Projections Of Domestic Violence And Erotic Terror On The Film Screen

From its inception, the captivating intensity of film has been driven by images of erotism and violence. The first film screened a century ago by the Lumière brothers, showing a train steaming headlong into a Paris train station, so scared its audience with the illusion of imminent violence that many reportedly ran panicked from the theater. Word of mouth spread the news that movies could be vividly frightening, and an entertainment tradition began that continues with today's blockbuster violent films. While movies have fed on the vicarious thrills of screen violence—wars, gang fights, Westerns, and crotic excitement from romance through film noir, until recently few feature motion pictures have seriously addressed cruelty and violence within the erotic pressure cooker that is the nuclear family.

O. J. Simpson's alleged brutal murder of his wife Nicole Brown brought the issue of spousal abuse as forcefully into the public eye as Simpson's acquittal dramatized the persistence of the machismo hero and the chillingly perverse entertainment pleasure stirred by sexual violence. The patriarchal tradition so long made it possible for a man to treat his wife and children as chattel, subject to his whims and “correctable” by him, that laws permitting a husband to flog his wife only changed in this century. According to a recent issue of Women, Gender and Psychoanalysis over three out of every 100 women, or 1.8 million women, are severely assaulted by their male partners each year.1

Similarly, there has been little motivation in the traditionally