A warning that this post discusses depictions of sexual assault and abuse. Please feel free to skip if such topics are triggering for you.
Not to sound like the voice over narration of a teen movie, but there are two types of people in this world: those who gravitate towards media about highly sensitive topics like rape and abuse, and those who don’t. I’d always thought of myself as firmly in the latter camp, though I can understand where those in the former are coming from – accruing knowledge as a protective measure, maybe, or some form of exposure therapy. Look down the barrel at some of the most egregious ways the people you love and the systems you live within can fail you. Train yourself not to flinch.
For most of my life I preferred not to look at all, which I know is a massive privilege. My pop culture sensibilities naturally fall along the lines of escapism and comfort, fantasies where the mythical creatures are love interests who don’t disappoint in the end (though sometimes there are dragons, too). When I’d inevitably run into plot lines about sexualized violence, it was usually on accident, like when I picked up Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life before a beach vacation in 2019 with just a brief skim of the deceptively benign back cover blurb.
So imagine my horror when I realized what I’d actually signed up for: 800 pages about a boy who’s abused – sexually, physically and/or emotionally – by nearly every authority figure in his life and whose trauma never loosens its stranglehold on him. “One of the themes of the book is this hope we all live with: that one other person can save us – and the realization that we really can’t be saved, that the idea of being saved itself is sort of a false conceit,” Yanagihara said in an interview with BookPage. Consider the message received.
I can’t think about A Little Life without remembering the sensory dissonance that made reading it feel all the more surreal. My fellow travelers and nature itself were playing their parts to a tee – waves crashing on the shore at my feet, gulls crying overhead, sunblock and sweat slowly sliding down my back, children shrieking with glee as they ran past – but the spirit of an idyllic beach vacation couldn’t penetrate the bubble of dread and heartbreak the novel had built around me. Even now I’m not sure what to make of the story and how it’s told. When does a narrative about rape and abuse become gratuitous? Where and how do you draw the line between being realistic and being exploitative of trauma? What do artists who use these issues as central themes in their work owe their audiences – hope for survival, a moral lesson, the truth, or nothing at all?
I’m thinking a lot about these questions again two years later because I’ve suddenly developed an interest in the types of stories I shied away from before. After gorging myself on a diet of exclusively feel-good TV to distract myself from the pandemic, I must’ve reached a limit and wanted something pointier and less charitable for a change. Whatever the reason, my media intake over the last month and a half has become a steady stream of the stories our culture tells itself about sexual assault and abuse – who perpetrates it, who survives it, how to live with the trauma and what forms accountability or justice can take.
I’ve been watching and listening to:
I May Destroy You, Michaela Coel’s masterclass of a HBO series about an up-and-coming writer who gets roofied and raped by a stranger while trying to meet her deadline. How she unravels the tangled knot of her memory and trauma forms the thrust of the series.
Promising Young Woman, Emerald Fennel’s vicious, startling directorial feature debut about a woman who’s essentially Veronica Mars for the grad school crowd. The protagonist puts her life on hold to become an avenging angel for her best friend, who was raped by one of the most popular men in their medical school class and soon after took her own life.
A Teacher, Hannah Fidell’s miniseries adaptation of her 2013 feature debut of the same name about an English teacher in her early 30s who grooms her 17-year-old student, enters into a sexual relationship with him and derails his life.
Lolita Podcast, Jamie Loftus’s interrogation of the cultural reverberations of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita in everything from pop psychology to Lana Del Rey’s career.
Here’s a pop culture confession for you: I’ve never read Lolita and I probably never will. Now that I’m a few months away from aging out of Leo DiCaprio’s dating pool (practically spinsterhood!), I think I’ve missed the window for having a much older boyfriend read passages of it to me in the park while I sit in his lap, a la Bradley Cooper and Suki Waterhouse. If I can’t have the authentic Men Explain Lolita to Me experience, then what’s the point?
I am willing to listen to a woman explain Lolita to me, though. Lolita Podcast has helped correct misconceptions I’ve had about the novel for years, mostly about Nabokov’s intentions in writing it in the first place and how the abuse is framed therein. Jamie Loftus clarifies that Nabokov never conceived of Lolita as anything close to a “love story” – just a deeply unreliable narrator’s delusion of one. Every time I think about how much of Lolita’s cultural legacy can be traced back to men’s inability to read critically I feel like my head is going to explode – how funny, how depressing, how fucking predictable.
It’s an objectively batshit take, to interpret a book about a grown man kidnapping and raping a 12-year-old child over and over again while she tries to escape him as “romantic,” but not a particularly surprising one when you consider the source. A lot of straight white men don’t have to, or particularly want to, approach reading as an exercise in empathy, in seeing the world through the eyes of a protagonist whose life experience and values might never intersect with their own. The literary canon is about them; they are the heroes of the most enduring American stories. So why should it be any different with Lolita and its manipulative narrator, Humbert Humbert?
But I still don’t think we can let Nabokov off the hook quite so easily. In the podcast's second episode, Loftus asks Nabokov scholar Dana Dragunoiu why the author wanted to explore such dark topics through the mindset of a perpetrator. Dragunoiu says that Nabokov didn’t approve of art that’s purely pedagogical, that delivers straightforward lectures about good and evil without any nuance or imagination. His stance takes on greater ideological and symbolic resonance, according to Dragunoiu, when you consider that he escaped from the Soviet Union as Lenin was starting to restrict art to telling cautionary tales and not much else. That’s all well and good, but why did rebelling against state censorship of art have to entail erasing the humanity of a child sex abuse survivor from his book? It’s not like his only options were After School Special or Confessions of a Pedophile. Good writing – inventive writing, challenging writing – is what separates art from PSAs. On that, Nobokov and I agree. I just think it wouldn’t hurt to be a little more thoughtful about whose pain and subjectivity we’re encouraged to take on as our own.
If you haven’t read Lolita, like me, you might not know that there isn’t even a character named Lolita in the novel. Dolores Haze is a 12-year-old girl; Lolita is what Humbert Humbert sees when he looks at Dolores. Generations of readers have taken this fictitious hallucination of “Lolita,” a precociously “seductive” child who’s somehow capable of giving consent, and made her name immortal instead of Dolores’s. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask why Nobokov’s novel is so easily distorted to justify harming the young women and girls whose plight he apparently was trying to draw attention to. The disconnect between his artistic intent and the public misinterpretation of it is certainly important to acknowledge. But so is the potential danger of taking on sexual assault and abuse as his artistic project while insisting on ethical ambiguity.
There aren’t any direct ties between Lolita and the other three pieces of media I listed above, but because I’ve been absorbing them concurrently I feel like they’re all in conversation with each other. A Teacher, for example, also features the perspective of a predator and depicts the unsettling slide into harmful intimacy between an underage person and an older authority figure. There are key choices that A Teacher makes, however, that mark the distance we’ve traveled in understanding child psychology and sexual assault since Lolita – namely, the point of view of the survivor (Eric) is given as much screen time as the abuser’s (Claire). Eric’s inner life is explored alongside that of the woman who grooms and preys on him, from infatuation to guilt to self-hatred to finally understanding that his trauma isn’t his fault. Creator Hannah Fidell’s 2013 film of the same name ends when Eric is still a high school senior, right as Claire is caught by the authorities. With the series, Fidell zooms out to capture the fallout as well. But it seems as if Fidell is still more interested in how the abuse happened in the first place than in how the effects of such abuse might’ve reverberated in Eric and Claire’s lives for years afterward, so the ending feels unearned and a bit preachy. Points for effort, though.
Whereas A Teacher attempts to complicate the idea of what abuse looks like through the eyes of an abuser, Promising Young Woman and I May Destroy You place the focus firmly on the people whose lives fall within the blast zone of abuse. Both repudiate the notion that the edgiest, most subversive and psychologically complex stories you can tell about sexual assault and abuse belong to those who dole out the harm. Nothing about survival is clear cut – a fact that Promising Young Woman and I May Destroy You illustrate in provocative detail.
Episode six of Lolita Podcast gives a crash course in Lolita iconography and how misreads of the text have resulted in a lasting image of Lolita as a lollipop licking adolescent peering over a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses, a benign front for a preternatural siren who maliciously lures men to their doom. Promising Young Woman seems to play with this ultra-feminine, Lolita-esque aesthetic, presenting a candy-coated feast for the eyes that masks a bitter, teeth-shattering core. Cassie is stuck in a state of arrested development following a traumatic series of events: her best friend Nina was raped while black-out drunk and committed suicide after the school, her classmates and the legal system all failed her. Cassie dropped out in solidarity with Nina and, in the years since, her fury, grief and righteous thirst for vengeance have calcified into a hard shell. With pastel ribbons tied through her hair and a colorful Twizzler perpetually stuck in her mouth, Cassie has simply refused to grow up without Nina, forgetting her own 30th birthday until her parents remind her of it. As adulthood milestones pass her by, Cassie dedicates all her time instead to dismantling the rape culture that destroyed Nina, one complicit former classmate and self-proclaimed Nice Guy at a time. You want to fantasize about a sweet, pretty little thing whose rainbow nail polish might be hiding something more nefarious? Go ahead, Cassie seems to taunt, but you might not like what you find.
Just as Dolores is curiously absent from the text of Lolita, however, Nina is sidelined in Promising Young Woman. It’s the violation against her body and consent that forms the foundation of the film, but all we really know about Nina is her absence, which has come to define Cassie’s life. In Nina’s wake are the people who love and mourn her: Cassie, on a single-minded hunt for retribution, and Nina’s mother, who wants Cassie to stop digging up the past just to feel its sting anew. What would justice or vindication have looked like on Nina’s terms? We’ll never know because her pain has rendered her obsolete. And Cassie, who’s built an unholy shrine to Nina instead of a life of her own, seems to find her own destruction irresistible. Promising Young Woman paints a queasy portrait of survivorship – catharsis achieved through self immolation. Is having the last laugh worth it if you’re entirely consumed in the process of getting it?
I May Destroy You, which takes on similar issues of consent, closure and consequences, would probably say no. Inspired by the series creator, writer and star Michaela Coel’s real-life experience with sexual assault while trying to write season two of Chewing Gum, I May Destroy You follows protagonist Arabella as she tries to uncover the hazy details of her assault and figure out how she’s supposed to keep being a person through it all.
“Ego Death,” the final episode of the series, is one of the most singular, haunting TV-viewing experiences I’ve ever had – in part because it asks the viewer to consider and reconsider what type of ending you find plausible or rewarding or correct. It’s delightfully meta to watch Arabella, as Michaela Coel’s avatar, try out different endings to her story by taping index cards to the plot map on her bedroom wall and envisioning how each scenario would unfold. There’s even a brief indulgence of the type of rape revenge fantasy teased in Promising Young Woman, where the female vigilante reclaims power and control in an explosive moment of violent release. But I May Destroy You knows just as well as Promising Young Woman that such fantasies can yield only hollow victories. A brief coda follows the parade of discarded index card endings; Arabella has moved beyond the walls of her room, the narrative obligation for a tidy conclusion left unanswered. What this final episode showcases with such grace is that the fantasy of closure itself is intangible, ever-shifting and frequently unsatisfying. There’s no way around trauma but through it. Maybe that’s a more imaginative way to tell stories about sexual assault and abuse – the getting through it, rather than the getting even.