LAUGHING ABOUT RAPE

Can laughing about rape change rape culture?

Reality Check

“I’m a very special Holocaust survivor. I was in the camps with my wife and my girlfriend; and believe me, it wasn’t easy.”

Jack Polak recites parts of his Holocaust testimony with a cheeky smile across his face. Jack—a young, Dutch, married, Jewish man—had fallen in love with Ina—the other woman. And even deportation to a Nazi camp couldn’t get in the way of their passionate affair.

Jack and Ina’s story is the heart of the documentary Steal A Pencil For Me. I teach the film because it reminds us that the Nazis and their collaborators didn’t commit atrocities in a vacuum; the Nazis persecuted and murdered ordinary people who were trying to live ordinary lives. As Jack grins, we smile along and sometimes laugh gently at the complicated reality of his Holocaust experience.

So when I first watched the short film Meet My Rapist (you can watch it here) by director-writer-actor Jessie Kahnweiler, my uncomfortably-amused response felt comfortably familiar.

Confronting Rape

Interested in how we can engage young people and the public in questions about human rights—which includes confronting rape, sexual violence, misogyny, and rape culture—I invited Jessie on a video date. And she said yes!

It was your usual chatter. Y’know... filmmaking, humor, rape, “Holocaust survivor speed-dating,” that sort of thing.

I asked Jessie about using comedy to draw attention to rape culture. “What feels natural to me is using comedy to trick people into giving a shit,” she explained. “I wasn’t like 'I wanna make a rape comedy, like let’s really stir it up,' I wanted to fucking deal with my rape and this is how I deal with it.”

So the film is a form of testimony? I asked her.

“It had been eight years since I’d been raped. And I felt like I’d done everything I was supposed to do. Therapy, y’know—. You could supplement any other kind of trauma or skeleton or stuff people don’t wanna deal with. The film is about me confronting my own denial, and how I’ve moved through all these steps of healing. In this effort to be this strong feminist chick, I forgot to just be.”

Bubble Wrap

I told Jessie why I thought her film works so well as an educational device. In one scene, Jessie brings her rapist home to meet her parents. In another, Jessie’s rapist gatecrashes a job interview and distracts her by popping a sheet of bubble wrap. At the heart of the film is the reality that rape and the aftermath of rape are ever-present. “Will you stop it?! Just stop it!” Jessie snaps.

Moments within the film are so jarring, and the script is so embarrassingly funny, that the viewer is forced to consider how we, collectively, think about and talk about rape and sexual violence. “I was like raped, but I wasn’t like raped,” Jessie smiles apologetically.

“You laugh because you’re uncomfortable,” Jessie explained to me. And I was reminded of teenagers who laugh at photographs of open mass-graves and naked women about to be shot. Laughter indicates surprise and shock and the failure of expectations—and learning.

The 'R' Word

As the film builds, its unexpected scenes reveal questions that survivors of rape rarely ask out loud, in part because our culture of “first-world rape” (as Jessie put it) and victim-blaming and misogyny force survivors to keep their memories and trauma hidden from view. “What’s my rapist doing now?” Jessie wondered out loud. “And does he remember me? And how the fuck am I gonna get over him?”

Rape is taboo.

I toured Auschwitz last summer, I told Jessie, and an employee of the museum told us that Auschwitz tour guides are explicitly discouraged from talking about sexual violence in the camp.

In Meet My Rapist, Jessie Kahnweiler does the opposite. The film’s genius lies within Jessie’s bravery and audacity to say out loud what we’ve been trained to keep silent. “No one here wants an angry woman,” the interviewer warns her. “Because honey,” her therapist smirks, “Nobody wants to marry a rape victim.”

Responses

I asked Jessie about the public’s response to the film.

“I’ve gotten both positive and negative feedback. Some people just don’t get it,” she said, accepting that the film doesn’t speak to everyone. “What I’m most interested in as a filmmaker is how people think the way they do and why they believe certain things. In terms of rape culture, people are like, 'Rape is really bad.' But we’ve gotta open up the conversation. The fact that people are offended by the title Meet My Rapist—now that’s a fucking problem.”

When Jessie talked about the thanks she continues to receive from other survivors of rape, it became clear that the power of Meet My Rapist has even surprised its filmmaker.

“I mean, you wanna talk about the greatest moment of my life? The email from a rape victim. Or the guy who is a father of three who had been molested. I’m being honest about my shit, and it connects with people and helps them heal. As personal as it is, it feels like this issue is so much bigger than me.”

Throughout our conversation, it was obvious that Jessie doesn’t have a particular message or specific agenda. “I don’t have any of the answers. But in my work, the fun is in asking the questions.” Jessie wants people to think and reflect. “I don’t wanna tell you how to feel about the film. That’s your job, to be honest,” she said with a smile. “Sit with it. Be uncomfortable. Do some work.”


Interview with Jessie Kahnweiler, director of Meet My Rapist, December 3, 2013.

This is the first part of a series on teaching about rape culture. Read part two, here: Getting Teens To Talk About Rape

A SECRET MAP

For the last couple of years, I’ve been working on my first novel, TRAIN, a historical thriller for young adults, based on real events.

Lost In Berlin

A while back, eager for honest feedback, one of my readers suggested I do a better job with the novel’s “logistics of space.”

The Roma and Jewish teenagers at the heart of TRAIN are fleeing their homes. They crawl through the back gardens of Berlin and cower in damp basements. But, in an earlier draft, I hadn’t yet painted a clear picture of those houses, streets, and hiding places.

Despite chases across the city, I’d left out journey times across Hitler’s capital. I was depriving my characters—and my readers—of directions, times of day, proximity to key landmarks.

I’d paid lots of attention to character arcs and plot, and I’d ensured historical accuracy, but I hadn’t provided enough details of Nazi Germany to make those ten days in early 1943 come alive.

Writing From Photographs

I needed to get to know the geography of Berlin. But during the early writing phase, I was nervous to read beyond what was necessary for historical research, mostly because I didn’t want the descriptive prose of other writers to influence my own writing style or my characters’ voices.

First, I browsed photographs. Online searches brought up vivid black and white images of Berlin’s monuments and parks. Tram tracks embedded in the cobblestones crisscrossed and split, weaving themselves between grand buildings from which Swastika banners hung, dead, in the winter air.

I got the hang of describing the novel’s spaces. But I still needed to include journey times and directions for my characters’ routes of escape.

Finding My Way

I’d visited Berlin once before, but only for a week or so. I didn’t have a good sense of the city. There was no map in my head.

I searched online for precise directions—by foot—from the Moabit neighborhood to Charité Hospital; then directions—by car—from the Jewish Community Center on Rosen Street to Marzahn, the site of a Nazi camp for Roma families.

From my laptop screen to my head and into my manuscript, my characters began to find their way.

I created a single online map. On the map, I marked every event of my novel’s plot. And every home and workplace belonging to my central and minor characters. Every front step. Every meeting place. Every escape path, from Hackesher Market to St. Hedwig’s Cathedral, from Gestapo-raided homes to improvised hiding places.

I downloaded an up-to-date satellite image of the terrain; the ultimate bird’s-eye view of Berlin.

A Secret Map

But I had a problem. I’d superimposed Nazi-era history onto a contemporary landscape. My manuscript and I were full of doubts.

Did certain streets and public parks even exist in 1943? Had the West German or East German governments in post-war Europe moved a road? A bridge? Which neighborhoods had witnessed war up-close? Which buildings had the British warplanes destroyed?

When I noticed Google Earth’s “historical imagery” icon, I literally gasped and danced around my living room.

As if uncovering the key to a hidden passageway, caught in a sudden Internet-trance, I found myself sliding the years back to 1943 and staring in amazement at an aerial photograph of war-torn Berlin.

Comparing the modern-day map with this digitized historical artifact (the 1943 aerial photograph was likely taken from a British fighter plane), I discovered redirected streets and old buildings. I zoomed in on strange unfamiliar shapes. To figure out what they were, I compared search engine results with old-fashioned printed books in my home library.

I found that I’d placed the secret meeting place of two central characters, Alexander and Marko, close to a Nazi watchtower. I’d positioned the home of Elise and her fragmented Nazi family within walking distance of The Fountain of Fairy Tales. I realized that the British had bombed St. Hedwig’s Cathedral on the same day as a key turning point of my story.

Altered Fates

Just as some roads and houses of Berlin had been moved and rebuilt over seventy years, the plot of my historical thriller began to shift.

Tsura, a young Roma woman and anti-Nazi dissident, must now avoid certain cross-streets for fear of running into German soldiers.

Ruth, a Catholic girl dreading the deportation of her Jewish stepbrother, now becomes exhausted and pessimistic after a long trudge uphill as she passes bombed landmarks and houses that are still burning.

In moments of fear and reflection, the teenagers are now drawn to places of their childhoods. My rewriting of the story to reflect the nuances of history altered my characters responses, their decisions, and ultimately their fates.

While the key historical events of TRAIN stand in place, its fictional teenagers have become more real, their actions more credible. The precise moments, movements, and twists of the story are now more satisfying, more authentic, more compelling (to me, at least!).

As I work to finish editing my manuscript, I expect to discover a few more secrets of Holocaust history that, I hope, will surprise my future readers and, I know, will surprise me, too.