Ambivalence

A little while ago I saw a movie called Straw Dogs. Dustin Hoffman stars in it as an American mathematician who flees the campus politics of the early 70s to hang out with his wife in an English country house. They're stuck in the bleakest, grayest, most brutal town you can imagine...the American West in Cornwall. The wife, Amy, is from the town, but our "hero," David Sumner, is an American Jewish academic who scoffs at the idea of attending church (he quotes Montesquieu on the subject, to make the priest feel stupid). He also has more money than the English townsfolk, as he employs them to do manual labor around his estate. Also, his wife, the Bra less Wonder, is pretty hot. Needless to say, the guys in town hate David Sumner, and almost immediately they set about harassing him, violating his property, in various ways...

Detailed spoiler....



The plot of this film turns on a seven-minute rape scene that is hard to watch for its violence and the victim's ambivalent behavior. The victim, Amy Sumner, is sexy and youthful, almost disturbingly so...she doesn't look (or act) old enough to be anyone's wife. She reminds me of the twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls I know that have fully-developed bodies but still think like children; for both them and Amy, this sexual precocity brings a sense of vulnerability. Amy is, whether she knows it or not, in danger.




Also, she has boobs:






















I know whenever I have a bunch of Clockwork Orange dudes working on the roof of my cottage, I always undress in front of open windows. One could argue that she is deliberately provocative, but the haphazard way in which she exposes herself to potential attackers suggests to me an ominous naivete, more than anything else.

Amy's attacker is an old flame of hers, but she resists him, and he slaps her around pretty badly. After a while, though, she acts more receptive to his desires, and they end up kissing passionately while having sex. He whispers "I'm sorry." Some less charitable viewers might see this episode as proof that Amy wanted to be attacked, but I interpreted Amy's actions as pragmatic--she doesn't want to have sex with the guy, but if she resists anymore, she'll receive more physical and psychological injuries. So she decides to make the experience not-unpleasant, in order to survive. The fact that she makes this decision mid-act does not negate the fact that the act was a rape, and it does not retroactively change her disposition from resistant to inviting.

Still, her behavior is troubling for the viewer, or at least it is for me. One reason for this reaction could be that a representation of rape in which a female victim expresses an ambivalent response suggests that women enjoy being raped, or that women don't know what they want, which would make consent an irrelevant issue. I don't think that's what's going on--if this scene didn't carry with it a sense of violation, then it wouldn't fit with the general trend of harassment against the Sumners. Instead, this scene plays on your sense of moral outrage, first directed at the rapist, then at the victim. When Amy started acting as if she enjoyed what was happening to her, part of me felt revulsion--how dare she! I admit, there was a part of me that expected her to prove her virtue by kicking and screaming the whole time. Even though part of me felt for her, I also condemned her, and this reaction eradicated once and for any facile notion I might have had about female solidarity.














In any case, the film itself seems uncomfortable with the questions it raises about the victim's state of mind, so it confirms the reality of the rape in the most brutal way possible. As Amy is resting with her rapist-turned-lover, another man arrives, one that she does not know, and he forcibly takes her from behind. This time she resists throughout the ordeal, and two men have to restrain her. This second rape, as awful and tacked-on as it is, suggests that the filmmakers didn't trust the audience to sympathize with Amy.

Other stuff happens in this film, and ultimately it's about a male protagonist finally standing up for himself and defending his property (though in my mind, you could debate the value of his coming into manhood). I found this film interesting because of what it appears to expect of its viewers, and how it dealt with or failed to deal with those expectations.