Revenge: The Subversive Feminist Movie You Have To See
Post by guest contributor Kate Harveston.
Trigger warning for content discussing rape and sexual assault, murder, violence, male violence against women, and guns. Movie spoilers included.
Revenge movies. They can go one of two ways — brilliant or bomb. The 2017 French film Revenge is a revenge thriller following a young woman who is raped and unceremoniously pushed off a cliff, left for dead in the dry desert heat.
Or so we think. Give the girl a gun and let her work the rest out.
The formula for a revenge movie is simple but it straddles an interesting line. In this case, you may ask yourself if it’s right or wrong to feel satisfied when she eventually turns the tables on the guys. After all, does violence not beget violence? But this is a must-see as far as the revenge formula goes, because it does something quite different at a critical time in our political and cultural conversation.
The leading female character, Jen, is an American socialite who is secretly dating French millionaire, Richard. They fly off to his secluded desert villa to share a weekend before his hunting trip with his friends, Dimitri and Stan. The boys arrive early though, to Richard’s distaste, but they all drink and dance the night away.
While Richard is absent the next morning, Stan rapes Jen when she won’t submit to his unwanted advances. When Richard returns, he chides Stan and offers Jen hush money. Jen just wants to go home. They won’t let her, so she runs off into the desert, and the three men follow. She reaches the dead-end of a cliff and Richard pushes her off after feigning calling a pilot. A tree limb impales Jen. Left for dead, the three men vow to continue their hunting trip as if nothing happened.
But lo! Jen wakes and sets the tree on fire, releasing herself from certain death. She removes the branch and cauterizes her wound. She roams deeper into the desert to avoid her three attackers, who finally realize she’s alive and on the lam. Now, Jen is the hunter, and the audience watches the film from the female gaze.
I don’t want to give too much away, but the movie culminates in a naked chase scene, with Jen hunting Richard. Typically, the naked chase scenes are reserved for females and viewed through the male gaze, highlighting naked female vulnerability, but not in this case. Long story short, Jen does eventually emerge from her trials and tribulations victorious — I’ll spare you on how and why. You’ll just have to see the movie!
What makes revenge films so thrilling is that the victim gets eye-for-an-eye revenge after being wronged, which forces the viewer to explore and ponder the concepts of “What is good vs. bad? What is revenge versus justice?”
And, sure, this movie plays to that. But the thing that really sets it apart from the start is not its revenge plot, but its leading lady — Jen.
In many of the “attacker vs. attacked” movie scenarios, we are set up to root for the victim from the start. Think Laurie in the Halloween franchise. This movie, and so many others, play to the classic and deeply-rooted-in-patriarchy trope of the “Final Girl.” She’s depicted from the start as innocent, chaste and lovable, while her friends that die off one by one are usually mean, vapid or even just sexually active — because all you really have to do to secure your spot as a victim in a horror movie is be a female enjoying sex.
However, we are not set up to like Jen from the start of this movie. She’s a seemingly vapid and morally-bankrupt American socialite. Dressed in scantily clad garb and slinking around seductively sucking on a lollipop, she is revealed early on to be aiding an equally vapid millionaire in cheating on his wife.
We’ve all seen her type in the movies and even in real life, and in most cinematic thrillers, she would have been killed off very early on. Make no mistake, the audience is generally not set up to feel remorse for these characters when they are killed off in these movies.
The audience typically neither necessarily delights in these deaths or mourns them — these female characters are set up from the beginning as background noise, characters we don’t care about, and almost act as props that serve to move the main plot forward (hello, women as objects). This unfortunate truth comes as unsurprising for a genre that doesn’t often even meet the Bechdel test. But the rampant sexism in the horror and thriller movie industry is a topic for another day.
What’s important here is that without necessarily realizing it, the average viewer will find themselves rooting for Jen. And the implication behind this is the most significant part — no one deserves to be raped. Nobody is asking for it. Not cheaters. Not women who dress provocatively. Not money-grubbers, or women who are simply hell-bent on climbing the social ladder. Nobody.
The biggest argument, though, against the validity of this theme in the movie is that if no one deserves rape, then nobody deserves to be attacked and murdered either — contrary to the way Jen eventually prevails over the men who tried to harm her in the first place.
In this way, this thriller presents a paradoxical and philosophical feast for the eyes to consider. On the one hand, it’s empowering to watch the wish-fulfilling biblical vigilante revenge the female lead gets on these men. It satisfies something primal inside us. On the other hand, we are left with the question these movies always leave us with: Is the concept of revenge ever necessary or ethical?
Some films take it farther, looking into concepts like pedophilia. In Hard Candy 14-year-old Hayley agrees to meet with 32-year-old predator Jeff in a coffee house. In a twist, Hayley fixes the drinks and she asks him to take photos of her. Before he can, Jeff falls unconscious and wakes to find himself bound. Hayley explains she’s been tracking him and spends most of the movie playing mental torture games with him until she convinces him to commit suicide for his crimes. She walks away in her bright-red hoodie, reminiscent of a revenge-exacting Little Red Riding Hood.
The question of whether the revenge film is truly progressive is still hotly debated and up in the air. But the most important takeaway from this film? In the era of the #MeToo and “Time’s Up” movements, it’s important that we believe and support women, and that means even the women we don’t necessarily agree with or “like.” Yes, all women. Yes to including sex workers in the movement. Yes to believing and supporting all victims and all women, even the women you don’t get along with. Yes, all women.
Revenge is more than wish-fulfillment. It’s a story long overdue, and I highly recommend it.
Kate Harveston is a young writer from Williamsport, Pennsylvania. She enjoys topics related to culture, feminism and women’s health, and how those elements intersect and act upon each other. If you like her writing, you can follow her on Twitter or visit her blog, So Well, So Woman.
