Earlier in the week, I reported on charges that the TV show Game of Thrones was homophobic.
Now, following up on last year's outrage over the rape of Cersei by her brother, comes the response to Season 5, Episode 6 where the sadist ne'er-do-well Ramsay Bolton rapes his new bride, Sansa.
The outrage seems to be over the gratuitousness of the scene. The rape goes by so quickly, its significance and horror are diminished. Worse, the scene may have been added to titillate male viewers.
From The Mary Sue:
In this particular instance, rape is not necessary to Sansa’s character development (she’s already overcome abusive violence at the hands of men)... Rape here, like in all instances, is not a necessary story-driving device... What a missed opportunity to do something that would have actually surprised your audience. Rape, on the other hand, is expected.
My concern here is that you could say this about any rape scene written about or depicted on TV or film. There are always other ways of telling us about a rape instead of depicting it. I think this might be more an aesthetic criticism masquerading as a political one.
Sarah Ditum makes a stronger case over at the New Statesman:
[Game of Thrones] has given up on seeing women through our own eyes... The programme makers had the choice of whether to make us watch or not, and they put us right there in the room, camera focused lasciviously on her suffering face. Even worse though is that they put Sansa’s stepbrother Theon in the room as a witness, and made his anguish at watching her rape the closing note of the programme. Apparently violence against a woman counts for more if it distresses a man.
And from
Salon:
rape isn’t mere violence; it’s not a punch to the head or a knife through the ribs. It’s an act that attempts to divorce a person’s soul from their body; to imitate the language of intimacy in what is purely cruelty. It is a kind of murder, except afterwards, the victim can still walk and talk and breathe. I question any depiction of rape that seeks to add to a woman’s violation in the text by further robbing her of her dignity in how that story is told.
I am not going to weigh in here, except to ask a few questions--
* Game of Thrones depicts plenty of murders. They happen quickly, sometimes from the murderers point of view, and are designed to titillate with blood and gore. So what is the ethical difference between presenting a rape in the way the show does and the way it depicts murder?
* Part of the problem seems to be the lack of the camera's focus on Stansa. But wouldn't that have been more exploitative? In a sense, seeing it through another's eyes is a kind of distancing technique that only makes us feel the horror more profoundly. It's like the decision in Shoah, the documentary about the Holocaust, not to show any footage of the Holocaust itself. You are forced to imagine the horror by looking at the pleasant, grassy fields where decades earlier stood the concentration camps.
Frankly, I'm up in the air on this one.