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• 1 2018-07-14T00:06:27-07:00 Sex, Violence, and Sexual Violence in the New Hollywood, 1967-1991 1 plain 2018-07-14T00:06:28-07:00

  Welcome to the Terrordome: Sex, Violence, and Sexual Violence

  Mixing blood, sex, and politics, the plot of this historical screenplay now thickens.  Before anything else, let us consider the mere facts of exclusion in the cinematic industries (movies, TV, and Digital)
  
  Justified before U.S. law as "art," sex, violence and sex-violence were rapidly appropriated simply as vehicles for mass profit extraction, fear-based political scripts, and male supremacy in society and the culture industries overall.
  
  Excursus: Dangerous Worlds
  
  ​Hollywood-dominated mass media generated a frighteningly violent screen world, but the virtual violence of movies and TV has been extremely unrepresentative of the actual violence in society. Most violence is committed by whites, but media violence most often represented a minority as the perpetrators.  Most violence against women, including rape, takes place in or near the home, but most media violence against women, including sexual assault, takes place in public, on dark streets.  Media violence combines with state violence to target communities of color and women.  
  
  A typical alphabetized list of the leading writers and directors of the New Hollywood is remarkable for one fundamental fact.  None were women:  Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, John G. Avildsen, Robert Benton, Peter Bogdanovich, John Boorman, Mel Brooks, John Cassavetes, Michael Cimino, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, Clint Eastwood, Miloš Forman, Bob Fosse, William Friedkin, Monte Hellman, George Roy Hill, Dennis Hopper, Norman Jewison, Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, Sidney Lumet, Terrence Malick, Paul Mazursky, John Milius, Paul Newman, Mike Nichols, Alan J. Pakula, Sam Peckinpah, Arthur Penn, Roman Polanski, Sydney Pollack, Bob Rafelson, Franklin J. Schaffner, John Schlesinger, Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Robert Towne.
  
  Women as actors, however did figure prominently among the greatest new talents of the New Hollywood: Ruby Dee, Diane Keaton, Ali MacGraw, Cybill Shepherd, Angelica Huston, Shelley Duvall.  
  
  But in the New Hollywood's old hierarchy, even the best women talent were paired with the Leading Men: Polanski landed Sharon Tate as a starlette-trophy wife; Bogdanovich left his first wife and collaborator Polly Platt for the 21-year old Cybill Shepard in 1971, then left her for the 20-year-old Playboy Centerfold Dorothy Stratten in 1980; Robert Evans, the transformative producer who saved Paramount with New Hollywood films Rosemary's Baby, Love Story (1970), The Godfather (1972) and Chinatown (1974), snapped-up Ali MacGraw, who later chose to leave Evans for Steve McQueen.  Diane Keaton collaborated with, acted for, loved and lived with Woody Allen, and then loved and lived with Al Pacino when they both had roles in The Godfather, Part II.  These were power couples, to be sure, and it must be said that many of these women flexed their independence and strength, especially Keaton.  
  
  The overall trajectory for women in Hollywood remained stalled at at ceiling of trophy wives to the new male masters of an industry that remained addicted to women's weak and erotic contribution to profit margins across the cinematic industries.  The story of rising new wave of women directors and producers does not begin until the 1990s, but women as creators of mass media content remained in an almost vanishing minority well into the 21st century (see Moby-Dick: On the White Maleness of Hollywood)
  
  With the graphic violence of the Vietnam War saturating the press and television news across America and the world, Sam Peckinpah, thought America needed a Western that showed how unromantic violence really is.  He said of his intent in The Wild Bunch (1969), "I wanted to show what it is like to be gunned-down."  Roger Ebert declared, in his initial 29 June 1969 review that The Wild Bunch was  "possibly the most violent film ever made," and yet he recognized its serious message. Peckinpah's opening scene is one of civilians slaughtered in the crossfire of armed gangs with no good guys in sight.  The years of the New Hollywood's rise was also America's descent into darkness.  Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated in April and June of 1968; the Manson Murders took place in August of 1969; the My Lai Massacre was revealed in November of 1969; the Jackson and Kent State killings were to follow in May of 1970.
  
  It must say something significant about the New Hollywood that the landmark film signaling its arrival was noted first of all for setting a new standard for screen violence. Warren Beatty (producer/star) and Arthur Penn did set a new standard for gun violence in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), but new freedoms to portray other forms of violence would outstrip Bonnie and Clyde in the coming years. Indeed, while justly hailed as a serious film with strong anti-establishment message, it is almost predictable as a vehicle for the rebellious New Generation, recycling the genre of Romantic Bank Robber as folk culture hero of the 1930s Depression (which is also "when" it is set of course).  
  
  In 1967 Roman Polanski cast Sharon Tate as the Vampire Bride Sarah Shagal and promptly fell in love with her, marrying her in the following year.  A sexy-tease comedic spoof on the Dracula genre, Polanski achieved a macabre sensuality throughout.  Tate next landed the role of Jennifer North in Mark Robson's 1967 Valley of the Dolls.  It was based on the best-selling potboiler novel by Jacqueline Susanne of 1966 -- "Dolls" being a euphemism for barbituate tranquilizer.  The melodrama revolves around physical pleasure and emotional pain, lead characters all begin with promising careers in acting, but descend into drugs, affairs, and face the consequences of bad decisions.  Sharon Tate's character Jennifer North resorts to soft-core pornography films, is diagnosed with breast cancer, and commits suicide. 
  
  The following year, 1968, Polanski got to the heart of Hollywood's misogynistic sex-violence: his victim the titular character: Rosemary (Mia Farrow), who is deceived, kidnapped, drugged, and raped by Satan himself and her body forced to bear a monster. Polanski had desired, but was unable to cast his own wife Tate in the role, overruled by ). The artistry of Rosemary's Baby lies in Polanski's psychological explorations in script and in directing the superb performances of John Cassavettes and Mia Farrow.  True at least to the premise of Ira Levin's bestselling 1967 novel and Polanski's film adaptation, the violence toward Farrow is sadistic, visually graphic.  The near-addiction of Hollywood to violations of female vulnerability is an element so essential to the movie business that cannot be overstated.  Rape is the ever-present patriarchal cudgel and also trap of contemporary society.  As practice, it keeps women in subjection.  As screen portrayal, it warns women and girls that they are unsafe, and until very recently, presents the violent male as the solution to this vulnerability.
  
  In Rosemary's Baby (1968), Polanski embarked, little could he know it, on a real-life march of Horror.  The movie climaxes with the very Devil fathering a child in a Satanic colony disguised as respectable New Yorkers.  Polanski's bloody scene in which Mia Farrow's character is raped by Satan, marketed the slashed female body for mass consumption.  A year later, Charles Manson, targeting both Polanski and his wife Tate, perpetrated cruel murder of the Polanski-Tate and the La Bianca households for mass media consumption--for political terror.
  
  Sharon Tate was the "It Girl" of 1969, her celebrity and beauty made her the target Manson sought, someone whose gruesome death would shock the Whites of Los Angeles into a murderous rampage against people of color.  All of this is about bodies and horror.  Race war fantasies, as Mike Davis showed in his brilliant and unique essay, The LIterary Destruction of Los Angeles, have been surprisingly common motif.  In Manson, the fantasies escaped the bound of slasher-genocide pulp novels and science fiction movies, to invade the public sphere in a mounting Age of Terror.  
  
  By 1969, the United States was ruled now by Nixon's New Right.  His promised plan for Law and Order was given its best chance during his first year in office.  He escalated the Vietnam War, and all hell literally broke loose, in battlefields and city streets. It was in this context that two major films, The Wild Bunch (1969) and Dirty Harry (1971), again set new standards for screen violence, but in very different ways.
  
  Sam Peckinpah's Western, set on the Texas-Mexico border in 1913 during the Mexican Revolution, is loosely based on an actual band of outlaws of the same name.  An aging gang of train robbers has their last ride as modern society overtakes them.  The Wild Bunch stars William Holden, who plays a grizzled veteran in his 50s who maintains a code of dignity, even honor.  Holden's role in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) had also marked the passing of an era, but in that film, he had represented the new, rather than the old order (in Sunset, of "Hollywood," in Wild Bunch, of "The West").  From the opening to the final scene, the film offers ridicule and satire of established authorities.  Pike's gang first appears as impostors wearing U.S. Army uniforms.  During the Vietnam War, in the same year as the My Lai Massacre, dressing criminals in military uniform had rather obvious connotations.  The railroad men, supposedly representing the Law, are also criminals, even less savory than Pike's Wild Bunch gang.
  
  While The Wild Bunch is remembered first of all for its extreme, graphic violence, Peckinpah neither romanticized nor fantacized violence.  Peckinpah wanted the violence to be horrible , not glorious.  He features children throughout in contrast tot eh age and gravity of the gunfighters, and to make the audience feel their fragile vulnerability in a ruthless world.  Killing is sheer waste in The Wild Bunch, so the film clearly qualifies as a critical protest--ironically enough--against the incessant violence of the Nixon era.
  
  Not so Dirty Harry, released  two years later in 1971, directed by Peckinpah's mentor, Don Siegel.  Siegel's experience spanned both Old and New Hollywood, and shows in many ways how indebted the latter was to the former.  Dirty Harry had a long development cycle.  The screenplay is officially credited to Harry Julian Fink, R.M. Fink and Dean Riesner.  The Finks wrote the first version inspired by the real-life but still (2015) unidentified "Zodiac" serial killer who murdered at least seven victims in the San Francisco Bay area in 1968 and 1969.  The script revolves around a no-nonsense San Francisco cop, "Dirty Harry" Callahan, determined to capture a serial killer known as "Scorpio."  That lead role was offered to a surprising number of men before Clint Eastwood assumed the role, beginning with Frank Sinatra and John Wayne.  Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum, and even Steve McQueen and Paul Newman were offered the role.  Mitchum and Newman both reportedly refused the role because it was so reactionary and unjust.
  
  Along the way, legendary screenwriter-directors Terence Malik and John Melius had a hand in the script.  Once Eastwood signed-on, he insisted on the version of the script that favored the heroic cop in defiance of a liberal establishment.
  
  Dirty Harry, the character, is an almost seamless proponent of Richard Nixon's Law and Order political and policy agenda. This is evident throughout eh film, as Dirty Harry Callahan disrespects protocol and his hapless superiors in single-minded pursuit of a serial killer.  But the complete political agenda of the film is on full display in the District Attorney scene in the last Act of the film, in which Callahan is informed by the District Attorney Rothko (Josef Sommer) that because Callahan had violated so many laws protecting suspects' rights during arrest and detention, the serial killer "Scorpio" will be released. From beginning to end of this scene, Rothko represents the "liberal" Warren Court rulings, Escobedo and Miranda are both named specifically. Written and produced at the height of Nixon's Law and Order campaign, the Dirty Harry script is practically a verbatim restatement of the Law and Order attack on the limitations placed on law enforcement in the 1960s. Dirty Harry is not just a tough cop: he represents the Republican position in 1971: that cops should be given full freedom to get tough on criminals. In this view, suspects' "rights" are a joke. Cops know well enough when they have a real bad guy, and real bad guys deserve to be either beaten, tortured to give up evidence, or summarily shot. The scene justifies naked state violence by portraying the criminal procedure protections as only helpful to criminals.
  
  
  Rape in Cinema-Television
  
  Start with Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter
  
  From the advertising copy for a videocassette film anthology, titled The Best of Film Gore: "See bloodthirsty butchers, killer drillers, crazed cannibals, zonked zombies, mutilating maniacs, hemoglobin horrors, plasmatic perverts and sadistic slayers slash, strangle, mangle and mutilate bare-breasted beauties in bondage."Note. 
  
  
  
  [move this to American 1989]:
  
  The great turning-point for Hollywood movies was achieved with Callie Khouri's screenplay and Ridley Scott's film, Thelma and Louise (1991). In the climax of Act I, the central plot element is the killing by Louise (Susan Sarandon) of Harlan (Timothy Carhart), who attempts to rape Thelma (Geena Davis) in a parking lot behind a bar where they had been dancing.  Nineteen ninety-one however, was a long time to wait since the beginnings of cinema 100 years earlier.   Khouri, born in 1957, was twenty years younger than the New Hollywood generation.  Scott, while he began in television the 1960s, did not direct a feature film until 1977 (with the Napoleonic The Duellists) played a major role thereafter with Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982) to generate a new era of blockbuster thrillers with an edge.
  
  Screen types are really literary-dramatic types. The Knighthood and Gallant Chivalry of the protector-from-rape masculinity Hollywood descends directly from Don Quijote. (More accurately, from 12th-century Arthurian legend,  14th-century Amadis de Gaula, and its sequel by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo's Las Sergas de Esplandiá​n, (1495-1510) the romances of chivalry that drove Don Quijote mad (but which we only remember now because of Miguel de Cervantes's 1605-15 satire).  In the medieval romances of chivalry, the villain is quite literally a rapist, and the hero a highly sexed defender of women's virtue)    Since Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915) rape, attempted rape, forced marriages have assumed an institutional permanence in Hollywood.  It's a classic protection racket:  We warn you that you can be sexually assaulted, and offer our services to keep you safe.  It could be that movie portrayals of women's bodily vulnerability and desirability and powerlessness is more honest than banning that from the screen. Real chronic and lethal sexual violence against girls and women is an ongoing chronic horror.  
  
  So the next significant condition to evaluate is how are sexual assaults portrayed in the films?  If freedom of expression must include freedom of sexual expression, for consensual pleasure not only of the participants, but of millions of freely consenting adults worldwide, then sex on the screen is not in itself inherently wrong in any way.  While it usually is and certainly can be exploitative, demeaning, and morally wrong, it certainly does not need to be so.
  
  The crucial question then, is: How are women's and girl's dignity and worth and value portrayed?  On this crucial point movies vary from left to right.  In Clint Eastwood's first film as writer-director-star, High Plains Drifter (1973), his character opens the movie with an attacker-sympathetic rape scene.  An apparently middle-class woman named Callie Travers (played by Marianna Hill) insults Eastwood's "Drifter" and rather symbolically knocks a cigar from his mouth.  "I'll to teach you some manners," Drifter says, grabs her wrist and drags her resisting and screaming into a nearby barn, where forces her into the hay, has unambiguously forceable penetration, while she verbally and physically resists in no uncertain terms: "what are you doing?" and "stop!", "no!"  Eventually Callie Travers begins to enjoy the rape as pure sensual pleasure.  This is nothing short of the rapist's fantasy and one of the oldest justifications men have made for sexual violence.Note
  
  Rape is violence, of course, and the Horror genre has, since the New Hollywood, profited mightily from the fear of sexual violence,and the intersection of sex and violence in sadism.  The contemporary "Ripper" genre appropriately honors "Jack the Ripper's" disemboweling and severing sadism of London's Whitehall district in the 1880s.  While it is unfair to class Polanski's 1968 Rosemary's Baby with the 1974 Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Polanski in effect broke the dike with a crack that opened into a mighty flood by the end of the 20th century.  It is instructive, then that in his "ultra-violent" A Clockwork Orange (1971), while he does exploit strip-tease visual arousal and rape fear, Stanley Kubrick, unlike Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter (1973), honestly and consistently portrays female victims as hurting and terrified.