Truth is Scarier than Fiction
Blink Twice and Gisèle Pelicot: Revenge, "Justice," or a Secret Third Option
TW: Sexual assault
A few months ago I was put into a group chat:
Would any of you be down for a movie tonight?
I would be down!
What movie
Lowkey there’s a couple I would see haha how do u feel about scary 👀
Blink twice would probably be my first choice!!
Is that the Zoe kravitz one? I don’t really like scary but I would be down to see blink twice
I heard it’s really good
To which I replied:
i hate scary movies but
(Yes, questionably enough, I do still have Auto-Capitalization turned off in my iPhone Keyboard settings. A vestige of my youth, I suppose.)
Yes i think Zoe kravitz wrote/directed and channing Tatum is in it!
But😏
I think it’s more thriller than scary
It’s described as “harrowing, funny, and twisted” lol
Okay I can do that
I discreetly pulled out my AirPods and Googled the trailer at my desk.
i would see it i think. it gives don’t worry darling
which did mentally disturb me and still does if i think about it too much but what am i gonna do live under a rock
also i miss y’all!!!!
And so it was decided. We cross-coordinated our respective schedules and departure sites to find the group’s optimal theater and showtime, debated which seats to reserve (G2-G4 at Lincoln Center AMC Auditorium 1), and dispatched our A-List Entourage invites.
Arriving the customary 10-15 minutes into the trailer sequence, we rushed through the concessions line (Small Popcorn and a Coke, duh) and sped-walked (in a cool way, of course) to our seats in the massive theater. The lights began to dim in all their Nicole Kidman glory and I felt a flutter of nervous anticipation for the “harrowing, funny, and twisted” ride I’d officially boarded.
It’s been weeks now and I’m still feeling quite psychologically thrilled by it.
Blink Twice —Zoe Kravitz’s directorial debut— follows protagonist Frida (Naomi Ackie), a strapped for cash cocktail waitress who’s in self proclaimed “need [of] a vacation.” The opening scene of the film depicts her sitting on the toilet, scrolling mindlessly through her phone.
Via her feeds, the audience is introduced to Frida’s personal social media presence —featuring elaborate, quirky DIY nail art she calls “aNAILmals”— as well as our antagonist, tech billionaire and playboy Slater King (Channing Tatum).
In an interview Frida watches with a silent smile, Slater is shown sitting comfortably beside a talkshow host, defending his character and expressing shallow remorse. The conversation hedges around an unspecified scandal of “regrettable behavior” which resulted in King’s stepping down as CEO of his company, and tacitly focuses instead on the interim since his fall from grace, wherein the young entrepreneur proudly reports he has purchased an island —is leading a slower life now, going to therapy, and giving back; the works. A reformed* playboy, then.
Frida shuts off the screen to get ready for work: this night, coincidentally, catering for a King-Tech gala.
After passing some hors d’oeuvres and being yelled at by her boss —standard service industry stuff— Frida’s roommate and best friend, Jess, (Alia Shawkat) reveals she’s brought floor length dresses to sneak into the party. Frida excitedly joins her friend in swapping the black aprons for black tie; the two don their rich people costumes and join the festivities for all of five minutes before Frida’s heel breaks, she falls dramatically to the floor, and none other than Slater King moves to help her up.
Holding her hand for stability and snapping off her good heel to even the pair out —in a moment that foreshadows the rest of the movie— King compliments Frida’s nails.
Swept up in being seen and chosen by the powerful, rich, and handsome man of the hour, Frida and Jess spend the night in league with King’s entourage. After hours filled with bubbles and butterflies, the starstruck cocktail waitresses prepare to retire back to their real, dismal lives with a wad of depleting cash tucked behind their bathroom mirror. To the women’s pleasant surprise (and the audience’s knowledge of the inevitable), after saying a quick goodbye, King trots back over and nonchalantly invites them to his island.
Chartering a private jet, arriving to a resplendent mansion, and being shown to rooms complete with all-white attire and personal vials of designer “Desideria” perfume, the first few shots of King’s island seem too good to be true… because they are.
Of course, only the audience —who watched the trailer, commuted to the theater, and paid to be thrilled— know this.
All lackadaisical days spent by the pool and hedonistic nights plied with alcohol and drugs, Slater’s island is seemingly exactly the vacation Frida dreamed of.
It’s in this gluttonous fashion that the cast live out their twisted version of a Groundhog Day simulation; having surrendered their cell phones to Slater’s personal assistant Stacy (Geena Davis) upon arrival, they are unaware of and largely unconcerned with how long they’ve been there.
Frida and her companions are contented to revel in the copious amounts of extravagance Slater’s provided until they start to notice suspicious inconsistencies in their memories. Frida begins to wake up with inexplicable dirt underneath her fingernails and stains absent from her clothing where she remembers them being the night before. Confused but determined to enjoy herself, she swallows her doubt and repeatedly assents with gratitude when Slater asks her: “Are you having a good time?”
It is Jess who finally breaks the unspoken rule of not asking any questions. After witnessing one of Slater’s staff brutally kill a snake on the property, the scale of her intuition tips away from a belief in her host’s general benevolence and goodwill.
Obviously, (and in a deus ex machina of the genre,) Jess must be the first to die.
Shortly thereafter, she is bitten by a snake one night while the rest of the group is partying, resulting in a sudden nosebleed and heightened paranoia. Cradling her injured hand, Jess tells Frida she wants to go home.
“Okay, let’s not go crazy.”
“Everybody is, like, smiling and laughing like 1960s fucking flight attendants. Like, ‘Are you having a good time?’
I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m having a great time.’
[cries] I’m scared, Frida.”
“I think you just need some sleep.”
“Don’t. No, no, don’t, don’t, don’t do that. Don’t do that.
[breath trembling] Can’t you feel it? There’s something wrong with this place.”
“What’s wrong? What’s wrong? I seriously want to know.
Is it the amazing food? Or the tsunami of champagne? Or is it the 1,020-thread-count fucking sheets? What is it?”
“You’re not listening to me.”
“Please. Please. For the first time in my life, I’m here. And I’m not invisible. So please.”
The next morning, Frida wakes up in her routine of blissful forgetting. Exploring the grounds in search of Slater, she runs into the aforementioned staff member —aptly titled “Badass Maid” (María Elena Olivares)— who offers her a mysterious, green substance to drink, muttering “red rabbit, red rabbit” as she does, but otherwise making no indication she speaks English.
Apprehensive but curious, Frida takes the liquid and begins to choke on it in disgust. Without hope of answers from the non-English speaking maid, she leaves in a confused rush to rejoin the rest of the group.
Back at the daily brunch, the men announce their plans to go fishing. Hungover and uninterested, the women propose “girl time” instead and the group agrees to split for the day.
Later, wearing face masks and arranging themselves in loungers around the pool, the women lazily pass around a lighter that Jess had been sharing with them throughout the trip. Noticing the bright yellow smiley face exterior, Frida suddenly realizes her friend is missing.
[lighter clicks] “Where’s Jess?”
More disturbingly, when she vocalizes this epiphany, no one else seems to remember Jess being there at all.
“What do you mean?”
“What do you mean, ‘What do I mean?’
Jess.”
“Who is Jess?”
From there, things begin to unravel quickly.
Back at her room, Frida’s ensuing mental breakdown is interrupted by a knock on her door. She opens it to a disturbed looking Sarah (Adria Arjona) who holds up the yellow smiley-faced lighter and flips it over to reveal a label— “Jess” scrawled in Sharpie.
The two become quick confidants, piecing together the fragments of their flawed memories —using their scrambled intuitions as glue. Neither know what day it is, how Sarah got the bruise on her arm, or why they don’t remember Jess.
“So you don’t think I’m crazy?”
“What’s crazy is that we got onto a plane with a bunch of dudes we don’t know.”
“I thought you all knew each other.”
“No. Cody just chatted me up at a coffee shop, just talking about how he knew Slater King.”
[stutters] “But Heather and Camilla, they know everybody, right?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, my God! What the fuck were we thinking?”
Oh, fuck! I knew it! I knew it! I knew it! I knew it!
I knew it was too good to be true. Of course they’re fucking with our heads because that’s what they do.
They distract us with these cute little outfits, and they shower us with raspberries and champagne.
But you know what? We know what’s really going on.
They are trying to control us. They’re trying to make us look crazy. And it’s working.”
Retracing what they know of Jess’s disappearance and their time on the island, Frida and Sarah realize the men are making them forget via the application of their gifted “Desideria” perfume. Slater said as much himself, ominously repeating like a riddled slogan: “Forgetting is a gift.”
They also uncover the amnesiac’s antidote: the green liquid Badass Maid gave to Frida —snake venom, which Jess herself was injected with before she conveniently went missing. Testing their theory, Sarah knocks a vial of the tonic back with the same difficulty Frida experienced, but sure enough: once ingested, the revolting liquid triggers nosebleeds and revelations. The women begin to remember the traumatic nightly activities of the trip.
Plotting to somehow save themselves, Frida and Sarah return to the pool and, through the guise of tequila shots, pump their peers with the corrective snake venom. The unsuspecting happy-go-lucky party girls effectively become ticking time bombs. Cheers.
Frida peels off to repossess their cell phones, desperately digging through Slater’s office despite the threat of the men’s impending return. In her search she accidentally uncovers a mountain of incriminating photos; hundreds of Polaroids similar to the ones the men have been compiling for the duration of their entire stay, except chronicling previous trips —documenting years of rowdy nights and brazen abuse of forgetting guests.
One of the guests pictured is a familiar looking cocktail waitress, with longer hair and different nails —these with tiny, hand painted red rabbits— but unmistakable all the same. The entire audience exhales in disbelief: Frida has been here before.
When the men return, Frida barely misses Slater’s discovery before rejoining the full party for their nightly feast. They gather around the grand table like they have every night for the past… unknown amount of time, and a last supper of sorts commences.
Frida and Sarah go through the motions of their normal routine, reluctantly accepting the men’s attentions despite their increasing flood of disturbing memories —flashes of Jess’s murder and screams for help during their sexual abuse among them. When Heather and Camilla begin to remember, well, that’s when shit really hits the fan.
After dinner the women pair off with their respective male counterparts, at first for a spontaneous dance party, and then, as individual realizations dawn, to enact their revenge. Utilizing whatever tools are at their disposal —a corkscrew, marble chess board, and sheer surprise— the women begin to pick off their assailants.
It was at this point in my viewing experience that I leaned over to my friends and (in complete opposition to my typical taste or interest) emphatically clapped, exclaiming: “Oh, it’s about to be a slasher film!”
It was about a week after seeing Blink Twice that I first heard of Gisèle Pelicot’s case.
A 71-year-old French woman who has made recent headlines for her survival story of prolific abuse, Gisèle Pelicot is currently testifying against 51 men who her (now) ex-husband is accused of inviting to sexually assault her while she was drugged and unconscious. Over the course of a decade, Pelicot repeatedly and unknowingly experienced sexual abuse at the hands of her husband of over 50 years.
I don’t think Zoe Kravitz could’ve written it if she tried.
It is so much worse than anything the human mind wants to imagine.
And still, the similarities are striking.
Blink Twice ends with the mansion burning to the ground.
Sarah and Frida, having survived their abusers, sit side-by-side and watch the site of their torture go up in smoke. Accompanying them in their moment of triumph is Slater laying unconscious in Frida’s lap; she pulled him from the fire, not allowing him to die. Sarah looks, through the smoke and shock, over to Frida and asks, “You sure you know what you’re doing?”
The film picks up some time later at another King-Tech gala. Dressed the part and seated at one of the roundtables instead of serving it, Frida is announced as Slater’s wife and the new CEO of his company. Beside her, Slater sits in a confused Desideria-induced haze; Frida keeps him in a state of forgetfulness using the same flower toxin he used on her and his other victims. What’s even more: she administers the amnesiac through his vape pen, to which he is addicted —classic.
In the ultimate rape revenge plot, Frida not only survived, but assumed control of the empire that once belonged to her assailant; stole the power he leveraged to control her and countless others. A woman with little to no means of affecting personal upward social mobility —her class vulnerability, arguably, being the very reason she was victimized— Frida takes advantage of the cards she was dealt.
She makes lemonade out of rotting lemons, inherited from a poisonous tree.
What compels me so much about this ending is that the audience knows the alternative. Frida and Sarah spell it out themselves, when putting the pieces of their reality together and coming to terms with their situation:
“We need to call the cops.”
“Yes.”
“We need to call the FBI.”
“Yes.”
“We need to call the cops and the FBI.”
“Okay, but wait.”
“What?”
“Wait, wait. Say we call the cops and the FBI, right?”
“Uh-huh…”
“And we’re, like, ‘Hi. Hello. Please send help. Slater King and his buddies are doing horrible things to us.’
They’re gonna be like, ‘What did they do?’
And we’re gonna be like, ‘Um… We don’t know. Cause they’ve been secretly erasing memories with perfume, I guess.’”
[gulps]
And the guys would be like, ‘What? We would never do that, other white guys we probably play golf with.’
And Heather and Camilla will be like, ‘Nothing but good times and fat fucking blunts over here, officer.’
And I’ll be like, ‘Come on, guys, believe women. Here is my friend’s lighter.’
And they’ll be like, ‘Sure thing. Of course. You crazy fucking bitch.’” [breath trembling]
While far fetched, Kravitz’s ending is the closest we get to righting the narrative. Because there is no plausible ending in which Frida truly wins, is there?
Her best friend has been murdered. She has been victimized not once, but twice by a rich, powerful, unrepentant man. No one will believe her.
And even if they did, the damage has already been done.
There is no possibility of “justice” —not in the system in which we know it. At best, we can achieve punishment: the removal of her assailant(s) from society; the degradation of their reputations, their quality of life, their freedoms.
And even then, we know these “corrections” don’t really apply to everyone. There will always be a slimy sheen of protection covering those with money, power, or status —those for which our faulty band-aid of carceral punishment just doesn’t stick.
And even then, say it did, and Slater King gets “put away.” Better yet, by these metrics, he gets sentenced to life in prison without parole. How does that improve the new material reality of Frida’s life? What healing, recovery, or repair does that accomplish? How would it help her at all?
Here is the beauty of fiction: we don’t have to play within the framework of what we know —especially when what we know, frankly, sucks.
Truth is scarier than fiction, but fiction is more satisfying. Frida gets revenge. What for Gisèle?
Pelicot is valiantly testifying against her assailants —all 51 of them, ranging in age from 26 to 74.
“On Wednesday, Ms. Pelicot said she had listened to wives, mothers and sisters of many of the accused describe them as ‘exceptional men’ who did not seem capable of rape.
‘Me, I had the same in my house,’ she said of her husband, telling the court that she had considered him the ‘perfect man.’
The lesson, Ms. Pelicot said, was clear: ‘A rapist is not someone in a parking lot at night.’”
What I know of sexual assault is this:
It is a crime of power which rarely happens as a result of random opportunity.
More often it is an inevitability; the obvious product of a host of power imbalances so pervasive that even with the best intentions, it is the probable outcome. With less than the best intentions, it is an inordinate weapon of mass oppression —one as old as the lemon tree itself. It’s difficult for consent to exist where equality does not.
It is also not anomalous; rape is not the exception to an otherwise successful, peaceful, and functioning society. It is a natural symptom of a deeply flawed system —the rot starts at the roots.
And the lemon tree —Patriarchy, if my extended metaphor is failing itself— has its most prolific harvests when women believe they are crazy, overreacting, or alone. The lemon tree thrives on a disproportionate distribution of belief: overly generous in men and lacking generosity for ourselves.
So, my view is that Gisèle Pelicot is making lemonade. She is using the faulty tools at her disposal to make an unthinkable wrong as right as she can muster.
And she is doing a damn fine job.
She has fought to make her case open to the public, sharing footage of her rapes and sexual abuses as incontrovertible evidence. Her trial is transforming how France —and the world— discusses sexual violence. She cites a belief in her own higher purpose: “I want victims of rapes to tell themselves, ‘If Ms. Pelicot did it, so can we.’”
Truth is scarier than fiction, and perhaps that’s what makes Blink Twice so thrilling: it skews uncomfortably —scarily— close to the real.
If I were to write a version, I’d want Gisèle and Frida to have better endings. More than revenge, or a grasp at “justice;” could there be a secret, third option?
One in which no one has to be a hero, or re-victimize themselves, or steal the master’s tools —resigned to the fact they’ll never dismantle his house.
Could there be a secret, novel, other possibility where women are believed? No, let’s dream big: where there is nothing to be believed over. —Where the canyon between gendered realities is not so wide we cannot shout across it; hear something intelligible; co-create a truly mutualistic exchange.
I suspect the answer is yes, probably, we just haven’t imagined it yet.
In the meantime, I suppose that is what fiction is for <3
“I hear lots of women, and men, who say, ‘You’re very brave.’
I say it’s not bravery — it’s will and determination to change society.”
—Gisèle Pelicot, testimony, October 23, 2024
More:
“Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State” by Catharine A. MacKinnon
“We Come from Old Virginia” from Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger edited by Lilly Dancyger
Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis
“The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” by Audre Lorde
https://www.innovatingjustice.org/areas-of-focus/restorative-justice
Unreallllll. 👏👏👏👏👏