When I was growing up my mother had a favorite phrase to describe what she considered to be the epitome of an embarrassing question: âThatâs like asking someone when he stopped beating his wife,â sheâd say. At the time the saying seemed to me to be just that. I saw no possible connection between it and the news, received while I was away at college, of the death of our longtime childhood babysitter, killed by her boyfriend. Like many people of my generation, I entered adulthood unaware of the everyday occurrence of domestic violence and its devastating effects. It was in the early 1980s as a Ph.D. student taking classes in womenâs studies, feminism, and film that I first became aware of the extent of violence against women on a global scale. Even then, however, the very occasional references to domestic violence in the articles and books I read and the screenings I attended seemed distant and abstract: acquaintances or friends of friends may have been harassed or stalked or even sexually assaulted by strangers, but not, as far as I knew, abused by their partners.
It was not until 1990, after I became an assistant professor at a small-town university and at a colleagueâs urging applied to join the board of the local womenâs shelter home, that domestic violence became a reality for me. As I read a borrowed, dog-eared copy of The Battered Woman (Walker 1979), listened to the concerns of the shelter staff, and heard the horrific, courageous testimonies of battered women at the annual candlelight vigil, the violence that had seemed so remote was suddenly not only real but closer to home than I had dared to believe. Since that time I have witnessed and heard stories of abuse in many unsuspected places and situations: on campus and in my neighborhood, in my professional capacity as a faculty member and program director, as a colleague, as a friend.
Today, few people can claim to be unaware of intimate partner violence as a significant social problem. Since the early 1980s we have witnessed what Evan Stark (2007) refers to as the âdomestic violence revolution â (p. 6), characterized by four critical developments: an increase in community services for abused women; the criminalization of domestic violence and the allocation of state resources to protect women and prosecute perpetrators; increased sensitivity to how domestic violence affects families, especially children; and challenges to the normative values that sanction abuse as a legitimate form of power and control. Yet despite more legal sanctions against batterers and better services and advocacy for battered women and their children, in 2014 one in four women was the victim of severe physical violence by an intimate partner (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2014). And while intimate partner homicides of married women have dropped by almost 20% since the 1970s, the rate has increased for women who are dating (Brody 2011). Clearly, then, the domestic violence revolution has fallen short of its goals of making, as the buttons and pens handed out by my local womenâs shelter home propose, âEvery Home a Safe Home.â
Tellingly, too, much-heralded public awareness notwithstanding, reports of domestic violence still appear only sporadically and selectively in the media. 1 In 1995, Wendy Kozol observed, âAmerican national media are continually rediscovering (and forgetting) the problem of domestic violence that pervades American homes, despite their own coverage of this topic since the 1970sâ (p. 646). Sadly, Kozolâs observation still holds true today. Abuse is frequently presented in an episodic news frame that portrays events as isolated incidents rather than tying them to a larger social context (Post et al. 2009). Every year brings a new âcrisisâ of abuse, usually in the form of news of a physical assault of a girlfriend or wife or ex-wife by a male celebrity , as evidenced in the 2014 media frenzy surrounding Ray Riceâs assault of his fiancĂ©e now wife Janay Palmer . 2 Indeed, as I write this Introduction, media outlets are buzzing with reports of Sitora Yusufiyâs testimony that her ex-husband, Orlando Pulse Nightclub shooter Omar Mateen , abused her. 3 Although isolated high-profile cases of intimate partner violence may have joined the other scenarios of violence against women that collectively saturate the contemporary media landscape, there is still little attention being paid to and little change in the chronic epidemic of abuse in the United States, where a woman is fatally shot by a spouse, ex-spouse, or dating partner every 14 hours (National Coalition Against Domestic Violence 2017).
American football star and actor O. J. Simpson âs 1994 arrest and 1995 trial for the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman are emblematic of this revolution as well as its stumbling blocks. The mediaâs extensive coverage of the case brought us the disturbing and now all-too-familiar images and soundsâthe police pursuing him in his white Ford Bronco SUV, Nicoleâs bruised face in the photographs found in her safe deposit box, her panicked voice on the 911 tapes, the âtoo-tightâ blood-stained glovesâthat have been revisited periodically over the years in reports about Simpson and in the uneasy jokes of late-night talk show hosts. The release in 2016 of the five-part documentary O.J.: Made in America (Dahl and Edelman 2016), along with the ten-episode first season of the FX television series American Crime Story , The People v. O.J. Simpson (Falchuck 2016), reconfirms the significance of this event in the history of domestic violence and its representation. Yet the so-called âtrial of the centuryâ that many saw as the point of no return for domestic violence, the moment where it might be forced out permanently from the shadows of privacy, faltered and then fell under the weight of accusations of mishandled and planted evidence, as well as the racially charged aftermath of the Rodney King verdict and the Los Angeles riots 4 three years earlier. Raoul Felder and Barbara Victor (1996) observe in Getting Away With Murder: Weapons for the War Against Domestic Violence, âIn fact, domestic violence , which should have been the pivotal issue at this trial, was visible only for a moment, just long enough to give battered women hope that finally this crime would be put on trial on television throughout the country to show what can and does happen to women who live in this kind of hell ⊠Tragically, that never happenedâ (p. 271).
The factors that impacted the Simpson trial intersect with those that Stark (2007) identifies as being responsible for the stalling of the domestic violence revolution more broadly: first, the failure to provide a functional definition of abuse by continuing to privilege physical violence and marginalize the more typical strategies of intimidation, isolation and control; second, the lack of understanding outside of circles of advocacy of the complexity and specificity of intimate partner violence , especially its wide spectrum of contradictory and cyclical behaviors; and finally, the failure to understand the role of social factors such as race, ethnicity , age, and economic status in its enactment and experience. Feminist cultural critic Susan Bordo (1997) attributes the Simpson juryâs verdict, for example, to the inability to âthink race and gender at the same time, let alone analyze the interrelations between the twoâ (p. 103). We might add to Bordoâs list celebrity and wealth, which closely allied Simpson to white privilege but which did not prevent his defense team from âplaying the race card.â Despite what might seem to be exceptional circumstances, as Bordo comments, âIn allowing impressions and images to replace the examination of evidence, the reasoning of the Simpson jury was more indicative of contemporary habits of thought than uniqueâ (p. 94). Thus, while the Simpson case may be emblematic of the stasis of the domestic violence revolution , it also points to the unacknowledged tensions and gaps that configure abuse as well as our reactions to it.
Domestic Violence in Hollywood Film
Notwithstanding the apparently increased visibility and decreased public tolerance of domestic violence as a social problem, the unresolved tensions and gaps at the heart of this stasis are reflected in and perpetuated by contemporary U.S. popular cinema. Since the mid-1990s intimate partner violence has provided a steady stream of subplots and backstories 5 for innumerable movies and television dramas. More importantly for my purposes here, it has been at the center of a number of feature-length Hollywood films: Gaslight (Hornblow and Cukor 1944), Sleeping With the Enemy (Chernov and Ruben 1991), Whatâs Love Got to Do With It (Davies and Gibson 1993), Dolores Claiborne (Mulvehill and Hackford 1995), Enoug h (Walsh and Apted 2002), and Safe Haven (Brenner and Hallström 2013).
Domestic Violence in Hollywood Film: Gaslighting is a case study of this particular group of films from a feminist cultural perspective informed by the insights of gender and film studies, intersectional theory, and domestic violence literature. The bookâs primary thesis is that, despite the fact that these narratives seem to sympathize with their protagonists and challenge myths about domestic violence, most offer all-too-comfortable positions from which we can âseeâ what we already assume about men as abusers, women as victims, and the racial and class politics of violence. For example, these films perpetuate notions of abused women as complicit in their own situation by having chosen the âwrong manâ (Waldman 1983) and of abusive men as monstrous âothers,â linking this otherness to particular stereotypes of race, ethnicity, and class while glossing over the nuanced ways in which abuse is enacted and experienced differently in and through these social categories. These films deny in turn the many complexities and contradictions of abuse, to which there are no easy Hollywood solutions. Most ...