Last week I picked up the original Swedish film, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo from my neighborhood library. When the globally-successful books by Stieg Larsson were all the rage, I had pretty much ignored them, as I characteristically tend to do when anything becomes a blowup shooting star like that. (Harry Potter had been out for 8 years before I even looked at it.) But I ran across the tattoo girl in the library and thought, what the heck.
At that point I was only vaguely aware that the narrative centers around a punk-styled young women and that the author had apparently witnessed a gang rape in his youth and had always regretted not doing anything to help, thus resulting in this balls out character Lisbeth Salander.
Within the first fifteen minutes of the film I found myself watching a horrific, graphic, violent rape scene. It was like watching a train wreck the way I couldn’t look away. When the scene was over and I became aware of what I’d just seen and that I felt a full-body nausea, I turned the film off. Period. I returned it to the library as quickly as I could, in some desperate attempt to get the thing out of my house (out of my mind). But my mind reverted to it frequently thereafter, painfully, like a nightmare that you just can’t shake in the morning.
How does employing and exhibiting graphic violence against women in film, aka entertainment, do anything but perpetuate graphic violence against women?
Even the idea of an author glorifying such violence while claiming to oppose it, seems suspect. But reading is not watching. Reading is a particular kind of imaginative experience. But for the filmmakers choices could be made–can be made– about how to include delicate material and the choice in this case was to lavish in the gruesome cruelty of rape and violence.
We as a culture condone this. We condone it and allow it by buying the tickets to the movies, by not thinking twice about what we’ve seen, by not voicing our opposition. Culturally we find it morally unacceptable to include depictions of molestation or rape of children, or necrophilia. These things may be alluded to or danced around but they are not depicted.
So why is it that we sanction violence against women?
I was discussing this with my sister-in-law and she mentioned a segment of a bell hooks documentary, Cultural Criticism and Transformation, where hooks is discussing the brutal murder of Nicole Simpson and the subsequent OJ Simpson trial. hooks brings up the concept of “the spectacle” from Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (that I had recently begun reading, and there will be much more on that later), wondering how she could watch the trial and the turning of the real-life murder into bright and shiny media hype or race issue or a class issue or something for people to discuss over their pedicures, without feeling that she was “colluding” in the violence done against this woman, Nicole Simpson.
hooks was asked on Good Morning America to give her response to the trial and all she said was this:
“The only thing I really know about the OJ Simpson case, is that it began and ended with male violence.”
In the short video segment hooks makes a very insightful, eloquently-stated argument. I invite you to watch it.
If we as a society want to live in a present and move into a future where our daughters and neighbors are safe and respected– where human life is sacred and honored–how can we continue to condone the constant advocation of violence against women in our entertainment? We pay for those movie tickets and DVD rentals. We sit around watching those channels. And when these despicable human atrocities are depicted, do we say a word against them? Do we stand up for ourselves and the world we want to live in? Or do we shrug and say, “Well, that’s just how it is.” It is this way because we allow it to be.
There is no benign depiction of violence. Wherever and whenever violence exists at all, it is feeding on itself out in the world, through us. Only we have the power to change that.
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