A post by Margrethe Bruun Vaage

Trigger warning: rape in the context of rape-revenge films

I keep thinking that my next project should surely be about something nice. But in my research I keep being drawn to some of the darkest corners of film and television fiction. In philosophy there have been discussions about imaginative resistance, and how there are limits to what we are willing or able to imagine (see e.g., Gendler and Liao 2016 for an overview). It is not my aim here to revisit these debates, but rather to report from what is going on at the other side of town, so to say: as a film theorist it seems to me that there are many ways that fiction can and does invite engagement that breaks with our moral principles.

One such example is found in the antihero, who for some time has prevailed in television series, particularly in the US, but also in many other national contexts following the huge success of series such as The Sopranos and Breaking Bad. The most typical spectator response seems to have been to root for main characters such as Tony Soprano and Walter White, but they are in fact people we would be loathe to support in reality.

Another example of engagement that we might not fully condone is found in the central role played by harsh punishment in fiction. Media psychologist Arthur Raney points out that spectators of crime fiction, for example, “might tend to expect and demand (for the sake of enjoyment) a punishment that is greater than what is morally acceptable in reality; only such over-punishment will lead to enjoyment” (Raney 2005: 151). The proper villains getting their just desert at the end of a suspenseful story is a mainstay in fiction, sometimes sidestepping the law in vigilante stories such as the Dirty Harry films, for example. And it can be remarkably pleasurable to watch punishment in fiction, even for those among us who are decidedly against harsh punishment in real life: I for one am against any kind of capital punishment, and firmly believe in reform rather than prison as punishment. However, put on a Dirty Harry film, and I’ll gleefully enjoy watching those punks get lectured on the .44 Magnum.

For women to step into the role as vigilante more seems to be needed. A very serious violation such as rape has been used in the rape-revenge film as motivation for a woman turning violent (also in the Dirty Harry film Sudden Impact). Although there are female antiheroes, the trend of antihero series overall was male-dominated, and I kept wondering where one finds the truly transgressive women: this is what lead me to the rape-revenge film.

The rape-revenge film is a type of film that has been notoriously controversial, with wildly violent examples such as I Spit on Your Grave that was widely condemned as misogynistic, but recently there has been a trend of rape-revenge films made by women filmmakers, such as Revenge, The Nightingale, and Promising Young Woman, that has been celebrated as feminist by critics and feminist film theorists (see e.g., Billson 2018; Creed 2022). A woman is raped, and the law is commonly unavailable or unwilling to help, so the rape survivor takes the law into her own hands and takes revenge on her rapist(s), typically in violent ways. Some rape-revenge films can serve as a thought experiment on the response to rape, which is still subject to cultural negotiation: suppose a woman is raped, and you cannot explain it away. And there is no law, no justice. How do you feel? And how do you feel when she takes revenge on the perpetrator? The rape-revenge film can serve as a place of rage for women, as argued by Jack Halberstam in his analysis of Thelma and Louise: it can be used to explore cultural resistance imaginatively (Halberstam 1993). Important to this is the anger that such films stir up, which I hold is central to the potential political value of some contemporary rape-revenge films (Vaage forthcoming). The rape-revenge film arguably pokes at a shortcoming of the law: the rape survivor’s revenge can be a cultural critique – this point is sometimes lost in critical discussions of these films.

However, the main point here is just how conflicted the examples I have pointed to can make a spectator feel. Rape-revenge films are difficult to watch because the rape – whether it is portrayed explicitly or not – is deeply disturbing and frightening, stirring up real life fears. However, it can be enjoyable when the woman emerges as avenger in a clearly imaginary turn: through gritted teeth one might find oneself cheering her on, against better judgment. I do not think rapists should be castrated, tortured, raped and killed. Yet when watching the female avenger enact her revenge on-screen I can admittedly feel a strange kind of bloodlust. And it is this state of feeling conflicted that I want to focus on here. Exploring the strong moral emotions triggered by revenge and punishment, and how these might run counter to moral principles, can explain this conflict.

Theories about engagement with fiction in film and media basically hold that a moral evaluation of the characters is central and foundational to our engagement in a story (see e.g., Smith 2022; Zillmann and Bryant 1975). However, the question is what kind of moral evaluation is at work. Psychologists such as Joshua Greene and Jonathan Haidt have developed so-called dual process models of morality, where there are two routes a moral evaluation can take: a quick and dirty intuitive route, and a slower route through rational deliberation (Greene 2013; Haidt 2012). This latter slower route is arguably informed by the moral principles we support to a greater extent, and if a work of fiction explicitly encourages moral thinking of this slow type, our imaginative engagement will probably also be informed more systematically by our moral principles. But the question is whether we as spectators often allow ourselves to bracket this slow, moral deliberation when engaging in a fictional story, and rely on what our gut feeling tells us about what feels right (Vaage 2013, 2016).

And as it turns out, there are many ways for a fictional story to manipulate our gut feeling: we get to know Tony Soprano so much better than the other characters, and he has vulnerabilities; he shows kindness; and empathy makes us partial to those we know best (Maibom 2014; Vaage 2016: 39ff, Vaage 2023). Mere alignment with one character more than others manipulates our moral gut feelings. A story can also manipulate our moral gut feeling through stylistic means: in Breaking Bad, the sequences where Walter White breaks the law are typically exciting, with rapid editing, music, and careful build-up of suspense, in contrast to the stifled slowness of the sequences set in the Whites’ family home (Vaage 2016: 64ff). Spectators might want to defend Walter White’s transgressions morally because it is so much more fun to engage with Breaking Bad when Walter is bad: our gut feeling kind of just says yes.

The phenomenon I point to is troubling, in that some spectators might end up simply cheering for the wrong thing (e.g., on the ‘bad fan’ see Nussbaum 2014). Hegemonic masculinity is arguably explored in problematic ways in the antihero series, and this question could have been articulated more clearly in the reception of these series: where the transgressive, violent woman tends to stir up lots of cultural fears, perhaps the transgressive male antihero should have stirred up more. Yet there is also learning potential in these stories because they are prone to make us feel conflicted. As Greene explains, feeling conflicted about something calls for explicit reflection (Greene 2013: 295; see also Plantinga 2018: 132, Vaage 2016: 20-3 and Vaage forthcoming). Fictional stories that tend to put us as spectators in a position of feeling conflicted, torn between moral principles and moral intuitions, may bring about moral reflection. Indeed, this is evident in the widespread discussions of antihero series, and the controversy of the rape-revenge film: these films and television series commonly make us want to discuss.

As humans we can be contradictory, and one explanation for some such contradictions is found in the two routes a moral evaluation can take, sometimes pulling in different directions. Furthermore, fiction can be a way for us, as a society, to address cultural contradictions, what is yet unresolved and subject to on-going cultural negotiation. And this might just bring us close to an important function of fiction and the imagination: in an imaginary sphere we as spectators can explore responses that are off-limits in real life, feel conflicted about it, and potentially learn something from the ensuing reflection.

References:

Billson, Anne (2018): “How the ‘rape-revenge movie’ became a feminist weapon for the #MeToo generation” The Guardian, available at < https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/may/11/how-the-rape-revenge-movie-became-a-feminist-weapon-for-the-metoo-generation>, accessed 10. May 2024.

Creed, Barbara (2022): Return of the Monstrous-Feminine. Feminist New Wave Cinema. London: Routledge.

Gendler, Tamar Szabó and Shen-yi Liao (2016): “The Problem of Imaginative Resistance.” In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Literature, ed. Noël Carroll and John Gibson, 405–418. New York: Routledge.

Greene, Joshua (2013): Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap between Us and Them. New York: Penguin.

Haidt, Jonathan (2012): The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. London: Allen Lane.

Halberstam, Jack (1993): “Imagined Violence/Queer Violence: Representation, Rage, and Resistance.” Social Text 37: 187–201.

Maibom, Heidi L. (2014): “Introduction: (Almost) Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Empathy;” In Empathy and Morality, ed. Heidi L. Maibom, 1–40. New York: Oxford University Press.

Nussbaum, Emily (2014): “The Great Divide: Norman Lear, Archie Bunker, and the Rise of the Bad Fan.” The New Yorker, [online]. Available at: <http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/04/07/the-great-divide-3> [Accessed 7. May 2024].

Plantinga, Carl (2018): Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement. New York: Oxford University Press.

Raney, Arthur A. (2005): “Punishing Media Criminals and Moral Judgment: The Impact on Enjoyment.” Media Psychology 7(2): 145–63.

Smith, Murray (2022): Engaging Characters. Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema, 2nd edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Vaage, Margrethe Bruun (2013): “Fictional Reliefs and Reality Checks.” Screen 54(2): 218–37.

Vaage, Margrethe Bruun (2016): The Antihero in American Television. New York: Routledge.

Vaage, Margrethe Bruun (2023): “Should We Be Against Empathy? Engagement with Antiheroes in Fiction and the Theoretical Implications for Empathy’s Role in Morality.” In Conversations on Empathy: An Interdisciplinary Encounter, ed. Francesca Mezzenzana and Daniela Peluso, 116–34. New York: Routledge.

Vaage, Margrethe Bruun (forthcoming): The Female Avenger, Women’s Anger, and Rape-revenge Film and Television. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Zillmann, Dolf, and Jennings Bryant (1975): “Viewer’s Moral Sanction of Retribution in the Appreciation of Dramatic Presentations.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 11(6): 572–82.