Rape, Revenge, and Race

foxy+brown

Foxy Brown acquires a razor on her way to her revenge.

Jack Hill loved to interpolate other exploitation genres in his exploitation films. So while the 1974 blaxploitation classic Foxy Brown isn’t exactly a rape/revenge, it does have a rape/revenge set piece tucked away in the middle. Foxy Brown (Pam Grier) is caught by the evil drug pushers, and sent out to the Ranch. There, two beefy, chuckling white trash hillbillies hook her on heroin and rape her repeatedly—until (of course) she frees herself and inflicts a terrible revenge involving coat hangers, gasoline, and charred corpses.

Hill’s rape/revenge riff — like many a rape/revenge riff—is indebted to deliverance. The white trash rapists in the context of a blaxploitation film take on additional relevance, as they spit racial epithets and even use a whip on Foxy, nodding to slavery and the history of sexual violence against black women. In Deliverance, poor whites are presented as a debased, violent, but also victimized racial other, locked in conflict with effete urban gentrifiers. Foxy Brown deliberately reminds viewers that rural whites and urban whites aren’t always at each other throats, but have often made common cause against people who look like Pam Grier.

The Deliverance reference isn’t just about race, though. It’s also about gender. In Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Carol Clover points out that the male rape in Deliverance serves as a prototype for many of the female rapes in exploitation cinema. That means that male viewers are not (or not just) supposed to identify with the male rapists; they’re supposed to identify (as they do in Deliverance) with the person being raped. In Foxy Brown, the imagined viewer is certainly mainly black. The Deliverance reference inscribes that viewer as not just black women, but black men as well, both of whom are encouraged to identify with Foxy as she is violated, and then takes violent revenge.

There are other indications in the film that rape in the film is about violation of black men, as well as violation of black women. In particular, the fate of the lead dope pusher Steve (Peter Brown) at the conclusion of the film is a collaborative male/female endeavor. Foxy allies herself with a black anti-drug, neighborhood watch coalition, and together they kill Steve’s bodyguards and capture Steve himself. The men hold Steve, and pull off his pants. Then they look to Foxy for the final order, and their leader castrates him. Finally, Foxy puts his genitals in a pickle jar and takes them to show his girlfriend, the evil Kathleen Wall (Kathryn Loder). Rape/revenge stereotypically uses castration as the recompense for rape—but in this case, that castration functions both as revenge for the sexual violence against Foxy, and as revenge for the way the heroin dealers have exploited the black community as a whole (and black men in particular.)

Even though the rape/revenge sequence only takes up 10-15 minutes in a 90 minute film, then, it is structurally and thematically central. First, it presents heroin pushing and sexual violence as parallel crimes, both used by white men (and white women) to humiliate and torture black people. Second, in doing so, and through the reference to Deliverance, it solidifies Foxy Brown’s position as a point of identification for black men as well as black women, both in her rape and in her revenge.

As Claire Henry points out, Foxy Brown, and other blaxploitation films, often aren’t included as part of the rape/revenge canon. Henry argues that this is because white society (and white critics) do not see black women’s rapes as important, or worthy of attention. Stephane Dunn notes, though, that the rape/revenge in Foxy Brown is in many ways downplayed; Foxy shows no ill-effects from sexual violence, nor for that matter from her forced heroin injections. Rape serves as a metaphor for white violence against blacks, but the specificity of the individual trauma of rape is lost — as well as the specificity of the historical sexual violence unleashed against black women.

The rape/revenge genre, then, focuses on white women, and has trouble thinking about the intersection of race and rape. Blaxploitation focuses on racial exploitation — and has trouble thinking about the intersection of race and rape. Foxy Brown doesn’t so much resolve the dialectic as illustrate it. Hill includes a rape/revenge skit in the middle of a blaxploitation revenge feature, and showing how the two parallel each other, but never, quite, manages to bring the two together into a whole that honors and sympathizes with black women’s historical, and ongoing, experience of sexual violence.
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One possible exception to the above is Talia Lugacy’s The Descent (2007). One of the few rape/revenge films with a female director, it also is unusual in featuring a woman of color; Rosario Dawson plays Maya, the lead.

As often happens with rape/revenge films, The Descent gets a worse rep than it deserves. This critic for example attacks it in part because he doesn’t understand why she refuses to go to the police (maybe women of color don’t share your faith in the cops, maybe?) and because the rape scene is insufficiently explicit (how can we care about sexual violence unless it’s really spectacular and gross?)

But while The Descent isn’t a disaster, it can’t be said to be a success, either. The film does confront race head on. Jared, the rapist football player jerk, uses racist insults as he date rapes Maya. More, his frat-boy persona and indeed the whole college milieu is figured as white; the best part of the film is the way that it functions as a kind of sickening send up of Dead Poets Society and the typical John Hughes rom com. Jared brags about seizing the day and takes Maya out to see the stars and keeps pushing at her and pushing at her boundaries, just the way you’re supposed to do, and isn’t that cute that he’s such a swoony deep romantic John Cusack lead— and then, whoops, it turns out that swoony deep romantic lead is in fact an awful priviliged racist raping shit.

The revenge part of the film seems to have racial overtones as well, though the handling of them is less sure. In reaction to the rape, Maya starts to take risks; she frequents a club where the clientele is black, Hispanic, and queer. Mya’s non-white identity becomes a kind of alternative to the square, college life with its hypocrisy and violence.

The solidarity in the face of oppression is never expressed unambituously as it is in Foxy Brown, though; instead of framing resistance to white supremacy as politics, it ends up being presented as titillating lifestyle choice, complete with BDSM games and foot fetishism. It’s not clear, either, what we’re to make of Maya in this setting. Has the rape degraded her and damaged her by pushing her into this more interracial milieu? Has the rape opened her up to sexual and communal possibilities (as she suggests at the end)? Neither of these seems like a very thoughtful takeaway, and, perhaps realizing as much, the film vacillates between them in confusion. As in Foxy Brown, rape/revenge doesn’t seem quite able to tie together its themes of sexual and racial violence. In these films not all women are white, and not all men are black, but while women of color exist, at least as far as rape/revenge has managed so far, their outlines remain blurry.

6 thoughts on “Rape, Revenge, and Race

  1. There’s a reading that I’m sure that neither you nor Dunn are likely to favor: to wit, Foxy shrugs off the ordeals of rape and heroin addiction not as a means of some “disavowal of history” but because she’s a super-tough heroine who can do such things. Male film-heroes rarely have to suffer rape, of course, but I’ll bet there have been heroes who had to overcome forced drug addiction just through manfully gritting their teeth. And of course male heroes survive all sorts of elaborate tortures, a representative example being Conan being hung on a cross and left to die in the desert.

    So if Conan recovers from his ordeal and apparently never has so much as a bad dream from the experience, is that too a disavowal of some aspect of “history?”

  2. I haven’t read Conan stuff. I think the trope where heroes aren’t affected by violence is similarly stupid, sure, and tends to downplay the effects of violence.

    You can see why these narratives are poisonous in the discussion of harassment in comics this week. A guy grabbed a subordinates crotch; the subordinate (a man) froze. Some people commented that he should have slugged him. There’s this heroic default idea that people shouldn’t be traumatized or even confused by sexual violence, or any violence. It tends to reduce sympathy for victims.

  3. Addicted to victimage. It’s like Robert Palmer’s “addicted to love,” but more sappy.

    Maybe you’ll see the opening phrase before you delete the post; maybe not. But this time, it’ll see print elsewhere, if anyone who catches sight of the post chooses to check out the original.

    At times I’ve wondered if I was wasting my time critiquing Frederic Wertham, because the man is dead and gone and his direct influence is a thing of the past. But you, Noah, have made clear that you intend to carry on his tradition of making spurious connections between things you don’t like.

    I tried, Noah, to think which of your posts best sums up your philosophical attachment to the concept of victimage beyond the boundaries of commons sense. At one time I might’ve thought the height of your absurdity would’ve been your attack on an episode of AGENTS OF SHIELD– I repeat, a single episode– because one event in the story reminded you of the real-life shooting of Trayvon Martin. Though that essay weeps a lot of crocodile tears at the series’ lack of a strong black protagonist, I wonder how long such a protagonist would have appeared on that show– or any show– before you performed a little “ultraliberal lynching” on the producer for some other damned thing.

    But no, this one wins the prize for being most absurd.

    Your tendency to characterize all “power fantasies” as fascist– another point you hold in common with Wertham– is simplistic in the extreme. But at least you’re consistent, if only on your own terms, when you attack actual power fantasies, be it those of AGENT OF SHIELD or of FOXY BROWN.

    The true height of absurdity is reached in your return comment to me here. I asserted that FOXY BROWN– which I believe to have been an inspiration to many viewers of color, rather than somehow erasing their real history– has been inspiring precisely because it allows a black woman to be a near-superhuman warrior. I assert also that because Foxy is behaving in the same superhuman way as any model of male superiority– my example being Conan surviving crucifixion– that she’s achieving a level of heroism rarely given to heroines of the period.

    I didn’t expect you to agree, and you tried to brush off the significance of Foxy by complaining about “downplaying the effects of violence.” OK, still absurd, but not the MOST absurd thing…

    That comes when you do a Wertham by trying to claim that a fictional power fantasy has a direct effect on the real world:

    You can see why these narratives are poisonous in the discussion of harassment in comics this week. A guy grabbed a subordinates crotch; the subordinate (a man) froze. Some people commented that he should have slugged him. There’s this heroic default idea that people shouldn’t be traumatized or even confused by sexual violence, or any violence. It tends to reduce sympathy for victims.

    This is classic Werthamism, since the good doctor liked to cite, as evidence of pernicious comic-books, incidents of juvenile delinquency in which no actual link to comic book-reading had been cited. You didn’t provide a link to the place as to where this real-life story was told. I assume it’s here, though Heidi McDonald doesn’t mention anything about anyone criticizing the assaulted fellow, and I didn’t find anyone in the thread claiming the victim should have slugged his assailant. I take your word for it that someone may have said words to that effect– but why in the hell would it be a “heroic default?” Why wouldn’t it be a “self-defense default,” as it would be anywhere outside the subculture of comic books? And what in the hell did any of it have to do with heroic power fantasies?

    *Maybe* the alleged persons who doled out unasked-for advice were insensitive– but your distortion is worse than anything they said. The real-life victim is to you just a club with which to pound on heroic fantasies, though what happened to him certainly happens in subcultures that aren’t built around fantasy-concepts. Your rhetoric collapses if you can’t show your readers a never-ending stream of victimage, and when you can’t find enough to attack in the present, you resort to harrowing up dead guys like Lovecraft and Frazetta, with the balmy notion that you’re somehow speaking to modern-day abuses.

    You’re doing marginalized peoples no favors by depicting them as perpetual victims. But by all means continue. You won’t actually change anything, but you’ll give me lots of grist for my own critical mill.

  4. Also, Gene…I love Foxy Brown. Jack Hill is awesome. Not sure why the possibility that it has some upsides and some downsides sense you into paroxysms of hysteria…but whatever makes you happy, I guess.

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