aka I Know What You Did Last Month
This unnecessary remake of the 1978 exploitation classic tanked big time at the American box-office. Grossing just under 95,000$, this multi-million dollars venture is the umpteenth proof that Hollywood should devise a two-tier system of production in order to recoup its losses from blockbuster bombs. Given the instant availability and low cost of digital medias, this is the route they should be taking. Then, instead of having sharply photographed, eminently theatrical and ultimately uninvolving exploitation films, we'd have true visions of horror. That said, while it fails to capture the gritty realism of classic exploitation cinema, this film boasts a form of misogyny that was long forgotten, thus creating one of the most appalling examples of phallocentrism in the annals of cinema.
Topical interest
First things first; I must confess that I haven't seen the source material for this film, neither out of disgust, nor ethics. I haven't seen it for reasons purely circumstantial. Therefore, the current review will not be comparison-based and this will probably enhance its relevance. What drew me toward this film is curiosity. Curiosity and topicality. I will come back to this later, but I wished that this film could metaphorically avenge Lara Logan, the CBS correspondent whose brutal rape during the recent Egyptian uprising stirred controversy and revealed the twisted beliefs beheld by many conservative commentators.
As you probably know, I Spit on Your Grave is a rape/revenge film in the tradition of The Last House on the Left. Only here, the victim avenges herself, turning the table on her aggressors and submitting them to tortures worse that what she has personally endured. Obviously, this last assertion is debatable, but the fact remains that it is the ethics of revenge which are appraised here, as in all revenge films. This is precisely where their interest lie, in opening up a debate between the fans of these films and their detractors while making spectator identification wholly problematic. Should we condone the vindictive violence onscreen as a form of justice, or as some critics have suggested, a sign of female empowerment? And what about the rape scene: harmless male fantasy or revelatory snippet of true-to-life violence? These questions are essential to any appreciation of the film, but the fun of analysis also pertains to hypothetical speculation.
The rednecks are overdetermined rapists. And sexy women are overdetermined victims. Just for the fun of argument, let us imagine Arab rapists. Obviously, this would shock quite a few people, but what would it do for the spectators, or commentators of such films? Then, let us imagine a man being raped by rednecks... Oh! Somebody already beat us to the punch: James Dickey, the guy behind Deliverance. Now, I'm certain that the mere mention of this title instantaneously brings back the painful memory of Ned Beatty's victimization in any male who has seen the film. This should draw many more questions, paramount of which is why there aren't more examples of sexual violence directed at men, considering its effectiveness amongst genre film fans. I'm betting that most male moviegoers remember the rape of old Ned much more vividly than that of any screen female, including Italian goddess Monica Bellucci, whose abominable rape in Irreversible was excruciatingly lengthy. I'm betting that many of these guys have playfully replayed the squealing bit in one form or another during their life. As for the rapes of women, they're a common occurrence, both onscreen and off, which has tended to lessen their impact in the minds of men. Now, you'd think that a film like I Spit on Your Grave could actually thwart these trends, but that's where you're wrong. Made by men, for men, relegating women to the depths of infamy, it is merely an example of self-centred scrotum-petting.
Men are pigs
One Thousand and One Phalluses
Jennifer Hills is writing her second book and she needs isolation in order to do it. On her way toward a forest cabin in Hicksville, USA, she meets a threesome of foul-looking gas station attendants, the "pack leader" of which dishes out lame attempts at seducing her, convinced that his rugged good looks will magically illuminate the road to her panties. When Jennifer mocks him, it's clear that his fragile male ego has been hurt, as well as the tenuous authority he seems to hold on his buddies. When he stumbles in front of her, slipping on an oil spill and falling flat on the wet cement like a goofball, the insult is just too great for him. Although, he lets Jennifer leave, you know that he has silently pledged to regain his status amongst his boys by using her weak body as a way to assert his dominance.
A few scenes pass by in which we see Jennifer parading in various skimpy outfits, including a surprisingly revealing jogging attire that attracts attention to itself mainly because of the narrative incongruity it suggests. Since she is shown as a boozing pot-smoker, it's hard to believe how Jennifer could also be a dedicated jogger. There is no absolute contradiction here, but the jogging bit is clearly out of character. The raison d'être of this scene is merely to show Jennifer's body and so is that of the underwear scene in which she undresses completely in order to remove a wine stain on her pants. While scrubbing over the sink, she is unknowingly filmed through the window by a mysterious pervert whose appreciation of Sarah Butler's lanky body is meant to echo our own. From where I stood, both these scenes appeared excessive in their showcasing of Jennifer's skin, as if they were meant to accuse her of titillation, hence half-justifying things to come.
After a while, during which we have learned next to nothing about the "protagonist" except a certain inclination toward nakedness, there's a plumbing failure at the cabin and she needs the help of a plumber. A slow-witted local comes to her rescue and is awarded a kiss for a job well done. Being somewhat of a complexed virgin, the young man is embarrassed and flees the scene, only to go and brag about the kiss to the three gas station attendants from before. As a friend pointed out, the fat one with the camera is actually Damian from Mean Girls. You know, the sarcastic gay guy who loves pink... Well now, he's got a bandana, some leathers and a rad attitude. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't picture him as anybody other than Damian, which made me shout at the screen a couple of times (things like: "What's happened to you, Damian?" and "Nooo, Damian, noooo!!"). Identity confusion aside, he portrays the voyeur of the group, the pervert who rapes not with his cock but with his camera. In this scene, he shows head rapist Johnny the clip taken earlier through the window of the cabin. Combined with the jealousy derived from dim-witted Matthew's confession and the frustration from his first encounter with Jennifer, Johnny becomes overwhelmed by his urge to rape. And so he packs his guns and invites his buds to share an evening at Jennifer's cabin, thus reclaiming his leader status.
Johnny has got one great, big hard-on for Jennifer
There begins the night of one thousand and one phalluses, during which guns and cocks alike swarm around Jennifer and into her mouth, vagina and ass. Of course, there's no hardcore material, but the scene still seems interminable. At first, the guys push guns down her throat, "preparing" her for the following onslaught of cocks. In a disturbing display of broken masculinity, they rely on deadly metal phalluses to assert their dominance. Then, they do so through the humiliation of dim-witted Matthew. Using his shy appreciation of Jennifer as a springboard, they force him to express his love physically, like a man. They first laugh at his impotence, but then, they are quick to encourage him to go "deeper" and "deeper" once he musters enough testosterone to start humping her like a wild animal. All the while, the camera lingers on the atrocities, making it a point to capture the overzealousness of the nonchalant yokels in matters of rape.
At some point, Jennifer manages to escape, only to fall into the clutches of an accomplice, the local sheriff, who brings her back to the cabin where she is gang-raped some more. After the deed, which involves anal and oral penetration, she manages to stand up and walk down a muddy path on very shaky legs. Just before the sheriff gets a chance to shoot her, she does an angel leap into a river and vanishes from the narrative until the time of reckoning arrives. Later in the film, Jennifer confesses to have survived off bugs and stuff while in the woods, recovering from the incident and plotting her revenge. And although this is the most horrific part of her tale, it is not shown onscreen. Instead, we are treated to the sight of the boys enjoying the great outdoors by drinking beer on discarded car seats. Then, in accordance with the most dated of slasher film clichés, they start being stalked by an unseen assailant who draws them outside their houses by making thudding noises, leaving dead animals on their porch, and such and such. Eventually, the five men are all sequestrated and killed, each in obligatory poetic fashion that often borders on the comical. Frankly, the specters of both Jason Voorhees and the Jigsaw Killer loom about this forced, unoriginal and unsatisfying conclusion.
Testicular synapses
I'm sure that the majority of people will agree to say that most genre films are male-centric. Although you rarely see a live one, these films are all about cock and cock-titillation, and this film here is the perfect example. Not only does it focus heavily on the motivations and apprehensions of the rapists, but it manages to transform the rape victim into a ghoulish, soulless slasher. Given its prevalent phallocentric philosophy, the title contains a blatantly misleading incongruity. It is the "I", which seems to suggest that the female victim is also the protagonist and thus inherits decent screentime and characterization. But as things stand, the titular pronoun is used in the exact same way as that in I Know What You Did Last Summer. It is the denomination of a monstrous observer and savage judge of morality ready to slash you from behind a bush (no pun intended). By depicting Jennifer as such, the film likens her tormentors to the gorgeous teenagers from Jim Gillespie's film, basically good folks involved in a moral dilemma solved by an outside entity holding the supreme truth of the universe.
Much to my surprise, the film focuses almost solely on the rapists, limiting Sarah Butler's output to that of a slasher villain, tormented at first, then transformed into a wisecracking avenger. Contrary to the male rapists, whose characters are distinctive and developed, Butler's Jennifer is a generic victim. All we know about her can be resumed to clichés. She is a big-city writer, of what, we don't know. De facto, she is depicted as a drunk who needs the quietude of the country for inspiration. That's all we learn about her. Her remaining contribution to the film involves stripping butt-naked, screaming gloomily, being force-fed various forms of phalluses, and taking revenge. Never is her psychological ordeal fore-fronted, whereas that of the rapists is devoted an entire hour of screentime.
For some reason, the makers of this film thought it would be neat to show the aftermath of the rape entirely from the rapists' point of view, keeping Jennifer as a plot device for later use. Hence we see dim-witted redneck Matthew crying away in a desperate, and infuriating effort to rally us behind his plight. We see the poor sheriff being traumatized by a videocassette left by Jennifer in his family house. All this generic thriller fodder does is to flesh out the "antagonists", humanizing them much, much more than Jennifer. This greatly widens the discrepancy between the very "human" rapists and the highly objectified victim, whose entire persona is limited to her body, and most specifically, her genitalia. In the end, the film builds up toward an underwhelming finale that showcases all the screen-writers' creativity embodied in the torture implements utilized by Jennifer to exact revenge. Wishing to follow in the footsteps of Saw, minus the sickening editing, director Monroe locates the crux of horror not in the theatrical rape scene, but in these fakely imaginative contraptions. This is quite fitting if you consider how the rapists are fleshed out to maximize the effect of their demise and how Jennifer functions in the exact same way as the Jigsaw Killer. Just like sick old John Kramer from the undying torture porn franchise, her ordeal is useful only insofar as it encourages her to teach her victims a moral lesson. Just like Jigsaw's sickness, her rape is incidental. It is used not to characterize the protagonist, but to give a dubious moral dimension to her killings, as exemplified by their "poetic" nature (the voyeur has his eyes eaten out, the anal rapist is anally raped...).
To all you rapists out there: never forget to kill your victim!
Otherwise, you could go to Court or have your nutsack removed
The film self-destructs because the fantasy of female empowerment is likened to that of sexually-repressed slashers à la Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers. Rape itself is shown as something horrible, but one that is no different from other crimes, one that entails no horror but potential revenge on the perpetrators. What the film basically tells you is this: after you rape a girl and she starts wandering away from you, don't just stand there and laugh, shoot her in the back before she reaches the river. That way, you can bury her body in the forest and be forever blameless. That way, you can save your balls and cock, go back to your family and enjoy a normal life. This is made explicit by the fact that Jennifer is depicted as a looming specter whose function is retribution. Her body is not the vector of a painful post- rape aftermath, but a mere sperm dumpster bestowed with castrating hands. That's all there is to the "female-empowerment fantasy" suggested by New York Times columnist Jeannette Catsoulis. And for those who say that the perpetrators get their rightful punishment through the liberated hands of a liberated female, well they don't. Their ordeal involves no humiliation, nor does it put the burden of shame on their shoulders. It is important to note that Jennifer does not observe as her victims are executed, leaving them an ill-deserved quietude prior to death. Hence, she fails to capture the power of the gaze, which remains in the male realm. Most of all, she fails to really humiliate her victims, whose deaths are almost heroic. Protesting loudly, and in great contrast to her own meek opposition earlier in the film, the men go out with a bang whereas we would have wanted them to whimper and cry and break into shapeless, battered balls of shame. In that light, castration is only a half-effective symbol of justice, which fails to truly break down the macho self-assurance of the rapists. What's even more shocking in these scenes is how Jennifer tortures her oppressors using their own words. By replaying the previous rape scene with a simple reversal of roles, she fails to become her own person. She is merely the reversed mirror of male aggression. She uses the weapons of men, the words of men, but without gaining their power to look. She is supposed to be a successful writer, and despite that fact, she has no confidence with words and must rely on the words of men to express herself. Hence, she is never liberated from the shackles of patriarchy. Victim in the beginning, she is also victim at the end, in a vicious circle which the film willfully keeps unbroken.
Women are from Mars, men are from Venus
Strangely, the film is not about male aggression, it is about male fragility. All the pivotal scenes prior to the rape focus on the humiliation suffered by Johnny's ego. First, he gets rejected. Then, he is humiliated by Jennifer in front of his friends at the gas station. This double hit obviously tarnishes his image amongst his peers and threatens his alpha male status. When Matthew comes up to him and claims to have been kissed in his place, his ego is dealt an even stronger blow. That's when he decides to use the rape scenario as a way to step back into the spotlight, prove his manhood and reestablish his self confidence. The city woman is just a convenient outlet to achieve this. Much like a warrior's trial, overcoming her monstrous femininity allows the men to gain a form of selfhood, which is exemplified by the returning peace following the disappearance of Jennifer and the heroics displayed by Johnny and Andy in the face of death.
Beauty and the Beast
Unfortunately, and this is the main flaw of the film, Jennifer's character doesn't benefit from such a complex exposition. All through the film, she is pictured as a crude parody of femininity, alternating between the rigid roles of victim and castrator. There are absolutely no shades of grey in her characterization and this is how the film does violence against her. By creating a character so shallow, they have effectively reduced femininity to an accumulation of clichés that only warrant a male conception of females according to which rape is wrong only insofar as it is punishable (by law and by shears). There is no female empowerment here, and those willing to make that contention are either mad or uncaring. Female empowerment does not mean giving women the weapons of men and allowing them to do violence against them. It means giving them their righteous place onscreen as full-fledged, tri-dimensional characters with enough psychological depth to convey the full horror of rape and not merely the genital aspect thereof. It means giving them access to discourse, and not merely have them use prefabricated sentences or mimicked dialogue. All these things, which the film doesn't do, are what contributes to making females alien to male sensibilities, which thus makes their plight unintelligible to us.
The theatrics of exploitation, or dreaming of Header
If it was pure exploitation, I wouldn't be so hard on this film. But instead, it chose to trade the cheap, home-movie look of 1970s exploitation films (which worked so perfectly in early Craven) and go for that pristine, distancing Hollywood shine. In the process, it injected high doses of morality into the narrative as well as failed attempts at dramatic depth, creating inner contradictions that eventually tear the whole project apart from the inside.
While Sarah Butler is a great casting choice (her frail physique making her a perfect victim), the crew of redneck is mostly miscast. Soft-eyed soap opera star Jeff Branson hardly makes a convincing villain, while L.A. art curator Daniel Franzese comes out as a rather awkward redneck. What really compromises their effectiveness, though, is their carefully selected, almost preppy clothing and delicately catered facial hair. Their lack of a Southern accent also impairs their ability to transport us to the dirty South. Obviously, all of these people were cast not as film characters, but as theatrical actors provided with an extended wardrobe. And in the end, far from "becoming" their characters, they come across as a bunch of city guys with a bad case of country-fever.
All the way through I Spit on Your Grave, I was hoping to see grandpap Martin pop out of the scenery and "show them youngins how you really one-up someone". Header wasn't that great, but at least it boasted decent actors for the job. Their thick accent and dirty look was necessary to ascertain the proud roots of their characters. For them, rape needn't be explained in lengthy exposition scenes. It was an established tradition, just like it was in Deliverance. From where I stand, this new iteration of Meir Zarchi's semi-classic is a politically correct rape film that's produced far too nicely to reflect the crass reality it is trying to depict. The clean-looking, sexually challenged rapists are neither convincing, nor are they terrifying. And the attempts at creating dramatic tension without giving the victim half the onscreen time she deserves, well that's just pathetic.
Schlussel, Hoft, Wilson and the vicious circle of rape
As a social phenomenon, rape is very interesting in its ability to instantly reveal one's intrinsic beliefs. The mere word triggers a plethora of diverging, oft-contrasting reactions from people. Most of them involve some sort of castration fantasy. But others are near-apologies. One of the most disturbing and strangely common reactions to rape is the condemnation of the victim. Most advocates of this logic tend to focus on the good looks or skimpy outfits worn by women as a form of justification for male rapists. According to them, beauty and self-confidence are things unfitting for a woman to flaunt, lest she immediately becomes an object of universal lust. You'll notice that this way of thinking is strangely similar to that of many Sunni Muslims. At any rate, it is hardly befitting of any society claiming that its women have been "liberated".
But what's more disturbing in this ideology is how men are depicted as being merely instrumental in the act of rape. It's like every single man is a sex-focused pervert with a brain directly located in his scrotum, a machine which has got to fuck anything even remotely attractive. When tabloid readers nod their heads and suggest that such or such rape victim "should've seen it coming", they're basically saying "she should've known that men can't possibly keep their dicks in their pants". These kinds of statement are offensive to rape victims in that they put the blame on their shoulders for being attractive, but they are also offensive to men, which they liken to beasts unable of self-control.
Going back to Lara Logan, I Spit on Your Grave didn't do anything for her. It didn't do any rape victim justice. It merely uses their plight as a way to replay an almost Freudian castration narrative in which the "lack" is the only thing to characterize women. I understand now that Logan's own personal form of vengeance will be to stand tall again and brave adversity as she used to. She must stay unbroken, and thus the rapists will have lost in their attempts at dominating her and taming her femininity. Yet, in all their pettiness, these beastly men are not nearly as bad as the hardcore hate-mongerers from the backwoods of humanity who immediately used the incident to try and propagate their beliefs. Like starving dogs eyeing a stinking pile of excrements, they jumped on the ugliest headlines possible in order to fuel their hateful agenda. If it is true that hate breeds hate, then they are the living proof thereof.
Illuminating blogger Debbie Schlussel had this to say about the Logan's rape: "It bothers me not a lick when mainstream media reporters who keep telling us Muslims and Islam are peaceful get a taste of just how "peaceful" Muslims and Islam really are. In fact, it kinda warms my heart. Still, it's also a great reminder of just how "civilized" these "people" (or, as I like to call them in Arabic, "Bahai'im" [Animals] are". Obviously, the natural reaction to such drivel is fury. But no matter what I think about Miss Schlussel, I will not give her the satisfaction of dishing out insults for she would certainly revel in them, as she obviously revels in hatred. I will simply try and dissect the aforementioned hate speech. First of all, despite a shy retraction after she was panned and insulted by "the left", which I'm sure she was, there is no denying that she expressed joy about Logan's rape. Hell, the opening paragraph of her blog entry (transcribed above) states that her heart (what heart?) was warmed by Logan getting a taste of violence. These are the kinds of words that you cannot undo, especially when used in a lead! Although I agree with Miss Schlussel about how reading is fundamental, I cannot say that she softens the blow anywhere in the following paragraphs. Quite the contrary.
Following an excerpt from a real media source in which Logan is said to have "suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating", she casually remarks: "Hey, sounds like the threats I get from American Muslims on a regular basis. Now you know what it's like, Lara." Hummm... It kinda seems like she is comparing Logan's ordeal to her own, the poor thing. But although I'm sure she is pelted with hate mail every day, I doubt this mail ever raped her. Being a staple of hate-mongering, the "rape as lesson" narrative is used by Schlussel with clinical coldness in order to do a better job of hate-mongering. This allows her unapologetic and unfocused hatred for Islam to take roots, thus allowing the vicious circle of in-humanism to be completed. First through her carefree attitude toward Logan's rape, then by putting words like peaceful, civilized and people between quotation marks when referring to 15-20% of the world population, she proves herself to be not merely slanderous, but downright misanthropic.
Debbie Schlussel uses rape as a battle trumpet
(this representative photo was taken
while browsing here)
Other criticism of Logan is to be found in the enlightening writings of Jim Hoft and Simone Wilson. Hoft, the eagle-eyed Gateway pundit who spotted Al Sharpton's rarely seen Nazi salute, blamed Logan's "liberal belief system" for her attack. The guy probably doesn't even know the meaning of the word "liberal" but that's another thing... As for his hatred for Logan, it has taken strange proportions since scabrous aspects of her personal life came to be publicized (or invented) by tabloids. From then on, he started a real campaign against her, dishing out elegant puns such as "in-bedded journalist" and "media whore".
As far as I am concerned, his vitriolic antics point to one thing and one thing only: a secret fondness for the lady. I'm just guessing here, but could all these nights in crusty sheets where frustrating wet dreams were chased away by dawn could have gotten to ol' Jim when he heard that Lara had torrid affairs with men other than him? Did he felt betrayed? Or was his soul devoured by jealousy? At any rate, his comments regarding the personal life of Logan are not only unjustified, they're unworthy of any serious journalistic pretense. As for the strange question he asks early in his article, "Why did this attractive blonde female reporter wander into Tahrir Square last Friday?", I'm inclined to think it shows just how he personally lusts for her. More than that, it shows just how natural rape can appear to the advocates of fear and how inclined these people are to blame beauty for it.
What Hoft is basically saying, by focusing on how good Logan looks, is "she should have known". Everybody knows blonde babes are a shoe-in for brutal Arabic gang-rape. And for those who don't know, there's unattractive, beige-haired male reporter Jim Hoft to make it clear. To answer your question, Mr. Hoft, Logan went into Tahrir Square because that is what journalists do. They go where the action is, in order to report the news as it happens, so as to illuminate the world with the beacon of knowledge, even if it means putting one's life on the line. A blogger is not a journalist. At least, very few of them are and you are certainly not one of them. Reprocessing information from other media sources, regurgitating them if you will, and stamping them with a candid, unfocused and partisan comment, this is not journalism. It is just ranting. And using the ordeal of a woman you personally describe as "attractive" as a way to promote hate, well that's just inhumane, unworthy at least, of anything Logan stood for when she "wandered" into Tarhir Square.
Simone Wilson, in a much milder article for salon.com, insisted heavily on what she calls "the Hollywood good looks" of Logan. While she doesn't use them to justify the incident per se, it seems to come naturally for her to mention how "shockingly" beautiful the victim was, and how blonde. Not unlike Hoft, who also uses the irrelevant epithet "blonde" to describe his favorite "media whore", Wilson reduces Logan's entire being and career to her physical appearance. Which is what rapists also do. Wilson would say she doesn't condone rape, which I'm sure she doesn't. Nonetheless, she replicates the very mindset allowing rape to be justified. Insofar as a woman is characterized only by her "good looks", she never comes out as a real person, with real feelings and emotions. She comes out as a flat object, the object of the gaze, which in its superficiality warrants any sort of immediate self-gratification. I Spit on Your Grave's superficial outlook on Jennifer is the same as Wilson's on Logan. While both entities may argue that they don't support rape, they support the underlying mentality, which dictates that a woman is just as good as how fuck-able she looks.
It is what it is, but exactly what is it?
I Spit on Your Grave is nothing but what it represents. It is nothing but the reaction you can derive from it. Its content is only as interesting as the analysis you make of it. But from a purely objective standpoint, the film fails because it misplaces drama, away from a greatly objectified woman whose ordeal is exploited to forward a vacuous moral lesson. It fails because it is too sharply-photgraphed and too theatrical to allow the realistic depiction of a very real issue. It fails because the chic rednecks and unimaginative writer from the narrative are totally un-involving. It fails because its very existence is based on a contradiction. By trying to be politically correct and exploitative at the same time, the film doesn't know when to hit the gas and when to hit the break. The result is a complete, utter crash that leaves no survivor on or offscreen.
1/5 A far too glossy, phallocentric exercise in contradiction.
