August 12, 2005

• You're just asking for trouble here.
• neither is acceptable. perhaps the question is why is sex not acceptable when violence is.
• What if rapes were set to cool music, shot from cool angles, and contained witty dialogue? Clockwork Orange?
• Remark about sex vs power in 3...2...1...
• Because you can argue that killing someone is not wrong, depending on circumstances. I don't think anyone would be able to argue that in respect to raping someone
• sex. christians.
• In movies, murder is used as a plot device, to either conveniently resolve a plot, in that so-and-so dies, end of story, or set it in motion, that so-and-so kills somebody, goes on the run, etc. In both cases, the murderer is likely the protagonist, in which case the audience is meant to sympathize and even like the killer. Thus, murder is set in an acceptable or understandable way. However, rape doesn't serve the same function. It would be more of an expository device, in that a man's raping of a woman is meant to show what a nasty piece of work he is. If the story is told from the woman's perspective, the rape is both expository to her character, and serves as a plot vehicle -- she gets raped, story begins or story continues. Rape can hardly be used as a plot ending. For either use, rape cannot be glorified, in that if it were, we won't see the man as bad, or the woman as sufferring but good of character. Of course, there are going to be exceptions to this, but I think that's what it comes down to -- if we're meant to sympathize with the perp, the act is glorified, and if we're meant to sympathize with the victim, it's shown horrifically. My guess, at least.
• I think it also depends on *where* the television is located. If my memory serves, I recall seeing a fairly graphic rape scene that seemed glamorized on a late-night serial that was broadcast in Japan.
• Tarantino and Sin City are crap.
• Murder victims don't have to live with the memory of their attack, and aren't reminded of it every time they see a murder on TV.
• Because you can argue that killing someone is not wrong, depending on circumstances Wow, that is a far cry from the kind of thing the poster is describing (and you know it). I agree with the poster that this is an odd phenomenon. It's not a bad thing to point out these inconsistencies and wonder why. Causing pain to others is meant to be a villainous quality, in terms of character, but that use is changing. (enter the anti-hero, the vigilante, etc) If we look at the character of Mr. Blond, from Reservoir Dogs, we see a character who is largely glorified -- probably the best example of where the line is drawn, in that about half the people I've talked to identified with Mr. Blond and the other half, the cop he was torturing, with predictable results in terms of reaction. Torture, like rape, has been used almost exclusively in fiction to create sympathy for the victim and antipathy for the perpetrator. Killing is a far more mixed bag. Maybe it's just the endless desensitization of that one act. We've had people pulling triggers -- for laughs not "justified" reasons -- for ages now. There should be an outcry, but there isn't. we're meant to sympathize with the perp, the act is glorified, and if we're meant to sympathize with the victim, it's shown horrifically That doesn't explain why we're willing to buy into the glorification for one terrible act and not another. Can I raise a tangential (but perhaps not unrelated) point? How often do you see a female victim of either murder or any kind of physical attack (eg: a fistfight with a tough female character) where the act is glorified? Certainly far more often than, say, then years ago. So victims of glorified acts of violence have almost always been male. That may explain why we're much less willing to cross that line with nearly female-specific acts of violence.
• Murder victims don't have to live with the memory of their attack, and aren't reminded of it every time they see a murder on TV. But there's the whole family and community of friends who I imagine would not like it taken lightly. A lot of rape victims also keep it to themselves. When a murder is glorified or made comedic on tv or in movies, you'd think there'd be a whole community of people hollering at the media to make it stop.
• >That doesn't explain why we're willing to buy into the glorification for one terrible act and not another. Why do we buy into it? Because they're movies and television. By sitting ourselves down and watching, we're throwing ourselves right into that state of wilful suspension of disbelief. The regular rules no longer apply. We are not horrifed by that which should horrify us because we are in that different state of perception. Our wilful suspension means that we are ready to accept the presentation that is offerred to us -- that one act is bad and the other good, depending on the requirements of the characters and plot. We accept the one and not the other simply because we are asked to, and we are willing to comply. Our acceptance of those portrayals depends upon how we watch them -- critically, or passively. If passively, we are deeper into that suspension of disbelief, and if critically, we remain closer to our 'natural' response, were we to see those acts in the flesh.
• Rorschach, you know some weird people. I don't identify with Mr. Blond or the cop, and I don't think I'm alone in that.
• It's a valid point to raise (although, I would submit that "glorified" murder is completely subjective ... I would argue that Mr. Blond's actions do not glorify murder ... everyone thinks he's insane and he ends up dead on the floor). I think it's because rape is a much bigger taboo than murder. It's more than just violence, it's humiliation and degradation. Murder can be and usually is impersonal, while rape never is. It's such a visceral violation that people, when viewing it, get very emotional. It's a risk putting it in a film when it's required for the plot, and it's box office suicide if it's gratuitous.
• Murder can be and usually is impersonal In movies, I mean.
• There should be an outcry, but there isn't No there shouldnt. Slight tangent to the issue, but we have more than enough censorship without more outcries. Movies are art and should be allowed to reflect anything the artists choose. People should vote with their wallets. If you dont like it, dont see it. The whole "glorifying" argument is just code for censorship in my book. It is "acceptable" because we have a first amendment which allows for freedom of speech. Personally, I am willing to "buy into" anything if the movie is good. Tarantino movies are, as I mentioned above, utter crap in my book, because they are so cartoonish and "surface" - the characters arent people, and the movies are about nothing but reminding us how cool the director thinks is, and that tends to involve a lot of killing, racial slurs, etc.
• If we go to extremes, it could be argued it already is, in the form of the 'rough seduction scene', when the hero, maybe still dripping with the blood of the villains he blasted away while uttering a funny pun, takes his 'just reward': the damsel in distress, who might be a wild girl but ends up tamed by the strong-jawed hero. How many seduction scenes involve displays of power, the re-affirmation of male=strong, female=weak? And yes, it's bleak how the gut reaction of many people towards a scene involving the threat of sexual violence can end up with *relief* IF the victim ends up killed instead of raped. Just shows the terrible power of that act.
• to condense: If you believe that art can "glamorize," in other words, causeimitative behavior in real life, you are in favor of censorship and should work to have all unpleasant art banned. Otherwise, if you dont like it, dont see it.
• Koko, Flagpole, I think you're onto something -- murder has a level of acceptance that rape does not simply because there is no victim remaining, so to speak. Once the person has been killed, the sufferring has ended. Of course, were we to be exposed to the surviving families and friends, that attitude would change, but in those cases, we wouldn't be asked to find the original murder acceptable for whatever reason.
• It isn't just about art, either. There is a strong distinction between the two crimes in real life. The subculture that exists within prisons treats rapists *very* differently than murderers...even though our justice system gives harsher penalties to the latter. It's probably because we can envision murder as being justifiable, as in "he had it comin'", whereas we can't do that with rape.
• I think it has a lot to do with the fact that murder can happen between 'equals' (e.g. two tough guys or a cop with a gun vs. a gangster with a gun), but rape always necessitates a weaker individual (or drink and drugs to convert a strong person into a weak one). It is strength taking advantage of weakness. Murder can be that, but is often other things - many of which many americans find palatable, like revenge or war.
• I think the difference between rape and murder lies in the social subtext. Murder, more often than not is either retaliatory or pre-emptive, whereas rapes are often about power and intimidation. I think that torture is a closer analog to rape than murder is, as they are both (often, but not always) about interpersonal power, intimidation, and infliction of pain in very specific and psychologically scarring ways.
• To add on to what chimaera said, and I may be way wrong, but I would guess that more murders happen between parties that know each other then rapes. In otherwords, rape is a "wrong place at the wrong time" happenstance, where murder may be more planned out.
• Before I kick out for the weekend, I just want to thank all the posters for the remarkable tone of civility and rationality that they've shown towards each other, and this post in general. And of course, now that I've said THAT...
• You mean, like, why was it wrong for President Clinton to lie about oral sex, but it`s ok that Bush lied about reasons for war? Good question, what are the priorities in this country?
• Some very interesting observations here, and I also appreciate the civility... I think that dramatic (glamorous and other) on-screen murders often portray emotions-into-actions that viewers connect with; and while the overwhelming majority of our population understands the emotion/reasoning, we are not compelled to follow the example. In many of the "glamorous" cases, it's also usually committed under such extraordinary circumstances that the murder is no longer truly in the "suspension of disbelief" category in its true sense. The other murders seem to end up in plots where justice prevails on the murderer-- where, again, the viewers have the vicarious thrill of seeing justice done. Rape? No way to maintain any suspension of disbelief-- the act shocks the viewer out of that state by the force of the violence AND degradation AND depravity. It simply doesn't take any normal viewer where they'd like to go.
• And retank, take it elsewhere.
• I think it has a lot to do with the fact that murder can happen between 'equals'.. I think yentruoc is right. Perhaps I just don't watch enough tv, but how often do we see the murder of children, or maybe some nice old ladies, glorified? I feel like the murder of a woman will almost always be presented as something reprehensible, not a fun action sequence. And the rape of men (as in prison movies or the famous Pulp Fiction scene) seems like an altogether lighter topic.
• I fail to see how murder is glamorized in your examples. Murder was a bad thing in Sin City. Merv was trying to solve a murder, Hartigan was trying to prevent a murder. Note that killing != murder. You'll have to be more specific with Tarantino. Give me a movie or scene.
• Good question ! Rent the Japanese movie " RAPEMAN " to start with.
• techsmith: I could be equally wrong, but what they tell most women in self defense classes is that most people are raped by someone they know and only a small percentage are of the "stranger in the bushes" variety.
• The crime murder may be glamorized for the broader offerings it will bring for viewing a crime TV show or movie. This sells the airtime, which brings profits to the networks. but it is not acceptable to do so with rape? Check out the Lifetime Cable channel, many TV dramas about rape. Murder is more glamorized for the fact it’s societies highest crime that few people would like a person walking free from the crime's punishment. Look towards your own neighborhood for local news reports of murders versus rapes. Almost all murders are mentioned. Also, it’s human nature for people wanting to see people hang, which with murder carries the most sever punishment for a crime. Then, proving the murderer and motive for it is the crime's bigger drama than rape. Viewers can easily be gained by this crime than the rest. As you don’t have to physically have contact with the person one kills unlike rape. So catching the criminal may be harder which gives an intellect value for the show. Also the reason for the crime may have an impact here. The reasoning behind a murder can be endless where as rape is a selfish act caused by perversion. This gives a surprise-ending factor in a murder show. Because many viewers will watch the murder's show’s ending for the motive of the crime though the culprit may have been known at the show’s start. All these things together spark people’s interests in this type of crime being shown. Like driving by a big car crash and slowing down just to rubberneck.
• Pretty much all of us can say that at times, if our fear or hatred or anger were magnified, we could have committed murder. But I think it's less common to have emotions that, if magnified, would have made any of us rapists. I think it's the greater commonality of pre-murderous emotion that makes it perhaps more palatable to consider, and even perhaps in that way less troubling to experience vicariously as entertainment.
• Well, the anal rape of Ben Affleck is, if not glamorised, certainly approved of in Mallrats... I think everybody who's talked about the relative power-realationships and the characteristics of the victims has pretty much hit the nail on the head. The kind of glamorised murder we're mostly talking about happens either between peers, or to characters who have been established as undeserving of our sympathy. Furthermore, I suspect that there's a difference in that, very often, the murder is almost tangential to the glamorisation. It's not the act of murder itself that is the goal - that's merely another prop, alongside the cool coat and the atmospheric lighting and the pounding soundtrack, to emphasise what an utterly awesome badass this guy is. The victim will either be a characterless cipher or an established sleazeball, and thus very easy for the viewer - living vicariously through the murdering character - to push to the back of their mind and instead just go, "hey, great coat". In general, the more glamorised the murder is, the more flippant it will be. That's a very hard effect to achieve with rape, where the action itself is clearly the goal, and a very personal goal at that. If a character commits rape, and how they do so, tells you a huge amount about the character. You can't really push that to the back of your mind. In Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days, there's a repeatedly viewed extended scene of rape and murder. While it certainly isn't glamorised, per se, because of the role it plays in the plot (which I won't spoil) it isn't explicitly framed in a condemnatory manner, and it has many of the characteristics of ways in which non-sexual violence is traditionally filmed to give the viewer a visceral thrill. And it's disturbing as shit.
• Why do we buy into it? Because they're movies and television. That wasn't the question. Why do we buy into the glorification of one act and not another. Your suspension of disbelief argument should work for both, which would render the poster's question much less interesting. As it is, we accept the fictional, glorified portrayal of one and not the other. That is interesting. yentruoc, I think you're onto something. To reply to a few other thoughts, though -- I don't think that "glorify" needs to be taken the way some are taking it here, and I am certainly not advocating censorship though that's a natural connect, since in the 80's, one major factor on whether a violent bit of fiction would make it onto tv was whether the perpetrators were filmed in a favourable or unfavourable light. But I think we've all seen "glorified" violence -- let's forget the middle ground and think of the obvious cases -- slow-motion bullets riddle structures and persons, melodramatic music plays, and the perps get away with their crimes (at least initially), and most importantly: they're made to look cool. Creating sympathy for characters isn't rocket science, and a good filmmaker can begin with sympathetic or unsympathetic characters and plan when your sympathies should begin to change by what they show you. (remember the bank scene in the Matrix? pretty much all of the "cool" elements of violence there full stop -- but the clever thing here is that the people taking the bullets are: i) "asleep", part of the system, and ii) liable to turn into an agent at any moment. In order to dismiss audience feelings completely here, those taking the bullets needed to be devalued, and they were, effectively, I think) That being the case, it would be a simple matter to concoct a story where these variables were not in the usual state: murder not justified, rape of an otherwise powerful figure, etc, etc, and somehow I don't think that the fictional rape would be any more palatable to watch, while the murder still would. It would take additional elements (a saintly victim, killed while trying to help others, perhaps) to make the onscreen murder of any victim as shocking as the rape of an even unfavourable character. So those of you saying that there is something intrinsic about the act, you may be right. Though I still think that this puts it in the same sphere as fictional torture, and I still don't think we have the same level of shock there -- so I'm left to think that it's at least partially about the victim demographic. Pretty much all of us can say that at times, if our fear or hatred or anger were magnified, we could have committed murder. But I think it's less common to have emotions that, if magnified, would have made any of us rapists. That could be it, too. Good observation.
• I feel like the murder of a woman will almost always be presented as something reprehensible, not a fun action sequence. And the rape of men (as in prison movies or the famous Pulp Fiction scene) seems like an altogether lighter topic. Sorry I missed that. Very interesting. I'd forgotten about that bit in Pulp Fiction (which I guess is telling).
• i think we've all felt from time to time that 'damn, i want to kill that f**ker'. it probably gives us a smile somewhere within. we also might say 'damn, i want to f**k her/him' and the thought of it will most certainly make us smile as well. but when we catch ourselves saying 'damn, i want to rape that b*tch' is when we think damn, i'm f**ked up. so rape is generally not a good selling point if it's glamorized. we'd all walk out saying 'damn, i'm f**ked up.' if there was no murder in movies and tv, id want to kill someone. but i don't feel a great sexual need for rape. i can act out any sexual fantasy i want with the right partner. but when was the last time you could act out a murder fantasy??? that's where movies step in. better a fantasy than the real thing: (clears throat) the struggle against radical extremism. and sin city was visually stunning - visceral - good. the documentaries a day in the life of north korea, the corporation, the revolution will not be televised, outfoxed, spin, and on and on were all excellent but revealed how f**ked up people are when they don't keep their power fantasies as just that - fantasies.
• You can say fuck if you want, uhmyang. Just don't fucking glamorise it.
• ahhh fuck it.
• Too fucking right.
• I was thinking recently about violence against women in movies. Mostly, I was thinking about assaults, punching in the face, etc. And it is typically treated very seriously when it is shown. It is not often shown to demonstrate how cool a character is. I figured that maybe it was shown differently from murder because the viewer is more likely to slap a woman than he is to kill someone. Therefore, a moviemaker feels some moral obligation not to trivialize slapping women. That led me to taking it further and going to the more violent crime against women: rape. And, yes, I meant rape against women. Raping men in movies is a typical source of humor. You don't hear "don't pick up the soap" type-jokes about women. So I wondered if rape was an extension of my theory about the slapping of women: men are much more likely to rape a woman than they are to kill someone so they would rather not depict rape in a trivial light. I certainly have enjoyed reading the comments as they have helped me to think more about the issue in different ways.
• In Germany, porn is perfectly acceptable, but violece is not. In America violence is perfectly acceptable, but porn is not. You can die in horrble, brutal, bloody, ways here, as long as you have your clothes on.
• I think in Japanese culture, rape is more "acceptable" than murder. Some of my (mostly male) friends had seen several Japanese porn movies for sale at various places and loads of them seem to be about rape, or at least initially non-consensual sex. So, as VertexOfLife has pointed out, it does differ from country to country?
• Rape damage (Mental) is infectious. My GF from 10 years ago was attacked. I still carry the damage.
• Ya ever watch the Lifetime channel (you know, the men-are-guilty-of-everything channel)? Lifetime does a pretty good job of glamourizing the process: slightly washed-out star plays "ordinary person" who has horrible act committed against her by a man (it's always a man - women never do anything wrong on this channel) and eventually she bounces back through a show of inner courage and strength. Sorry - sometimes bad shit happens to people and not only does it stay happened, but they don't recover from it. Despite the Lifetime Channel's best efforts, rape is impossible to glamourize (good thing, too) because it is not exactly well-defined. A murder starts and ends with someone dying. It's a simple act, easy to commit, permanent, and there's not much grey area. You don't get "sort of" murdered, one is either murdered or one is not. For rape, there is no definite starting point - it's not just about nonconsensual sex. There are power aspects, mental aspects - it covers a whole gamut of aspects. It is a voluntary act on the part of the offender - you don't commit rape in self-defense - which raises all kinds ugly questions about ourselves, if we bother to think about it. Like murder, rape can be committed against either gender; there is no upper or lower boundary for age. One cannot murder an animal (despite PETA's best efforts to convince us otherwise - killing is not the same as murder) but a human can rape an animal and if you believe the National Enquirer, some animals rape humans. Personally, I'm not going to wear a dolphin-guard the next time I'm in the ocean. For the writer, rape offers such a cloud of nebulous boundaries, that it is easier to just kill someone rather than spend two hours agonizing over whether or not a rape was committed. It's murder every time because it's such a simple act. Plus, there's the whole good-sex-is-bad, killing-is-good aspect that our (American) society inherited from the Puritans and other religions. --- NOTE: Author of this comment does not condone any kind of violence other humans and is not wholly comfortable with killing of animals, when you get down to it. However, "going upside someone's head" is a perfectly sensible and deserved act.
• In movies, as in real life, flimsy justifications must be provided so that the killing can begin. Once the bad guys kill the good guy's family, for instance, the good guy is justified in doing whatever he wants. He's got that squinting-into-the-distance look that means he's out for Justice and if you ask the wrong question he might just kill you too. It's okay with God and that ought to be good enough for you. It *might* be okay for the hero to have sex as long as he's married and only does it in flashbacks. For the most part, though, God doesn't want anybody touching their Bad Parts or thinking about any of that dirty rubbing stuff; so anybody in the story who does any raping or other sexing not ratified by God is identifying himself as a person who should be killed with a rocket launcher, or possibly one of those cool miniguns with a spinning barrel.
• Bang Bang!
• A mixed bag of thoughts on this topic. An interesting movie to see in light of this conversation is Man Bites Dog, a French-language film made in the mid-1990s. Try to see it uncut, although the uncut version is extreme and disturbing. It's about a rapist and murderer who is being followed by a film crew. It's horrifying. And it might cast light on some ideas that you guys have been exploring. (Then again: it might not. I haven't seen it since 1997.) Quite a ways back, Rorshack (sp?) said: But there's the whole family and community of friends who I imagine would not like it taken lightly. A lot of rape victims also keep it to themselves. When a murder is glorified or made comedic on tv or in movies, you'd think there'd be a whole community of people hollering at the media to make it stop. Someone I knew very casually about ten years ago was murdered by her boyfriend in late July. I hadn't ever been close to her (she was a friend of an ex-boyfriend with whom I had a terrible breakup; we continued to run in parallel circles and had mutual friends for years), and I hadn't thought of her much in a long time. But when I heard about her death, and the grisly details of it (he stabbed her with a knife and then, some time later, upon realizing that she was still alive, he slashed her throat with a katana), I fell into a funk that lasted about a week. Some friends accused me of morbidity. I think I was primarily horrified that this could happen to someone I knew, albeit not well, and that she didn't even live to see 30. I have some livejournal icons that struck me as funny a few months ago: one is a movie hero wielding a sword, with the caption, "Stabnation!" Another is a photo of decayed skeletal remains (those found in the caves on the show Lost), with the caption, "It's just a flesh wound!" Neither of these seems remotely amusing to me anymore. Likewise, an episode of a crime drama shown a week ago was about a potential serial killer who decapitated young women. There has been a rumor going around that Fawn was decapitated (although I have also seen police statements refuting it). I asked my family to find something else to watch. If I had this degree of sensitivity to what happened, I cannot imagine what people close to her are or have been feeling. And yes, I want some of it to stop. (more)
• I don't think "movies are art" is a good excuse - not all movies are art. Most of them are commercial entertainment. Occasionally Michael Bay should be stopped. Just not by law, not forcibly... we should vote with our dollars about the context of violence. I don't think most Americans (or people of any country, really) are intellectually/politically engaged enough to do this. They want escapism. Finally, not addressing the quoted material: It seems like the general mood of this thread is that rapists are punished and while, in movies, murdered characters may have been "asking for it", raped characters never are. But in real life, it's very hard to get a conviction for rape even in cases that go to trial, and blaming the victim has been a common strategy. Many rape victims don't get the support they need; many don't even admit it ever happened. (I won't even go much into the discussion of how most women are raised, in an atmosphere of fear, with the knowledge that you always have to be careful, often with the idea that sex is something that men try to take from you, rather than something you'd be interested in participating in.) If rape victims get counselling, it is often of the variety that suggests that "you'll never be the same, your life will never be the same." Certainly suggesting that your life is, if not ruined, then "altered." I have a friend who has the worst nonfictional rape/molestation story that I have personally ever heard, and her rapist was never even reported. For some time later, she was a volunteer rape crisis counsellor, and she told me that she was always very irritated by the rhetoric of "nothing will ever be the way it was before you were raped; he's destroyed some things for you." Whenever she dealt with someone who came in, she made a point of saying, "Things might be bad for a while, but you CAN get back to the point where you were before. This does NOT have to irreparably change your life." Which I thought was pretty interesting. As far as rape being more acceptable (in terms of entertainment fodder) in Japan: another very commonly accepted Japanese thing is the idea of middle-aged men lusting after high-school girls. Gender roles are changing there, but they've never really had a viable feminist movement. I think a lot of current attitudes towards the depiction of rape in America are inherited from second-wave feminism. But feminist theorists still think we have a long way to go, that there are a lot of rape-fantasy scenarios in movies or rape-suggestive fashion or etc.
• Also - sorry, the order of my comments above suggests that "not all movies are art" is meant to follow directly on "yes, I want some of it to stop" as an advocation of censorship of violence in movies. But I meant them as two separate comments - "not all movies are art" in reply to drjimmy11's comments that there shouldn't be more outcry. Some violence is just gratuitous, and the movies aren't good enough to justify it. But there are, yeah, plenty of good movies (like The Matrix and Sin City, mentioned here) that have oodles of gratuitous violence. And though several have held up Sin City as a good example of a movie where murder is depicted as either bad or merited, I know a ton of young feminists who were very bothered and disturbed by the movie, not the least because of what they saw as the disposability of the female sex-worker characters and because more than one male character slaps a woman. They were particularly disturbed by the line of heads mounted on the wall. You can read the stereotypical rant here. (And if anyone is interested in what I thought about that rant, which can be summed up as "it would be better if it didn't consist of so much hyperbole," you can read my comments in the comments area here - I was addressing a friend who more or less agreed with the statements made in the rant, but I've screened her comment.)
• I know that I'm pushing the envelope here but picture this: A film that takes its time to explain the complex relationship between a man and a woman. The man is battered and sexually abused by the woman (possibly through an abusive relationship) and as plot thickens, slowly learns that he must "get back" at her. The film ends with a rape scene. The film would be seen as a story of the weak triumphing over the abusive and the rape the culmination of the triumph. The effect would not be unlike the plot of many murder-glorifying movies, where in a unlawful environment, the antihero is somehow terribly wronged and must take matter into his own hands. (Punisher, Pulp Fiction, Sin City) Damn I'm f**ked up.
• Thanks for your thoughtful comments, verbinx. That's a level of insight that it just isn't possible to guess, though I'm sorry you've had the experiences to carry it. No, I had the same thought, removeable -- in that the various things people say are more typical of a murder plot could be imported into a story involving rape -- and the interesting question would then be if it suddenly became a more acceptable storyline. I think we agree that it doesn't. As for the Maxwell's Silver Hammer animation (from MeFi and MeCha, where it was consistently called "cute if morbid"), it isn't hard to imagine how difficult it would be to make an animation about rape "cute". Impossible is more like it.
• I watched House of Flying Daggers (Shi mian mai fu) last night, which gives an attempted sexual assault a comedic twist near the beginning -- the male character is drunk and in a house of "entertainment" and jumps on a dancing woman with the obvious intention of getting her clothes off, then presumably having sex with her.
• Tracicle, I never did see HoFDs. Can you elaborate on how this relates to rape (since you mentioned he's in a house of "entertainment")? Or, explain more about what happens after and how it relates to the general plot?
• I got the impression, because it's not explicitly described, that the "entertainment" was female companionship and actual entertainment, like dancing, singing, games, conversation, but not including sex. (That's the bit I'm unclear on; they may have chosen to downplay the sex part of the service.) But one of the women is asked to dance for this drunken male character, she does so in front of him and the rest of the women -- it's all quite dignified, a proper performance -- and he leaps on her in mid-dance, rips her clothes and fondles her before being pulled off by the local coppers. Later in the film the same woman is assaulted in a similar way by another man who claims to be in love with her (and she presumably was in love with him). They meet in a forest, begin to have consensual sex until she pulls away (she's now fallen in love with the first guy, the drunken dude), and he, in a fit of apparently jealousy, rips her clothes off her and is stopped by another woman from actually having sex with her. The first act comes across as playful, mischievous, comical, while the second is definitely malicious and performed by a guy who's not right in the head, but I couldn't tell you what it is about each scene that gives that feel aside from the acting and maybe the setting (first is in a room surrounded by people, second is alone in a forest).
• I think the reason the first attempted assault in HoFD comes off as comical is that it's not actually REAL, nor is it personal. He's doing it to establish his fake identity. He knows that it's not actually going to happen, and probably doesn't have any intention of going through with it. The second attempted assault is in every way the opposite: personal, real, and yes, malicious, with no expectation that someone will necessarily come along and stop it. To be honest, both attempts bothered me when I saw the movie, which I didn't really like (I thought it was pretty but kind of absurd). Another issue is that, through the course of the movie, the main male character (who makes the first attempt) is shown as handsome, charming, and heroic, while the secondary male character turns isn't as good-looking or personable, and indeed turns out to be kind of a rotter. Is that second assault seen as reprehensible partly because he did it, or is he seen as reprehensible partly because of the attempted assault and its icky details, or both?
• while the secondary male character turns isn't as good-looking or personable... Obviously, "turns" wasn't meant to be there. :)
• I didn't think the secondary male was particularly bad, plot twists and double-agenting aside, until the rape scene. Until that point he was just sort of a neutral character to move the plot along. The whole love thing felt false from the get-go. I was bothered by both scenes also, and I agree with you that the movie was beautifully filmed, but rather silly. I almost had to tape my mouth shut to stop MST3King. I think you're right about the first assault, too, but it's the closest I think I've seen to a rape being treated as anything other than serious and violent.
• Thanks for the insight.
• About HoFD: The first scene took place in a brothel; the leader of the House of Flying Daggers was posing as a madam. The attack on the "blind" dancer, who was herself posing as the daughter of the master of the HoFD, was staged to draw the HoFD into the open. The second attempted rape was by her longtime lover, and IMO was an expression of his rage and grief at her betrayal. I feel it was meant to be disturbing, but the fact that it was interrupted saved it from being gratuitous. As for the overall absurdity of the film, that's really the style of Chinese martial arts films, which are much like faerie tales in nature.
• Anyway, I don't think it was any more or less absurd than "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" or "Hung Fu Hustle". Then again, I love Chinese martial arts films because they're so absurd. disclaimer: comments not meant to sound snarky
• removeable friend: Would the final scene be "set to cool music, shot from cool angles, and contain witty dialogue?"
• Not as absurd as Kung Pao: Enter the Fist, which I adore as long as I skip the cow scene. "THAT'S A LOT OF NUTS!"
• Haven't seen that one. Yet.
• 'Tis a rescreening of an old '70s martial arts movie but with a new redub and the insertion of an American dude playing a Bruce Lee type. Most of the funny comes from the redub and unusual editing choices.