Skip to main content

the killer inside of you

As I wrote in April, to complain that "The Killer Inside Me" is full of misogynistic violence is a little like reading "Moby-Dick" and objecting to all the stuff about whaling. Violence against women is Thompson's text and theme and central metaphor -- and in case I haven't made this clear, anyone who might find the violence in this movie gratifying or arousing is already virtually beyond the bounds of professional help.

[. . .]

Within the first few minutes of the film, Lou is sent to run Joyce out of town and she responds by slapping and slugging him. She's bored and lonely and sick of sleeping with ugly guys for money; she's looking for a reaction, and she gets one: On the verge of walking out, Lou comes back and tackles her, pulling down her panties and whipping her bare ass with his belt. The sequence is both erotic and violent, profoundly troubling and potentially arousing, designed to provoke a whiplash of emotional, psychological and libidinal responses. It sets the table for what follows: an exploration of the dividing line between sex and death that's at least as morbid and philosophical as anything in modernist European literature. (Andrew O’hehir, “‘The Killer Inside Me:’ Much ado about misogyny,” Salon, 17 June 2010)

Arousal

Re: “On the verge of walking out, Lou comes back and tackles her, pulling down her panties and whipping her bare ass with his belt. The sequence is both erotic and violent, profoundly troubling and potentially arousing, designed to provoke a whiplash of emotional, psychological and libidinal responses.”

Are you saying here that YOU found this panties-being-pulled-down, this bare-ass whipping erotic, that you are to be counted amongst the "potentials" who were aroused while watching it? Or that it JUST IS erotic and violent, smartly rigged to potentially or even likely trigger libidinal responses, ostensibly possessed by all of us?

If YOU found the scene erotic, I wish you had just said as much, and made clear whether or not you were also aroused by it -- and if not, how you were able to sense that others would find it so -- and either defended the remarkable possibility that you can be fundamentally woman-loving and experience eroticism and arousal in a scene of this nature, or brought forward the possibility that the fact that you did enjoy a scene you suspect you shouldn't have enjoyed, means you're not quite in fact so distinguished from the clearly mongrel, beyond-the-pale male who relishes this kind of violence.

- - - - -

Killer inside of you

Personally, I think it unlikely that many men don't get a hard-on while watching explicit scenes of female victimization, not because they all regrettably still are in the possession of reptilian brian-stems that make they forever capable of lapsing brute animalistic, but because most were raised by mothers who were severely emotionally / intellectually deprived in the patriarchal societies / families they grew up in, and therefore spent their earliest part of their lives foremost serving their mothers' unmet needs rather than their own. Deprived mothers aren't magically capable of producing nurturance; nurturance only comes from the well-cared-for, the respected, the loved. So most men find ways -- are driven to find ways -- to enact revenge for their being used, but also to pretend that this isn't what they are up to, as they also learned early on that the one thing you don't do -- at the threat of abandonment, of experiencing catastrophic aloneness, destitution -- is to convey that you are on to the fact that mothers weren't entirely self-sacrificial and marvelous in their motives (their version, the only version), that they wanted to squeeze every bit of attendance out of you before they abandoned you once aging, teenagerdom, turned you on to other things. Patriarchy hurts mothers; hurt mothers hurt their kids: any other version is a lie "good boys and girls" have learned to, have been scared into, tell (ing).

Link: "The Killer Inside Me": Much ado about misogyny (Salon)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Discussion over the fate of Jolenta, at the Gene Wolfe facebook appreciation site

Patrick McEvoy-Halston November 28 at 10:36 AM Why does Severian make almost no effort to develop sustained empathy for Jolenta -- no interest in her roots, what made her who she was -- even as she features so much in the first part of the narrative? Her fate at the end is one sustained gross happenstance after another... Severian has repeated sex with her while she lay half drugged, an act he argues later he imagines she wanted -- even as he admits it could appear to some, bald "rape" -- but which certainly followed his  discussion of her as someone whom he could hate so much it invited his desire to destroy her; Severian abandons her to Dr. Talus, who had threatened to kill her if she insisted on clinging to him; Baldanders robs her of her money; she's sucked at by blood bats, and, finally, left at death revealed discombobulated of all beauty... a hunk of junk, like that the Saltus citizens keep heaped away from their village for it ruining their preferred sense

Salon discussion of "Almost Famous" gang-rape scene

Patrick McEvoy-Halston: The "Almost Famous'" gang-rape scene? Isn't this the film that features the deflowering of a virgin -- out of boredom -- by a pack of predator-vixons, who otherwise thought so little of him they were quite willing to pee in his near vicinity? Maybe we'll come to conclude that "[t]he scene only works because people were stupid about [boy by girl] [. . .] rape at the time" (Amy Benfer). Sawmonkey: Lucky boy Pull that stick a few more inches out of your chute, Patrick. This was one of the best flicks of the decade. (sawmonkey, response to post, “Films of the decade: ‘Amost Famous’, R.J. Culter, Salon, 13 Dec. 2009) Patrick McEvoy-Halston: @sawmonkey It made an impression on me too. Great charm. Great friends. But it is one of the things you (or at least I) notice on the review, there is the SUGGESTION, with him being so (rightly) upset with the girls feeling so free to pee right before him, that sex with him is just further presump

When Rose McGowan appears in Asgard: a review of "Thor: Ragnarok"

The best part of this film was when Rose McGowan appeared in Asgard and accosted Odin and his sons for covering up, with a prettified, corporate, outward appearance that's all gay-friendly, feminist, multicultural, absolutely for the rights of the indigenous, etc., centuries of past abuse, where they predated mercilessly upon countless unsuspecting peoples. And the PR department came in and said, okay Weinstein... I mean Odin and Odin' sons, here's what we suggest you do. First, you, Odin, are going to have to die. No extensive therapy; when it comes to predators who are male, especially white and male, this age doesn't believe in therapy. You did what you did because you are, or at least strongly WERE, evil, so that's what we have to work with. Now death doesn't seem like "working with it," I know, but the genius is that we'll do the rehab with your sons, and when they're resurrected as somehow more apart from your regime,