Women's e-news has an interesting article about "torture porn" directors positing their work as "feminist." This descriptive category, coined by David Edelstein of the New York Times (and frequent Fresh Air film reviewer), refers to recent films such as Hostel and Captivity.
One part of the piece in particular struck me:
"Men are making films and calling them feminist when they don't understand the feminine experience," Soloway [a consulting producer of ABC's TV show "Dirty Sexy Money" ] said. "It's their salute to how they see female power."
I find this quite interesting and also don't doubt this is likely the directors' intentions. Isn't it interesting though to see what "power" means to these (male) directors and how it looks when taken up by a woman? But in their unproblematic and uncritical depiction of sex-violence, they don't see how both are gendered realities, and in women's daily lives are combined as a means of controlling and possessing women. This lack of contextualization makes their rendering of them more in collusion with gender-based oppression than fighting it.
Further, it leaves the idea of (masculinized) power and its role in maintaining racist, heterosexist patriarchy uncriticized. Women are depicted as powerful so long as they control the violence done to them (brutally done and graphically depicted) by violence of their own.
Lindsey Horvath, who works in film advertising and is president of the National Organization for Women's Hollywood chapter says, [...]
"Essentially I watched an hour and 45 minutes of a woman being stalked, drugged, nearly raped and terrorized," she said. In the end, the character escapes and kills her attacker. "It's like as long as the woman kills the guy at the end, then of course it's a female empowerment movie."
For the reasons listed above, I find the rationale that the eventual "triumph" of the female character overrides and makes unproblematic the rest of the depictions in a film unconvincing. The ends apparently justify the means. In a way, the sexualized violence throughout the film may also function to make palatable the fact that "the woman wins," that the woman takes control of herself back from (symbolic) masculine domination.
Further, I really have to doubt that people see movies like these because the woman wins in the end.
I must admit I am fascinated by the way gender and sexuality is produced in horror films. Some recommended reading from my reading "wish list":
The Naked And The Undead by Cynthia A. Freeland
Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film by Carol J. Clover
Also check out Ax Wound 'zine.
Thoughts?
UPDATE 3/20: Women's E-News writer Rachel Corbett has a more detailed discussion up at Alternet.
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