Double Standards in Revenge Narratives

Roger Ebert loves The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. And he hates the recent remake of I Spit on Your Grave (he’s not too fond of the original, either). In his review of Grave, he condemns the revenge narrative for being nasty and exploitative, lingering on the violation of the central female character as much, if not more than, as on the ways in which she later exacts revenge on her violators.

But here’s the thing – I don’t understand how these specific narrative elements in Grave really differ all that much from similar aspects of Dragon Tattoo. In both, we see a young woman sexually assaulted and humiliated in protracted sequences that are framed so as to make the audience complicit in the heroine’s assault. The revenge these women take upon their assaulters is poetic in its brutality, but, as I state in my review of Dragon Tattoo, do these sequences really balance out the gruesome acts that call them into being in the first place? Why must we watch our heroines be repeatedly violated in the most degrading of ways – and why must this violation be filmed so artfully – before allowing them their retribution?

Which got me to thinking. Apart from John Schlesinger’s weird Sally Field vehicle, An Eye for an Eye, I cannot come up with a single female revenge narrative that is not based on a personal, bodily violation of its heroine. It’s the very thing that makes An Eye for an Eye weird – that it follows the conventions of male revenge films, with a heroine who is not exacting revenge on her own behalf, but for the honor a loved one (in this case, her daughter, who was . . . raped and murdered), which is to say, his/her own honor. Male revenge films almost never spring from the personal, bodily violation of their heroes. Rather, they involve a man – usually a father figure – taking revenge for damage done to family and loved ones, and on the way, fashioning of themselves the über-patriarch. Just off the top of my head, there’s Jonnie To’s recent Vengeance, Mel Gibson’s 2010 flop Edge of Darkness, Kevin Bacon in 2007’s Death Sentence, Taken with Liam Neeson, pretty much every film Steven Segal has ever made, and the upcoming Faster with Dwayne Johnson.

Some additional notable female revenge narratives? In The Brave One, Jodie Foster is physically and sexually assaulted, and later takes revenge for both this action and the resulting murder of her fiancé. Enough has Jennifer Lopez as a beaten wife who learns to fight back. There’s Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies, in which Uma Thurman’s Bride character takes revenge for her betrayal and the murder of her fiancé – but who begins her bloody spree by killing the rapists who violated her while she was in a coma. Compare this with the more ideological revenge that Tarantino’s Basterds take upon the Nazis in Inglorious Basterds, and there is in fact little to compare. (Though Melanie Laurent’s character proves an interesting figure, as she is avenging her family, though she does not entirely escape sexual humiliation at the hands of Christoph Waltz,’s Col. Landa. There’s also Marcellus Wallace’s rape and revenge in Pulp Fiction, though it is a minor plot point, and not the driving narrative – perhaps Tarantino is more interested in bending some of the vengeance film rules than are most mainstream filmmakers.)

What about male revenge narratives that center around the violation of the male body? The Crank films sort of qualify, though Stathem’s Chev Chelios is most certainly not sexually violated in either of them. Tim Robbins’ character is raped in The Shawshank Redemption, but his “revenge” is more upon the powers that be than on his attackers. (Interesting note – there are 110 “keywords” associated with The Shawshank Redemption on IMdB.com, including “pie” and “hat”, but not one of them is “rape”. Also, looking up “rape and revenge” as an IMdB keyword search is not a recommended 3 a.m. activity.)

Others? I can’t think of any. A few searches and some canvassing doesn't yield much fruit, which to me means that wherever the narratives of male violation and revenge live, they’re largely disregarded or forgotten. (There is, however, some material to be found on television – both the little-remembered Kingpin and the lauded OZ used male sexual violation as a motive for revenge.) But the female narratives of violation vengeance? Well, they get green-lit for remakes by filmmakers both unknown (Steven K. Moore and I Spit on Your Grave) and lauded (David Fincher and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo). And it seems that, as Ebert’s reviews of these two films proves, we sometimes let pretty window dressing distract us from how unnerving these narratives really are.