Watching Rape

Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture

Sarah Projansky

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9780814768129
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Looking at popular culture from 1980 to the present, feminism appears to be "over": that is, according to popular critics we are in an era of "postfeminism" in which feminism has supposedly already achieved equality for women.

Not so, says Sarah Projansky. In Watching Rape, Projansky undermines this complacent view in her fascinating and thorough analysis of depictions of rape in U.S. film, television, and independent video. Through a cultural studies analysis of such films as Thelma and Louise, Daughters of the Dust, and She's Gotta Have It, and television shows like ER, Ally McBeal, Beverly Hills 90210, and various made-for-tv movies, Projansky challenges us to see popular culture as a part of our everyday lives and practices, and to view that culture critically. How have media defined rape and feminism differently over time? How do popular narratives about rape also communicate ideas about gender, race, class, nationality, and sexuality? And, what is the future of feminist politics, theory, and criticism with regard to issues of sexual violence, postfeminism, and popular media?

The first study to address the relationship between rape and postfeminism, and one of the most detailed and thorough analyses of rape in 25 years, Watching Rape is a crucial contribution to contemporary feminism.

1

A Feminist History of Rape in U.S. Film, 1903–1979

This chapter is a history of the representation of rape in mainstream¹ U.S. film from 1903 through 1979, but it is not a comprehensive history of these representations during this time period.² To write such a history would be nearly to write the history of cinema itself. Scholars argue that rape is pervasive in narratives generally, and cinema is certainly no exception.³ Quite probably not a year has gone by since the beginning of cinema when any number of films have not represented, implied, or alluded to rape, attempted rape, or other forms of sexual violence. I would argue, in fact, that rape is a key force throughout the history of U.S. cinema and that one cannot fully understand cinema itself without addressing rape and its representation.

While representations of rape are ubiquitous throughout the history of film, shifts in the frequency of particular modes of representation of rape have occurred. Up until the early 1930s, explicit references to rape and onscreen depictions of attempted rape were relatively common. By the mid-1930s, films with explicit rape themes appeared less often; however, allusions to rape and sexual violence continued. In the 1960s, explicit representations of rape once again became commonplace.

The development of self-regulation in Hollywood and the eventual formation (and then demise) of the Production Code offer one perspective from which to understand these shifts. Focusing on self-regulation in the 1910s, Janet Staiger (1995) argues that narrational techniques—such as a clear motivation for a character’s immoral act or a moralistic ending in which the “bad” characters face punishment—regulated, but also justified, representations of sexuality. In relation to rape, films might represent a character who rapes or attempts to rape someone in a variety of ways: he could be saved through transformation, function to teach other characters or the audience a lesson, help to define a film as “serious” or “high art,” or face the consequences of choosing to take a “bad” action. Additionally, narratives might depict rape as a punishing consequence of women’s inappropriate actions. In this context, one might argue that self-regulatory practices actually invited (particular kinds of) representations of rape.

When the Production Code began to take effect in the late 1920s and early 1930s, it held that representations of rape and seduction “should never be more than suggested, and only when essential for the plot, and even then never shown by explicit method. They are never the proper subject for comedy” (“Documents” 1995, 62). Thus, rather than eliminating rape altogether, the code prescribed certain narrational strategies that, as Ruth Vasey (1995) argues, led to “elision, or effacement of sensitive subjects” (81) such as rape.⁴ The Production Code’s call for effacement was not a new mode for representing rape, however. The development and codification of this Production Code–sanctioned approach followed logically from preestablished modes of representation. As both Vasey and Richard Maltby (1995) point out, the code was based on existing practices of city censorship boards, and it corresponded with many of the methods of self-regulation developed in the 1910s, such as the narrative and moral imperatives for representing rape that I mention above. Furthermore, earlier censorship boards and film producers were themselves drawing on precinematic rape narrative forms. In fact, the Code’s imperative that rape “should never be more than suggested, only when essential for the plot” mirrors the findings of the essays in Rape and Representation, an anthology that examines both ancient and contemporary rape narratives in oral culture, prose, literature, film, and elsewhere. Summarizing the collective findings of the anthology, the editors write,

What remains is a conspicuous absence: a configuration where sexual violence against women is an origin of social relations and narratives in which the event itself is subsequently elided.… The simultaneous presence and disappearance of rape as constantly deferred origin of both plot and social relations is repeated so often as to suggest a basic conceptual principle in the articulation of both social and artistic representations. (Higgins and Silver 1991, 2–3, emphasis added)

The censorship boards and later the framers and interpreters of the Production Code, then, drew on well-established modes of representation when making their decisions about “appropriate” and “inappropriate” depictions of rape in the relatively new medium of film. The result was that by the second half of the 1930s and continuing into the 1940s representations of rape and sexual violence were predominantly an “absent presence” in cinema. Films alluded to rape obliquely but nonetheless systematically depended on rape to motivate narrative progression.

After federal antitrust actions against the film industry and the 1952 U.S. Supreme Court decision that films were to be considered under rules of free speech, the Production Code gave way to a new form of self-regulation: a ratings system, a descendant of which is used today. Concomitantly, the number of films depicting explicit rape or attempted rape increased. For example, Aljean Harmetz (1973) examines nearly twenty films from the late 1960s and early 1970s that include rape, calling rape “the new Hollywood game” (1).⁵ While, as I illustrate in this chapter, rape was anything but new to Hollywood, Harmetz’s article is an example of public discourse noting a shift in the representation of rape toward more explicit depictions during the late 1960s and early 1970s.⁶ Harmetz’s article also illustrates, however, that implicit representations of rape continued during this era. For example, Harmetz criticizes the writer/director Paul Mazursky for claiming that what Harmetz considers to be a rape scene from Blume in Love (1973) is not a rape scene: Mazursky claims, “on some level, [the character in Blume in Love (1973)] permit[s] it to happen” (quoted in Harmetz, 11). This scene, then, is an example of the continuation of implicit representations of rape.

In short, while the number of explicit representations of rape in cinema has varied historically, standard narrative conventions that contribute to rape’s elusiveness, many of which were codified during the Production Code era, appeared regularly during the entire time period under study here, blurring firm distinctions one might want to draw between pre-/post-Code and Code films and maintaining a consistently high number of representations of rape in film overall. Given this elusive/ ubiquitous history, I have the following two goals. First, I seek to demonstrate just how pervasive rape is in mainstream U.S. films up until the 1970s, regardless of shifts in self-regulation and modes of representation. In order to illustrate this with as many examples as possible, I draw on my own viewing of more than fifty films from 1903 to 1979 that represent rape in some way; on the subject indexes and plot descriptions in the American Film Institute (AFI) Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States for 1911–1920 (Hanson 1988), 1921–1930 (Munden 1971), 1931–1940 (Hanson 1993), 1941–1950 (Hanson and Dunkleberger 1999), and 1961–1970 (Krafsur 1976) and the AFI special topic catalog on ethnicity in U.S. cinema for 1911–1960 (Gevinson 1997); and on keyword searches of Web sites that include plot descriptions of films.⁷ In order to include many films that subtly imply rape rather than explicitly represent it and thus are not indexed under rape (or related terms) in the AFI catalogs or on the Web sites, I also draw on other scholarly work that explores implicit representations of rape in film⁸ and on other relevant films I have seen while researching this book.⁹

Throughout the chapter I rely on brief summaries and downplay some of the more canonical examples of films that include rape (such as Birth of a Nation [1915] and Gone with the Wind [1939]) in favor of texts that have received less critical attention in order to emphasize how standard these representations are throughout cinema, not just in the relatively unique films of cinema studies’ canon. This approach to criticism helps illustrate rape films’ ubiquity and begins to challenge the elusiveness of many of these representations, the second goal of this chapter. To further this goal, I also include some close textual analyses, particularly of films that elide the sexual violence on which their narratives depend. If rape is everywhere in film and yet often offscreen, alluded to, or not acknowledged as “really” rape, this chapter offers a critical analysis that insists on identifying all these types of representations and naming them as forms of rape within narrative.

Specifically, the particular history I tell in the first section of this chapter explores the multiple, ambivalent, and contradictory ways rape narratives have contributed to and depend on social categories of gender, class, race, and nation. The second section addresses the relationship between rape narratives and the representation of feminism. In this second section I ask specific questions about how representations of rape have helped to negotiate social understandings of feminism and women’s activism historically and about how these representations intersect with the social categories of gender, class, race, and nation described in the first section.

Rape in Film: Gender, Class, Race, and Nation

In what follows, I separate my discussion of gender, class, race, and nation into separate subsections in order to pay due attention to each issue. By addressing each issue separately, I illustrate a distinct difference between a mutability of gender and class and a reification of race and nation in these films. In addition to considering gender, class, race, and nation singly, however, I also address the intersections of these issues, arguing, for example, that some rape narratives draw on a relationship between gender and class in ways that reaffirm a heterosexual family structure. And, for instance, I suggest that the mutability of gender is a key part of the process of maintaining national boundaries through depictions of rape. By addressing gender, class, race, nation, and their intersections, I hope to illustrate the complex and versatile roles rape plays in U.S. film. Throughout this section I also emphasize that there are no consistent stereotypes in rape narratives that appear in all or even most cases. For example, a man of color, a white man, a wealthy man, or a poor man might each just as easily be a savior as a villain. Similarly, a woman’s desire for a “foreign” man might lead to rape, or it might lead to the assimilation of the foreign man into U.S. society. This point is particularly important because much previous research on one or several rape films depends on generalizations about consistency in representations of rape.¹⁰ My examination of a large number of films from a wide time period illustrates that rape narratives are much more versatile and varied than this research has suggested. My overall goal, then, is to describe both consistencies and inconsistencies, emphasizing the pervasiveness of the appearance of representations of rape while highlighting the versatility of the forms they take.

Women, Vulnerability, Independence, and the Family

Women are often vulnerable in rape films, but the relationship between rape and women’s vulnerability is complex. Specifically, two seemingly antithetical types of narratives are common: those that depict women’s vulnerability as leading to rape and those that depict the rape of an independent woman as making her vulnerable. Paradoxically, the first set of texts suggests that women should be more self-sufficient and independent in order to avoid rape, while the second set of texts suggests that independent behavior and sometimes independent sexuality can lead to rape. In both cases, however, most narratives resolve the paradox between vulnerability and independence by providing a conclusion that successfully incorporates the woman into a stable heterosexual family setting.

In the films that depict women as innocent, naive, and vulnerable, and as facing rape as a result, the women may lack control over their own lives or bodies; hence, they lack agency and therefore logically must be rescued from rape. Some 1910s films depict men’s use of drugs, alcohol, or hypnotism or women’s amnesia or fainting to indicate women’s hypervulner-ability.¹¹ Other films from the same period represent young orphaned women as particularly vulnerable because they are parentless.¹² In some, rescue by a male guardian culminates in romance.¹³ Other films heighten the orphaned woman’s vulnerability by depicting her seemingly “kindly” guardian, often a single man, as a rapist.¹⁴

In the 1948 film Johnny Belinda, Belinda is particularly vulnerable because she is both deaf and mute. When Belinda begins to become more integrated into the community her vulnerable naïveté leads to a rape that makes her even more vulnerable. The rape also naturalizes her return to passivity through her eventual incorporation into marriage as the institution most likely to protect her from future rapes. Some scholars have claimed that this is the “first” post–World War II film to address rape directly, and rape is central to the narrative’s development, but Johnny Belinda nevertheless relegates the rape and Belinda’s experience of that rape to the margins of the text.¹⁵

The first section of the film depicts Dr. Robert Richardson’s attempts to teach Belinda American Sign Language. Belinda, however, already communicates well through smiles, gestures, and body language, and she even keeps track of the customers at her family’s flour mill by using a written symbol system she and her father have developed for this purpose. After Lucky McCormick, one of Belinda’s customers, rapes her, however, Belinda stops communicating, which isolates her even more than her pre–American Sign Language life did. As a result, after the rape Robert communicates and translates for her, initiating the narrative repression of the rape that Belinda’s silence facilitates. For example, when Belinda’s father finds out that Belinda is pregnant and demands that she tell him who did this to her, Robert erroneously says, “Even if she could talk she couldn’t tell you. … [It’s] blotted out of her mind.” Here, Robert “forgets” that Belinda can communicate and that, because Lucky is one of her customers, she even has a specific linguistic symbol to represent him.

Belinda’s vulnerability increases further when Lucky and his new wife, Stella, convince the town that Belinda, impregnated as a result of the rape, is an unfit mother and that Lucky and Stella should therefore adopt Belinda’s child. However, Belinda fights physically to prevent Lucky from taking her child, which leads to his accidental death and her subsequent trial for murder. At the trial, Belinda is unable to communicate because the lawyers face away from her, making it impossible for her to read their lips. Ultimately, Belinda is acquitted only when Stella speaks up, admitting that Belinda killed Lucky in self-defense. After the trial, Belinda begins to sign something to Robert, who is now her fiancé, but he stops her and says, “You don’t have to say anything.” By the end of the film Belinda has become even more silent, vulnerable, and dependent on others than she was at the beginning of the film, (supposedly) having lost her language skills, her ability to think, and even her right to talk.¹⁶ Overall, the flow of the narrative suggests that, given her vulnerable state—which led to rape, which led to the birth of a child, which led to an accidental murder, which led to a trial—the film’s culmination in heterosexual romance is even more necessary for her protection and happiness.

In such films with drugged, hypnotized, orphaned, and silenced women, innocence makes women vulnerable to rape; other films transform previously independent women into vulnerable women by subjecting them to rape or sexual violence. Some films emphasize this causality by depicting women’s strength or independence as an explanation for why t...