They’re not just lazy, either. The one in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo felt really unpleasantly voyeuristic to me. Just gross.
Irreversible I’ve thought about watching a few times, but never worked up the motivation. I like Cassel (I even watched Blueberry), but that just sounds like a horrible film.
Edit: I’m reminded a bit of Funny Games - I don’t remember there being rape in that, but just torture porn, with Haneke silently wagging his fingers at you and telling you how awful you are for watching this irredemiably unpleasant film he made (twice).
Yeah. The only justification I can see for rubbing the audience’s noses in a rape scene like Irreversible does is to wake people up: “SEE HOW HORRIBLE RAPE IS!!!” But then, I think people who would respond well to that message already know how horrible rape is. Meanwhile, its horrific rape scene likely serves as fap fodder and worse for who knows who.
Take away the rape scenes and the lingering looks at the torture of women and you lose about 85% of the content of ‘Criminal Minds’, among other shows.
I confess I am a sucker for tv cop shows, but whenever one of them starts doing a rape scene or plotline I tend to change the channel - partially because it’s not something I choose to watch and I find the voyeuristic parts very uncomfortable, but also because it is pretty boring at this point, and the article notes. Worst of all are the (apparently inevitable) rape or attempted rape of one of the female cop characters to drive a storyline.
Rape is a serious issue in our culture and we need to find a way to discuss and eliminate it without turning it into spectacle and voyeurism.
Since it’s unlikely that rape scenes will stop being used so damn much, now that the genie is out of the bottle, the only thing left to do would be to pepper film/TV with male/male rape as well. At least, that would probably irk enough men so that they would want their fun, non-rapey escapist entertainment back.
It brings to mind the only reason I don’t like 28 Days Later as much as I could: The attempted rape and sexual slavery of the only two female characters. A friend of mine was arguing that it was realistic and that it would be what would happen if the world fell into such chaos (oh, the good old realism argument).
I responded that if the point was realism, then they ought to have raped and enslaved the younger, weaker and/or unarmed men as well, because as real-life situations of imprisonment, war and siege show, male-on-male sexual violence also happens a lot. My friend quite openly though that would have sucked, though. All I could say to that was an emphatic “Yep.”
“But those aren’t stories we often see depicted; indeed, the sexual assault of men is disproportionately ignored by the stories we tell about rape.”
I’m not sure whether this is true, or whether they just don’t garner as much attention. I can think of a few good examples of male rape in recent TV series/films. The wedding crashers is a good example, where the rape of Vince Vaughn’s character is presented as being hilarious. Similarly with Josh Hartnett in 40 days and 40 nights, and the hilarious rapes that happened in Horrible Bosses 1 and 2. Don Draper was raped as a child by a prostitute (though this didn’t garner much media attention, and many commentators refused to call it rape). In Homeland, Peter Quinn’s hotel manager had sex with him when he was incredibly drunk, and no effort was made to show that he had given ongoing enthusiastic consent to intercourse, and the issue of his inebriaton wasn’t really dealt with (similarly few commentators seem believe that a person who is too drunk to stand might be unable to consent to sex). There was male-rape-a-plenty in Sons of Anarchy, but very few commentators took issue with that. Finally, Theon himself is a survivor of a rape attempt (and the fact that the distress witnessing Sansa’s rape may be compounded by his own experience of near-rape has not really been picked up on).
I agree with some of the author’s concerns, but think that the discussion should not just be restricted to rape. I think that violence is a similarly lazy plot device, and is all too often relied upon as a mode of character development, particularly for male characters. Whether this is the torture porn of Theon, or the ‘violent humiliation followed by violent retribution’ type story-lines of countless movies. And what is really concerning is that very often a characters response to being a victim of violence is simply not dealt with. Just as the author says that ‘do not write a rape scene’ should be a rule with few exceptions, I think that ‘do not write a violent scene’ should also be a rule with few exceptions.
Well, it might have to be outside of a prison context, where male/male rape is already quite prevalent in mainstream entertainment (most recent instance I can recall seeing is in Sons of Anarchy, but it’s a common trope).
Really? they showed it? Actually no pretty sure they showed Theon’s face and his reaction to it and not the actual act itself. I thought that was pretty effective and messed up. Didn’t seem lazy. Then again we are talking about art/literature and it is all subjective.
I know everyone’s still banging the Fury Road drum, but it’s such a brilliant example of how you can accomplish all the things lazy writers use to justify showing rape (Big Bad is SUPER bad, post-apocalypse sucks for ladies, violent oligarchy sucks, etc) without actually having to show it. That’s what good writing does- we get the stakes without having to endure 10 minutes of depraved fap-fodder.
Directors and producers, as a group, are notorious for exchanging opportunities for fame with sex. They even have a euphemism for it. Except in all the worst of cases, the victims decline to name the perps, leaving them in power and in positions to abuse again.
Despite that, we can all name numerous cases off the top of our heads: Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, Bill O’Reilly, Marc Collins-Rector, Bryan Singer, Phil Spector, etc, etc.
If young actresses/actors have to cater to these scum, they why would the writers be immune?
It’s happening on lower levels as well. Sometimes you can score couple months of what looks like a relationship for writing her thesis.
Happened to someone I know. Who thought her interest is genuine and got unceremoniously dumped after the thesis was successfully defended. Me, I am playing my cards wrong and just ending up contracted by their boyfriends for help with the key chapters…
I wonder where we’ll end up if we continue down that road. I’m not one to argue whether murder, torture, assault, battery, mayhem, suicide, child abuse, animal abuse, or genocide are more or less fitting subjects for works of art and/or entertainment than rape is, but they sure have all been historically popular. Can’t perform a high school production of The Fantasticks without wondering whether or not to excise the song that extols the merits of “a pretty rape.” Can’t perform many works of Shakespeare without bloodshed and endemic sexism. So long, Huck Finn. Toodle-oo, every incarnation of Star Wars. NC-17 ratings for every movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and DC ones to boot. Horror and suspense and noir as genres would be dead, Westerns would be like Hopalong Cassidy without so much as a cap gun, and action movies would have to take place on upholstered playground equipment with heavily-padded floors.
Without violence, the conflict in most of our dramas would be reduced to the level of a Not-Very-Special-Episode of Full House. Debate all you want about whether rape scenes constitute lazy writing (I disagree, considering lazy writing to appear in all genres and with all possible scenes, regardless of thematic content), but think for a moment where literature would be without violence.
Just about the oldest joke in Hollywood refers to the starlet who was so dumb she fucked the writer to get ahead.
It’s true that in features, at least, writers have next to no power. Different story in television, where the showrunners are almost always writers instead of directors or non-writing producers. But still, scripts are commissioned and written based upon what the studio or writer thinks is going to be a story that people will want to see. Rape culture certainly does feed that, but only insofar as it influences all of Western culture at large. Hollywood suits get laid whenever they want, by and large, and indulge their power trips in many ways, most of them legal. But their goal is to make a tentpole that turns a fat profit (or, at a certain stage in their career, wins them adulation and golden statuettes), regardless if the film in question is violent or rapey or full of feminine empowerment and progressive rightness.
If they think people want to see something, they’ll make it. So yeah, “rape culture” answers the “why” but only because audiences keep watching it, not because the studios are run by a cabal of rapists.
As always, Mr. Petersen, I appreciate your insider insights.
These, though, are different conclusions than the OP, the estimable Ms. Hudson.
She writes that rape scenes are a lazy way to provide characters/stories with motivation, maturity, edginess, or depth. Poor (and harmful) story-writing, and I agree.
We should also consider that these rape tropes may also be the result of moral and / or economical laziness in the business of making motion pictures/TV. I’d imagine a fair number of writers looking to make rent succumb to the pressure to write-in dodgy shit because it’s an effective way to make a buck off their producers, directors, and ultimately audience. And, some of those producers/directors may fire them if they don’t.
I disagree. I think they certainly can be employed as a cheap and easy way to shock, titillate, or get some kind of unearned emotional reaction from the audience. But that puts me in mind of what John Carpenter said about shocking the audience. Essentially he said he could cut together twenty feet of black leader film, cut in a single white frame and add a loud bang, and the audience would jump… but there’s no artistry, no real suspense in doing things that way, and No True Filmmaker (ha ha) would resort to such gimmickry.
And so he’s tried to stay away from the cat-jumping-loudly-out-of-the-closet jump scares, though that hasn’t kept countless other filmmakers (family members of mine included) from taking that easy way out. By the same token, I have no doubt that plenty of writers and directors use rape scenes as casually and thoughtlessly as they inflate the body count of their movies, and I agree that that is irresponsible. I think that calling for a moratorium on all rape scenes, however, is a knee-jerk response that won’t solve the underlying problem.
I really don’t think you give enough credit to the intelligence of writers, and I think you overestimate the studios’ urge to propagate evil. When a TV show’s stories are broken in the writer’s room, and somebody suggests that a character be raped at some point in the season, there’s going to be discussion about whether or not that will be a compelling dramatic plot point, or whether it will be the kind of locus on a character’s arc that elicits sympathy. There will be discussion about how this event shapes the character’s arc in the future. These days, there will also be discussion about whether including such a scene will result in negative backlash. There won’t be a lot of sympathy for the character herself, not because she’s female, but because she’s a fictional character, invented and sketched out and performed to suit the dramatic whims of the writers and directors. Those characters get hit by trucks and thrown off cliffs and set on fire and blown off the decks of sinking cruise ships by the busload without a second thought, because they are written to receive that fate.
But look: a writer who balks about the depiction of a rape within a series arc is probably not going to get fired for balking at that. No studio is going to ding a show for shirking on their rape quota. No showrunner is going to turn deaf ears to writers who object in good faith to a plot point that offends their conscience, if for no other reason than that such a showrunner would quickly gain an unsavory reputation in town, especially nowadays.
I won’t say it has never happened, but I don’t think you’d need many fingers to count the number of TV and film writers who were forced by the Powers That Be to write a rapey, violent scene they personally didn’t want to write. That shit gets written by people who think they’re writing the best material they can under their circumstances. Historically, the studios and networks need to ask them to tone down the violence. Can’t wait for someone to produce the HBO memo that proves otherwise.
Watch “The Invisible War” a documentary about sexual assault (against both men and women) in the military. The military won’t admit there is a pervasive problem within all branches of the military. Read the too many to count stories about sexual assault on our college campuses where it’s ignored or dealt with in ways that you want to scream or cry or both. I could go on, but I won’t…I’ll just sit here and try to believe in a world where “discussing and eliminating” rape is a possibility.
