Clover also used these films as the basis for her theory of cross-gender identification in horror.Īt the end of the decade, in her book The New Avengers: Feminism, Femininity and the Rape-Revenge Cycle (2000), Jacinda Read shifted away from Clover’s psychoanalytic methods, which were central to many early feminist approaches to the rape-revenge film. Here Clover discerned a kind of feminism within 1970s and 1980s rape-revenge films like I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978) and Ms. This tradition first gained academic traction through “Getting Even,” a chapter of Clover’s 1992 book Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Since the early 1990s, the scholarship on the rape-revenge film has been dominated by feminists, including Carol Clover, Barbara Creed, Jacinda Read, Sarah Projansky, and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas.
Jumpcut rape revenge movie#
Before I explore these ideas, however, I want to briefly describe the literature on the rape-revenge movie and establish a very basic understanding of sexual-selection theory as it relates to the subjects at hand. What is more, this analysis speculates as to why some rape-revenge scenarios, despite their plentiful brutality and nudity, have struck viewers as thematically and politically progressive while others have come across as more exploitative. Such an analysis also offers a potential explanation of how and why rape-revenge movies construct rape as a special crime-and this inquiry can help illuminate everything from the routine use of flashbacks in rape-revenge to this fictional structure’s more recent reliance on torture porn. To begin with, a biocultural analysis rooted in Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection can provide a plausible hypothesis that explains why the pairing of rape and revenge seems so “natural” in this kind of narrative. By placing these rape-revenge scenarios in the context of current debates in evolutionary psychology, film scholars can gradually begin to re-imagine the logic of this narrative structure. Though highly detailed, this scholarship currently offers readers few ways of theorizing the cinematic rape-revenge narrative in a general way.Ī biocultural analysis offers a way out of this impasse. Unfortunately, film scholarship on rape-revenge has made little of that dual universality, in part because recent discussions of rape-revenge in film have been mostly a-theoretical and tentative. Given this universality, it is unsurprising that scholars have recently shown that the rape-revenge meme has itself been universal across film history and culture. A biocultural approach is relevant at the formal and psychological levels to the analysis of a widespread cinematic narrative structure whose very name conjoins two human behaviors, rape and revenge, that scientific researchers have identified as universal across human history and culture. And they will further strengthen their position if they can show that the film scholarship in those areas would benefit from an intervention. (To be clear, a “biocultural” approach is one that combines biological methods-whether evolutionary, cognitive, or the like-with more traditional humanities methods.) In my view, bioculturalists in film studies will position themselves to deflect such criticism if they focus on areas of inquiry that are clearly compatible with evolutionary thinking. At the same time, I noted that film scholars working in this biocultural vein should be careful in developing their rationales, for they can expect criticism from scholars who prefer traditional theoretical regimes. In a recent issue of Philosophy and Literature, I argued that film studies could learn from the way in which literary Darwinists have applied evolutionary theory to questions of genre and interpretation in literary studies. The rape-revenge film: biocultural implications Not just a classic book, an epochal book: Susan Brownmiller’s feminist inquiry into rape, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape.
Palmer’s controversial book A Natural History of Rape. The cover of Randy Thornhill and Craig T. The title page of the second volume of Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. The cover of Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’s recent book, Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study, features an image from Ms.
Jacinda Read’s revisionary reading of rape-revenge moved this area of study away from psychoanalytic methods. The rape-revenge film: biocultural implications by David Andrews JUMP CUTĬarol Clover’s study of gender in horror, Men, Women, and Chain Saws, contains a groundbreaking examination of rape-revenge.
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