I Spit on Your Grave

This one [along with Ms .45, which I believe was in part inspired by this film] was heavily discussed in the rape-revenge section of Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, to such a degree that it made its way to the front of my list. I had heard about it for years, but had trouble finding it. I DID keep finding I Will Dance On Your Grave, which seems like a cheap attempt to make money off of people who think it’s this one. Their covers are also quite similar.

The DVD opens with about 75 interminable trailers about how very excellent the sound on this disc is and that you cannot skip past and cannot fast-forward through. Then we see Jennifer Hill, our main character, leave New York and take a drive out into the country. She stops for gas, where we first see our rapists, and informs the station attendant that she is going to this country house she has bought that she has never seen. She gets to the house and walks around back, then decides to strip her clothes off and take a dip in the lake, without having unpacked or gone into the house at all. She gets a delivery of groceries from Matt, this semi-retarded guy who works at the local store, and he says he heard that “New York is an evil place.” Jennifer says “well, here’s a tip from an evil new Yorker.” Matt then asks if they can be friends, Jennifer says they can. So, they’re friends, and Matt seems a little pleasantly flummoxed to be friends with this woman. We have also found out that Jennifer has come out here for the summer to work on her novel, and that most of her published work so far has been in women’s magazines. As a copywriter, I was thinking “Oh God, I hope we get to take a peek at her novel,” and we DO!

So the guys are sitting around bored. One of them thinks about Jennifer and wonders “do beautiful women ever take a shit?” which cleverly sets up at least that character as seeing beautiful women as somehow not human. Then another of them chimes in that all the women in New York are whores, and that he’s “going to go to New York and fuck all the whores.” Another claims he’s going to do the same in L.A. They then go out to Jennifer’s house to harass her. She is writing outside while wearing a bikini, and the guys cruise by on a boat, then keep revving and cruising by in the lake, apparently oogling her body as she lays there. Then they come by her house and night and make whooping sounds outside. It’s creepy, especially when you see that she hasn’t locked the doors. What? Some New Yorker ISN’T going to keep all doors locked at all times?

The next day while Jennifer is in a canoe, the guys come by and start dragging her canoe behind them in their speedboat. They drag her across the lake, then grab her and throw her to the ground. Matt, the semi-retarded one, has confessed to the guys that he thinks she’s kind of a nice, so the supposed ‘reason’ for the attack is to ‘get’ her for Matt. When he won’t do anything, another of the guys jumps on for a rape that is quite detailed and brutal. You will notice that there is no music during the rape [apparently there’s no music in the entire film], which I thought was a good decision. You will also note that the guy pretty explicitly comes inside her.

They let her go and she runs off into the woods. The horror and shock are quite apparent on her face and in her body language as she stumbles naked through the woods. This is one of the clues that Ms .45 is a riff on this movie, because both of them seal the anti-rape point-of-view of the movie in showing in detail the horrible physical and psychic consequences. There is a chilling little surprise next for those who end up watching this movie, but as it would happen the guys haven’t really let her escape and another of them brutally rapes her, also coming in her. We then have another completely harrowing scene as she makes it back to her cabin after a long, horrible walk through the woods.

Turns out the guys are already waiting for her in the cabin. They persuade her “friend” Matt [who has not so much as raised is voice to defend her, by the way] to go ahead and rape her, and he attempts to, but “can’t cum with you guys watching.” His attempt is filmed in a creepily close way that really evokes how unpleasant it would be for Jennifer. She, by the way, is laying exhausted, bloody and naked on the floor. At last the last of them, Stanley, gets on, but it seems that all he wants to do is beat her. Matt says to him “You wanted total submission, you got it!” And finally they all leave. The entire rape sequence has lasted 20 minutes.

The guys force Matt to go back in and kill Jennifer. He can’t stand to do it, so he just wipes the knife in the blood, and comes back to tell the guys it was accomplished. They speed off in the boat. Jennifer eventually cleans herself off [a totally brutal shot of her bloody body in the shower], and two weeks pass wherein she thinks about what happens and apparently gets stronger. She pieces her novel [which they ripped up] back together and starts writing again. And she plots her revenge.

SPOILERS > > >
The guys haven’t heard anything about her body being found, and they want to send Matthew up to check on her. Please take note of the ice cream sundae right in Matthew’s face that really rather resembles a breast in this scene. It’s a little funny [yet realistic] that they keep sending Matthew on these missions, yet they all know he is completely unreliable. Anyway, Matthew is working at the grocery store when he gets an order to take up to Jennifer’s house. Also note that just behind the grocery bag, Matthew sees the butcher cutting a pig in half, with these two legs in the air and him cutting a bloody hole right in its crotch. I think this and the sundae are here to show how the rape is on Matthew’s mind and its images and their meaning are stuck in his brain. He delivers the groceries, and Jennifer comes on to him, letting him have sex with her, when she slips a noose over his neck and hangs him over the river.

Her next victim is the first rapist, whose name I didn’t get. She pulls up to his mechanic shop and seduces him, then pulls a gun on him. He says that Stanley [the one who just wanted to hit her] made him do it, that he has a wife and kids, and that “a man is just a man” and she “MADE him see her sexy legs.” She seems to consider this; ‘well, I DID make him look at my sexy legs,’ and lowers the gun. She then comes on to him again [and these morons fall for it] and tells him that he deserves a hot bath. She asks him about his wife and kids, then steps into the bath and cuts off his cock and balls. She then locks him in the bathroom to bleed to death, and listens to a Puccini opera while he screams and yells upstairs.

The other two are dispatched with less vigor, but you will notice that in this case the phallic weapon she assumes IS the boat. She also has a great facial expression of knowing triumph after handily removing the axe from the hands of one of her former attackers. Stanley [the violent one] gets it last, and I believe that she says “Suck it, bitch,” to him, which is what he said to her when he climbed on. Then she drives off and that’s it, the movie ends.
< < < SPOILERS END

This movie was much more intelligently and artfully done than I had imagined. This is not stupid, exploitative shit. I was really surprised at the amount of excellent, electrifying images there were here. I was also quite impressed with the way the movie treats the psychology of the rapists. I’m sort of used to men being treated as these animals who can barely restrain themselves to exist in society anyway, and then suddenly explode into sexualized violence, usually with a pack mentality [compare this film with the rape in The Accused]. What this movie got across in a way that was even more chilling than the idea that all men are rapists within is that the guys were just BORED. The movie spends a fair amount of time with them beforehand, so we know them as real people, and we can see what little excitement there is in their lives—and how exciting this “beautiful woman” from the city is. We understand that they objectify beautiful women and see them different from ‘normal’ women in their discussion of whether beautiful women defecate and how all women from New York are “whores.” It seems that the whole, long rape sequence was not planned, but happened spontaneously when Matthew refused, and continued rolling from there. Then we see the fear and suspicion on the minds of the four rapists later. I’m not saying the film made apologies for them, they NEVER see Jennifer as a separate living being with her own intelligence and feelings, but what it does do is lay out their psychologies in much more detail then we usually get in movies.

The question with films that depict a rape is always: does the movie glorify the rape? Or generate excitement in the audience with the rape? One could argue that anything depicted on film in a way glorifies it, but I think that the filmmakers take steps to minimize that effect here. As I said, there is no music, especially during the rape, and music in a film is usually used to encourage the audience to feel something, usually some form of excitement. Also, the aforementioned focus on the psychology of the men draws away from our being able to simply enjoy the rape in an unambiguous way, as does the extreme focus on Jennifer’s pain, humiliation, and torment. The film shows long takes of her stumbling through the woods, covered in dirt and blood, and there’s nothing exciting about it. The film also used the image of her naked and prostrate on the floor of her cabin not for excitement, but just to show her vulnerability and how brutal all this is. And I do have to say, this is without doubt THE most brutal movie I have ever seen.

This movie is famous for being attacked by both Siskel and Ebert [separately] as the worst movie ever made and a total abomination. Their reviews got it pulled from the mainstream theater in which it was showing and, of course, inadvertently helped seal its notoriety. I wonder what Ebert would think of it if he were to view it again. To me it is a movie of unquestionable quality that just happens to take a very brutal and unflinching look at the psychological realities of rape, and the fantasies of revenge [the second half is markedly less realistic] one might have after having experienced it. The “reviews and articles” section on the disc nicely charts the film’s reception from revulsion to some acceptance.

This film was originally titled Day of the Woman, which one of the supportive writers in the accompanying articles thinks is a much better title, but I like I Spit On Your Grave. It sums up all of the enduring hatred and anger that the film taps into, and doesn’t try to cast this film as a cultural piece about all women and how they all want revenge [a direction Ms .45 takes much more explicitly]. What IS a little disturbing is the way that the film was originally marketed. The trailers show very little of the rapes [and do not explicitly state in any way that the female character was raped], but instead concentrates on the woman stalking men. We are told that the Day of the Woman is “the ultimate day of terror.” Even the art on the current box shows a woman from behind, head out of frame, with tiny cut-off shorts that show ample portions of her ass. It seems that some of the people marketing this movie are some who most are in need of seeing it.

What Remakes Say

A near-constant area of commentary in anything related to movies recently is how many remakes have been coming out. Their prevalence makes sense from a studio perspective, as the film will have name recognition even before it’s released, and a certain portion of the audience will be interested in seeing it regardless of how it turns out. Once it’s released, it can be amusing to compare the original to the remake, seeing what it chose to keep, what it chose to discard, and how its focus changed or did not change. After viewing quite a few remakes of movies I was familiar with, I began to see patterns in ways that the films were reimagined, what was changed or left out entirely, and those patterns can be interesting to study with an eye to what they say about the ways movie audiences—and by extension, society in general—has changed since the original was made. In order to more accurately examine what these films say about Hollywood’s perception of the current state of American society, I have limited the films discussed here to mainstream films produced by Hollywood, and those released post-2001.

Ideas are not invited
The most noticeable direction in remakes is a shift away from overarching ideas. For example, the original Poseidon Adventure set up a debate between two views of God that would be played out through the action of the story. A few minutes into the film, Gene Hackman’s young priest has a debate with an older priest about the relationship of man to God. The older priest argues for a passive attitude of worship; pray to God and he will help you. Hackman believes that God helps those who work to help themselves, without waiting for divine intervention from above. This debate gets played out through the action of the movie, when what can be considered an “act of God” places all of its characters in a situation in which they must either take action or wait to be saved. The filmmakers seal a major portion of the debate when all of those passively awaiting assistance are killed, but the fact is that the film floats an idea that provides a context and resonance to the action of the film. The recent remake, Poseidon, jettisons this idea entirely and makes no gesture toward trying to supply a greater framework for the action of the film. It is just a survival story where some people live and some people die, with no larger idea uniting it all.

Similarly, the original Amityville Horror, not exactly an intellectual masterpiece, still contained an interesting subtext about the husband’s conversion from Judaism to Catholicism and played with the tensions of that throughout the movie. In the remake, none of that remains. The family has average, mundane concerns and irritations that are magnified by the haunted house they live in, but any kind of wider idea has been completely removed.

Kindly refrain from social criticism
A related but even more prevalent trend is away from films that provide social criticism. The original Japanese horror film Pulse [Kairo] imagined a world in which the social isolation and loneliness created by the technological modes of connection-at-a-distance—cell phones, email, IMs—literally transform people into ghosts and leads to the breakdown of society. In the recent American remake, this idea has been watered down to the point of being negated: in this version the problem is not the technology itself, but merely that humans tapped into “a frequency we were never meant to find.” Where the original criticizes the current state of society using fanciful means, the remake has no problem with the way the world is, so long as we don’t find that freaky frequency—which everyone in the audience knows doesn’t exist anyway. Whew, so we're safe!

A similar example arises from comparing the original and remake versions of the sci-fi sports film Rollerball. In the 1975 original, the fictional game serves as a form of social control by “teaching the futility of individual effort.” The remake jettisons this in favor of a facile statement about how using violence to boost TV ratings is, like, so wrong. In a similar vein, the abundant social commentary of George Romero’s original Dawn of the Dead invited viewers to compare American consumerism as exemplified by mall shoppers with mindless zombies who act only on instinct. Like Poseidon, the 2004 remake throws any larger social commentary out in favor of an ideology-free focus on action and gore. It’s no longer about anything except who lives and who dies.

No character development, if you please
Another trend in most recent movies that is only revealed in higher contrast by remakes is the lack of patience audiences can muster for character development. The remake of Poseidon is the most obvious example, if only because we know that there was a fair amount of character-building material shot that was excised from the released film in order to get to the action faster. This approach may have backfired in the tepid response to the movie at the box office, and the large amount of negative Internet comments along the lines of “why should I care about these people if I have no idea who they are?” The original devoted almost 40 minutes to setting up the individual characters, their histories and hopes, before the disaster happened, under the idea that the audience will be more involved with their stories if they have some personal knowledge about them.

Another example of the move away from interest in character development can be seen in the two versions of Dawn of the Dead. The original features an interesting and explosive dynamic between the four principal characters that changes, deepens and evolves as the film wears on. The remake increases the number of principal characters, accompanied by a corollary decrease in their character traits and flattening of their interactions with each other. One character cries for about five seconds over her recently killed husband, then it’s back to the exploding heads!

But enough about everyone else, let’s get back to me
With what character development is left, the trend clearly seems to be toward the concerns of the individual as opposed to that of society or the group. Again, Poseidon provides an example, as our group of heroes is focused their own survival, rather than concentrating on how they can help the greatest amount of people. Note that in the original, two characters sacrifice themselves so that the others may live, while in the remake, only one character sacrifices himself, while another actually kicks someone else to his death to save himself [and this is one of the heroes]! Even the theme songs reflect the focus away from society and onto the individual. In the original song, note the amount of times that “we” is used to indicate the struggle of a group of survivors… “There’s got to be a morning after, if we can make it through the might. We have a chance to find the sunshine, let’s keep on looking for the light.” In the remake, the focus of the song is on two people, and there’s no more larger struggle, it’s all about, what else—love: “I’ll never let you go, I’ll be the journey and you’ll be the road… together we’ll be hanging on, because all we have is love.”

This tendency toward shrinking a movie’s purview to concentrate only on the love of one couple is also seen in Solaris. In the original, the main character dealt with his feelings about his dead wife, but also his commitment to his parents and his place in the larger society. The remake is all about love, cutting his parents out of the equation entirely. A similar [although pre-2002] example of this trend would also be Titanic. Although it is not trying to be a remake, one can’t help but note that A Night to Remember is about the nobility and generosity of a the human spirit as our characters bravely face certain death, while Titanic concentrates on two characters, and the only interest is in whether they—and their love—will survive.

But what does it all mean?
So do these trends reflect actual shifts in society, or merely Hollywood’s perception of what audiences will respond most strongly to? The answer is probably a bit of both. Americans seem not to want to listen to any ideas or arguments coming from Hollywood—witness the bile reserved for entertainers who dare to utter a political opinion. Furthermore, in light of the ever-decreasing levels of education in this country, ideas can alienate an audience who both don’t see any merit in considering them, and feel insulted if a movie demands thought they are not prepared to put into a film. Better to concentrate on something that everyone, of any educational level, can understand: love.

Additionally, in our polarized social and political environment, ANY ideas—and certainly statements of all but the most tame of social criticism [racism is wrong!]—run the risk of alienating at least part of the audience. So to maximize profits, as well as make the material more palatable to the increasingly important international audience, it’s important to minimize anything that might be in any way controversial.

A trend away from character development and toward decisive physical action; away from overarching ideas, and certainly from ideas that offer social criticism, toward events that happen for superficial reasons—or for no reason: these trends can be seen in most mainstream movies, but remakes provide a direct A / B comparison that bring these trends most clearly to light.