“It was just a party.
I didn’t know it was the beginning
of the end.” Victim narratives
in our culture have reinforced the idea
that once you become a victim,
that’s all you’ll ever be. Looking at a number
of these stories (which typically center
on women), we can see
some patterns in the (often damaging)
messages they send: The victim is voiceless,
rarely allowed to tell her own story in depth,
or else not listened to. Instead,
the details of her life and her drama
are used to reveal windows into other characters’
complex psychology. The victim is idealized “She was my
personal angel.” -- turned into a perfect
blank slate and (often) an object of lust --
as if the tragedy of her death
is in part that she’s no longer
sexually attainable. Even if the victim doesn’t die,
she’s forever a victim -- paralyzed by the tragedy
that hangs over her and traps her in time
Frequently, the victim is
blamed and shamed “I was branded
as a tramp”, And painted as weak --
perpetuating the insidious, false idea that
a victim could (or should)
have done something differently, or that getting
taken advantage of was somehow a personal failure.
In the aftermath of the Me Too movement,
many people have criticized the use of
the victim label itself, now instead referring
to people who’ve experienced trauma as survivors.
“The reason why I consider myself a survivor
is because I did not let this break me down.”]
Yet on the other end of the spectrum,
the “Superheroic Survivor” story -- the flipside to
the classic victim narrative in our culture --
can be equally one-dimensional,
simplistic and uninterested in a real person’s experience. Here’s our take
on why it’s time to move beyond
the victim-survivor binary and listen while
the person who lived through hell tells her
(complicated) story herself. “There was nothing ever
to suggest that I had a life outside of the courtroom,
that I was on a track of my own,
that I had my own dreams and goals
before the assault happened”. If you're new here
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to try Skill Share today. The stories we see on screen
typically illustrate the victim as an idea
of a person, a symbol, or a reflection
of the other characters in their narrative,
rather than a fully developed individual
who has a complete life and personality.
In Forrest Gump, the crux of beautiful,
illusive Jenny’s character is her inability to escape
the trauma of her childhood abuse -- she’s linked to the image
of a damaged bird who can’t fly away
as she wants to. “Please god make me a bird
so I can fly far, far away.” Given the story’s
point of view, her self-destructive decisions
serve as motivations for Forrest and she’s stuck
in this spiraling state until the very conclusion
of the movie, when (after briefly finding
some stability) she dies. In a 2018 interview with Variety,
Keira Knightley claimed that she doesn’t often
do modern movies because “the female characters
nearly always gets raped.” Her words call attention
to just how often the victimized woman
is reduced to being a tragic story set-up
"Maybe we'll both learn a few things
about Laura Palmer". Framing the victim
as a intriguing mystery to anchor the story structure around
can be seen in shows from Desperate Housewives
and The Killing, to Top of the Lake,
but perhaps the most iconic, quintessential example
is Twin Peaks, a series that
starting in 1990 established the magnetic power
of framing the beautiful victim as an enticing puzzle
we can enjoy solving. The murder of
homecoming queen Laura Palmer is the inciting incident
for an entire town of quirky characters
to reveal all of their dark secrets. “You wanna know
who killed Laura? You did!
We all did!” A major problem
with victim narratives is that they often
don’t feature or give sufficient weight to the victim’s voice
or her experience of events. Akira Kurosawa’s
1950 classic Rashomon -- an even earlier example
of using the victim event as a central mystery
to reveal other characters’ intricacies and points of view --
centers around differing accounts of Masako’s assault.
Her attack is her character’s defining moment,
but her voice is just one of several
that are framed as equally unreliable, as the various versions
of events compete with each other to determine whether she is weak,
helpless, deceitful or even in some way responsible.
13 Reasons Why is a modern example showing
we’re still framing plots around idealized victims
who illuminate other characters. “I’m about to tell you
the story of my life, specifically why my life ended.” Here the suicide victim
Hannah Baker does have a prominent voice --
each episode focuses on a different tape
recorded by Hannah implicating people
as partly responsible for her death.
But Hannah still is there to be
the catalyst for others like Clay’s character development,
as he works to avenge the one-dimensional
idealized version of Hannah he has created in his head.
Part of Twin Peaks’ power was how it subverted the ideal
of the perfect, virtuous victim.
Blonde “good girl” Laura is revealed to live
a chaotic double life filled with secret romances,
drug abuse and sex work. “She said people
try to be good, but they’re really
sick and rotten, her most of all.”
But she’s still depicted as an almost ethereal being --
the hidden dark side of her personality
coming across as dangerous yet sexy,
entrancing, even mystical. So it almost feels
as though the most tragic aspect of Laura’s death
is that she was so beautiful. “So beautiful.
Who would do a thing like that?”
Much like Laura, female victims in genre films
are often represented through a disconcerting mix
of idealization and sexualization after death.
Archetypes like The Hitchcock Blonde, or the beautiful victims
of Italian giallo films, are as gorgeous as they are doomed.
This tendency to define deceased women
by both their suffering and their sex appeal
unfortunately also shapes how our culture reports on
or dramatizes the stories of real-life murder victims.
The 1980 murder of Playboy Playmate Of The Year
and rising star Dorothy Stratten
was sensationalized in highly exploitative media treatments.
(like this 1981 TV movie Death of a Centerfold
with the tagline “every man’s fantasy,
one man’s obsession.”) You can still see
the same thing happening in this 2013 front page
of UK tabloid The Sun, blatantly objectifying
Reeva Steenkamp in a bikini while reporting about her murder
by Oscar Pistorius. The 1969 coverage of the death
of actress Sharon Tate (arguably more famous
as a victim of the Manson family murders
than for her screen career which was cut short)
focused heavily on her sex appeal.
"Miss tate, who starred in Valley
of the Dolls, was 8 months pregnant
and was found in a bikini-tight nightgown."
Newspapers used promiscuous photos of her for their front pages,
and The Sunday Mirror reported on the murder with lines like
“Sharon, 26, who sometimes called herself
‘sexy little me,’ died with another woman
and three men...”. Quentin Tarantino
revisits Tate’s story in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood,
and has said he wanted to undo the
“fact that she’s a person consigned to history
for the most part defined completely and utterly
by her tragic death” "I think it's horrible
that she's been defined by her murder
because of the movie. I don't think
that's necessarily the case anymore". The film purposely
rewrites history, imagining a world
where this murder is prevented, and (according to Tarantino)
aims to lend Tate an air of “normalcy”
and show she was “more than [her victim status]...
you actually watch her doing things that people do
in a life, running errands, driving the car,
just life stuff.” This gets at
a huge problem with our cultural framing
of murders and assaults, both fictional and non-fictional --
too often they equate the victim in our shared consciousness
with the worst thing that ever happened to them,
erasing the rest of their personalities.
After she was murdered in 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson
became dehumanized to the point that she’s now
almost solely known for being the victim in the
O.J Simpson murder trial. Even despite
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s intentions to correct this trend
of making victimhood a permanent identity, though,
the film’s portrayal of Tate is still underdeveloped --
one-dimensionally lovely, with very little dialogue,
story or conflict. “For me,
I just saw her as a ray of light." So it continues to play
into the classic victim narrative’s use of a purely innocent,
unbelievably sexy woman as a symbol that means
something to others (instead of telling her story
from inside her experience.) “Sharon absolutely has a type.”
“I never stood a chance.” In the comedy realm,
Search Party cleverly exposes just how self-serving
and false the whole glamorous, romanticized victim story
has always been. Central protagonist Dory
becomes obsessed with the disappearance of a hauntingly tragic victim --
but the missing Chantel turns out not even to be a victim,
let alone some profound source of meaning,
“Who are you hiding from? Honestly? Myself.”,
and it’s clear Dory was just projecting
a lack of direction in her life onto this non-story.
“I think you've decided that this matters to you
because you have nothing else. One-dimensional depictions
of the victim as a beautiful image or metaphor
are frustrating for anyone looking to see themselves
represented on screen. So plenty of stories
take the opposite path, giving us the warrior-like
badass survivor -- but is this alternative
really as empowering as it seems? "By 20
she was one of the top female assassins
in the world." The inspirational Survivor
is often portrayed on screen as a near superhero
with unmatched resilience and a determination to avenge
their own trauma while stopping these wrongs
from being inflicted on others. This corrects some problems
with the victim narrative -- giving the survivor more agency --
but it still risks reducing the character
to something one-dimensional and not fully human.
In The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Lisbeth Salander’s trauma
acts as an origin story for her becoming this impressive,
empathetic “survivor superhero” as she goes after
the same kind of men who inflicted pain upon her. “If I find a girl
in here with you, whether she came
of her own free will or not.” “I’ll kill you.”
Survivor narratives metaphorically split characters
into two people: the person before the trauma,
and the person who is forever changed
after the event. And a big problem with this
is that these stories implicity frame
the survivor’s trauma as (to quote Jessica Chastain)
a “phoenix moment” that actually gifts them
with immeasurable strength “Without Littlefinger and Ramsay
and the rest, I’d have stayed a ‘little bird’
all my life.” Like Lisbeth Salander,
Red Sparrow’s Dominika Ergova credits her impressive skill set
as an undercover operative to the pain she’s undergone
(in this case, both her sadistic,
torturous training, and having survived
a sexual assault). In Audition,
Asami’s brutal ability to overpower any man
she feels has wronged her (as a direct result of her abuse)
highlights another recurring theme in survivor stories:
all these women seek physical revenge,
with the kind of violence and strength typically reserved
for male characters and respected by men.
In reality, though, living through abuse
doesn’t automatically make someone stronger,
probably won’t lead to them becoming an awesome fighter,
and is far more likely to hinder their progress
or reverse their growth in many ways.
Promising Young Woman offers a more nuanced update
to this revenge story, with protagonist Cassie
resorting to psychological tactics rather than physical.
“I said, what are you doing?” As she seeks to avenge
the assault and suicide of her best friend Nina,
Cassie does transform into someone more bold and vengeful;
however, this isn’t all good -- in her personal life,
this shift is self-destructive and unproductive to her goals.
Her transformation is most explicit in the film’s climax,
when she adopts a combination of Nina’s persona
and the supernaturally confident female avenger.
“I said my name was Nina Fisher.” “Can you let me go please?”
“I’m sorry I can’t.” But this sequence ends
in Cassie’s death -- as she’s a woman
alone in a room with a dangerous man
who’s physically stronger than her -- a shocking ending
that draws attention to the fragility of both Cassie
and the survivor narrative itself. Not everyone does survive attacks,
so turning survivors into super-empowered,
aspirational archetypes is limiting, and perhaps distracting
from the reality. In the wake
of the Me Too movement, survivor stories have flooded
the cultural zeitgeist, with women reclaiming their agency
and taking control of their voices.
“I feel relieved now to know that I’m able to say it
and not be afraid anymore.” These real life stories
reveal how unhelpful the victim vs. survivor binary
truly is. In her memoir Know My Name,
Chanel Miller wrote: “I am a victim,
I have no qualms with this word, only with the idea
that it is all that I am. However,
I am not Brock Turner's victim. I am not his anything.
I don't belong to him.” "I had to force myself
to learn my real name, my identity.
To re-learn that this is not all that I am.”
One of the key changes in recent years is that,
finally, our society is interested in listening to the voices
of victims-slash-survivors. Miller was
a watershed example of that, when her viral written statement
got her named a Glamour 2016 Woman of the Year
(then anonymously as “Emily Doe”) before Know My Name
made it onto numerous top book lists of 2019.
The same shift can be seen in how more and more
of the public finally believes Dylan Farrow’s testimony
of abuse by Woody Allen in 1992. Documentary series Allen v. Farrow
tracks the way that significant evidence
of these events -- in addition to Farrow’s voice
and unwavering account -- have been ignored
and rejected for decades due to Allen’s immense popularity
and backing from powerful people. "I love Woody,
I believe him, and I would work with him any time."
And the documentary sheds light on the added trauma
of having to fight against people denying your reality,
while knowing that an abuser hasn’t been punished
and may be inflicting the same kind of suffering onto others.
A similar shift has happened in our culture’s
shared reevaluation of its shocking collective mistreatment
of Monica Lewinsky, who now describes her relationship
with Bill Clinton as a “gross abuse of power.”
After years of being victim-blamed and slut-shamed,
Lewinsky is finally getting a voice in her own story,
both through her influential anti-bullying work
and through her involvement in retelling those Clinton era events
on American Crime Story Impeachment: “I’ve been incredibly lucky
the last few years to reclaim my narrative.
And so the opportunity to have a seat
at the table around that was really meaningful to me”.
These real-life examples underscore that,
far from a person being either a victim or a survivor,
the truth lies in both of these things co-existing.
The use of the term survivor in Surviving R Kelly
acknowledges the resilience of the women who had their power
stolen for so long -- but that strength doesn’t negate
and conclude their hardship “It’s over with,
but it still haunts me.” In the Larry Nassar case
(documented in 2020’s Athlete A), the powerful
victim impact statements that gymnasts including Simone Biles
read aloud in court before his sentencing,
illustrated both these women’s strength and the shocking ramifications
of Nassar’s abuse. “My parents chose to believe
Larry Nassar over me” “I watched my father realize
what he had put me through. My father and I
did our best to patch up our tattered relationship
before he committed suicide in 2016.” Part of the complication
of the victim vs. survivor binary is that people are often unaware
or not fully conscious of the level of trauma
they’ve undergone until after the fact;
it can take years to process the experience.
In cases of sexual assault, it’s common for survivors
to have fragmented memories, so it’s not easy to draw
a clear line through the before and after
of a traumatic event. In Jennifer Fox’s The Tale,
based on the director’s own life experiences,
the protagonist is initially confused when confronted with a story
she wrote as a child detailing a sexual assault.
At first she refuses to label herself a victim,
but slowly she is able to face the truth
that she’s buried for her entire adult life.
“Why are you so angry now?” “Well why are you not angry,
that’s what I wanna know.” In I May Destroy You,
a semi-autobiographical story from Mikaela Coel,
Arabella attempts to piece together a sexual assault
that she doesn’t at first remember, and then is assaulted again
in an encounter she doesn’t initially know
is an abuse. “He placated my shock,
and gaslighted me with such intention that
I didn’t have a second to understand the heinous crime
which had occurred.” Her process of coming to terms
with what’s happened to her and how it’s changed her
is chaotic and many-layered. At times she adopts
the survivor superhero mentality and becomes a social media influencer,
but ultimately dramatic revenge or even the closure
of seeing her attacker punished aren’t possible.
She can only achieve a level of peace
through looking inward and trying to understand
the complexities of her psychology. In Room,
the moment where Jack escapes the shed
that he and his mother have been imprisoned in
is genuinely euphoric, but rather than this climax
being the film’s end, it’s also just the beginning
of that shift from victim to survivor.
We watch as Joy navigates the difficult process of reassimilating
into the greater world, which no longer resembles
the life she knew before she was kidnapped
as a young woman. “But Ma says
they don't live together in the hammock house anymore.
Grandma lives there with her friend Leo now.
And Grandpa lives far away.” We’ve seen her display
incredible resilience, raising a son in this environment
(and even, miraculously, giving him a mostly happy
early childhood). But her trauma
hasn’t made her stronger -- it’s something she’s powerful
in spite of, which frequently drags her down
and emotionally cripples her. After the escape,
she’s not transformed into a badass, heroic, warrior woman;
she’s fraught with anxiety, and struggles to adapt to normalcy
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,
I’m supposed to be happy”. These more nuanced representations
of victimhood and survival acknowledge that being a survivor
is an ongoing process that may never really be over;
moving forward is possible, but it’s not a clear-cut,
one-size-fits-all path. Oversimplifying this narrative --
or using victim’s voices in an exploitative, for-profit way --
is likewise a problem today. We see this in Feel Good,
when Mae tells her agent about her history
of harassment and assault, we see her experiencing uncertainty,
but her agent quickly leaps on her experience
as a post-Me Too marketing opportunity. “You’re gonna do
Arnie’s panel show, and live on air
you’re gonna air his dirty laundry.” Moreover,
just because more people are listening to survivor’s stories,
that doesn’t mean there isn’t still huge backlash
against women who speak out or that they don’t face
the prospect of this news story taking over their public profile
in a lasting way. “For two or three days
you'll be famous and then the caravan moves on.
But from tomorrow, that's all you'll ever be".
It’s also important for all of us to continue
to educate ourselves on the many forms that abuse,
assault and victimization can take. “Emotional abuse is abuse”. I May Destroy You
dramatizes how Arabella’s friend Kwame, a gay man,
experiences an assault that’s totally dismissed
by the police, who aren’t properly trained
to recognize attacks that aren’t on cis straight women
or don’t fit the typical profile -- something that also features
in a more comedically played Shamless plot
“I'm here to report a sexual assault.”
“Another woman falls prey to the patriarchy.
What's her name?” “Uh...Carl...?
Uh, Carl.” To this day,
thanks to the victim narratives we’ve all been raised on,
sadly those who suffer trauma can be quick to blame themselves.
“I got played by a pedophile. God, I am a f*cking cliché.”
One of the hardest challenges for a survivor is in
how to adjust their self-image to include this thing
that happened to them, without letting that overwhelm
or erase the rest of themselves. "I know who I am,
I know what I'm worth, and I know
what I'm capable of". It’s also hard for victims
not to feel their recovery should have a time limit,
or that they need to rush towards some state
of acceptance and inner strength. Ultimately,
by throwing out the victim-survivor binary,
we can end the pressure to oversimplify.
We can be both victims and survivors
at the same time, and readjusting after a traumatic event
is different for everyone-- just as defining who we are
is a constantly evolving, life-long process. “This is the beginning,
it is not the finale!” And that’s why we’re here,
And that’s why we rally.” This is The Take,
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