I Watched This: I Spit on Your Grave

In Roger Ebert's review of the Last House on the Left remake, he compares it to the original and says, "Is this what I'm reduced to? Grading rape scenes." He gives it an arbitrary 2 out of 4 stars. I don't blame the dude for throwing up his hands. It does seem sort of pointless to do serious criticism of "Revenge" and the more specific genus "Rape and Revenge" movies like The Hills Have Eyes and Last House on the Left. You should know before going into I Spit on Your Grave if you're the dude the movie's made for, or if you're not. These aren't films of nuance. They're films of extremes. The farther they take you to the edge without going over, the better (at least for people who can keep from running out the theater to faint or puke). I Spit on Your Grave goes pretty far, farther than most.

Quickly: I Spit on Your Grave is a well-made film. The acting is capable, the hillbillies believably bad, our victim-heroine played frightened and vengeful as necessary.

Now the nitty gritty. If you don't know, the standard R&R movie has this structure: the first half or so is about our protagonist being sexually/physically abused while the second half has her abusing and killing her tormentors (really not that different than Passion of the Christ so you can argue that these revenge movies have a classic Catholic feel). The permutations in this film: Jennifer Hills rents a cabin in the middle of nowhere to write her novel; she gets terrorized by a group of rustbelt, camo-and-plaid-wearing locals; she gets away; she kills each said local in gritty, but inventive ways.

Ok here it is, base level: I like seeing killing on screen and I like imagining revenge. Of course, in modern life, restitution is not a given, but a rarity so when we get a chance to experience it (albeit in manufactured bites) a lot of us jump. Check this New Yorker article on revenge-based cultures; there's cons (obviously) and pros; not a small pro, BTW, is the intense satisfaction for getting yours (the flipside is the regret and torment for not getting yours). 

To maximize the associated feelings (i.e. glee), there has to be, firstly, an equal or more amount of terror perpetrated by those-to-be-killed. I need an hour of intense Clockwork Orange numbing to really appreciate the last half. I Spit on Your Grave puts a lot in the bank. The first half is quite the spectacle, an hour of rising violation (from the men tossing Jennifer's kitchen cupboards, to ordering her to "show me your teeth", to flicking lit matches at her, to, finally, finally, the gang rape with several positional permutations). After, my fingers and toes felt hollow.

Surprisingly, I got over all that pretty easily. If anyone were to argue that the filmmakers are irresponsible, I think it would be most interesting regarding how they left me off the hook. Let me explain: dividing the two sections is a series of fade-ins and fade-outs of the men doing their everyday, drinking beer in front of their trailer, pumping gas and squeegeeing windshield, etc. A month passes for them as approximately a minute passes for us. Those guys are evil if they can just move on after just a month. Interesting that I moved on after just 2 minutes of viewing-time. That's how these types of films are built. The horror isn't meant to linger. The extremes aren't made to haunt but to provide a temporary anaesthesia.

I'll theorize that the numbing comes with the abrupt revearsals. After the violence to our heroine, we're over-ready to see the same paid out to the assholes. I was practically drooling in anticipation. It's easy to move on and feed that anticipation. The movie doubles up the revearsals by using some parallelism in the killings. Each dude added his own flourish to the torture and Jennifer, novelist that she is, flips each flourish in each kill. For instance (and I'll have to spoil one kill to make my point), Stanley filmed the entire rape on his camcorder (revenge movies as meditaions on filmic voyeurism has been done to death; check Martyrs for the best one). So Jennifer pins the guy's eyes open with fish hooks, spreads fish guts on his face, and put his camcorder on him with the view screen flipped so he can watch his face get pecked-up by some crows. And the crowd cheers. 

One other interesting thing I noticed is how suspense gets suspended. When Jennifer notices nighttime footsteps and loud bangs are dead birds thrown at her window, I held my breath. When the same exact horror conventions are deployed against Johnny the ringleader, the fear is gone. Maya stopped watching through her fingers. Cauterize us with enough horror and conventions that usually stoke terror instead stoke gidiness.

I'm not going to apologize for liking this kind of movie. The recipe is pretty transparent and titillation comes easy. The thing is that these films make me actually feel something. Nine out of ten mainstream films don't do that. Rom-coms and rom-roms, Valentine's Day, The Notebook, are advertised as being about love but they're so far from that and rarely do they stimulate anything remotely loving. "R & R" films are about terror and the joy of revenge and they actually do produce pretty good facimilies of those emotions. A cinema of nuance, yeah, but more important it's a cinema of feeling.