I was rooting through the
“Spooky Halloween” DVD bin at my local Wal-Mart, tossing aside
predictable Casper the Friendly Ghost and Friday the 13th fare, when I came across something unexpected: the 2010 version
of I Spit on Your Grave. This is, of course, the remake of the
1978 film of the same name (a.k.a. Day of the Woman) wherein
Buster Keaton’s granddaughter plays a progressive, NYC-based writer
who has probably read her fair share of Susan Brownmiller. She goes
to a rural area to get some solitude, but instead gets the full
Brownmiller treatment from four feral local men. After the ordeal,
she takes merciless revenge on all four of her assailants. The
director of the original, Meir Zarchi, compared his talents to those
of Fellini.
The 2010 version recapitulates the 1978 plot, though it expands the rapist count to five. It also adds a few interstitial scenes between the rape and the revenge, allowing for some minimal characterization (i.e. that one of the assaulters has a wife and child) that makes the whole undertaking that much more vexingly ambivalent. The rape scene is even more unnecessarily long than in the original. Afterward, you empathize with the main character, even if you didn’t before. The pert, twenty-something leading actress, Sarah Butler, is not exactly convincing in her portrayal of a writer. Personally, I don’t know many colleagues in the craft with CrossFit bodies befitting of skimpy swimwear, and so, for suspension-of-disbelief purposes, the female lead might have been better framed as “pre-med” or “a scientist” rather than as a “novelist.” The rapists, however, have changed from random local yokels to hard-bitten sons of the soil—that is, expressly redneck—and so the remake leans more heavily on city vs. country tropes than did the original. This makes the female lead even more sympathetic and her protracted, torture-porn revenge more satisfying. The original film messed with the viewer in a deeply problematic way, in that you started to feel minimally sorry for the unwitting rapists as they were systematically brutalized. In the newer version, the revenge feels more eugenic than anything else. In the end, there are five less future Trump voters left standing. As such, you are willing to forgive the implausible, Saw-level complexity of the kills.
All told, the remake isn’t exactly Fellini, but it is probably a better film than its namesake. Still, there’s something lost between eras. The original, after all, was meant to be viewed in the grainiest of prints in the dingiest of the NYC (or outer-borough) grindhouses, sitting in the dark alongside hustlers, Nam Vets, and other assorted degenerates—the kind of people who cheer during the revenge and the rape. The 2010 version is something you end up watching with your vaguely emo girlfriend while she intermittently massages her iPhone 11. Sure, you’re reminded of the horrific potentialities that perpetually lurk between men and women, even in the twenty-first century, but it’s just not as ghastly this time around.
Perhaps the real horror is that you can find a rape movie like I Spit on Your Grave stacked atop Casper the Friendly Ghost at your local Wal-Mart. This is another jarring reminder of the amoral aesthetic juxtapositions wrought by late-capitalist sensibilities. Of course, Casper was the ghost of a child, suggesting undertones as dark—or conceivably darker—than the timeless, gendered violence of I Spit on Your Grave in its 2010 or 1978 iterations.
The 2010 version recapitulates the 1978 plot, though it expands the rapist count to five. It also adds a few interstitial scenes between the rape and the revenge, allowing for some minimal characterization (i.e. that one of the assaulters has a wife and child) that makes the whole undertaking that much more vexingly ambivalent. The rape scene is even more unnecessarily long than in the original. Afterward, you empathize with the main character, even if you didn’t before. The pert, twenty-something leading actress, Sarah Butler, is not exactly convincing in her portrayal of a writer. Personally, I don’t know many colleagues in the craft with CrossFit bodies befitting of skimpy swimwear, and so, for suspension-of-disbelief purposes, the female lead might have been better framed as “pre-med” or “a scientist” rather than as a “novelist.” The rapists, however, have changed from random local yokels to hard-bitten sons of the soil—that is, expressly redneck—and so the remake leans more heavily on city vs. country tropes than did the original. This makes the female lead even more sympathetic and her protracted, torture-porn revenge more satisfying. The original film messed with the viewer in a deeply problematic way, in that you started to feel minimally sorry for the unwitting rapists as they were systematically brutalized. In the newer version, the revenge feels more eugenic than anything else. In the end, there are five less future Trump voters left standing. As such, you are willing to forgive the implausible, Saw-level complexity of the kills.
All told, the remake isn’t exactly Fellini, but it is probably a better film than its namesake. Still, there’s something lost between eras. The original, after all, was meant to be viewed in the grainiest of prints in the dingiest of the NYC (or outer-borough) grindhouses, sitting in the dark alongside hustlers, Nam Vets, and other assorted degenerates—the kind of people who cheer during the revenge and the rape. The 2010 version is something you end up watching with your vaguely emo girlfriend while she intermittently massages her iPhone 11. Sure, you’re reminded of the horrific potentialities that perpetually lurk between men and women, even in the twenty-first century, but it’s just not as ghastly this time around.
Perhaps the real horror is that you can find a rape movie like I Spit on Your Grave stacked atop Casper the Friendly Ghost at your local Wal-Mart. This is another jarring reminder of the amoral aesthetic juxtapositions wrought by late-capitalist sensibilities. Of course, Casper was the ghost of a child, suggesting undertones as dark—or conceivably darker—than the timeless, gendered violence of I Spit on Your Grave in its 2010 or 1978 iterations.