Making a Man “Invisible”
Elisabeth Moss’s latest study in scary faces debunks the faux-feminism of rape-revenge films.
The 70s was instrumental to horror in a lot of ways. It gave us our first slasher in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It proved that the genre had award potential with The Exorcist.
It also started a subgenre known as the “rape-revenge film,” a polarizing name that’s continued to raise questions of empowerment since its inception.
Rape-revenge films are largely made by men and for men. We’re talking The Last House on the Left, Netflix’s The Perfection, and I Spit On Your Grave (somehow incredulously also known as Day of the Woman), the last of which includes a rape scene so long and graphic that, in hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have watched it when I was in high school. I don’t even remember finishing the film.
As male-consumption films, they get a heaping helping of the male gaze. Female victims are often objectified before, during, and after their rape.
They also have a bare bones and predictable three-part structure:
I: A character, usually female, is violently raped/abused and left for dead.
II: She doesn’t die and begins the healing process.
III: Healing eventually comes in the form of catching/torturing and killing rapists.
Yet despite this, there’s a grotesque sense of perceived female empowerment intertwined with this pervasive misogyny. They reclaim their power by killing their rapists. They exercise the same amount of violence as the men who defiled them, and this somehow creates a “feminist” message.
The Invisible Man (directed by Saw’s Leigh Whannell) doesn’t seem like a rape-revenge film at first. The greatest physical act of violence committed against Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss) is a brief and brutal tussle between she and her invisible ex-boyfriend, Adrian (Oliver Jackson-Cohen).
What we end up getting is a tasteful subversion of the subgenre’s typical tropes and an examination of how lackluster the men who populate and create it are. It follows the formula and characteristics typical of a rape-revenge film, but weaponizes it to illustrate how a female protagonist should be portrayed in these purported empowerment flicks.
The film opens on Cecilia’s tense face.
It’s the middle of the night. From her expression and demeanor, we know that the man still asleep next to her is very, very dangerous. She begins to make her anxiety-inducing late-night escape.
She also tiptoes around her house in a short silk nightgown.
She seems awkward in it. There’s no lingering shots on her legs, no slow pan up her mostly exposed body and no clear indication of the male gaze, yet the outfit somehow exudes an uncomfortable presence.
It isn’t until weeks later, when she’s safe in a friend’s home, that we learn that Adrian controlled, among other things, how she dressed. Now clad in comfortable jeans and sweatshirts for most of the film, Cecilia regains an ounce of control.
The aforementioned three-part narrative happens out of order or off-screen.
While we’re treated to a lengthy monologue on all the ways Adrian possessed her — including performing such a thorough mental mind fuck on her that she’s convinced he knows her thoughts — a large portion of the film’s beginning is dedicated to her already trying to move past his abuse.
Her existence stops at his possession of her. She is an object. She is not meant to survive or outlast him.
She doesn’t want to get even; she just wants to move on with her life. And as someone who’s left a controlling relationship before, I get it. You know that it’s over, but you still keep waiting for something to shatter this fragile life you’ve built. Support is integral, but even then you’re half-convinced something bad is going to happen.
For Cecilia, she has her sister and friends for support. The traumatic event has already passed, or so she thinks.
Then she’s somehow drugged before a job interview. Someone sends a hateful email to her sister from her account. An unseen force punches a teenage girl in the face, with Cecilia being the only other person in the room. As the film progresses, she’s stripped of her support system.
“This is what he does!” Cecilia pleads as her allies pull away, leaving her alone. “He’s trying to isolate me!”
This a huge trope in rape-revenge films. In them, our female protagonists are barely even two-dimensional. They’re isolated, have no friends or means of support and are overwhelmingly characterized by their trauma.
And even when they exact revenge, the abusers they kill still “win” in the end because they have pushed her to become a murderer. They become the most important thing that happened to her.
Adrian pushes Cecilia to fit into this narrative. He wants her to be violent and reactive to him, because then he still has control over her.
That’s what truly made this movie scary for me: this idea that the person hurting you feels that they’re doing nothing wrong and eventually, you’ll start to believe it too. That acting out just makes you the asshole, not them. Cecilia tries to fight back, but Adrian’s invisibility renders her helpless for a moment.
Adrian becomes the rape-revenge sub-genre given form. He is the male need to make themselves the center of a movie allegedly about women made flesh.
How can you fight something that no one can see? How can you say you’re being abused when there’s no physical scars? So many times, I thought I was crazy or mis-remembering something, and as I watched Cecilia beg people to believe her, I started to worry that no one would and that she’d be stuck.
As we later discover, the reason behind his elaborate torment — which includes faking his own suicide, following his ex-girlfriend around in an invisibility suit, and killing her sister to frame her for murder, among other things — is pretty pathetic: no one’s ever left him before.
The implication is that she can either be his or have her life destroyed. Her existence stops at his possession of her. She is an object to him. She is not meant to survive or outlast him. Her doing so is a direct violation of how things are supposed to be.
And so Adrian becomes the rape-revenge sub-genre given form. He is the male gaze, the objectification of women, this need to make themselves the center of a movie allegedly about women, made flesh.
And in the end, it doesn’t work.
Unlike more “traditional” films of this sub-genre, Cecilia’s not the only one who gets hurt. Her world doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Her friends are terrorized and her sister is murdered.
For Cecilia, healing doesn’t come from getting back at the abuser for something he did to her. Now, that’s just an added bonus. She only crosses over from wanting to expose him to wanting to hurt him when her loved ones are in jeopardy.
She wants proof, but she’ll handle the burden of it on her own terms now.
When The Invisible Man ends, the narrative comes full circle.
Cecilia pretends to go back to Adrian. Dressed once again as he likes, in lipstick and heels, she dangles the promise of a relationship and a family in front of him, a classic “sexuality as bait” trope for the old r-and-r flick.
But first, she wants to hear him admit that he was the man in the suit.
She’s planning on killing him, but she wants to make sure that she wasn’t crazy first. That is her true catharsis. Not framing him for his own suicide, but confirming her suspicions and trusting herself now in a way that she didn’t when he was still dominating her life.
This is her true revenge.
Of course, she ends up killing him anyway. Not all of us get closure with our abusers. I certainly didn’t. But seeing Cecilia finally believe herself and undo her mental shackles makes me feel like I could have it.
Adrian’s gone. In retrospect, he barely existed in the film to begin with. Despite being the titular character, he was never meant to be the focus. Cecilia has hijacked the narrative. She’s turned this cowardly “invisible” man into a footnote in his own story, burying him and leaving him unremembered and unmissed.
Maybe all that time and money spent working on the invisibility suit should’ve been put toward something a little more useful. Like, you know, therapy. Then you wouldn’t be another man added to Elisabeth Moss’s ever-increasing “shitty men in prominent positions” kill/emasculate streak.
Fun facts: Demi Moore was the woman on the original I Spit On Your Grave cover. Annie Lebovitz was, thankfully, not the photographer this time.
Editor’s note: I unfortunately learned that there was a new sequel to I Spit On Your Grave that came out just last year. Will I watch it to see what’s up? Maybe. Stay tuned.
