violent imagery in 2020 – 40 years after Ebert first saw the
film – and so I hosted a screening for some friends one
Friday evening in my living room. The fact that the guests
all knew each other might have effected their responses.
But as I examined their reactions to the film’s first half,
I could see none of the relish Ebert described: women
and men alike covered their faces and held their breath;
some were even angry when they realised that after the
first attack, Jennifer’s troubles were still not over. Indeed, I
Spit on Your Grave is famous for the fact that its real-time
depiction of gang rape takes up 30 minutes of its runtime.
Yet discussing the film afterwards, none of the viewers I
gathered found those scenes gratuitous or sadistic. Rather,
they were fascinated by the film’s focus on the dynamic
between the four rapists, even during the attacks. Zarchi
indeed shows the looks the men constantly exchange as
they assault Jennifer, highlighting the fact that, to them,
this is just a way to mark their dominance over something,
and over each other. As one of my guinea pigs remarked,
the violence escalates with every attack, as the men try to
out-perform each other in order to gain the respect of their
leader, Johnny (Eron Tabor), the first rapist and instigator
of the violence. It seems Ebert either missed or did not care
for the way Zarchi’s film, rather than relish in the violence
done to its central female character, showed that rape was
not necessarily about sex, but about power.
However, another element of the film makes it feel more
dated and trashy: the retribution in its second half. Like the
woman sitting behind Ebert, the audience at my house
cheered at Jennifer’s ingenious and daring methods. As
one of my friends argued, there is a fantastical quality
to this part of the film, where this violated woman does
not go to the police or flee in her car, but instead reveals
herself to be a deadly black widow. Another mentioned
that this section of the film was also darkly funny: in luring
the men to her house by flattering them – getting Johnny
to sit in her bath by making him believe that “she liked it”
and wants more, for example – Jennifer pokes fun at their
stupidity and inflated egos.
Another viewer explained that, despite how enjoyable
this fantasy is, he wasn’t sure Jennifer was actually
getting proper revenge for the brutality of the attacks
on her. Indeed, her revenge is more expeditive, and not
demeaning in the same way. One female viewer was
particularly shocked by the scene of the men mocking
Jennifer’s writing – they did not simply want her body, they
wanted to totally humiliate her. Jennifer does not inflict the
same psychological violence on herassailants.
Though I Spit on Your Grave is more intelligent about
the dynamics of sexual violence than Ebert made it sound
in his review, we all agreed that the film fails to reckon with
Jennifer’s trauma (beyond the implication that she must
be quite unwell to want to meet her assailants again and
put herself in extreme danger for the chance to murder
them). Perhaps on another Friday night I’ll show my friends
the 2015 sequel to the 2010 remake, I Spit on Your Grave
III: Vengeance is Mine, in which Jennifer, now working
as an assault hotline operator, is forced to kill again after
justice fails one of her friends from group counselling...
As long as men attack women, the rape revenge genre will
be here to stay029