In 1978 Meir Zarchi wrote and directed one of the most unintentionally funny movies I've ever seen. The original I Spit On Your Grave shouldn't have been funny, and I guess I can blame a mixture of beer and company on the uproarious laughter that we bellowed at the TV while watching the vaunted forty-five minute rape scene. I know how bad that sounds, and I should therefore qualify: the performances, not to mention some of the dialog, were so accidentally funny during the entire film, that we couldn't help but laugh. To date, my brother and I still repeat and then laugh at the line, "Your breaking my concentration!" I highly recommend you look up the first one to see what I'm talking about.So, it wasn't with an uneducated innocence that I entered into watching the remake by Steven R. Monroe. More than anything, I was curious if the remake would live up to the list of things that made the first so controversial and abhorred back in its day: full-frontal nudity, unabashed, prolonged scenes of a group of men abusing a helpless young woman, and of course the resulting violence when the woman gets her revenge.
I have to say, I was impressed. This latest version managed to be gut-wrenching even amidst the cinema culture that produces the likes of Saw and Hostel. However, I'm sad to admit--worried that I'm actually a sociopath and true-blue /b/tard is the more likely sentiment--that some of the execution still came off as a little funny. I'm mostly sure it wasn't just me, as I've seen that famous scene in the Monica Bellucci movie, Irreversible, which also involves rape, and I didn't find any part of that the least bit funny. It must have been something about the yokel-thugs referring to the girl as horse, and checking her teeth, even so far as forcing her to expose all of her teeth by pulling open her mouth with her fingers that made me laugh... That's too ridiculous to watch with a straight face.
Over all, I recommend seeing it. If nothing else, it's a good measuring stick for exactly what portion of the audience you fall into and whether or not the topic of rape is a gigantic, glowing red button that triggers your ire and rage as a subconscious, knee-jerk reaction.
---Spoiler Alert - I'm going to talk details from here on out, so avert your eyes if you'd like to see the movie unspoiled---
Now, with my brief and likely insufficient 'review' out of the way, I need to talk about what I Spit On Your Grave summoned in the depths of my socially aware, contemplative mind. The entire thesis of the movie, if you will, the underlying fabric of it, is that a young, innocent woman is raped, is emotionally deformed by the experience insofar as becoming a crazed killer, and then enacts her revenge in an incredibly brutal and vicious series of horribly violent murders--the prolonged, traumatic rape by half a dozen men, so hopelessly skews her psyche, so mangles her fragile sense of self, that she can't help but go clinically insane.
What she does to these guys is horrible. Not necessarily in regards to the audience. I've seen worse. Much worse. Watch any 80's pulp horror film like Hellraiser, or any of the new breed of slasher flicks like Saw or Hostel if you want to see some incredibly disturbing, excessive deaths. For that matter, the Final Destination series has a leg or two up on the gore scale.
Why her vengeance plucked my nerve as much as it did was because until this point, the movie had felt largely realistic; normal, even keel, middle-of-the-road. A full half of the movie feels like it could be in any genre of movie, and yet when the killing starts the dial is cranked all the way over to Slasher. It was too sudden a transition to feel natural. By transition, I mean to say that the characters we observed until this point felt very human. The group of guys were just that: a group of guys. A bunch of bayou buffoons; down-home boys. They fish with each other, they work at the local gas station, own crappy, run-down trailer-park homes and cars, and not a one of 'em has a girl of their own--no ball and chain at home. They were not the empty, clichéd, 'waiting to get killed' faces you normally see in a horror/slasher movie.
That's how these antagonists come off: backwards, uneducated, filled with angst and social, financial, and sexual frustration, but little else. They are not a group of crazed, sociopathic, serial killers who drill holes in the skulls of their victims and construct disfigured, elaborate sex-dolls out of the corpses of their victims. They're just a bunch of guys.
Ergo, while I can very easily condemn their actions and proclaim the woman a true and honest victim of uninvited, unrepentant rape, I can also empathize, in a very small way, with the group of idiot-thugs. They're men. Stupid, unconstrained, substance abusing men who convince themselves to do something horrible. They force themselves on this poor woman, and are violent and abusive when she resists or isn't compliant. It's a morose, disturbing sequence.
The movie then changes gears and digs out of its trunk the big, bulky, obtuse question that I found myself mulling over after the credits started to roll. For the remaining duration of the film, we watch as our young, attractive victim, whose only mistake was choosing to stay in that town and stop at that gas station, hunts down, subdues, and captures all five men, draging their limp bodies (that part you have to assume, as its never explicitly shown,) to a long-abandoned swamp-shack in the middle of the wilderness, then brutally tortures and maims them, resulting in their deaths.
I need to describe each death for this discussion to be complete.
Death one: the fat guy with the video camera. She lures him into a bear trap which snaps shut, practically severing his leg in half--the bones jut out and blood gushes from the wound. She then thwacks him over the head with a baseball bat, rendering him unconscious, duct-tapes his head to a nearby tree, gouges fish-hooks into each of his eye-lids, then ties the line attached to each behind the tree, so that his eyes are kept open. She then guts a fish and smears the goop on his eyes so that crows come and pluck out/eat his eyes. After the birds have done this, he dies of blood loss and shock.
Death two: the slick-haired, short guy. After rendering him unconscious by smashing him over the head with a baseball bat, she suspends him over a bathtub with his hands tied behind his back. He is laying on his stomach, suspended by two support beams, staring down into the tub, which she fills with water. Once it is filled, she plunges his head into the water a few times, nearly drowning him. Then, after terrorizing him to no real effect, she gets a large--probably as big as a 2 kilogram--container filled with Lye. Once the Lye begins frothing in the water, she yanks out the second support beam, which was supporting his chest. He now must keep himself raised above the acid-bath using only his abdominal muscles. As you can imagine, he eventually gives way and falls into the bath. The severe pain causes him to burst back out of the water, but the resulting cycle inevitably ends with him drowning in the mixture.
Death three, the tall pack leader. Bashing him over the head with a tire-iron at the gas station, she brings him back to the shack, strips him naked, then ties him spread-eagle in a standing position, with a stirrup in his mouth. After pulling a few of his teeth and forcing him to give a blow-job to a hand gun, she gets a pair of large shears from another room, and summarily cuts off his genitals. She leaves him in this state to bleed out.
Death four and five, the Sheriff and the dunce. Again, after rendering them unconscious and bringing them back to the shack, she ties the sheriff to a small desk so that he is in a bent-over position, pants down, legs tied to the desk and hands tied behind his back. She has inserted his shotgun deeply into his anus and tied the gun off to a chair so that it is secure. After sodomizing the sheriff with the gun for a minute or two, she ties a string from the trigger to the wrist of the dunce who is sitting across the room, unconscious, facing the sheriff. Of course, when the dunce wakes up, he twitches, pulling the trigger, killing them both.
Why did I explicitly describe each of the deaths, ensuring that all the details were included? Because the question the movie raised was, "Are we, the audience, really being asked to see the two halves of his movie as equal? Was her rape and subsequent abuse really so bad that what she did to the men was justified and... reasonable? Am I supposed to be cheering for her and saying, 'They got what they deserved!'?"
How couldn't I ask that question?! I almost couldn't believe what I had just watched. It wasn't the gore or the method of execution. Like I've said, I've seen worse watching countless horror and slasher films. It was the idea that I was supposed to be cheering for the woman. Was she really the heroine? If the writer/director meant to spin things on the audience, forcing you to decide which side you're on, considering each side is so intrinsically wrong, than kudos to them! A damn good job, if that was the objective.
But if the movie was designed to be what I really think it was, a vengeance story with brutal retribution, then... It lost me, by forcing me to seriously contemplate the scenario. I had to weigh the two halves separately, dissecting the offenses involved. On the one hand we have rape. Rape, by definition, is "the unlawful compelling of a woman through physical force or duress to have sexual intercourse." While they did physically assault her, I need to emphasize for the sake of this discussion that none of the physical damage inflicted was severe or permanent. Of course, the emotional trauma is immeasurable and obvious. I can't begin to imagine how dispirited and traumatized that kind of experience would leave you.
Then, on the other side of the I Spit On Your Grave coin, we have horrifically brutal torture and mutilation, resulting in death. The men are beaten, slashed, stabbed, lacerated, burned, drowned, shot, mutilated, and sodomized. Each of them dies a painful, miserable, unspeakable death. I need to emphasize death. She kills them all. Permanent, irrevocable death.
Is that really where we are now? Do we, as a social entity, really think that Rape equals Torture and Death? Is raping and abusing a woman SO horrible and terrible and treacherous and wrong, that the offenders deserve to be tortured, maimed, and killed?
I can't say, because I really don't know. I've never been raped. I've never been tortured, maimed, and killed. Therefore, I cannot, with any certainty, proclaim that one does or does not equal the other. If I were to opine, I'd say that rape isn't as bad as torture and death, and that anyone who thinks the former should beget the latter in regards to justice, is a raving lunatic.
I suppose the root dilemma, the core concern that I wanted to contemplate and discuss, in the notion of fairness; of objective consideration of all parties involved. It reminds me of a true story that I heard about a convenience store owner in Vancouver who had been repeatedly robbed by a petty theft. The thief would take apples, chocolate-bars, flowers; all small and insignificant items, but theft nonetheless. One day the store owner catches the thief with his CCTV cameras, stealing a bouquet of flowers. He chases the thief down, brings him back to his store, locks him in a back room so he cannot escape--the police had been having real difficulty tracking down the thief--and calls the cops: "I've got the thief here!"
The store owner was arrested by the police and charged with Kidnapping and Unlawful Detention, a felony. The store owner faced federal punishment and a permanent criminal record that would have revoked his passport and irrevocably destroyed his public image. The petty thief, who had never stolen a one-time sum large enough to be considered felony-grade larceny, would have only faced a small fee and a slap on the wrist.
Is that fair!? Can any reasonable, thinking person actually say out loud "The store owner got what he deserved! He should never have detained that man in the back of his store."
What binds I Spit On Your Grave and the story about the shop owner together is the notion that we, as a culture, are slowly developing a very perverse sense of justice. It scares me to think that a person could see the painful, unnecessarily prolonged deaths of the five men as "justified," in the same way that some might think the charges laid against the store owner could be seen as "justified." Both examples require the same brand of thought; the same fundamental perversion of reason.
That is what I Spit On Your Grave was to me, and I hope it's the same thing to you: an important discussion, where the crimes involved are only variables in an equation.
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