Empowerment by Design

She Said (Maria Schrader, 2022), Women Talking (Sarah Polley, 2022), and Tár (Todd Field, 2022) all address the aftermath of sexual harassment and rape. Notably, these films share a refusal to depict assault, which differentiates them from the prevailing cinematic practice of titillating audiences with sexual violence, ostensibly in order to repudiate it. By eschewing assault scenes, these films turn their audiences’ attention from individual acts to ideological structures. Each film represents a different version of and backlash against rape culture; in so doing each asks the spectator to extend culpability beyond assailants and their immediate enablers to the institutional systems that empower them. By not depicting rape or sexual assault, these movies also suggest that film viewers are complicit in rape culture too. Their representational strategies insinuate that sitting back and watching simulated assault as entertainment carries with it an implicit acceptance of such assault—and thus that audiences should not just demand better but do better themselves.