Victimhood in I Spit on Your Grave

Both this film and Texas Chainsaw Massacre just STOP after the climax is reached. Leatherface is left twirling his chainsaw in the air and Jennifer smiles as she drives away after killing her final tormentor. These endings, both in their abruptness and in the parallelism of their imagery (one ends with the male victimizer still alive and the woman crying whilst being rescued, while the other ends with all villains slain and the woman smiling after she carries out her own vengeance) fascinate me to no end. 

I am wondering how I Spit on Your Grave works in terms of Carol Clover’s conception of the slasher film, which is most comfortably embodied by TCM as we have discussed. Grave complicates this conception, and I am not quite sure what to make of it, so I apologize in advance if I say something thoughtless in this post. Is Jennifer the slasher? Or are her eventual victims? Who does the targeted male audience identify with? In terms of the male audience, I would say there is a double identification that happens during the castration scene, because they are rooting for Jennifer to get her revenge but repulsed by the sight of the castration. Although, as I think we talked about, there is a certain level of sado-masochistic pleasure to be wrought from that sequence on the part of the male viewer witnessing the penis-removal, so how does that complicate the identification? 

Jennifer is both victim and victimizer in a way we don’t usually see in the Final Girl trope. The horror she suffers is very much rooted in real world experience, while it is easier to disconnect from something like Friday the 13th or any other film with the slasher-as-monster. This is especially complicated in the scene where she kills Matthew, her first victim. I feel as though the intention on the part of the filmmakers was for the audience to actually feel pity for Matthew since it is clear he doesn’t really understand what is happening throughout the film, which makes him both victim and victimizer as well. The other men can barely be called victims since their deaths are unquestionably deserved. Again, I am not sure what to make of this in terms of Clover’s theories, except that Matthew represents thwarted masculinity in a certain sense, in a similar way that Sally’s brother in TCM also does, except that he is an innocent, while Matthew is not. Matthew is castrated in a way as well, right up until his final moments at least, but it is not Jennifer who does the castrating, it is his friends. 

I may return to this post and add to it, but for now that’s all I’ve got. Thanks for reading.