PART FOUR:
SECRET CEREMONIES
One day I was thumbing through the HBO guide and noticed a movie listed that I’d been anticipating ever since seeing the ads earlier that year: Extremities (1986).
Fawcett’s coif aside, the character that really made an impression on me was James Russo as the thug that tries to rape the former Angel only to have the tables turned on him and end up bound and gagged in the fireplace.
In retrospect, Extremities amounts to little more than a mediocre adaptation of a stage play, with production values that reek of movie-of-the-week.
But to my young mind it would operate as a gateway into harder drugs – namely movies like The Last House on the Left (1972), I Spit on Your Grave (1978), Ms.45 (1981), Lipstick (1976 – which is unique in its assertion that listening to electronic music is a factor in the perverted tendencies of rapists!), Last House on the Beach (1978), Poor Pretty Eddie (1975), Dirty Weekend (1993) and Thriller: A Cruel Picture (aka They Call Her One Eye, 1974).
But that would all come later. The immediate consequence of watching Extremities was a new vocation for my unwanted Jimmy Osmond doll:
RAPIST.
While many manifestations of neurosis are triggered by external factors, rape is especially tragic in that it always results in neurosis. Despite eventual ‘renormalization’, no woman ever fully recovers from being raped.
Even when a woman is able to emotionally detach herself from the occurrence, that detachment itself is often accompanied by a cynicism that will negatively affect all her future relationships.
Their sense of moral assertion and vigilante justice is probably the primary factor that led to my interest in rape-revenge films.
It’s been said a million times that horror films are meant to be cathartic, and that we put ourselves through the terror as a means of symbolically overcoming something we’re afraid of.
And for a woman, we’re taught that nothing is more terrifying than the ever-present threat of rape.
So it seems natural to me that I would love rape-revenge films, especially when the revenge is particularly sadistic or creative, or when the female protagonist is completely transformed as a consequence.
The film that had the biggest impact on me, and which sealed any doubt I had about being a rape-revenge fan, was Abel Ferrara’s Ms.45 (aka Angel of Vengeance).
I’d seen clips of it watching Terror in the Aisles (1984) — a popular horror compilation that also first introduced me to Gary Sherman’s amazing Vice Squad (1982) – and the image of a young girl in a nun’s habit blessing each bullet with a kiss before putting it into the magazine of her weapon immediately set me on a hunt for the film.
I would not be disappointed.
Ms.45 is the most enjoyable and fulfilling rape-revenge film that follows the standard genre trajectory.
Other rape-revenge films are notable for their innovations: The Accused (1988) sees its revenge in court, The Ladies Club (1986) in a clandestine operating room, and Irreversible (2002) turns the established pattern on its head.
But among the countless rape-revenge films that enjoy a similar structure, Ms.45 remains the finest of its ilk.
The film stars Zoe Tamerlis, the doe-eyed beauty who would go on to co-write Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant (1992) before dying of drug-related lung and heart failure in 1999.
Tamerlis stars as Thana (her name rooted in the Greek word for ‘death’), an innocent mute girl who works as a seamstress at an independent fashion studio in NYC’s garment district.
Her innocence is stressed through her relationship with others: her nosy landlady checks in on her; her boss pats her on the head; her co-workers look out for her — they all see her muteness as a “severe handicap” but seem intent on helping her make a productive life for herself.
But all in all she is looked upon more as a child than a woman.
She will become a woman through the course of the film – not by being ‘deflowered’, but through the act of survival.
She is raped not once but twice by two unconnected assailants as she returns home from work (the first played by director Ferrara).
She kills the second in her apartment, severs his limbs and deposits suspicious paper bags in random dumpsters around town.
The murder weapon is ironically an iron – her primary tool at work.
As such, her anxiety is constantly triggered and she becomes irritable and subject to flashbacks of the event.
She starts to lack concentration, stops short of finishing tasks and gets in trouble for inattentiveness.
Her response, scrawled on a notepad to a co-worker: “I wish they would all leave me alone.”
After the incident(s), Thana suddenly becomes hyper-aware of male aggression and machismo – it seems to be everywhere.
She becomes suspicious of others’ concerns for her and is averse to being touched.
She knows she’s alone and has to take care of her problem alone. She can’t even look at her own body in the mirror without visualizing her assailants in the room with her.
There’s no therapy for Thana – but there is disassociation, withdrawal and revenge.
It must be pointed out that Zoë Tamerlis inhabits this role with such believability that her performance really is at the heart of why this film continues to hold up.
She goes from genuinely terrified to genuinely demented with remarkable emotional agility.
It is obvious that the silence of many rape victims is represented and emphasized by her character’s muteness, but it’s suggested through a dream sequence that she was raped as a child, and that her muteness is not biological.
Muteness is the most prevalent psychosomatic manifestation of post-traumatic stress disorder – also used to great effect in Umberto Lenzi’s Knife of Ice (1972) – but Thana’s solitary existence, her need to survive mute and alone in a dangerous city, is far more sympathetic than most similar portrayals.
Thana’s gun becomes her voice and it’s a loud voice that’s been waiting a long time to be heard.
Psychologists assert that there are three stages to rape trauma syndrome- the acute stage (where everything is hyper-intensified and extreme shock or hysteria may occur), the outer adjustment stage (an attempt to create the illusion of normalcy despite lingering inner turmoil), and the re-normalization stage, wherein the rape stops being the central focus of the victim’s life, and feelings of shame and guilt subside.
Rape-revenge films don’t exactly follow this pattern, especially since the genre requires that revenge take the place of re-normalization. l
After the initial period of intense nervousness, Thana skips the second phase of rape aftermath – which in films is usually signified by dressing dowdy, the cutting of long hair, the general denial of womanhood – in favour of the third (cinematic) phase: the Vamp (Dario Argento’s Stendhal Syndrome (1996) is probably the most concrete example of all three phases at work).
The sleazy score by frequent Ferrara collaborator Joe Delia, with its repetitive bursts of obnoxious sound, simulates the rushing of adrenaline as Thana’s mission becomes clear.
Thana herself becomes the hunter, actively seeking out scumbags to dispatch.
She goes out into the park late at night and is circled by a group of thugs (one of whom has nunchakus!) and the typical spatial relationship is illustrated: the woman’s movement is restricted by male desires.
There are places a woman can’t go – her world is smaller than a man’s because she is forced to retreat inward as men move forward, constantly invading her space.
In real life, instead of asserting their right to access certain places, women are forced to avoid them, to give them over to men: a notion similarly expressed in Auli Mantila’s female vigilante film The Geography of Fear (2000).
However, Thana goes to these places deliberately; she puts herself in dangerous situations and reinforces her womanhood by coming out alive.
If survival defines a woman, her methods of survival are what set one woman apart from another.
Thana’s diminished responsiveness to the social world and her workplace is addressed frequently, and her lack of hesitation in gunning down any semi-threatening male can be attributed to a sense of foreshortened future or fatalism.
It’s common for a rape victim to feel as though their life cannot revert to what they knew before, that they have no future, and that nothing matters any more.
This makes considering the consequences of their actions difficult.
In most rape-revenge films, when the woman is avenged, the film ends.
Reality doesn’t impede this superficial sense of fulfilment with a coda about how the woman was later tried and convicted for her crimes, as would happen in real life.
Because that would be depressing.
And from my perspective, it seems that rape-revenge films are meant to be strangely triumphant.
Ms.45 dares to deglamorize its female protagonist and her agenda.
The film does a more thorough job than most in showing the consequences of giving in to revenge – Thana sabotages her own future, her career, a circle of supportive friends who are themselves outspoken women who could have helped her.
This gives the film a sense of sadness and regret not always encountered in the standard rape-revenge films, which are more centred on how the male assailants have ruined their victims’ lives, and not how the women contribute to the ruination of their own lives.
Thana may be triumphant briefly, but she loses out in the end.
hexafu 