Representing Sexual Abuse in Outlander and Spotlight

I spent this weekend in 1740's Scotland and 2000's Boston thanks to Starz's Outlander and Tom McCarthy's Spotlight. These are two very different (excellent) stories depicting two very different times, but they overlap on one key element: they both contain stories of rape and molestation committed by men, on men (or boys). Here's my attempt to work out how those representations worked, and what they might mean.

Outlander's male protagonist is the strapping, fearless Scottish Jacobite soldier Jamie Fraser who is married to Claire, a time-traveling combat nurse pulled back to 1743 from 1945 (forgive the premise; it's actually great). Jamie's dealings with the Scottish rebellion from the British has left a price on his head, and when he is captured and sent to prison close to the end of the first season, Claire musters up some comrades and cattle (yes, cattle) to break Jamie out before he is hanged. However, it's not Claire who gets to him first but rather the show's villain, "Black" Jack Randall, a redcoat gone rogue who has a perverse obsession with Jamie. How perverse? Let's just say that movie blood hardly ever makes me squeamish, but Black Jack's brutal flogging -- 100 lashes -- of Jamie midway through the season made me yelp in protest despite being alone in my apartment.

Black Jack's goal is not just to torture Jamie. He wants to break him. Tobias Menzies, who plays Randall, has said that he thinks Randall is an exercise in sadism and that some viewers reckon Randall loves him, and he plays the character with just enough empathy for the viewer to feel horror and pity in equal measure. I won't go into all the details, but Black Jack breaks Jamie down not only by raping him but by inflicting so much shame against his masculinity, sexuality, and love for Claire that he is left staring, unmoving, wishing for death. And we see it all.

 Randall's sadism at work

Spotlight, on the other hand, relies on testimony by victims of Boston's priest abuse scandal to represent male sexual abuse. What starts as a seemingly regional story based on a single priest and a few hush-hush settlements begins to spiral as more leads point to a city- and even country-wide scandal. It's as if all of Boston had been muzzled for decades by the Catholic Church; the abuse was rampant, everyone knew, and no one could speak up. Shame and silencing were everywhere. We don't see reenactments of these crimes but rather feel their gravity thanks their simple multitude. Numbers speak loudly here -- 13 priests becomes 90 becomes 250 -- and the breaking down of a few survivors as the film employs them to recount what happened to them as boys is more than enough. We feel those broken spirits multiply as we see the names and addresses of the priests tally up.

One of many of the Boston priests' victims, Phil Saviano

Both stories examine what it means to be a victim just as much as they examine what it means to be a predator, especially when those victims are male. For some reason, watching Randall rape Jamie made me more uncomfortable than watching him attempt to rape Claire, which he does earlier in the season. Maybe it's because I have seen rapes against women on screen before. Heck, SVU is dedicated almost entirely to this phenomenon. Yet I think it's because seeing an ultra-masculine man who builds his manhood on his strength being broken down into helplessness was as tragic as the thought of pedophile priests singling out boys from poor families with absent fathers.  The victims are different but their pain is the same. It's that of the predators boring shame so deeply into their souls that silence is their only companion. Especially when those predators have incredibly unshakable systems of power to shelter them from justice (the priests were simply sent elsewhere; Black Jack's got Britain propping him up by his Redcoat).

What resonates most with me when comparing these stories is that we can't and shouldn't qualify shame by degree, and that watching a depiction of abuse is just as powerful as not seeing it. We tend to think of masculinity as synonymous with resiliency, as if men should be unbreakable. And if they are broken, their pain must be suffered in silence, lest they betray weakness or invoke systemic abuse. So whether or not a film or TV show chooses to physically show an instance of male sexual abuse, it's so incredibly moving and sad and important to infuse the subject matter with vulnerability and to show the power dynamics at play. In Spotlight, the Boston Globe must go after the Church and not the individual priests to make the magnitude of the scandal resonate, and that's what stories about male sexual abuse should do too, if they are approached well; they should go after the system. They can expose the cracks in the power structures that keep hegemonic masculinity afloat by emphasizing the importance of speaking up and being vulnerable. I'm not saying that every show should undertake a rape scene, but rather I am happy that these two stories were able to humanize and empathize with victims while simultaneously exposing the cowardice of the people in power to keep such atrocities under wraps.

The Unruly Man?

Masculine aggression in film and tv has been puzzling me lately.

As part of my thesis, I've been working through Kathleen Rowe's theory of "The Unruly Woman," a transgressive character type in the genre of comedy who disrupts gender conventions by exhibiting an unbecoming physicality. The unruly woman is slobbish, loud, and funny. Think Roseanne Arnold and Melissa McCarthy in Bridesmaids and you've got the idea. Thanks to her comedy, the unruly woman is able to pose her female physicality as problematic and laughable in order to subvert expectations of women on screen, thus occupying a feminist position.

Is there such thing as the unruly man, though? If we try floating the idea of gender conformity to men in film and television, we get figures like James Bond, Indiana Jones, and Edward Cullen, who rather become their physicality and use it to assert their masculinity. In other words, their bodies are never at odds with their characters, and these bodies actually trigger or reinforce their character's causality.

I'd like to examine cases, though, where physicality goes to the extreme and ends up possibly subverting these characters' own power. We watch them move from protagonists to antagonists when this happens. Perhaps this is where we find the unruly man.

One actor portrays this principle beautifully (or brutally). Matthias Schoenaerts, star of Rust and Bone (2012) and Bullhead (2011) is a burly 6'2" and gained a massive 70 pounds of muscle for Bullhead, in which he plays a cattle farmer who gets mixed up with illegal testosterone.  Similarly, in Rust and Bone, he is an underground boxer who smashes competitors' teeth out for a living. I won't give away any plot details of these films, because they are excellent and you should watch them, but I will say that in both instances, the third-act story arcs involve Schoenaerts's physical strength in tricky, dangerous situations.

Schoenaerts in Rust and Bone

Another classic example of this physical brutality indicating a mental spiraling is Fight Club's Tyler Durden. He starts off as a sexy, violent ideal, but his (imaginary) presence has damaging physical effects on his alter-ego's body. And more recently, there's Adam in Girls, who is often shirtless, takes out his aggression issues on his woodworking projects, and escalates to unhealthy, borderline sexual assault in the end of the second season. He is the only one of my examples to be somewhat redeemed, when he runs (again, shirtless) across Brooklyn to save Hannah from her crippling OCD. By the way, Hannah is another unruly woman - she and Adam make a great unruly match.

Of course, men's self-destruction through fights, drugs, alcohol, or other means happens a lot in movies and television (Hank Moody, anyone?) but I think what's different here is that in the characters I describe, their physical nature does not coincide with acceptable forms of masculinity. Instead of being commended for their strength, and their ability to use violence to overcome the bad guys, they have traits of the bad guys brewing in them. They are too strong, too agressive, too threatening. Most of all, they can't keep this agression in check, and it costs them the viewer's sympathy as favorable representations of men. When I watch these men, I am constantly negotiating my own distance from them, trying to forgive them for their corporal mistakes, and trying to dig into their interiority which their bodies so problematically eschew.

I have no idea if others have this reaction when they watch strong, conflicted men who take their emotions out using violence. But I am definitely glad that these characters exist, however threatening they feel, because underneath their exaggerated hypermasculinity lies stirrings of the current crisis of masculine identity that deserves more attention in the media. The question remains, though: can the unruly man take up a feminist position that advocates for a more nuanced portrayal of men in the cinema?