Gender Bashing: The Penetrating Power of THE LOVED ONES
“When the hitchhiker in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre slits open his hand for the thrill, the onlookers recoil in horror– all but Franklin, who seems fascinated by the realization that all that lies between the visible, knowable outside of the body and its secret insides is one thin membrane, protected by a collective taboo against its violation.” – Carol J. Clover, Men Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film
Penetration is often the Final Girl’s final tool, the phallic blade that enters her assailant and completes her feminine-to-masculine arc. Once in a blue moon, however, we get a tangible woman baddie with a warped pathos and something sharp to poke and prod with. Audition‘s Asami has her acupuncture needles. Amy Dunne of Gone Girl weaponizes feminine sexuality with a single swipe of a box cutter. The bonus of having a woman offender in your horror film is that, sometimes, her torture tactics have a gender-subversive effect, whether intentional or not. For an extraordinary example of said effect applied with intention, look no further than The Soska Twins’ American Mary.
In the 2012 Canadian horror film, the titular medical student Mary is an anti-heroine. Following her rape, she enacts revenge by kidnapping her assailant and violating him in turn. Mary uses her surgical expertise to objectify (she forces his mouth open with a vaginal spreader and later photographs his mutilated body in suspension) and pierce the man’s flesh with tools, mirroring the way he previously degraded her to the status of a piece of meat and forced himself into and upon her. She also revels in the simple power of reducing him to a helpless victim, as he did to her. In a genius move, Jen and Sylvia Soska use the assailant’s body as the canvas for a measure-for-measure payback, mimicking rape in the process. Three years earlier, writer-director Sean Byrne utilized the same element to tell a rape-revenge story without including an actual rape, in The Loved Ones.
To be fair, there is no evidence that Byrne set out to do this, beyond an interview that confirms the case of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer as
Six months after a car accident that results in the death of his father, Brent Mitchell (Xavier Samuel) is working through his grief and pain as he attends high school. Lola Stone (Robin McLeavy), an odd loner with her sights on Brent, attends the same school. Her first words onscreen are a plea to Brent: “Will you go to the dance with me?” Once he declines, it’s off to the races. Lola decides to have a date with him anyway, whether he’s cool with that or not. She’ll take him, and she’ll have him. A few scenes later, Brent wakes up chair-bound at Lola’s house. The table before him holds a Lola, her father (John Brumpton), and a haggard, docile woman they call Bright Eyes (Anne Scott-Pendlebury), all formally dressed. Soft pop music plays and a light ball throws dazzling sparkles about the room. Lola brought Brent to a dance, after all.
Lola is messed up. Her bedroom is similar to a normal teen girl’s room, with a few jarring differences. Rather than the usual assemblage of teenybopper celebrity posters, truncated images of the male body grace Lola’s walls. These are juxtaposed with a large collection of dolls posed in
Brent’s ordeal begins immediately upon awakening, and the violation is three-fold. First, she subdues him. Lola injects a bleach-filled syringe into Brent’s neck, rendering him powerless to speak. Later, after an escape attempt, Lola and her father bind Brent to the chair again and pin Brent’s feet to the floor with kitchen knives. He is powerless, and can’t even scream.
Next comes the sexual humiliation, both overt and subdued. Lola unzips Brent’s pants and forces him to urinate in a cup, and threatens to castrate him so that his girlfriend can no longer “enjoy” him. Lola then shoves a chicken drumstick into his face which, while nowhere near as disturbing as the forced chicken drumstick fellatio in Killer Joe, is still an invasive oral assault complete with “Is it finger-
Finally, the drill scene. Lola’s father further restrains Brent and holds his head steady for her entrance. The tension is prolonged by a false start, as Lola isn’t experienced with the power tool and fails to apply enough pressure, resulting in a scrape to Brent’s forehead. Her father, with all of the exasperated chiding of an experienced “penetrator”, urges his daughter to thrust with force in order to pop the flesh-and-bone cherry. In a series of shots that I refuse to believe aren’t a direct homage to Fulci’s splinter-to-the-eyeball sequence in Zombie, the drill comes closer and closer until she finally thrusts it into Brent’s trembling body, through the center of his forehead.
This doesn’t kill Brent, but here Byrne uses horror elements to craft a monstrous facsimile of the degradation and trauma experienced after sexual assault. The flip side of destabilizing the gender tropes in this semi-slasher is that the Final Girl is a Final Boy. The formula mostly remains the same as Brent has to make it to the end. But Lola desires a specific effect from this boring: with the addition of scalding water into the drill wound, Lola plans on “boiling the brains” and turning Brent into a living zombie, another mute possession like so many dolls strewn about her bedroom. Again, as with so many serial rapists (and serial killers), it’s less about the act itself and more about power and possession.
With this penetration, Brent is now tainted. As with any kind of sexual assault, he will never be the same. Continuing on the sexual assault thread, the zombified boys (I hesitate to call them “ex-boyfriends”, as Lola seems to disregard consent entirely) living under the floor represent both the helplessness and the social shame of rape, amplified and grotesque. Genre-wise, this depiction of rape’s stigma is gender-subversive, but the public discourse led most visibly by actor Terry Crews emphasizes that rape and sexual violence is no longer socially considered a uniquely feminine experience. Male victims of sexual assault are increasingly speaking out in public spaces like social media; the mixed responses illuminate the stigma that still follows sexual assault victims, regardless of where they sit on the gender spectrum.
The Loved Ones is unique in that it speaks the language of sexual violence and its aftermath without depicting an explicit rape. By raping Brent without raping him, the film allows for cross-gender identification: everyone can participate (as the viewer) as a victim of assault, connect with the trauma, and sanction Brent’s bloody retribution.
I could be wrong in this stretchy read; sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Not only is actual onscreen rape missing, but the film spends more time on its assault sequence than it does on the revenge portion of the plot, a staple of rape-revenge cinema. This film doesn’t explicitly articulate sexual violence, probably because such a statement wasn’t intended. The desexualization is irrelevant, as sexual assault is mostly about power. In the same way that The Girl With All The Gifts takes on racial politics by way of its casting of Sennia Nanua in a lead role originally written (in M.R. Carey’s book) as white, so too does The Loved Ones comment on the power dynamics of rape by way of making its baddie a young woman. Handing her a long, penetrating power tool for ultraviolent abuse takes on dimensions it may not have had, had the genders been reversed.
This is Brent’s story, and the film’s sympathies lie with him. His only crime was being the object of Lola’s attraction and turning down her advances. His powerlessness, objectification, humiliation, and forceful penetrating violence act as prompts not just for survival, but for reprisal. Lola’s sadistic infliction of torture is egregious enough to justify bloodthirsty retaliation, as justified as Jennifer in I Spit On Your Grave or Thana in Ms .45. Whether he meant to or not, Sean Byrne made a deviated rape-revenge film when he made The Loved Ones.
The Loved Ones is currently streaming on Shudder and on Amazon Prime.
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