hexafu

EPILOGUE

Domestic horror in the 2020s is a call to speak out, a call to protest, and a reminder that we’ve been at this moment in history before and that the consequences of failing to resist are extremely high now.

Violence against women continues to take the forms it has taken for countless years— reproductive violence and coercion, physical battery, psychological torture, entrapment, emotional abuse, and dehumanization.

But domestic horror in the 2020s is also hell-bent on reminding us—all viewers, not just women— that the danger becomes infinitely graver if we allow ourselves to be silenced.

This is why it’s important for Cecilia to scream at the end of Immaculate, for Margaret to assert her pain in her C-section scene, and for Terry to whisper into Minnie’s ear, right before she jumps out the window, “You were right, Minnie: This is the role of a lifetime.” All three films end with the main character using her voice.

The finest domestic horror of the 2020s, in my opinion, takes that theme of using your voice to a glorious precipice. Not usually classified as a work of horror at all, the film is Sarah Polley’s magnificent Women Talking (2022). This film is an aria on the grief, pain, and fear of living as a woman in a history that seeks to erase you.

Winning the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, the Independent Spirit Robert Altman Award, and numerous other awards besides, the film clearly hit a nerve, appearing on American screens at a historical moment when women’s bodily autonomy and basic human rights to self-determination are precariously positioned at the verge of a new era of autocratic patriarchy.

Indeed, this film was released only two months after the Roe decision was reversed. The timing there—like the timing of Polanski’s arrest and the release of Paranormal Activity, or the timing of the ERA’s failure and the wrapping of Alien—is coincidental in the sense that neither event caused the other. But it’s also much more than coincidence.

Polley’s movie was reading the tea leaves about a political culture-our political culture— that was slowly, progressively, and determinedly turning its back on women.

Women Talking is based on a real-life domestic and reproductive horror—a bracing and horrific story, be warned.

Between 2005 and 2009, more than one hundred Mennonite women in a colony in Bolivia were systematically raped by their Mennonite menfolk, who drugged them with animal tranquilizers.

The men raped their sisters, nieces, wives, and neighbors. They raped little girls – girls under the age of six.

Horror beyond horror; violence beyond words.

Sarah Polley wanted to take this horror to the American public to make us bear witness to what these women and girls suffered.

In fact, Polley’s adaptation of the story – itself based on a novelistic adaptation of the actual historical events written by Miriam Toews in 2018—deliberately alters setting details to make it appear that this Mennonite colony is located somewhere in the United States. She is bringing the horror home to roost.

In her film, we do not see the sexual assaults in real time—only in scattered, fragmentary flashbacks. The attackers have already been taken to the police, and the rest of the colony’s men have left to post their bail.

Suddenly, and for the first time ever, the women are alone and unsupervised in the colony, and they have two days to decide what to do before the men return. They conclude together that they can choose to leave the colony, but then be unsure of divine salvation when they die. They can choose to do nothing and hope the men will not continue their violence after they’ve made bail. Or, third, they can choose to stay and fight.

Leave. Do nothing. Stay and fight.

These women are illiterate, but they decide to take a vote – their first ever.

They vote by making their tiny x on a large paper, under a picture of their choice. They can place their x under a drawing of fields, to mean “do nothing,” or under a drawing of a man and a woman fighting, to mean “stay and fight,” or they can make their x under a picture that means “leave.” The vote is tied between “stay and fight” and “leave.”

For the next day, a small group of these women have been deputized to decide the matter. They debate between the two remaining options.

During their conversation, the women try to imagine what being free would look like, feel like. They have never been part of the world beyond the colony. If they stay, what they may be fighting for is an equal role in decision-making in the colony; none of them know if this will work or what it would look like. If they leave, they must face a vast and mysterious world about which they know nothing: They have never seen so much as a map of the world nor any part of it.

They ultimately decide to leave because they realize that staying is incompatible with their own pacifism. Either they will knowingly subject themselves and each other to further sexual violence or they will murder the men to prevent it. Neither is a spiritually acceptable outcome, so they choose to go.

The film is grueling and mostly very quiet. The colors are muted, generally pale and washed out, apart from the dark dresses of the women. The sound design is minimalist. Almost the entire film takes place in a barn, and it mostly consists of dialogue. The film reads much more as a staged theatrical play than as a big-budget Hollywood film.

The entire movie is an invitation to enter into grief, through domestic horror. There’s the surface grief of these women and their daughters, who have been violated in a profoundly brutal fashion, again and again. That grief is red, angry, molten, and vengeful.

But there is also the hard, quiet, grey grief—the grief of women throughout history who have been kept illiterate and silent, unable to write, unable to have a voice for themselves. Women who have been denied any decision-making power. Who have not been allowed to vote.

The film takes place in the early 2000s, like the events on which the film is based, but the women depicted have a level of autonomy and independence comparable to the most repressed women in history. It’s hard to stomach— this is a film about women in contemporary times who are totally debarred from power, from knowledge, and from reading and writing. Women who know that there’s another world out there somewhere beyond their “colony” that there’s another world out there, somewhere beyond their “colony,” but also know that they do not have access to it. Women who, when given for the first time the right to some kind of self-determination, barely know how to wield it.

The grief of Women Talking is conjoined with its horror, although again, I haven’t read any reviews of the movie that classify it as horror. And maybe for good reason: It’s not a slasher film, nor a psychopathy thriller, nor is it supernatural. Even so, by my lights it’s a hard-core feminist horror film, a domestic horror in which the main action – the conversation among the women – takes place after the horror of sexual violence has been interrupted.

Even in the flashbacks, we are watching the horror hangover of an entrenched, atavistic, predatory patriarchal scheme in which women were systematically dehumanized, made to satisfy – entirely unwillingly – the violent lusts of their menfolk in their domestic spaces.

We are watching them try to come to terms with what has happened to them and to their daughters in their own homes, again and again.

It is agonizing; it is watching not just one woman who is made a prisoner and victim of sexual violence in her own home but an entire community of women, over the course of a long period of time.

It is a collective domestic horror and one of extraordinary magnitude.

In some ways, the horror is made worse by the fact that the men were not trying to enact some kind of diabolical scheme. They were simply drugging and raping women because they wanted to. And, of course, because they were off the grid enough to be beyond detection and prosecution. At least, for a time.

It was surprising to me that, despite my well-established tear duct condition-which kept me in tissues for the entire researching of Scream with Me – there was only one scene in Women Talking that actually brought me to tears. But what tears they were. They came on like a torrent—I didn’t feel them coming at all. Just a sudden lachrymal tsunami.

In this scene, the women are taking a break from their deliberations, and they hear a truck drive by the colony. It’s the 2010 census truck, we learn. The census taker calls through a loudspeaker as he drives by to say that anyone who lives in the houses should come out to be counted. No one goes, except for two teenage girls. They run out, and they are counted. They are numbered in the annals of public life. They choose to become part of the historical record. Part of time. Part of a history shared with a larger world.

Count me, I want to be counted. How many women in history have had this thought, versus how many women have been able to make it happen? I want to stand up and be counted. Include me in history.

Watching those girls run clumsily toward the truck in their antiquated calico frocks and ask to be counted? That broke me. They have grown up into a life in which they have had no possibility of playing a role in history. They were trained never to stand up and ask to be counted. But now, they will; they do; they did. However small that mark of legibility on that one census, they will have been counted. Not even their names but just the simple fact that they exist. They will have been numbered as part of something larger than the confines of the colony.

When I recovered from my tears, I started to think about the future anterior tense of verbs: will have been. That tense is so important to the history of feminism. It will have been worth it. I will have survived. I will have learned something. I will have been heard. I will have been counted. Because it envisions a future in which the present has become not just a past, but a meaningful past.

It’s a tense of auguring, a tense of divination. You are predicting the future in a way that shapes the present into a form you can use and think about. All this pain will have been for something. I will have been counted. That means that even if I die the next second, I will have been woven into history.

But there’s a problem with the future anterior, even as there’s a consolation in it.

One character in the film says, making an analogy between the women’s situation and the way she felt when she was driving her two-horse carriage on a bumpy road: “It was only when I learned to focus my gaze far down ahead of me—and not on the road immediately in front of Ruth and Cheryl – that I started to feel safe.” Put otherwise, she felt safe when she learned to drive her horse-drawn carriage in the future anterior. She looked up ahead, and she imagined the bumpy part of the road she was currently on as the past. Look far down the road, and you will feel safe. Look to the future for consolation.

The problem with the future anterior is that, as you cast your eyes forward on the future, you are still in the Bad Place now, and that the future is never guaranteed. You are quietly committing to the present as something ineluctable and unchangeable in your mental reach toward the future. You are staying stuck even while telling yourself you will get out.

The horror of Women Talking is the knowledge that these women – who have a choice, at last—are standing on the shoulders of generations of other, prior women. Those women will not have been counted. They will never have been counted. They were raped, hurt, silenced, muted, not taught to read, not shown a map, not allowed to scream. They were excluded from the book of the living, and they are excluded from the book of the dead. They will be forever silent. We will know nothing of them. Ever.

The meeting among the women in Women Talking is recorded by the one adult male they allow in their presence—a young man who left their colony long ago but returned with a college education to teach the boys. He takes the minutes of the women’s meeting by hand. It’s kind of a background dynamic in the film; you don’t focus centrally on it. But the women say, early on, that he needs to write large enough for others to read it in the future.

The women all know that what they are doing – their central and ultimate act of resistance and reclamation – is writing themselves into history. They are putting their names onto paper, their stories, their deliberations, their thoughts. He will take their words, their subjectivities, their views, their thoughts and make them stay still, make them be part of the world of the written word, part of history. They are transforming their horror into an archive.

Thinking about contemporary American political culture, doing nothing appears to me to be a non-option at this point. And I am not going to leave our “colony,” for three reasons. One, I love the colony. Two, I love too many people in the colony. Three, I am a pacifist, but I’m not opposed to fighting with words. So I am going to stay and fight, and I’m going to do it by writing.

And, when I need to, by screaming. I hope you will, too.

So I am going to end this book on domestic horror with a plea. Please write. Write journals. Write nonfiction books. Write histories. Write op-eds.

Write biographies. Write blogs. Write books. Write letters to your children.

Write letters to your abusers. Write letters to your congresspeople. Write essays. Write memoirs. And above all else, write screenplays. And then go direct them. Help us all to find our voices and help us use them to scream.