Nice Guys, Finished

 
In his recent post on Audition, Bert Stabler points out that the film is essentially a rape-revenge genre story. And yet, something isn’t quite right. Normally, we should experience the humiliation (and the sadistic pleasure) of the rape first, and then experiencing the sadistic pleasure (and the humiliation) of the revenge. That is the the inevitable, brutal, giddy fulcrum of narrative works. Conflict/resolution; crime/justice; brutality/counter-brutality; rape-revenge. It is the engine of plot stripped down to a crude, pointed bone.

In Audition, as I said, this simple axis of event goes awry. The front half of the film is essentially a romantic-comedy buildup — evoking a different, and perhaps uncomfortably analogous narrative simplicity. Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) , a producer and widower devastated by the loss of his wife, decides, at the urging of his son, to find a girlfriend. A director friend offers to hold a false film audition so that Aoyama can pick/ask out the most appealing of the actresses. Aoyama chooses a striking young ballet dancer, Asami (Eihi Shiina), who reciprocates his interest.

Only towards the film’s end does the rape start to coalesce, not as event but as disjointed image and memory. Our friendly middle-aged protagonist Aoyama learns (or imagines?) that his lover, Asami , was brutally tortured by her middle-aged dance instructor, and that she cut off his feet in revenge. Eventually, in what may be a dream, Asami cuts off Aoyama’s foot, linking him to her brutalizer. Essentially, rape and revenge occur simultaneously, or apparently simultaneously. The punishment calls forth the crime, or identifies the criminal. The narrative doesn’t drive the film so much as appear frozen and flickering at the end, a slowly strobing cascade of horror and violence playing ambiguously in the interstices of a supposedly more innocent life. Former audition and later exploitation merge; the film’s second half infects its first, and both intentionally implicate the director as manipulator of rape, revenge, and narrative. Indeed, with sequence broken, character starts to come apart as well, the filmmaker merges not just with Aoyama and his skeevy evaluation of female pulchritude, but with Asami and her gleeful vivisection. Scopophilia and sadism burst out of their narrative bonds to revel in frozen tableau — abjection freed from the facade of justice.

The 1984 Clint Eastwood film Tightrope has an oddly similar trajectory. Here too, a rape-revenge narrative wanders vaguely off its well-marked track. Police detective Wes Block (Eastwood) is, like Aoyama, a single dad (divorced, in his case) who loves his children (daughters, here)…but who also has an unpleasant side. Block frequents prostitutes, and seems to have a general inability to keep his dick in his pants. This complicates things considerably, since Block is pursuing a mysterious killer who rapes and murders prostitutes. The killer starts to follow Block and murder the prostitutes he sleeps with, and finally we learn that he (the killer) was once a cop himself.

Block and the killer, then, are insistently linked and doubled — and the film clearly flirts with the idea that it is Block himself who is the murderer. The murderer uses handcuffs on his victims; Block, too, has a thing for handcuffs in bed. The murderer likes to use ribbons for strangulation. Block…uses his tie.
 

 
When Block’s daughter (played by Eastwood’s real-life daughter) is raped by the killer, it becomes, paradoxically and queasily both the rape and the revenge — it is the trauma which punishes Block for the same trauma that he (the killer) has inflicted.

So, just as in Audition, the confusion of the rape/revenge is tied to a blurring or scrambling of characters. And also as in Audition, the complication or confusion of that narrative tends to create a fetishistic stillness. In Tightrope, this occurs not through dream-like images, but instead through repetitive focus on significant objects. The killer is identified again and again by a slow pan down to his shoes; his trademark red ribbons appear repetitively at different crime scenes; and of course because the killer is following the cop and the cop is following the killer, locations and characters repeat themselves with more ominous meaning (and music) as the film circles around and around itself in a slow twisting effort to catch its own tail.

Tightrope ultimately turns its back on its art film impulses and scurries back to the safety of being a Hollywood piece of shit, complete with dunderheaded final chase scene and Block heroically redeemed by fisticuffs and a good woman, not necessarily in that order. But before that happens, it, like Audition, exchanges the brutal rush of narrative for the immobile despair of, as Bert puts it, “endless defeat.” In these films, rape and trauma are not so much crimes that can be punished as stains that you stare at, day in and day out, till you can’t tell the nice guys from the sinners, nor violation from revenge.

12 thoughts on “Nice Guys, Finished

  1. Noah has done an excellent job of restating my points so they make sense. The idea that relatively decent if flawed characters can actually be destroyed by their flaws instead of redeemed by their decency is not a new motif, but one that maybe isn’t thought about in that way. Evil isn’t just banal, it’s largely unintentional and well-meaning.

  2. So have you seen that Korean movie, Bedevilled, yet? You’ll have an absolute field day with that one. It’s choked with metaphors, symbols, and commentary on misogyny in Korean society.

  3. Suat; I haven’t seen that yet! So much horror film, so little time….

    Bert, I agree (obviously!) that the well-meaning also deserve to be put to the scythe. I think there’s also in both films a corollary/implication that the well-meaning aren’t actually so well-meaning — partially perhaps because character is also an image, rather than just a narrative? That is, what you do isn’t the only way of thinking about who you are. People are symbols as well as stories, and the effort to finesse those symbols by presenting a particular story isn’t always successful.

    Or, to put it another way, nice guys participate in and benefit from rape culture too.

  4. Right, I concur. The narrative finessing, I would argue, is actually never successful, except as a deception. Which is why there are only well-intentioned people, even all the people who participate in crime. People are essentially soldiers, whose unrelenting atrocities in their line of work (the Symbolic) are fueled by their traumas (the Real) and rationalized or resisted by some story about it (the Imaginary).

    The repetition of images (which are obviously part of a narrative in any movie, as well as a visual icon) work in these sadistic movies as markers of the Real, the trauma that travels from person to person with the momentum of joyful destruction.

  5. Ah, there we go. I knew you could fill out my Lacanian algorithm better than I could.

    It’s kind of especially interesting in Tightrope, because the story does completely rationalize/resist the symbolic typology of the film. Eastwood and the killer are the same person; that’s the whole point of the film. The nice guy is a sadistic sexual predator, whose violence extends even to his own daughter (who is figured in the film as a kind of surrogate wife.) But the story vigorously rejects that insight, instead falling back on standard-issue Hollywood morality and endings.

  6. By the way, I saw Black Hawk Down last night, which couldn’t have done a better job of painting over atrocities with narrative. There was some line about how once you’re in combat, politics don’t mean shit. That makes sense coming form someone in the infantry whose life could change or end instantly, but as a line in a movie, is a lie.

  7. ————————
    Noah Berlatsky says:

    …nice guys participate in and benefit from rape culture too.
    ————————

    I can see “participate in,” in the sense of how even a fervently anti-Vietnan War activist couldn’t help but be involved, as an American, in the war. (His taxes help pay for the bullets and bombs!)

    But in what way do “nice guys…benefit from rape culture”?

    (I guess I’m about to start “straw-womaning feminism” again; accusing it of making sweepingly anti-male claims, and such madness.)

    If you nicely indicate interest in a woman, in what you consider a nonthreatening fashion, is it a benefit that being immersed in “rape culture” will cause that woman to cringe in horror, others outragedly accuse you of being a threatening, intimidating creep?

    —————————
    The culture is organized for the benefit of straight white men’s fetishes. Clint Eastwood is a nice guy, but he can go to strip shows and hire a prostitute. Aoyama is a nice guy, but he can have casual sex with his coworker and subordinate, or get a buddy to parade women before him like pieces of meat.

    Patriarchy has downsides for men too. But pretending it has no benefits is one way that nice guys convince themselves that they are nonthreatening and generally to be pitied.
    ————————–

    So if I’m dubious about how ““nice guys…benefit from rape culture,” that means I’m “…pretending [patriarchy] has no benefits”?

    Of course a male-dominated culture, where entertainment is overwhelmingly slanted to male interests, and women are routinely viewed at and encouraged to be “sex objects” tends to benefit males. And Japanese society… well, it makes America look like a feminist dream.

    But isn’t calling it “rape culture” a horrendously vile extreme? Apparently the latest inflammatory feminist shorthand for society; in the same fashion that “America-hating atheist Muslim friends of terrorists” is the Right’s terminology for liberals.

    Funny how in this “rape culture,” rape is a crime, for which men regularly get sent to prison. (Yes, some get away with it; just as they get away with murder, robbery…)

    And what about this twist?

    —————————-
    There are probably more men than women raped in the United States every year—most of them in prison. Best estimates put the annual number of prison rapes at about 140,000, which is 50,000 more than the 90,000 or so rapes of women reported to police. Gang rape of the most brutal kind is common, and weaker prisoners often seek protection from a “daddy” who fights off other predators in exchange for total submission and sex on demand. There is an ugly racial dimension to prison rape: Blacks and Mexicans deliberately seek out white victims, and black-on-white rape is probably more common than any other kind. Prison rape is an appalling secret in a country that prides itself on human rights…

    …As No Escape reports, Hispanics sometimes rape Hispanics, and blacks sometimes rape blacks, but neither group permits anyone of another race to rape its own people. If a black tried to “turn out” a Mexican, the Mexicans would riot and try to kill him. Blacks also defend each other from white or Hispanic rapists. It is only whites—unless they are known members of white racialist gangs who do stick together—who are on their own and can be raped with impunity.
    —————————–
    http://www.limbicnutrition.com/blog/mating-calls-the-horrific-reality-of-male-on-male-rape-in-us-prisons/

    How do “nice guys” benefit from this actual “rape culture”?

  8. Folks in prison are not generally considered “nice guys” in the way these things are usually constructed.

    Prison rape is a really horrible thing, and the way our culture uses prison in general is heinous. But the fact that prison is horrible, and that men get raped in prison, doesn’t change the fact that for the most part the culture is organized to cater to the fetishes of straight men. That’s what rape culture is — a culture in which women are treated as, and primarily identified as — things to be used by men. Eastwood is a nice guy, but spends his evenings in a world of strip clubs and prostitutes. Aoyama is nice, but can use his position of power to sleep with a subordinate, and/or to audition sexual partners like pieces of meat.

    Within the milieu of these films, those facts are directly linked to rape. Aoyama is analogized to the dance teacher who brutalized and raped Asami. Eastwood is analogized to the man who murders and rapes prostitutes (and who rapes his daughter.) These are sensational films, obviously — but I think they also get at what feminists talk about when they talk about rape culture, which is that the treatment of women as things is the prerequisite, the basic ground, for a situation in which sexual abuse and rape are systemic. That’s an insight shared by both of these films — neither of which would be considered especially feminist by most measures.

    Your basic criticism, incidentally, appears to be that the nice guys are really nice, and that the films are unfair to them. You’re on the side of Eastwood and Aoyama. Which is predictable and usual — and the fact that these two films resist that easy identification, without for the most part (especially re: Audition) turning the protagonists into anti-heroes, is precisely why they’re both worthwhile, I think.

  9. ————————
    Noah Berlatsky says:

    Folks in prison are not generally considered “nice guys” in the way these things are usually constructed.
    ————————–

    Aren’t most of those in prison nonviolent offenders? (Google’s to confirm: “nonviolent offenders make up more than 60 percent of the prison and jail population. Nonviolent drug offenders now account for about one-fourth of all inmates, up from less than 10 percent in 1980.” http://reason.com/archives/2011/06/08/prison-math , http://www.november.org/razorwire/rzold/12/1201.html )

    Compared to murderers, rapists, and other violent criminals, those would indeed qualify as “nice guys.”

    And anyway, as far as feminists are concerned (I may as well dispense with the “radical” feminists qualifier; if any moderate feminists show up here, they’re keeping silent), aren’t “nice guys” just vile scumbags too, who only pretend to be nice?

    —————————–
    But the fact that prison is horrible, and that men get raped in prison, doesn’t change the fact that for the most part the culture is organized to cater to the fetishes of straight men. That’s what rape culture is — a culture in which women are treated as, and primarily identified as — things to be used by men.
    —————————–

    You go from the indeed accurate “the culture is organized to cater to the fetishes of straight men” to calling it “rape culture.”

    Um, there is a difference between straight guys being catered to with halftime shows at football games featuring scantily-clad cheerleaders, popular entertainment crammed full of good-looking bimbos in revealing outfits and such, to saying that this constitutes a “rape culture.”

    Here’s again where my concern over the “devaluing of the currency” comes along. If some middle-aged lech gets his jollies over tanned, nubile cheerleaders jumping around, that gets related to rape.

    As you noted in the “I Spit On Your Prom” thread, “Movies like Ms. 45 even made a sustained critique of patriarchy, linking workplace harassment, rape, and the general marginalization of women into a single crime — punishable by death.”

    So, “the general marginalization of women” is the same thing as rape; deserving to be “punishable by death.”

    Who needs to be “straw-womaning” feminism, when poisonous nonsense — which would be called “sexist,” if men were doing it — like this gets spread by its adherents?

    And what happened to the old feminist argument that rape is an act of violence, not sexuality? Whose primary objective is to inflict pain and emotional suffering? (Which explains why the old and ugly get raped too.)

    In what way is a bunch of beer-swigging fratboys drooling over “Hooters Girls” an act of violence, whose ultimate fulfillment is rape?

    ——————————
    …what feminists talk about when they talk about rape culture…is that the treatment of women as things is the prerequisite, the basic ground, for a situation in which sexual abuse and rape are systemic. That’s an insight shared by both of these films — neither of which would be considered especially feminist by most measures.
    ——————————–

    The treatment of people as things — disposable in war, subjected to death or illness through dangerous products, to be cynically exploited and then discarded — is a standard part of our culture. It’s referred to as “thinging”; on a personal level, experienced when the slow cashier at the supermarket or guy in the car ahead is not thought of as a person, but a thing, irritatingly impeding you.

    But, does this translate to a “murder is just fine” attitude? No more than — a right-wingers would have it — being opposed to the war in Iraq = being a friend to Bin Laden.

    ———————————–
    Your basic criticism, incidentally, appears to be that the nice guys are really nice…
    ————————————

    I’ve no overly-idealized idea of “nice guys”; as I’d posted elsewhere at HU:

    That said, though, it’s not as if men aren’t mostly schmucks. (NSFW) http://i1123.photobucket.com/albums/l542/Mike_59_Hunter/KreiderKnowDiff.jpg

    ———————————
    …and that the films are unfair to them. You’re on the side of Eastwood and Aoyama. Which is predictable and usual —
    ———————————-

    I actually find the two characters disgusting and creepy; and you seriously think I consider them “nice guys”?

    But just like to a right-winger, being opposed to the war in Iraq = being on the side of the terrorists, to a feminist, disagreeing with sexist charges like “this is a rape culture” = being on the the side of those characters’ noxious behavior; considering them “nice.”

    “Mr. A thinking”; it’s not just for the Right!

    (I hope by the time we resume this discussion that Romney won’t have stolen the election, and feminists end up with something more substantial to gripe about; like the abolition of Roe v. Wade, which it takes only one more right-wing Supreme Court appointee to pass…)

  10. A lot of women don’t report rape because there is a slim to no chance, I’ve read 25% chance, if the rapist going to trail, much less being convicted. This is because of rape culture that makes us believe the women deserved the rape somehow and make women a commodity to be used and discarded for a man’s pleasure. Yes, prison rape is a crime too, but those people are in jail, not citizens trying to be law abiding.

Comments are closed.