The other night I brought my 14 year old to see Birds Of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn, the newest DC comic movie. The quick version of the premise is that Harley Quinn has just broken up with The Joker. She’s nursing her broken heart and trying to remember her value without him, but she also needs to face the fact that people are no longer afraid of her without his protection. It turns out she did some horrible shit to people while they were together. Many people want her dead.
Seeing this movie was my 14 year old’s choice, not mine, but we went because my kid wanted to go, and that’s what parents sometimes do. Plus it’s being hailed as a kick-ass feminist movie where the protagonists are a diverse group of tough women, written and directed by women, and I make an effort to support those kinds of movies in the theater.
Lately there’s an interesting conversation about whether or not we should define our strong female heroes by listing the ways they embody the violent predilections of “strong men”. Is it physical strength, in other words, that equals female empowerment?
I don’t know.
I have a soft spot for tattooed, leather-wearing females who know how to defend themselves and believe they deserve to keep themselves safe. I’m a little in love with Jane from Blindspot. Harley Quinn twists this trope because while she’s sometimes truly in danger, Harley Quinn commits a lot of her violence just for fun. It creates nuance for the female hero canon, which I appreciate. (And while I don’t love violence for violence’s sake in any movie, the violence here is not gory, like, say, Reservoir Dogs is.)
The movie absolutely has a place in that conversation about what an empowered woman actually looks like. But while women can definitely fight and rip shit up just for fun, my question is: do we have to in order to prove we’re also humans who deserve equality? That’s pretty much the opposite of the way I hope humanity goes.
What this movie about violence with women at the center does do beautifully, is deal with the fact that these women may be just a skilled as men at kicking ass, but their vulnerabilities are not the same. You can destroy a person’s body because it is human: break knee caps, shoot through hearts, peel off faces. But women’s bodies are often harmed first by sexual violence. It’s not that men’s bodies cannot be assaulted. It’s that in the exact same Evil Guy v Hero scenario, the male bodies are just killed, while the women’s bodies are assaulted first as if it’s the obvious appetizer portion of the murder.
Birds of Prey is jam-packed with campy, unbridled violence. It is loud and fast-paced, and part of the joy ride, except the scenes portraying sexual violence. These stand in perfect contrast.
First there is a moment where Harley Quinn is tied to a chair in the Evil Guy’s lair and he’s threatening to cut her face off with a knife. He doesn’t just run the knife near her neck, he gets close, he whispers in her ear, he threatens her body. There is the threat of violence (cutting off her face) and there is a separate, more upsetting kind of threat, which is that her body is at his mercy simply by the fact that he is a man and she is a woman and he might decide he wants to harm her. His proximity is the threat. It is worse than a knife.
Second, there is a moment where Bad Guy is in a club he owns and a woman at a table across the room begins laughing. Bad Guy has received Bad News and so he perceives in his fragile male ego way, that she is laughing at him. This is unacceptable. He crosses the bar and forces her up onto the table. He instructs the man she is with to slice her dress off, with his aforementioned face-peeling knife. Both the man and the woman comply.
Watching this, I immediately turned to block the eyes of my 14 year old, who I didn’t think needed to witness this kind of sexual violence straight out. My movement was instinctual because in so many movies, we, the audience, would witness not only woman’s assault, but the actress’s disrobed body, standing on a real table, exposed to the real audience. Her bareness would be our titilation.
In Birds of Prey, the camera cuts away from the assault. What we see instead of the woman’s nakedness is the emotional, grieving face of one of the protagonists who witnesses this cruelty and stands there, helpless. Eventually we return to the woman who is assaulted, framed from the shoulders up, clutching her dress against her body.
It’s moving and troubling, and affecting. We understand the impact of sexual violence here, we bear witness, without being complicit.
When we left the theater I checked in with my 14 year old about those scenes. I wanted them to know it was okay to be uncomfortable, or worried or need to talk. I wanted them to know I did not like witnessing sexual violence either. I wanted them to know that despite the fact that the Bad Guy never actually touches either women, these were moments of sexual violence.
And I wanted to talk about the way the scenes were shot.
The movie made a choice to cut away. I explained how normally movies don’t. I explained that in this case the directors made a choice not to let a sexual assault be a titilating moment for the audience.
If not showing the assault is a choice, then showing it is one too.
That’s important to remember, I think. And to tell our children to pay attention.
Every moment of a movie is a choice.
I think we should be honest and open about what assaults look like, and I don’t shy away from writing about, talking about, or seeing the messy parts of sex. But assault is not sex. And graphically showing someone’s body is avoiding the truth. The truth, the graphic reality, is there on the woman’s face, in the man’s proximity, in his implied power.
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