Now at the risk of seeming a bit Daily Mail here...girls love it.
They don‘t love being raped but most girls, generally, enjoy sex. Fair play to them; it's one of my favourite pastimes as well. Some girls likes their sex to be all candle-lit and like something from a soft-core porn film. Some guys like that too. Some people also like Michael Bolton. Let’s discount these people as they suck (and probably suck badly as tho’ your cock/clit was gonna jump out and bite them at any second).
Most sensible people with a sex life like a bit of variation and, at some point, this will surely involve something a bit rougher. Of all the people reading this there will be some who enjoy being tied up/slapped/spat on/humiliated/choked and even tortured. If this is carried out between two consenting adults then fair play to all involved.
Most sensible people fantasize. Some of these fantasies involve being completely in control and others involve completely losing control. Into this massive bracket of sexual “perversions” we can slip in rape.
There is a world of difference between a rape fantasy, even role play, and actually being forced into, perhaps, the most humiliating and degrading thing anyone can be put through. What if, however, you find your rapist attractive and have contemplated such a scenario? Does this make the act any less wrong?
Of course it fucking doesn’t. So why all the fuss about Susan George looking like she enjoyed it? What the fuck am I on about? Who's Susan George? What does this have to do with the world of controversial cinema? Why are we talking about a Sam Peckinpah film that isn’t the wonderful
The Wild Bunch? Why is Gary Glitter so vilified but no-one minds the fact Roman Polanski shags kids too? Why do we get life jackets under our seats in planes and not fucking parachutes? Before such huge questions are raised, however, let’s discuss
Straw Dogs. A short synopsis of the movie is required I feel.
Dustin Hoffman plays David Summer, a mild mannered (geeky), American mathematician. He is married to the beautiful Amy (Susan George). Wishing to flee the increasingly violent America he’s been used to all his life they seek a new life in Amy’s homeland of
Cornwall.
Being a geeky maths guy David spends far too long worrying about theorems and protractors and his wife gets bored. She spends most of her time flirting with some locals, including her ex-lover, for some attention.
Let's get one thing straight from the outset. Amy does fancy her ex, Charlie, and wouldn’t mind a bit. This is obvious from the outset. But she is married and, is part of a monogamous couple and chooses not to fuck him. Good for her, good for David, good for the institute of marriage. Everyone’s happy. Apart from Charlie.
Charlie and some other locals begin to resent this new couple. They are intimidated by David’s intellect and his withdrawn nature leads some to think he is a snooty bastard. Amy’s flirtation that leads nowhere leads to obvious resentment. There a few sly digs placed here and there towards the couple. Which leads to the murder...of the pet cat.
At this point David has two ways to go. He can either confront the local workmen or appease them. He goes a bit Neville Chamberlain and goes out hunting with them. Using a trick we all had played on us as children they send him off in one direction and fuck off in the other. David, geeky maths guy, had no friends at school and never learnt this one so spends hours waiting on his “friends”.
His “friends” however are at his house. Charlie confronts Amy, decides on her behalf she does want his boab, and rapes her.
Here's where this becomes complicated. Me, you, Amy, Charlie, even David, knows Amy does kinda want a piece of his meat.
Here's where this complicates the film more.
Does it look like Amy is enjoying her rape?
We'll get into that later, as it’s the reason I'm discussing the film, we'll continue with the short(ish) version of the film.
Anyhoo another one of these crazy hick locals comes along and rapes Amy too. Then they leave.
Hoffman, however, has finally counted to 100 (or perhaps 17 to the power of 12 seeing as he’s a mathematician) or whatever the fuck he was doing waiting on those arseholes and returns home. Amy says nothing. Something we will again go into later.
At some point later in the film they are driving home and knock down the village idiot (this being Cornwall we’ll assume one of many) and take the injured ’tard home to help him. In a bit of “Of Mice and Men” action this Celtic, pasty eating, tin mining fool has strangled some girl and some vigilante action is called for by a group of locals. David refuses to let them entry to his home and they try to break in. David snaps and reaps his revenge in some real cool, gory ways.
I can’t decide if Amy
is enjoying the rape. I’ve seen the film twice before and just re-watched it for this piece and it’s still beyond me. The idea of a woman enjoying rape was so alien to me first time I saw it I never even contemplated it. After discussing the film with my uncle he informed me of it’s banned history and told me it was because of that scene.
So I re-watch it then. I’ve just watched it again.
She isn’t
actually fighting him off with any great effort. She is kissing back at first. So she
must be loving it.
However she’s only kissing back at first. She does get slapped and doesn’t seem to happy about that. So she
must be hating it.
Is Amy resigned to what's about to happen or willing it on?
Peckinpah says this scene is intended to show the complete degradation she feels, or any woman, any person, who is being forced upon feels. She’s helpless and resigned to it. I don't think Peckinpah was that stupid. He knows fine well ambiguity in this scene would raise question’s in an audience member’s mind. The second rape is a different story altogether. Why is she kicking more, crying more, etc? Has she snapped, as David does later, or was this a step too far but the first bit was cool with her?
So this further raises the question was Peckinpah being misogynistic in his approach? Is it too easy to paint the idea that, deep down, all women want this (or something like it?) Or at least to paint the idea that's what Peckinpah was saying. I say no. Peckinpah made great films depicting violence and gore and most of it was for entertainment’s sake. The blood splatters that fly from people when they got shot in his films are the stuff of legend and Monty Python sketches. There was never an attempt to show violence in anything other than a glorified spectacle. It was the effects this had on his characters that showed the side of it that we abhor.
This film is no different. Amy is withdrawn after her ordeal. She is not the same libertarian, free-spirited, almost naive young girl we saw previous. But, even then, this raises more questions than it answers. Is she withdrawn because of the second rape; but didn't mind the first? Even worse: is she withdrawn through guilt as she was wanting it? Or is she withdrawn because she's actually been raped? To any normal person we'd instantly jump to the latter of those options. Censors aren’t normal people.
A film that asks more questions than it gives us answers? When your own thoughts on that scene say more about you than it does about the film itself? A film that can split people so down the middle no consensus will ever be agreed upon? That is the type of cinema we should see. The stuff that should be put to celluloid.
Maybe, just maybe, she did love it. Maybe this was all the proof some misguided fools had that any bit of flirtation means a girl must “be asking for it?” Peckinpah could well be a Daily Sport reading sexist pig. Cornish people probably are inbred, illiterate and prone to violent outbreaks against Jewish Americans. It honestly doesn’t matter. Few films will even dare broach a subject like rape. If they do they are almost always completely black and white in their delivery. The world has shades of grey, as much as we wish it never at times, as much as we refuse to admit those shades are there and as often as we ignore them. Sam Peckinpah’s
Straw Dogs takes those shades of grey and exploits them. It doesn’t exploit them for it’s own benefit but for ours. Whether we consider the questions raised about sexuality, violence or where they cross it forces us to look at something new on each viewing.
I wont even go into it’s question’s asked over violence being an answer for your own redemption and revenge. The subject of vigilantism or the price paid for our actions or even what side I think the film verges on with any of these debates. I hate to sit on the fence but don’t let anyone, or anything (especially fucking censors and the Mary Whitehouse brigade) tell you. Watch it. Decide. Discuss. Disagree. Then watch
The Wild Bunch.
Infact. Fuck
The Wild Bunch. Watch
Straw Dogs twice. You can watch those cool shoot outs next week.
Straw Dogs was banned from video release between 1984 and 2002. It's available on DVD now. One of the few films to be actually banned by the BBFC where it was a loss. It’s available uncut, and probably on the cheap, in a shop near you.
