The Rape/Revenge Genre’s Gender Revelations

By Noah Berlatsky

If you were going to single out two iconic mainstream feminist films from the last 25 years, there’s a good chance you’d pick Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise (1991) and this year’s Mad Max: Fury Road. Despite being 24 years apart, both have remarkably similar plots. In both films, female friends are sexually assaulted; in both films the friends escape by going on the road and visiting violence on the men who attacked them (and on other men as well).

In other words, both films broadly fit into the much-maligned genre of rape/revenge, in which the first part of a film shows a vicious act of sexual violence, and the second shows that act repaid in violence, blood, and death.

As a genre, rape/revenge is usually thought of as particularly debased exploitation schlock. Films like I Spit On Your Grave (1978) and Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (1972) were among the most reviled of the “video nasties,” which were condemned and censored in Britain in the early 1980s. Roger Ebert said I Spit On Your Grave was “a movie so sick, reprehensible, and contemptible that I can hardly believe it’s playing in respectable theaters,” and added that, “attending it was one of the most depressing experiences of my life.” Mick Martin and Marsha Porter, in their Video Movie Guide, called it “one of the most tasteless…