"Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In" for 8/14/02: "I Spit On Your Grave"
By JOE BOB BRIGGS
Drive-In Movie Critic of Grapevine, Texas
I've just been taping the commentary track for the new
"Millennium Edition" DVD of "I Spit On Your Grave," which may be
the most despised movie in the history of film. Sometimes I think
I'm it's only defender.
It's hard to believe that next year will mark the 25th
anniversary of this rape/revenge classic, and to this day it's
banned from television--ALL television. When I was hosting movies
on The Movie Channel, and later on TNT, I would occasionally ask
if we could get rights to it, thinking it would be a great thing
to show even if we had to use the censored version. But it was on
the "too grisly for cable" list, and it stayed there even after
standards loosened up in the nineties and "The Texas Chain Saw
Massacre," to use just one example, actually aired on premium
cable. They won't even show "I Spit On Your Grave" on adult pay-
per-view.
What is it about this movie that makes it so universally
hated? I could make a pretty strong argument for it being a
feminist tract, and in fact, when it was first released in 1978,
the title was "Day of the Woman." If you took Susan Brownmiller,
Andrea Dworkin and Gloria Steinem, and asked them to come up with
their worst-case version of the true nature of rape, it would
probably look a lot like what happens to Jennifer Hill, the free-
spirited New York magazine writer who rents a summer house in the
country in "I Spit On Your Grave" and gets brutally attacked by
the local pond scum. No sexuality at all--just completely
oppressive violence of man against woman.
And then she sets the world straight. Only she doesn't do it
in the wimpy legalistic way that Jodie Foster does it in "The
Accused." In that movie, for which Jodie Foster won the Oscar, a
girl is gang-raped and then fights through the legal system to
get justice against her attackers. It's the EXACT SAME PLOT as "I
Spit On Your Grave." The only difference is that Camille Keaton,
the grandniece of Buster Keaton who stars in "I Spit," does the
job herself. If you wanna talk about empowerment, this broad is
pretty dang EMPOWERED--as opposed to "The Accused," where the
creaky legal system ALMOST fails and lets the guys go free.
At any rate, the reason the movie got flagged for censorship
in the first place is that, when it was re-released in 1980,
Siskel and Ebert hammered it so brutally on "Sneak Previews" that
they all but called for its banishment from the face of the
earth. Then they continued to crusade against it, pretty much
establishing it as the movie that no civilized person should ever
permit himself to see. (Of course, that just made people like me
wanna see it even more.)
Their argument was that the movie was told from the point of
view of the rapists, and that the people who watched it in
downtown grindhouse theaters actually CHEERED for the rapists.
First of all, I've examined it shot-by-shot several times now,
and the first charge is just absolutely false. There's no
question, from the opening shot of the movie through the closing
shot, that the story is told from one point of view and one point
of view only--the woman's.
Not only that, but during the actual rape sequence, the
point-of-view shots are VICTIM'S point-of-view shots--the twisted
face of the grimacing rapist, and, by the way, WAY too many
closeups of flabby male bewtocks for my taste. You don't even see
that much of Camille Keaton. What you DO see of her is in the
aftermath of the rape, when she's bloody and dirty and virtually
catatonic as she tries to make her way through the woods back to
her summer house.
The reason the movie was shot that way is that the director,
Meir Zarchi, witnessed the aftermath of a real-life rape in 1974,
when he was the first to see a battered nude woman emerging from
a city park. He called for help and assisted her, but the
experience shook him--and led to "I Spit On Your Grave." He
wanted to show just how gruesome the experience is.
Actually Ingmar Bergman had made a similar movie in 1959
called "The Virgin Spring," but the difference in that case is
that the girl's rape is avenged by her father, Max Von Sydow.
Same thing with Wes Craven's first film, "Last House on the
Left," in 1972--the rape is avenged by the girls' parents. So
what Zarchi was doing is making a "what if" movie, as in "What if
women didn't have to rely on other people to take back the
power?" It's about the strongest "Take Back the Night" statement
ever made. She doesn't just take back the night. She takes back
the night, the morning, the afternoon, and steals the clock while
she's at it.
As the original poster put it, "This woman has just cut,
chopped, broken and burned five men beyond recognition . . . but
no jury in America would ever convict her!" Actually she only
killed four men, not five, and she didn't really burn any of
them, but they don't call em exploitation movies for nothing, do
they?
Now what about that second claim--that Ebert and Siskel
watched the movie in a theater where everyone was cheering for
the rapists to win?
First point--from a veteran of grindhouses, God how I miss
em--is that, the more intense the movie, the more young hormonal
males will say and do almost ANYTHING to make it appear that the
scene doesn't really affect them. If they laugh, it's not
necessarily a real laugh. If they adopt some anti-social point of
view--"Get her! Kill!"--it's always at a time when the action on
the screen is genuinely upsetting and they want everyone to think
they're badasses who can make jokes even during the scary parts.
It doesn't mean any more than ghetto murder slang--"I'm gonna
kill that mofo"--or the cheering that sometimes occurs when Jason
slices up a teenager in a particularly imaginative way. The cheer
is a form of nervous laughter, not identification with the
killer.
"At the film's end," wrote Roger Ebert, "I walked out of the
theater quickly, feeling unclean, ashamed, and depressed."
And all I've got to say to that is my second point--the only
reason he could feel unclean, ashamed and depressed is that HE
identified with the rapists. And that's VERY kinky. This woman
TRIUMPHS in the film. It's no different, really, than "Death
Wish" or "Dirty Harry." The first half of the movie sets up a
series of crimes so horrendous that, when the peaceful character
takes up arms, you don't mind it. The only difference is that
those are male fantasy projections and this is a female one.
It's been frequently written in video guides and elsewhere
that the film glorifies rape because the actual gang-rape
sequence is 40 minutes long. Actually it's not. It might FEEL
like it's 40 minutes long, but if you count the very beginning of
the entrapment of Jennifer, long before you're even aware that
it's a rape, and stop counting after she's been raped the final
time, it's about 24 minutes. The revenge, on the other hand, is
incredibly drawn out.
If I had to guess why this movie has drawn this level of
intense hatred, I would have to say it's because a lot of people
think rape shouldn't be portrayed at all. Murder is fine, but
rape is still taboo. But the rape is not nearly the most
terrifying part of the movie.
The worst scene--you know the one I'm talking about--is so
horribly gruesome that I can't imagine any male watching it
without remembering it the rest of his life. Let's just say it's
the ultimate MALE fear, and it's perpetrated by a cool, collected
female who, by the end of the movie, has restored herself to
sanity, the old-fashioned way.
Watch it with me when it comes out in November. I'm telling
you, it's due for a revival.
Web site for "I Spit On Your Grave": http://elitedisc.com/desc_page/titles_hscc_4.html.