Rape On TV Is Not A Coincidence; It’s A Choice
This Spring, one of my lifelong dreams came true — I got to work on a movie and hang out on a film set for the first time. The whole experience was magical — the warm lighting, the team huddled around the playback screen, unlimited snacks in craft services — it was perfect. The sheer number of people hanging around, though, was staggering. They were filming a few short scenes with only three actors, but there were so many people around! A film set is a well-oiled machine, with its own language and behaviors and implicit understandings of expectations.
That same night, my other half and I sat down to watch an episode of “Game of Thrones”. It was so cool to watch such an impressive production after being on set — I could easily imagine all the work that went into creating that world. The episode took a turn for me, though, when there was suddenly a sexual assault taking place on the screen. I had never once thought about how many people are physically involved in the creation of a rape scene.
That’s the thing about the dramatization and visual depiction of rape on television and in films — it is always, always, always a choice. The number of people who have to comply is actually quite impressive — just writers, producers, and directors, but also engineers and set dressers and prop masters and hair and makeup artists and office coordinators and the scores of Production Assistants who make up these massive professional teams.
These are not documentaries where they stumble upon a crime and capture it on film, but rather a months-long, expensive production involving hundreds of people at any given time. Imagine the number of people who had to stand around the actors playing Jaime and Cersei in the third episode of the fourth season of “Game of Thrones”. The light had to be just right. Makeup had to be adjusted. Hair had to be splayed, just so. The director had to direct the way that Cersei whimpered, lying there underneath her brother and rapist. There were probably multiple rehearsals for that scene, sometimes with them holding a script in hand while they lie there, in the space not occupied by the weight of of consent. I’m sure they were all business. I’m sure everyone was a real pro.
It is a collective agreement that we all make that sexual assault is just something that happens, and that it deserves to be highlighted in the warm, controlled lighting of a television or film set.
When we see these assaults on screen, they seem private. They seem like a crime that happened in the night, or even behind the closed bedroom door of a troubled marriage. Maybe it’s in a doorway or behind a carnival ride or in the backseat of an automobile.These simulated acts are never private, though. There is not some special moment where the entire crew of a television show is asked to turn their eyes or step outside as two or more actors play out the living nightmare of millions (yes, millions) of human beings in this country alone.
Instead, we experience it from the glow of our LCDs, our tablets, our tiny little mobile phone screens. We watch and we gawk and we “shame on them,” but we do not turn our heads or step out of the room. We applaud the director who confuses his audience about the intention of the rapist, and we call that director brave or ballsy or even groundbreaking. We renew season after season of shows that depict the victims of rape as dead, strangled bodies, or at best a destroyed empty vessel of a person, relying only on the comfort of hot running water to survive the seemingly unsurvivable days (let alone months, years) following a brutal attack, statistically likely to be by someone he or she knows.
So while the Internet debate rages on, commenter against commenter, scripts continue to be written, and we continue to vote with our clicks and our downloads and our views. The scene may be dimly lit, but the implicit support of rape culture is out there in the daylight, for everyone to see.
