The Tale (2018): lying to yourself to survive
TRIGGER WARNING: SEXUAL ABUSE.
SPOILERS AHEAD.
Documentarian Jennifer Fox (Laura Dern) lives an unnoteworthy life until her mother (Ellen Burstyn) discovers a short story written by Jennifer at age 13 and phones her daughter, worried. Jennifer thinks that the story is about her first boyfriend — and it is, at least for Jennifer. The short story is about Jennifer being manipulated by two adults until she was raped.
At age 13, Jenny (now played by Isabelle Nélisse) spent her school vacation in farm owned by Jane Gramercy, or Mrs. G (Elizabeth Debicki), in order to have horseback riding classes, and there she met the running coach Bill (Jason Ritter). As vacation comes to an end, Bill and Mrs. G start a weird talk about “forming a family” with Jenny, and having as its main rule “no lies”. They start following the rule by revealing that they are lovers — something very odd to be told to a girl who is just entering adolescence.
But Jenny thinks this is awesome. The farm becomes her constant weekend destination, and Bill and Mrs. G are seen as a modern and comprehensive family, the opposite of her big and boring real family — whose members are only overzealous.
It doesn’t take long until she spends a night alone with Bill — something planned by Mrs. G — and, by saying that she is “intense” and “not like the other girls”, he convinces her to show her breasts to him, to kiss him in the mouth and, later, to have sex with him. In this moment, he says the disgusting phrase “we have to open her slowly”, about the fact that Jennifer is a virgin. Yes, they have sex often — or better said, she is raped often. And it’s not because he convinced her to have sex that this is not rape anymore: after all, she was 13 and he was 40.
Telling stories to ourselves
No matter what, Jennifer believed that Bill loved her. That’s why the present-time Jennifer, at almost 50, still believes that the story was about her first boyfriend. She wrote the short story changing some details and later she told the teacher it was all fiction, and with this she postponed her cry for help — a cry for help that was uttered after the final scene, if uttered at all.
And here we see Jennifer’s problem — even if she wasn’t problematic before her mother found the story. Sooner or later we have to face our traumas and everything they caused. When Jennifer does that, stimulated by her mother’s discovery, she gets obsessed with remembering each detail and reconstituting each moment, to make sure her memory isn’t betraying her. She stops living in the present when the memories become the only thing she can think of.
Sometimes, our memory doesn’t betray us, but it changes the truth so we can survive. It is as if we had the same tool shown in the movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004), but our erasing process is still defective. We forget what should be forgotten for our own good, and we change the truth in order to handle it. That’s what happened to Jennifer when she wrote the short story.
In the editorial We won’t give up on movies, I said that I was sexually harassed in a movie theater. My survival strategy was, at the same time, like and unlike Jennifer’s. I didn’t forget. I remember which was the movie, I remember that it ended with the villain having his head smashed by a car and how I wished the harasser to meet the same fate; I remember the clothes I was wearing: winter clothes, I had my whole body covered (and then I can say that I wasn’t “asking for it” if the rape culture deniers come say something) and I was wearing a coat I never wore again. I didn’t tell my family at the time, when I was 18, because I though they wouldn’t believe in me — Jennifer didn’t tell her family because she was becoming rebellious, and because she believed that Bill loved her. But I also wrote a short story in order to survive. In it, I cathartically killed the harasser — yes, it was a literary lie that helped me survive.
This was my journey. Other harassment and abuse victims have different journeys. It was different for Jennifer. By the way, she didn’t even accept to be called a victim, because she was still in denial, believing that she had a romance that few people could understand. She even tries to relativize the situation, saying that those were “other times”, the 1970s of the sex revolution, and that’s why it wasn’t so serious. Only when she went through her journey — by recreating the steps, coming back to the place and even looking for Bill — she starts the cure. Who said that the cure comes easily?
Does this mean that we shouldn’t believe the victim, because she will almost always be lying, in denial — both when she says nothing happened and something happened? NOT AT ALL. Opening up about abuse and harassment is complicated because of the judgment and the skeptics. Opening up and making a formal denounce is part of the healing, has nothing to do with revenge and is an act that shows empathy — because a harasser / abuser rarely victimizes only one person.
Talking about trauma is on the basis of psychoanalysis — but you must tell the truth, or the therapy won’t work. Filming the trauma can also help — and this is what the director of “The Tale” did. How is this director called? Jennifer Fox. Yes, it’s her real life story that we see on the screen. At age 13, she chose to freeze her abusers in time through her short story and go on with her life — just like Bill and Mrs. G do, abusing some more girls along the way.
Jennifer Fox started questioning the truth about the romance that changed her life in 2006, when she directed the documentary “Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman” and heard many abuse stories that were just like the “romance” she had lived. It was the first step to go after the story and then face the facts — including the basic fact that her mind didn’t see any abuse, but her body did because she vomited whenever she thought about Bill and Mrs. G.
“The Tale” took a long time to attract financers, but it arrived in good time. We have the #MeToo movement showing that all women deserve to be heard, even the ones that romanticized the abuse. Maybe they are the ones that need the most to be heard, so they can talk and talk about what happened until they accept they lived something terrible and need help. In a short span of time, lying to yourself may be necessary, but you only get over a trauma if you say the truth — no matter how painful it is.
