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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Drunken Sex or Date Rape? A Look at the Issues Raised by Observe and Report

There’s been a bit of a brouhaha stirring over opening weekend about the alleged “date rape” scene in Observe and Report. When the film played at SXSW I didn’t hear a single person even mention this scene as being at all controversial. Now, as the film is seen – or not seen – by a larger group of film writers, some are accusing the film of making comedy of date rape. But does it?

Interestingly, some of the writers who are crying foul over the scene in question are making a judgment based on a roughly 20-second scene in the red-band trailer — not after seeing the film as a whole. Melissa Silverstein, in her write-up of the trailer for Women & Hollywood, makes this assertion: “So I forced myself to watch the trailer and there for all the world to see is Seth Rogen raping the passed out Anna Faris (a woman who is supposed to protect from a streaker.)  She is clearly not able to make a conscious decision, her eyes are closed and there is a trail of vomit on the pillow. She is being raped but since it’s a comedy they can mitigate it by giving Rogen a moment where his brain goes huh maybe she’s unconscious and stops pumping briefly only to hear Faris shout out something like ‘Why are you stopping motherf***er?’  Like that makes it ok.  Passed out screaming implies consent.  Bad premise.

She’s not the only one. On the website Jezebel — again, referring only to the trailer, not an actual viewing of the entire film — we have this:  “Ronnie (Seth Rogen) date rapes Brandi (Anna Faris) after taking her out to dinner, and today, bloggers are talking about it.” And on TigerBeatdown, the author goes on a lengthy diatribe, first before she’s even seen the trailer and is just reacting to what she’s read about it, and then more after she actually watches the trailer (but not the film). She makes some interesting points here and there, but much of it is just angry ranting about a film she hasn’t even seen.

To be fair, not everyone who’s writing about just that scene from the trailer found it offensive. Cinematical‘sJessica Barnes offers her take, “… as a woman, at no point did I really think rape when I saw the trailer. I saw pathetic, awkward sex between a man and a woman that might be pushing it a little when it comes to the definition of consent.

Meanwhile Mary Ann Johanson, writing about the film for Alliance of Women Film Journalists, opens her piece with this, “IS DATE RAPE FUNNY? That seems to be the big question of the day, because — yup — Seth Rogen’s character date-rapes Anna Faris’s character in Observe and Report, opening today,” — before going on to clarify that the bigger question for her is whether the film is even a comedy.

The New York Times, by contrast, offered this take from Dave Itzkoff in a feature story promoting director Jody Hill as an auteur: “In another scene he forces himself on a makeup-counter saleswoman (Anna Faris) after a date of heavy drinking and drug use. (Before the scene is over she indicates that she had given her consent.)” And in reviewing the film itself, the venerable Manohla Dargis leads with, “If you thought Abu Ghraib was a laugh riot then you might love Observe and Report,” but noted this specific issue with, “During an ensuing date, Brandi gobbles pills, guzzles tequila and even sputters puke, prompting Ronnie to kiss her square on the messy mouth. What follows next should have been the shock of the movie: a cut to Ronnie having vigorous sex with Brandi who, from her closed eyes, slack body and the vomit trailing from her mouth to her pillow, appears to have passed out. But before the words ‘date rape’ can form in your head, she rouses herself long enough to command Ronnie to keep going.
Weighing in somewhere in the middle of the two extremes are writers like Katey Rich, writing forCinemablend, who argues that the scene is rape, that Seth Rogen‘s character is a rapist, but that it’s okay within the context of the film. Rich defends this thesis, in part, with, “Ronnie is too dumb, too proud, and too insecure to think that Brandi can’t really give her consent when she’s stumbling drunk. Of course he’s not doing the right thing, just like Charles Foster Kane wasn’t being noble by forcing Susan into an opera career, and Tyler Durden wasn’t really making the best choice by blowing up the office building. The best, most complex characters in movie history are the ones that do awful things, that challenge your automatic affection for them, and Observe and Report is a smart, maybe even brilliant, movie because it brings you to exactly that point.

And from NY Magazine’s Vulture Bloga similar take: “It turns out that yes, by any reasonable standard of behavior, Seth Rogen’s character, Ronnie Barnhardt, totally rapes Faris’s Brandi. More surprising is that, in the dark world of Observe and Report, raping Brandi is one of the least unsympathetic things Ronnie Barnhardt does.

For me, the scene itself fell on the side of inebriated sex and not date rape, and I find the more vitriolic responses to it rather reactive and indicative of the larger issue of responsibility around sexual behavior and the urge to blame others for the negative consequences of our own choices. Further, I believe that equating this to date rape detracts from the real issue of women who actually are drugged against their will and sexually assaulted, and that there is a distinct difference between that and a woman choosing of her own free will to get herself completely inebriated and render herself incapable of making an informed decision of whether to have sex with a guy.

There’s an inherent contradiction that a lot of feminists seem to prefer not to discuss at all: if we say that a woman who is inebriated by her own choice is therefore no longer responsible for the sexual choices she might make while in that state, is it fair to argue that the man she’s with, if he’s also inebriated, should be responsible for making that choice for her?

Would writers who argue that the sex scene in Observe and Report is date rape also be willing to argue that if a man has sex when he’s “too drunk” to make a sober decision, he no longer has responsibility for the consequences of that sex, such as pregnancy or spreading a STD? How can we seriously argue that a man who gets chooses to get too drunk and has unprotected sex IS responsible for the consequence of that choice (and even demand that he pay child support for the resulting infant, should the woman choose not to abort the pregnancy — a choice over which he has no control) on the one hand, while arguing on the other that if a woman chooses to get herself too drunk to make a sober decision, the full responsibility for that choice must also fall on the man?
Men are not the enemy, and I grow weary of the twisting of ideas of female sexuality and female empowerment into an ugly worldview where the women are always right, the men are always wrong, and women want all of the freedom they see men as having while refusing to accept the responsibility that goes along with it.

That’s not the kind of female empowerment I believe in, nor is it the balanced view of power in relationships that I hope to foster in my own sons and daughters (and for those who might wonder, my oldest daughter is 23, and my four youngest — two boys and two girls — range in age from 12 to 5). Do I fear for my daughters, as they grow up and have to navigate sexual choices and relationships, and learn to accept adult responsibility for their actions? Yes, I do — but I also fear for my sons, growing up into a world where some of my fellow feminists would paint them as forever in the wrong, as the bearers of all responsibility for the choices and behavior of the young women they might encounter. I aim to teach both my daughters and my sons that they are responsible for both their choices and the consequences those choices might bear, and I hope that they will all grow up not to consider excessive drug or alcohol use as an excuse for making unsafe — or plain stupid — choices.

There is also the bigger sociological issue of whether some women deliberately drink to excess to relieve themselves of responsibility for making choices that, while sober, they might think twice about. The idea that date rape is not  a black-and-white issue, but one with many shades of gray that deserve consideration, is not a popular perspective in feminist circles. But I am a feminist who also believes very strongly in personal responsibility and accountability on both sides, not just one, for the consequences of the choices one makes. And I am a feminist who is also a mother … a mother of both daughters and sons, all of whom will one day have to navigate increasingly murky waters of decision-making around their sexual encounters.

I saw an interesting documentary at AFI Dallas called Haze, which is mostly about the excessive alcohol consumption on college campuses in the Greek system. But there was one bit in particular that struck me in that film where a professor talks about studies on how drinking patterns, particularly among female students, have changed over the past couple decades.  He says that many female students these days come to college intent on drinking as much as the boys do. They binge drink excessively — 15-20 drinks at a sitting is no longer uncommon.

Another professor in the film states that many of the college-age, binge-drinking female students he has interviewed say they do so specifically to absolve themselves of responsibility for promiscuous sexual behavior. I’d like to read an actual study that verifies this somewhere, but the prevalence of overtly sexual behavior by college-age girls at spring break parties and exploitative series like Girls Gone Wild would seem to indicate that many 20-something young women today view their sexuality as something to flaunt and exploit, not hide under a bushel — and they’re using drugs and alcohol to relieve themselves of the inhibitions that might otherwise make them think twice about what they’re doing.

Female empowerment is about the idea of women in control of their lives and their choices, not about women choosing to drink and drug themselves into a state of non-responsibility for their sexual decision-making.  The depiction of Brandi in Observe and Report is clearly the latter.

Brandi is reprehensible – and offends me as a woman by the way she represents women — and you could argue that Jody Hill‘s take on her and the type of woman she represents is completely misogynistic, but Hill just put the stereotype of this young, sexually active, hard-partying woman on-screen.  And if you don’t believe that, just take a stroll down the main bar drag in any random college town on a Friday or Saturday night and you will encounter many, many young women like Brandi, scantily clad, tottering drunkenly on stiletto heels, drinking and drugging themselves into total oblivion and talking about the dick they’re going to score.  Anna Faris plays this stereotype with a brutal honesty that should be, well, sobering. The moment when she yells out “Why’d you stop, motherfucker?” asks us to question our assumptions about what we’ve just seen.

Responsibility for choices, and the acceptance of the consequences for the actions one makes, has to fall on both sides of the male-female sexual equation — and that includes the responsibility not to consume alcohol or drugs to the point that you are unable to make sound decisions to begin with. Choices have consequences, and they’re not always good ones.  Rather than putting all this energy into debating whether a questionable scene in a film depicts date rape as “acceptable,” our time would be better spent finding ways to reach out to the women of the younger generation and educate them about their own responsibility to themselves to make smart choices around alcohol and drug use, and the consequences — alcohol poisoning, accidental overdose, questionable sexual encounters, STDs, unwanted pregnancies — that can result from those choices.

Observe and Report is a great stepping-stone into raising alI of these issues with both women and men.  But the discussion needs to start with the assumption that both men and women have a responsibility to themselves to make intelligent, sober choices and to not put themselves into precarious situations to begin with, not by assuming that the entire burden of responsibility for the decisions a woman makes can be obliterated simply by her own choice to drink too much.

– by Kim Voynar

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon