“They did worse than nothing”: Rape and Spectatorship in The Accused

© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 30, no. 1, 2000 “They did worse than nothing”: Rape and Spectatorship in The Accused Tanya Horeck Towards the beginning of March 1983, reports of a gang rape that took place in a barroom in New Bedford, Massachusetts, entered the national media. The following New York Times report provides an early account of the crime that came to be known as the “Big Dan’s gang rape”: A 21-year-old woman, recent to the neighbourhood, stopped at Big Dan’s tavern for some cigarettes and a drink about 9 P.M. Sunday, March 6. She emerged sometime after midnight, bruised, half naked and screaming for help. Her clothes had been torn from her, she told the police officers who were called by a motorist who had stopped to help her. She said she had been hoisted to the bar’s pool table, tormented and raped beyond count by a group of men who held her there for more than two hours while the rest of the men in the bar stood watching , sometimes taunting her, and cheering. When the police fetched her clothing and took her back inside, two of the men she identified as her assaulters were still there. Big Dan’s, which is one large room, had apparently been open for business the whole time. No one had called the police. One unidentified witness was quoted as saying in The New Bedford Standard-Times, “Why should I care?”(Clendinen A16) Across the nation, news reports and editorials denounced the “Big Dan’s pooltable gang rape” and condemned the male spectators who functioned as “cheerleaders ” to the assault (“Tavern” 38). As one local resident told reporters: “I like spectator sports, basketball, football, hockey. But that, that’s sick” (Clendinen A16). Five years later, the image of a raped woman running out of a bar screaming for help was immortalized in Jonathan Kaplan’s 1988 movie The Accused, Hollywood ’s first feature-length film on rape.1 The film’s depiction of the gang rape of a young woman on a pinball machine is probably the most infamous rape scene ever filmed. It is certainly one of the most seen; over a decade after its release, Canadian Review of American Studies 30 (2000) 2 Kaplan’s film is readily available on home video and is routinely shown on terrestrial and satellite television in North America and Great Britain. As one of mainstream culture’s most explicit representations of rape, The Accused is a key, if problematic, film for feminists: key because it clearly owes a debt to feminist consciousness-raising on rape; problematic because its depiction of gang rape belongs to a cinematic tradition in which the victimized female body becomes the body of cinema (Lebeau 139). To date, discussion of the film remains locked into the volatile debate over the “explicit—some say exploitative—gang rape scene” (Appio 3). On the one hand, critics like Cindy Fuchs argue that the film’s attempt to implicate the cinema audience in the on-screen spectacle of rape provides an effective commentary “on the way this culture looks at women’s bodies” (28). On the other hand, some see the film as submitting to the structures of voyeurism it professes to subvert; as Pam Cook notes, “it is debatable whether the explicit portrayal of Sarah’s painful humiliation (which is most likely to disturb those who either have been or might be raped) is necessary” (36). This article is an attempt to unsettle the by now familiar debate over the “positive” or “negative” nature of the film’s rape scene, to consider what else is at stake in what remains one of popular culture’s foundational representations of rape. James Snead has argued that “although films are not necessarily myths ... certain films have managed to remain repeatedly compelling and thus to assume a permanent, quasi-mythic status in a society’s consciousness” (53). What Snead says of films in general can also be applied to particular scenes and images from films. The barroom rape scene from The Accused is one such filmic image that has assumed a quasi-mythic status...