

In this narrative we see masculinity float free from any ties to the male body, femininity float free from any easy connection to frailness – we see them meet in the one body of this working class woman to excruciating effect.

Feminist Fangs: The Activist Symbolism of Violent Vampire Women by Melissa-Kelly Franklin

The acts of violence by the female protagonists are terrifying, swift, and socially subversive. They target misogynistic representatives of the patriarchal society that oppresses and silences women, taking them out one by one.

Slashing Gender Assumptions: The Female Killer, Unmasked by Kate Blair

To a certain extent, the reveal of woman as killer in both films comes across as a “gotcha” moment. After an hour or so of being scared out of your wits, it’s both surprising and puzzling to see a woman emerge as the killer. In the real world, most documented violent crimes are committed by men, but in a film, where anything can happen, there’s no reason to make this assumption.

“Did I Step on Your Moment?” The Seductive and Psychological Violence of Female Superheroes by Mary Iannone

This style of fighting codes our female superheroes as half menacing and half attractive – we are meant to be afraid of them, but also enticed by them. Their violence is inextricably linked to their sexuality.

Nobody Puts Susan Cooper in the Basement: Melissa McCarthy and Skillful, Competent Violence in Film by Laura Power

As McCarthy tousles with her own nemesis in the kitchen fight, Feig uses slow motion to let us savor the violence and bird’s eye shots to let us see the controlled swings of Cooper’s arms and legs as she fights. The violence is not slapstick. The violence is not played for laughs. The violence is just flat-out cinematically terrific.

“She Called Them Anti-Seed”: How the Women of Mad Max: Fury Road Divorce Violence from Strength by Cate Young

In Mad Max: Fury Road the “strong female characters” are notable specifically for their aversion to violence. The film portrays its women as emotionally strong people who engage in violence only in self-defense, and only against the system that oppresses them.

Sugar, Spice, and Things Not Nice: Violent Girlhood in Violet & Daisy by Caroline Madden

The character of Daisy personifies the film’s juxtaposition of violence and girlhood. Daisy loves cute animals and doesn’t understand Violet’s dirty jokes. The twist is even that she has not really killed anyone, thus remaining innocent of all crimes. The opening scene displays the most daring oppositional iconography — the young girls dress as nuns, the ultimate image of pure goodness, while having a shoot ‘em up with a gang.

Children: The Great Qualifier of Female Violence by Katherine Fusciardi

True, the rape revenge trope has been put at bay, but there is still a gender issue behind the remaining motivation. It focuses around the assumption of maternity being the all-encompassing passion. Until female characters can be violent for reasons that have nothing to do with their womanhood, there still isn’t complete equality in media.

How Spring Breakers Ungenders the Erotic and Transformative Power of Violence by Emma Houxbois

The girls, driven by desperation to escape their mundane lives to take part in Spring Break, scheme a robbery of the local chicken shack to raise the necessary funds to get there. To psyche themselves up for the crime, they exhort each other to pretend it’s a video game, to detach themselves and dehumanize their victims in a hurried pep talk to the same end as the grueling boot camp scenes sequences in Full Metal Jacket.

Mad Max: Fury Road: Violence Helps Our Heroines Have a Lovely Day by Sophie Hall

Furiosa, stabbed and wounded yet still persistent, takes down the main villain Immortan Joe. “Remember me?” Furiosa growls just before ripping his breathing apparatus–and half of his face–clean off. That quip may seem like your average cool one-liner, but for me it is so much more than that. It’s Furiosa, our female protagonist, who takes out the bad guy. Not Max. Not Nux, or any other male character. Her.

Puberty and the Creation of a Monster: Ginger Snaps by Kelly Piercy

Ginger, despite morphing into a werewolf, becomes our protagonist killer in a very human way, and the complexity of her journey is a cinematic rarity. A large part of its appeal is the addictive excitement-and-relief cocktail that comes with seeing your experiences reflected on screen–to see menstruation from a menstruating perspective. Who wouldn’t see want to see the violence of their PMS daydreams being played out?

When Violence Is Excusable: Regina Mills and the Twisted Morality of Once Upon a Time by Emma Thomas

In the past, Regina’s path to control is lined with dark magic. Dark magic is fueled by her anger, and the two intersect endlessly until it is hard to tell whether Regina is controlling the anger, or the anger is controlling her. What is definitive is that the more her power grows the more violent she becomes. With the only person who offered her a loving future dead, there is no one to rein her in.

Timorous Killers: The Breach of Shyness in Polanski’s Repulsion by Johanna Mackin

The eye we see in the film’s opening credits belongs to Carol and encapsulates her relationship to the internal and external worlds. To outside observers, Carol’s large, doe-like eyes are a signifier of her feminine allure, but, as is made palpable to the viewer, they also house her intense fear and constitute a deceptive barrier against the malignant traumas that disturb her internal world.

Death of the (Male) Author: Feminist Violence in Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar by Sarah Smyth

How significant it is, then, that Ramsay changes the ending from the novel where Morvern discovers she’s pregnant to instead give her a narrative of hopeful escape and adventure. Through the economic, cultural and narrative capitals gained from the violence enacted on the male author both inside and outside of the text, the female protagonist is offered a radical feminist alternative. Rather than by trapped by her class position, socio-economic position, job possibilities or pregnancy, Morvern is, instead, offered freedom, autonomy, and authority.

TV and Classic Literature: Is The 100 like Lord of the Flies? by Rowan Ellis

On the contrary, Octavia moves away from the explicit sexuality of her role in the pilot, and although her initial training is linked to Lincoln, she gravitates toward a warrior’s life to gain the respect of Indra. Although some critics have seen this as a drastic change in her characterisation, looking back at her first scene in the pilot, where she is held back by Bellamy while trying to attack the others for repeating rumours about her, it feels more like a development.

The Killer in/and the Girl: Alexandre Aja’s High Tension by Rebecca Willoughby

In High Tension, we have le tueur—the Killer—in place of the Monster, who in Shelley’s novel can be read as Victor Frankenstein’s doppelganger, that most famous of psychological devices used to illustrate the violence with which the repressed returns, doing all of the things the typical, well-socialized individual could never dream of doing. But where Victor utilizes the Monster to reject society’s expectations of him (including a traditional, heterosexual union with his adopted sister, Elizabeth), High Tension’s Marie creates le tueur because her desires do not fit within the normative world of the film.

From Ginger Snaps to Jennifer’s Body: The Contamination of Violent Women by Julia Patt

Thematically, Jennifer’s Body mirrors Ginger Snaps in many respects: the disruption of suburban or small town life, the intersection between female sexuality and violence, the close relationship between two teen girls at the films’ centers, and—perhaps most strikingly—the contagious nature of violence in women.

Timorous Killers: The Breach of Shyness in Polanski’s ‘Repulsion’

This guest post by Johanna Mackin appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

When Carol, the demure and unassuming young beautician at the heart of Roman Polanski’s surrealistic thriller Repulsion begins to lose her grip on reality, she externalises a deep fear of men into acts of fatal violence. Some of cinema’s most symbolically layered female characters are seen to present patterns of shy and socially anxious behaviour that belie murderous impulses, but who are these timorous killers, and what archaic chains of fear are made manifest in the violent outbursts they are given to?

Carol (played by Catherine Deneuve), is irretrievable from her shyness. She looks down as she walks, her manner is subdued and often sullen, and she frequently appears lost in a world of her own. Her speaking voice is soft and she speaks little, her movement slowed by the burden of fear, and she passes across things so lightly and interacts with the world so delicately that she can barely be seen to leave a trace upon it. Her fragility and reservedness (which as we will see provide a crucial, if unsustainable, defence against threats to the self), are only breached when outside influences encroach more than the barely tolerable amount she has come to live with, and these cracks in her armoury, which give way to hallucinations of violent sexual abuse, culminate in a double androcide.

Pioneering object-relations psychoanalyst Melanie Klein expands Freudian notions of death instinct, identifying that “anxiety has its origin in the fear of death,” which she sees as an impervious truth for every human. For the infant, the ambiguity of the object world represents a deathly threat to the self that destruction is projected onto, turning it into an external representation of the death instinct, which is introjected as internalised self danger and then projected back out into the external world. Constantly mediating a fear of the outside and a fear from within, external dangers are thus intensified due to internal fear, but the introjection of this harmful danger also intensifies “the perpetual inner-danger situation.”

The threat posed to Carol’s ego by the men she comes into contact with therefore greatly exacerbates her internalised danger, and thus the fear of death, or death of the self, given that selfhood is the only conduit through which we live in the world. Of course, real and imaginary threats can demonstrate a similar impact upon the individual, and in Carol’s case she is presented with significant instances of both, from the direct misogyny of men encountered, to imagined cracks in the walls of her apartment worsening outside of her control.

Terror management theorists developed the idea that “we humans feel fully secure only if we consider ourselves valuable contributors to that world we live in,” the world of meaning we have created to defend against the anxieties of death. A sense of our value within the world (or “self esteem”) is established in our interactions with others, and the extent to which we are able to be successfully incorporated into the dominant worldview. Studies following this position have shown that it is through elevated self esteem that we can most easily evade the fear of death. Carol’s self esteem, already negligible at the start of the film, is systematically shattered throughout the course of its events as she is leered at, coerced into romantic situations against her will, and scolded for her demeanour by a succession of people. A fundamental paradox at Carol’s centre is that her aesthetic presentation makes her appear acceptable to society, while her turbulent sense of self is greatly at odds with one which can be enjoyed as a fear-abating continuation of the dominant ideology.

In an edifying essay about the impeachment of the commercial skin industry on the way we view our own bodies, authors Kenway and Bullen highlight a crucial link between the perfect body image, and the sociological pedagogy of a myth that anything which threatens it possesses an abject quality. Naturally, these prescribed notions of attractiveness impinge greatly upon a whole society. Failure to properly conform can be taboo or prey to a litany of prejudices; compliance, as noted in Carol’s case, can elicit unwanted attention and expectations. This is epitomised in her sister’s lover’s view of her, as both “the beautiful younger sister” and someone who “needs to see a doctor,” when her failure to meet his expectations of polite social interaction threatens the stability of his own tentatively compiled defences against death anxiety.

The events that precipitate Carol’s unravelling stem from her sister’s involvement with a married man and subsequent holiday. Carol is reliant upon the protective forces exerted by her sister’s presence, and when the barrier of their private apartment is punctured by an unwanted male (she throws his belongings away after hearing her sister having sex with him), her abject defences necessarily harden, so that what little self is left may not be stolen from her. When she is left alone in the house, she meditates upon a family photo, which is returned to for clarity of motive at the end of the film. It features Carol as a young girl, lingering defensively in the background and casting a hateful stare at a nameless patriarch on the right. The implication, reinforced when the photo appears again as the final shot of the film, is that Carol was sexually abused as a child, and this is what has prompted her intense mistrust of men and series of harrowing rape hallucinations.

This internally harmful repulsion felt toward men, which was engendered in Carol at such a young age, has been unable to heal owing to constraints of society and the continual reinforcement of negative patriarchal behaviours. Colin exerts his entitlement over her (despite voicing his recognition at one point that “it’s all so sordid”), eventually breaking down the door of her apartment through sexually agitated aggression. Her landlord attempts to repeat the abuse she suffered as a child, repelled only by a fatal outburst. Even less overt threats such as cat-calling in the street and sexualised derision from other men in conversation (“Cinderella,” “Little Miss Muffet”) belie a menacing claim to women’s bodies, which asserts that Carol’s fear is not at all unfounded.

Whilst, as Klein suggests, externalisations of fear are often our most powerful therapeutic defense against it (via artistic expression, for example), Carol’s freedom to communicate is so muted by those around her, who will not weather her extremes of anxiety, that it is impossible for her to manage this fear in a healthy way, and so it spills over (like the filled bathtub into which her first victim is decanted) as an even more abject threat to be internalised once more, intensifying her removal from reality. People project onto her a social conformity that her life experiences render her incapable of meeting. Her trance-like episodes are condemned by customers and colleagues at work; her desperately relied-upon sister curtly dismisses her deep paranoia; she is told to not “look so mis’” by a well-meaning friend. This projected impediment of ill-fitting normalcy onto Carol sends her deeper into herself, manifesting as a timidity which in turn fosters more hostility from the external world which, rather than providing a patient and therapeutic space for Carol to talk into, imposes desired behaviours onto her. Her main pursuer, Colin, purposefully ignores her silence and negative body language as he repeatedly makes unwanted advances upon her.

Speaking on the development of schizoid states and schizophrenia in children, object-relations therapist D W Winnicott offers that failure of good-enough active environmental adaptation, produces a psychotic distortion of the environment-individual set-up. Relationships produce loss of the sense of self, and the latter is only regained by return to isolation. Being isolated, however […involves…] more and more defensive organization in repudiation of environmental impingement

For Carol, who can be seen to present with an obviously schizophrenic symptomatology, the healthy development of understanding illusion in the external world is distorted, or interrupted by childhood abuse. An incorporation of illusion into the life of a healthy child is challenged as they grow up (think of the tooth fairy, for example), but in the case of Carol the distinction between objective and subjective reality was denied a healthy conclusion by forcing a defensive retreat into a secret, “truly incommunicable” inner world, far removed from external reality. Here her use of illusion takes on more psychotic properties, especially when under duress such as that of her sister’s departure.

Compounding Carol’s fear throughout the film is a plethora of memento mori, which bind events to a sense of impending death. The devouring cracks in the wall; the sounds of clocks ticking and bells tolling at moment of heightened trauma; and finally, the rabbit, a symbol for Carol’s own self death (this is alluded to in talk of her being “strung up” and “all shaking like a little frightened animal”). The rabbit rots away throughout the film, eventually thrown out by the landlord who is then killed after he abuses Carol, thus severing her final defence against the unburdenable traumas of the past and from which she is unable to recover.

Winnicott speaks of the individual as then being able to inhabit a “false self that seems satisfactory to the unwary observer” (however unconvincing, Carol’s prosaic job and her hesitant engagements in conversation with Colin support this). This false self defends fiercely against the core self, “although the schizophrenia is latent and will claim attention in the end.” He describes a loosely organised self in defence against paranoid anxieties as “defensive pathological introversion.” Continuously expelling and incorporating the impeachments upon her secret, incommunicado core, Carol sinks further into a world which is entirely abject and encroaches upon the borders of her existence. This catastrophic entropy and its fatal consequences result in Carol’s defences eventually shutting down altogether as she slips into a kind of catatonic state at the end of the film. Her subjectivity is silenced by society, being deemed unacceptable, and so she has no reasonable outlet but to kill. Others must die so that she does not suffer total self death.

Repulsion is just one representation of the explosive anxieties of women in film. Carrie is perhaps the most famous example of a “timorous killer,” but other notable examples of introverted women being pushed to murderous extremes include Sleepaway Camp, Ms 45, Sightseers, Antichrist, and A Question of Silence, to name a few that are well worth exploring.

What these characters also have in common is an ability to explode and subvert the damaging environments that contain them. Sometimes their murderous transgressions from shyness and anxiety provide them with a kind of psychotic catharsis, and sometimes the consequences present a more abysmal loss of self, but what is consistently gratifying is the symbolic employment of such characters to illuminate the negative effect of a dominant cultural ideology on individuals. In a world ridden with stringent and judgmental expectations, the symbol of the timorous killer should be celebrated as a resistance against cultural order.

Johanna Mackin has recently completed an MA in Contemporary Literature in Culture and currently spends her time coding and writing poetry (the boundaries of which are often blurred). You can find some of her poetry on Instagram, or follow her on Twitter @johannamackin