Irreversible: This Won’t Help Alex

Warning: Spoilers

Irreversible is a film known for its controversial scenes depicting brutal violence and rape. The film is done in reverse chronological order, showing the revenge before the reason for it. It opens with the two male leads Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and Pierre leaving a gay club, unsubtly named Rectum; Marcus has a broken arm and both are being arrested as men around them shout homophobic insults, telling them they will be raped in prison – a place that men incorrectly assume is the only place they might be raped and also perhaps the only time they fear it. We are then shown the reason for their arrest, they were trying to find a man named Le Tenia and they find a man they assume might be him and after he prepares to rape Marcus – an apparently go to response – his friend Pierre takes a fire extinguisher and brutally beats his head to a pulp. The film very clearly shows this violence, which is in contrast to previous scenes where the camera refused to really focus on anything in particular.

Then the film keeps going backwards, showing them being racist to a taxi driver and abusive to prostitutes in their effort to find the club and the subject of their revenge. As the film goes further backwards we see the two men stood, just having been questioned by the police, looking shocked and horrified; they are approached by two men who tell them they can find the man who hurt their friend and that they will help them find and hurt him. The revenge is framed as something they would not get if the man is simply arrested, which implies that revenge is needed full stop. One of the men says that prison is not enough because he will be fed and clothed yet actually it is unlikely the man who did it would actually go to prison. Rape is a crime that very often does not result in conviction, most times it isn’t even reported due to the pervasive, very much not mythical, rape culture that exists in patriarchal societies.

Next we meet Monica Bellucci’s character Alex and we see her choose to go through an underpass rather than cross France’s roads – which can be hard to cross due to many parallel roads and little traffic lights or places to cross. As she is walking through the tunnel she sees a man beat a transwoman, who we have met earlier as a prostitute. The man then turns on Alex, stopping her from leaving and he quickly takes out a knife. He forces her to the ground and then anally rapes her for a scene that lasts for nine notorious minutes. During this scene the camera is sat on the floor, never moving from looking at Alex’s face during what is a brutal, disgusting scene. I agree with a reviewer on the BBC who described it as being indefensible. In researching this film I did find many men saying that they watched the film for this scene, and that yes it was to masturbate to.

Moreover, many reviews of this film have described the violence of this scene as making it akin to pornography; that alone is a very, unfortunately apt, description of the sexual violence that a vast majority of pornography is – though many will attempt to tell you that that’s not true (they’re lying). It is very worrying that these male reviewers first response to seeing a brutal rape depicted, however, is for them to compare it to what I assume is the pornography they have watched. It is a long scene, it is harrowing to watch, and there is no way in the world that a rape victim/survivor should ever watch this scene; it is the definition of why the phrase trigger warning exists. I definitely think there are misogynistic men out there who will happily watch and masturbate to that scene and I also think that they will not stop having an erection when he kicks her repeatedly in the face or when her face is smashed into the concrete floor but that those men would keep on masturbating.

It is this equation with violence and porn, entwined with what is more perversion than sex, is what causes many problems for women. After the rape we see Alex dancing, moments before she leaves and is attacked, with some friends at a party. She is dancing sensuously against her female friends and it would not surprise me that those same misogynistic men would sit and glare at the way that she is dancing; that every move of her hips would be used against her – used as evidence that she caused her own rape. Even Roger Ebert, along with other reviewers, described her clothing when she was raped; he made sure to explain he understands that women should be able to wear whatever they want but that her dress was ‘unwise’.

Yet the man who raped Alex was gay. This is not I feel, as some has said, homophobic but accurate; not that all gay men rape women but some do – in the same way that straight men rape men. This is because rape is nothing at all to do with sexual attraction but instead with entitlement, with power and with violence. After he has raped her the man goes on, whilst kicking her, about how she is entitled, how she thinks she is beautiful and therefore above him; yet he knows nothing about her, has never met her before and she barely said more than ‘let me go’. This is because he does not care about her, he does not care about women but instead he hates them, and has an idea in his head of how they are. He thinks she is there to be used and abused and it is important to note that misogyny, whilst entangled with sexual objectification and violence, is not only for those men who find women sexually attractive.

The irony that a man who felt entitled to her body thinks that she is entitled herself is not lost on the film; neither is the irony that violence just begets more violence and that it doesn’t solve a damn thing. However, many reviewers, and I feel the director himself, are simply happy to quote the film – Time destroys everything- and think that that is that. That the rape itself is predestined, that it is an inevitable aspect of life and particularly of women’s lives and I think that is simply not true; I like to think that men are capable of a bit more than that. But at the moment men don’t seem to think they are and I think Vincent Cassel was right in an interview where he said that the reason for this film is to show that men are animals, that they are the ones who destroy women, and that they need to stop.

The film gives us a spectrum of male entitlement and male violence and I feel that it is exactly that spectrum that ends in rape, and props up a world where rape is seen as an inevitable potential event in women’s lives. Marcus is Alex’s current boyfriend whilst Pierre is her ex and both throughout the film treat her like an object that they own; their revenge is done because her rape hurt them – one man who promises to help them find them even says ‘you think it will never happen to you’ even though it didn’t happen to them but to her.

They touch her body constantly and this is especially creepy when it is Pierre doing the touching; his hands are on her face repeatedly, stroking her, and he even says that he simply wants to watch her dance. It is said by Marcus that Pierre hasn’t been sexual in a while and then is perhaps implied that is because he is still in love with Alex – further reinforced by the fact that despite trying to be a calming influence on Marcus’ drug fuelled revenge he is the one who actually murders who he thinks had raped her. We also see a scene where they are all boarding a train and are discussing sex, and largely sex with her. Pierre repeatedly tries to coax the couple into talking about their sex life and even continues to do so when they are all in front of other passengers on the train. At one point during the conversation Alex seems to stop wanting to talk and closes her eyes, Cassel’s arm round her neck in what is meant to be an affectionate gesture; this is then followed by Pierre talking over her when she tries to tell him that he needs to focus more on his own pleasure in bed. Pierre seems to take this as an affront, perhaps trying to say that this is what men are told they are meant to do – put women first, and focus on giving them pleasure; yet this simply results in a stressed out partner who is too in their own head. A commenter on this film described her as ‘coldly’ saying this to Pierre and said that this made her an unsympathetic character and that it made them hard to care about the fact she was raped. The film uses her talking about sex, her being naked in an intimate setting, and even her showering to show that she is a sexual being and misogynistic men, as I have said, will use this all as things that caused her to be raped; which is of course illogical and ridiculous because her rape was caused when the man decided to rape her and that is it.

The film shows the horror first and then gives you an hour to think about it and how it impacts her life. We see her discovering that she is pregnant, a baby we assume she has lost after the rape due to its violence, and it is tainted by the fact we know that her life is now changed by her rape. It implies that her happy life, her partying with her friends, and her intimate moments in the shower are now gone because of the horror that we have seen her experience. I feel that this is true for many rape victims – that their lives are changed in a long lasting way due to their experiences, and I think it is something that many depictions of rape gloss over. I very much disagree that rape should be shown on film and TV, that it is often gratuitous and, as it is partly in this film, that often the focus of the rape is on the men in the women’s life and not her; but to a degree this film does show the impact that rape has on people’s lives – past and present.

However due to the spectrum of male violence this film displays we know that the racist, homophobic, quite sexist, drug taking boyfriend who, as Alex says, can be good (aren’t all racist, homophobic, sexists *sigh*) will not be able to even remotely be there for her after her traumatic event. Marcus and Pierre will be in prison for murder and that is that. They will presumably be there for a long time, it was an event with lots of witnesses and in a world that cares so little about women the fact it was done in the name of protecting a rape victim will not matter at all and nor should it.

So now Alex will, hopefully, wake up out of her coma to find her body brutally broken and her support network in prison. She will have to heal, physically and mentally and emotionally, as much as possible with no boyfriend or best friend; I hope that this fictional character has other friends, meets better men, and has a loving family who will not blame her for her own rape like many sadly and ignorantly do. She even has to recover from losing a child she had barely known existed without the father due to his own violent actions. For violence is pointless, revenge is pointless, and it is all as unsatisfying as the fact that in the end they murdered the wrong man.