Rape on TV: a justified look at violence against women or a crude plot device?

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/dec/13/tv-rape-portrayal-storm

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It’s a storyline that has been building for weeks. Now the rape of Linda Carter and its impact on her family are set to form the centrepiece for a traditionally depressing EastEnders Christmas episode.

So far, so standard – rape has been a go-to plotline in soap operas for years, from Brookside’s Sheila Grant to Coronation Street’s Carla Connor. Yet what now feels unusual is that rape storylines are no longer the preserve of the prime-time soap, having become increasingly prevalent in television drama, with stories ranging from the hard-hitting and sensitive to the jaw-droppingly bad.

Rape and its aftermath formed the central thread through Sally Wainwright’s bleak, brilliant police drama Happy Valley. Its threat has been ever present in both Allan Cubitt’s dark and violent cat-and-mouse thriller The Fall, which screens its final episode this Thursday, and the much-debated first series of True Detective.

In the second series of stylised gang drama Peaky Blinders, rape was threatened in the first episode and occurred in the fifth, while the third episode of this year’s Game of Thrones saw the show’s chief writers, David Benioff and DB Weiss, under fire after muddied writing turned a dark, complicated sex scene from George RR Martin’s books into rape, damaging one of their central character arcs in the process.

It has been a recent plotline in both Scandal and House of Cards, where ice queens Mellie Grant and Claire Underwood were “humanised” by the revelations of past attacks, was used as a clunky plot twist on Downton Abbey, and formed the midseason finale to historical teen show Reign, striking a dark note in what is otherwise a harmlessly daft retelling of Mary Queen of Scots’s life in France by way of Gossip Girl. In Mad Men, Joan Holloway’s shocking date rape on the floor of her apartment by fiancé Greg in the second season was a rare depiction in a medium that had preferred to make attackers anonymous.

But not all rape storylines are equal. The Fall, despite critical acclaim, has been repeatedly criticised for the way its depiction of a misogynist worldview often threatens to topple into the misogyny it purports to despise, while last week saw award-winning US scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin at the centre of a media storm after a topical subplot about an alleged campus rape in his journalism drama, The Newsroom, was branded ill-conceived, clunky and, in the words of the New Yorker’s television critic Emily Nussbaum, “crazy-making”.

This weekend, Bafta-winning television writer Wainwright entered the debate, saying that rape plotlines, while contentious, were also important. The issue, she says, is one of treatment: you can’t simply throw in rape as a way of jolting the plot along but, at the same time, to ignore it is to ignore a host of women’s stories.

“One of the things that upset me last season with Happy Valley was when extreme feminists were arguing that we should never show violence against women,” she says. “I understand why people say that, but I think the counter-argument is that you have to show the reality, otherwise you’re complicit in pretending that violence towards women doesn’t happen.” The key, she stresses, is to ensure that the rape is never sensationalised or gratuitous. “We were very keen not to show the actual rape on Happy Valley, our interest was to show the effect it had both on Ann and the people around her and that after-effect is something that we explore a lot more in the second season, because it is profound.”

By contrast, one of the key criticisms of Sorkin’s plotline was the way in which, after a bit of debate, the episode twisted the story to blame the accuser, placing the onus on her to prove that she was telling the truth. “The Newsroom was never going to be my favourite series, but I didn’t expect it to make my head blow off, all over again,” wrote Nussbaum of that decision, adding: “On a show dedicated to fantasy journalism, Sorkin’s stand-in doesn’t lobby for more incisive coverage of sexual violence or for a responsible way to tell graphic stories without getting off on the horrible details … Instead, he argues that the idealistic thing to do is not to believe her story.” Alena Smith, a writer on The Newsroom, tweeted she had objected to the storyline so much that she’d been thrown out of the writers’ room.

Similarly Downton was accused of using rape as a way of upping the ante and shocking Bates and Anna out of their cosy complacency, while The Fall continues to draw ire for the way its camera forces viewers to be complicit in Paul Spector’s crimes. “I hate to pick on The Fall, because it seems as though everybody is, but the issue there is that it’s so beautifully shot and lit and it lingers on the women’s bodies,” says Wainwright. “Happy Valley was shocking at times and difficult to watch, but we were careful not to be gratuitous and not to show women as nothing more than a slab of meat.”

For his part, Cubitt has defended his show vigorously, stating that “violence against women, often graphic, has been part of TV drama for a very long time. My concern has always been that, because we don’t know who they are, we feel nothing for these victims”, and arguing that The Fall is strenuous in its attempts to portray the killer’s victims as more than dead bodies.

Martin used a similar defence, telling the New York Times that “rape and sexual violence have been a part of every war ever fought, from the ancient Sumerians to our present day. To omit them from a narrative centred on war and power would have been fundamentally false and dishonest, and would have undermined one of the themes of the books: that the true horrors of human history derive not from Orcs and Dark Lords, but from ourselves.”

Sorkin said the campus rape plot was “the first episode of The Newsroom that I felt was really good” and that Smith had broken one of the cardinal writers’ room rules by talking about what went on.

Not everyone was convinced. “Aaron Sorkin doesn’t understand who the victim is,” wrote Libby Hill for website The AV Club. “He doesn’t understand how empathy works. And he, as a rich, powerful, white man in the United States, doesn’t understand that he is among the most privileged people in the world.”