Two Rapes
I rewatched Mountain King recently and I’ve been thinking a lot about the rape scene. It is interesting to compare Joan’s rape with a rape that occurred on The Sopranos, in which Dr. Melfi (played by Lorraine Bracco) was the victim.
While the two scenes have many obvious stylistic differences, they also share a very distinct impressionistic quality. By this I mean the way in which they are shot, edited and generally portrayed on-screen are important to the meaning behind these scenes and the importance each has in their respective shows.
Dr. Melfi’s scene is flagrantly violent, graphic and difficult to watch all the way through. We feel every ounce of her struggle with her attacker. By the end we’re exhausted. Parts of the scene and its aftermath are included in the clip below, starting at around 1:00 in.
The scene is the centerpiece of the episode, which focuses as much on the violation of Dr. Melfi, as on her quest for vengeance, and her relationship with Tony Soprano, her mob-boss patient. When she learns that her rapist was let go due to a technicality, she suddenly understands why some people utilize Tony’s services.
In the final scene, a bruised and swollen Dr. Melfi is seeing Tony for a session. He senses her anger and asks what’s wrong and if he can help. We know something that Tony doesn’t. We also know that if she told him what happened, he would execute her revenge, creating closure to her ordeal, exacting justice when the law was feable. In the end, Dr. Melfi keeps the incident from Tony, withholding satisfaction from herself and from the audience while at the same time upholding her own sense of right and wrong. It is a very tense, very raw scene … the very essence of deafening silence.
Naturally, the episode stirred a lot of controversy over the depiction of the rape, which took place in a parking garage stairwell. However I never agreed with the complaints because stylistically, it served a purpose.
When we learn that the rapist was set free, we feel Dr. Melfi’s anger. We feel the injustice as if it was happening to us. The emotional impact of the plot is heightened by having witnessed the depravity of the crime. Sympathy becomes empathy.
Without the emotional impact of the rape scene, everything else in the episode would be softened. By not giving the audience room to fill in any holes about the nature of the rape, by thrusting it in our face, we’re confronted with the injustice and cannot ignore her despair.
In MM’s Mountain King, the incident would today be considered “date rape.” In contrast to Dr. Melfi’s rape, Joan is submits to her violator, her fiancee Greg. Presumably because they are in an office, there is no screaming, no hard shoving, almost no noise whatsoever. We’re given an almost serene point-of-view angle from Joan, glossed over, dimmed, deadened.
The aftermath of this incident, in the context of Mad Men, is much less expressive, far more subtle than in the Sopranos. They go on their date. The incident is probably not spoken of. Her abandoned flowers the only symbol of what just occurred – and only for the audience to recognize.
The style of the scenes match the respective consequences that ensued. Dr. Melfi expressed her rage, and we identified with it because we felt the violence. Joan’s (thusfar) muted response reflected the way her rape occurred. This is in keeping with the art of the series.
These incidents may not be notable if not for the pre-existing link between these landmark shows. Neither show invented the rape scene on television. However knowing that the link exists encourages us to compare them in relation. The same crime shown very differently in very different contexts.
Sopranos (very graphic scenes)
Mad Men – Mountain King
June 15th, 2009 at 11:34 pm
I was thinking about Mad Men, and television in general (on a long road trip–almost too much time to think!) and how engaging, when it’s really good, it can be. And then I thought of Don telling Peggy that it isn’t sex that sells–it’s you *feeling* something. And horrific as these scenes both were, they definitely make you feel exactly what the characters feel. With Dr. Melfi, pure anger, hatred, need for revenge. And with Joan, you feel her quiet pain so exquisitely that you not only know that she SHOULD leave that ***hole, but also why she never would. It’s horrible, but you understand completely.
June 16th, 2009 at 1:24 am
What I found most interesting about these scenes is that the slow, subdued rape of Joan, with it’s long, drawn out sequence is far more painful and difficult to watch than the choppy, quick cuts that comprise Dr. Melfi’s sequence. I never saw this episode of The Soprano’s, so I don’t know if that’s how it actually appeared in the show. I could see how someone might become desensitized to violence if presented over and over this way, because eventually, you just tune it out. The quick edits and jump cuts eventually become tiring to watch, and thus meaningless — you don’t process or ponder any of the information because it moves so swiftly. With the slow, drawn out sequence, you watch, you absorb, and you suffer. It’s as bad on subsequent viewings as it was the first time you saw it. As horrendous as both these scenes were, I might be able to eventually watch the episode with Dr. Melfi’s assault. I can’t ever watch Joan’s rape again. I don’t want to.
I hate, hate, HATE. When film makers resort to rape because it forces us in the audience to be voyeurs to it. To witness it and do nothing about it. It makes me feel like I’m an accessory or accomplice to it. And I have to accept it like…this is okay. It’s not.
June 16th, 2009 at 3:44 am
I produced THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE SOPRANOS promo below above, and am honoured to have it featured here on BoK. I’ve never pondered the parallels between these rapes before because they are presented in such different contexts. So I love the astute observation that the style of scenes matches the respective consequences that ensued.
Joan’s rape is perhaps even more curious because it doesn’t strike me as “rape” in any overt way. It is undeniably an unwarranted, uninvited, heinous act by Joan’s fiance (who himself is clearly confused and out of his depth considering their previous bedroom scene), but my feeling is were we to ask Joan herself if she was raped, she wouldn’t say she was. Indeed, Matthew Weiner has stated (in an interview I cannot find right now, but read on a TV critic’s blog) that Joan was not raped. What transpired in Don’s office is something more like what happens in real world relationships every day, which in a way makes it even more tragic and heinous than Melfi’s shocking carpark attack. So do you think Joan thinks she was raped? Why, or why not?
#2: “I hate, hate, HATE. When film makers resort to rape because it forces us in the audience to be voyeurs to it. To witness it and do nothing about it. It makes me feel like I’m an accessory or accomplice to it. And I have to accept it like…this is okay. It’s not.”
THE SOPRANOS is widely criticized for its sex and violence – almost none of it gratuitous – despite the entertainment graveyard being filled with shows that offer nothing BUT sex and violence. It actually manages something far more complex by presenting violence in a realistic way. One of the finest aspects of the series is presenting violence for what it really is: brutal, with very real consequences, and made all the more shocking by interrupting the mundane daily lives of its characters. What is so compelling about Dr Melfi’s rape is that we all viewers are outraged at these turn of events, and are all rooting for her to tell Tony about her vicious attack. The justice system has failed her, we do not want (nor expect) this “Employee of the Month c*cksucker” allowed to walk free, destined to rape again. We are literally shouting at the screen for her to tell Tony, who is very protective of Melfi…
**Sopranos spoilers follow**
And there is the interesting part – in wanting to take the law into our own hands, in satisfying our thirst for revenge, there becomes no difference between our actions and those of a multiple murdering crime boss. Actress Lorraine Bracco noted that so many people came up to her on the street angry that her character did NOT tell Tony. And this where THE SOPRANOS offers profound moral ambiguity and becomes such a relevant, modern-day morality tale: we claim to condone the Tony Sopranos of this world, but when you think about it, what bright line can we draw between our actions and his? Is it moral to convince people that they should buy something they don’t really need? Or to increase profits by employing children at low wages abroad? We’re all guilty, and so none of us are guilty – anyway, it’s all relative, isn’t it? In our heart of hearts, we want the Tony Sopranos of this world to roll up their sleeves and do the dirty work; “You gotta do what you gotta do.”
For a great in-depth analysis of Melfi’s rape in THE SOPRANOS, listen to the discussion between Lorraine Bracco and Dr. Glen Gabbard (author of the bestseller THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE SOPRANOS) at the NPR website: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1148651 (Real Player required). This is really one of the finest storylines THE SOPRANOS and still widely debated between fans today; I’m equally curious about the rape in MAD MEN, because my bet it will go unmentioned for the rest of the series, only presented in context of visual cues from Joan to her new husband.
June 16th, 2009 at 8:40 am
The Sopranos rape felt really real and painful to watch, I still remember that ep.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:18 am
Lyle, Joan was raped. I don’t know what you think Matt Weiner said, but Joan was raped. He told us that he was very conscious of not having it appear in any way sexy, only violent.
But frankly, we did not need Matt to give us his personal assurance. Because it was so obviously an act of violence.
She said no. She fought. That is rape.
The added tragedy is that she does not at all understand that she was raped. But it was no less a rape than Dr. Melfi’s. Or say, all the real rapes of all kinds that are perpetrated every day.
Matt at our S2 finale party:
Several BoK discussions on the matter:
Here, here, and here.
I want to be clear that there is no debate.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:41 am
Lyle – I would double-check your source on MW’s comments on this topic. There’s very little interpretation necessary.
To Matt’s comments, it really goes toward the built-in cognitive dissonance of the show. Joan most certainly doesn’t think she was raped. But she may know she was assaulted. But in those days it was considered impossible for a husband to rape his wife, and similarly so between two engaged adults.
The look on Joan’s face after the attack says it all. She’s forlorn and quiet, indicating she’s still processing what happened. But as a contemporary audience, we can rightly project on the scene and the characters, since it was objectively the same as what happened to Dr. Melfi.
Joan has the foundation of self-respect not to emerge from Don’s office perky and blithe to the proceeding incident. Nor does she have the benefit of a society awakened to sexual violence to validate her feelings of violation.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:42 am
I sarcastically mentioned elsewhere that Joan staying with her rapist was a good decision, because he’s a doctor. Rapist is my description for him, if not Joan’s. I don’t think she saw it that way, just that he — in the simplest terms possible — hurt her.
I think it’s natural to deny the things you can’t change, the things you don’t wish to face. Joan can’t change being violated, so she doesn’t call it that — nor would a lot of women at that time. If she faces the truth of it, she has give up the (false) security he represents. That’s why she probably labels it as a minor infraction. She has to forgive it so that she can not rock the boat, and the only way to forgive it is to make it a misdemeanor.
Some day, hopefully when Joan is in a good relationship, she can give it its real name and see it for what it was. (I say, as if she’s “real.”)
June 16th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
I stand corrected. For this viewer it was not as black and white as others saw it — marred by the fact that both Joan, and her fiance, would not have deduced “rape.” Only by contemporary standards is it so, which is not the world of MAD MEN. Also, I think Joan and Doctor’s bedroom scene is a deliberate percursor to what transpires here, and cries out for interpretation. As I see it, Joan calming his anxiety/inadequacy over her own sexual prowess sets in motion his asserting power and control in Don’s office, which is exactly what rape is all about. Just as Joan comforms to gender patriarchy of the day, so too must her fiance. I am NOT making excuses here – like you say, rape is rape – but MAD MEN takes pains to point out in several ways it “must be hard being a man too.”
June 16th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Lyle,
I think what most are saying here is that Joan doesn’t call it rape, but we would today because women have made progress. What you seem to be thinking is that the people who feel that way are indulging in revisionism. However, revisionism isn’t possible for a show that is currently in production and is meant to be filtered through modern day sensibilities.
Joan’s inability to call it rape is not because there’s a gray area, but because she has neither the frame of reference nor the support of society which would allow her to match the label to the experience.
It’s not unlike an child who is abused by someone she knows, but hasn’t the words to express it, because the rules are about not talking to strangers. Strangers hurt, strangers rape, but people you love and trust and who have power over you don’t do that — so whatever just happened is something else.
I am fully amenable to the message that it’s hard being a man, too, but this is not a circumstance that I could reasonably label an example of that. What made him feel sexually inadequate was the threatening concept that Joan was more experienced — that his woman was more the man in the relationship. While there were societal reasons for why he would feel that way, his reaction was to punish Joan.
If both of them are victims of rigid gender roles, then the punishment wasn’t anywhere near equal. He got to prove his manhood and vent his rage, and she got violated.
June 16th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
The fact that Joan wouldn’t call it rape doesn’t make it less of a rape; it only makes it more of a tragedy. What makes it even MORE of a tragedy is that there are still people today who think there is a question.
June 16th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
There is. NO. QUESTION.
I hope no one minds if I go off on a rant here, but may I please clarify — hopefully for the last time — that there is, again, no such thing as “practically raped”?
This brings my cable total of rape surprise scenes, last night, to three:
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2009/06/weeds_dead_mom_walking.html
Context: These two characters, Nancy and Esteban, are dating. Nancy has in the past dealt drugs from her suburban home. It’s not clear whether she still does. Esteban, her boyfriend, is a Mexican drug lord and the mayor of Tijuana, and the father of her unborn child. Last season, Nancy told a friend in the DEA about an underground tunnel between Mexico and California, where she lives. Esteban’s people suspect she is the one who told.
In the final scene of last night’s episode, she confronts him at his office after drinking and eating sushi, and asks him if he’s going to kill her. He says he hasn’t decided. Decide, she says, and hands him his gun.
He responds by raping her. Then he says that she “doesn’t dictate the terms” of their arrangement. (Duh.)
After that scene last night, I felt: ambushed. Cheated. Stupid. Angry. And I saw, for the first time, what a very male channel Showtime (“Nurse Jackie” notwithstanding) is.
I think what is making me angry is this clear evidence, still, of public and media-sanctioned cognitive dissonance. Maybe I didn’t really hear Nancy say no; surely, of course, she and Esteban are dating. But what else I know about these things is that THEY DON’T MATTER. There are things people just can not do to one another. Rape is one. And that was rape.
I feel pretty sick about this, actually.
June 16th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
The most successful couple that General Hospital ever had was Luke and Laura. Their “romance” started when he raped her. He thought he was going to die, leaving little time for romance. Laura’s husband sorta, kinda implied she’d liked it. The writers referred to it as a forced seduction, but that was a euphemism if ever there was one.
The actor who played, plays, Luke said that they could call it whatever they wanted, but he played the role as a man who had raped a woman and who was always trying to make it up to her.
This was the early eighties. Both the principle actors left, only to return. When they returned, they did so with a teen son in tow. Rumors began that they were going to revisit the rape storyline minus the euphemistic terms for it.
Luke and Laura’s son’s friend — Elizabeth — was raped in the park. Lucky found her and brought her home, and Luke (hello, subtext, my old friend) startled her.
Lucky spends weeks struggling with what happened to his friend, questioning his father on what kind of sicko got off on doing that to a woman. You know, inadvertently twisting the knife a little more.
The actress who played Laura was on a seemingly never ending maternity leave, but one of the first scene she played when she returned was Luke telling her he needed to discuss raping her, and her telling him that she considered what had happened one bad night. Of course, when they discussed it, it became clear that Laura has suppressed a lot of pain and confusion as to why Luke hurt her like that — her reliving off it was very graphic and emotional.
(Even so, and even in the “let’s fix it, be PC, and get some ratings” version, there was still some screwed up stuff. Ten years later, this scene would have need another pass to make it acceptable. http://www.angelfire.com/tv2/UNRevised/transcripts/Trans9.html)
The point that the writers seemed to be making is that whether you called it rape, forced seduction, a really craptastic night, or Friday, didn’t change the nature of the act.
The writers of the original storyline, including one who became executive producer and then revisited it, were of the mind that if a woman came back for more it couldn’t be really rape — but rather something the man made her do for her own good, and because he was desperate. The beginning of a romance that led to a marriage that led to the highest ratings in soap opera history.
Joan would be in her fifties at the time of the first version of the story, and she would be elderly by the time that Laura spoke of the pain and betrayal of what happened. Next to her during the first go around could be a stack of romance novels in which a hero taking a heroine by force was the norm.
The writers of those novels and of General Hospital didn’t spring up out of nowhere. They didn’t randomly or radically come up with the concept that rape is sometimes okay and romantic. They weren’t orphans who learned nothing at their mother’s knee about the birds and the bees and the way of these between men and women. The readers and viewers who embraced these stories and made them profitable were not some crazy fringe group — they were housewives and office managers.
If rape can be called a forced seduction in 1979 and not called rape again until the late 20th century, would it be possible that a woman in the early 1960s might be raped and unable or unwilling to accept that?
June 16th, 2009 at 8:51 pm
Thank you Anne B for confirming my decision not to watch Weeds again.
I don’t know where the rape as a part of romance thing came from. Maybe hundreds of years of women not being able to choose their spouses? I am sick of it.
I did not watch The Soprano’s, but I remember the debate around Dr. Melfi’s rape. I like B. Cooper interpretation of how it was about revenge. So many people wanted a revenge plot for Joan too and she would not even think of it. It is so much resignation it is tragic.
June 16th, 2009 at 9:12 pm
Three of the most talked-about contemporary dramas. All with rape scenes.
I don’t know what to say.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:34 pm
hullaballoo, what I didn’t mind about the way “Mad Men” and “The Sopranos” treated the subject of rape is that they did not pretend it didn’t happen.
“Weeds” did. This is why I can’t in good conscience watch the show again.
There is a way to treat the topic that allows for either a male or a female perspective of “what just happened”. The producers of “Weeds” had that choice to make — and last night, they went with the male.
That was their prerogative. But they lost this viewer when they made it.
June 17th, 2009 at 10:51 am
“Indeed, Matthew Weiner has stated (in an interview I cannot find right now, but read on a TV critic’s blog) that Joan was not raped. What transpired in Don’s office is something more like what happens in real world relationships every day, which in a way makes it even more tragic and heinous than Melfi’s shocking carpark attack.”
Are you certain that is what Matt Weiner said? Because in an interview with Alan Sepinwall, he said that Joan had been raped:
“It’s crushing, but all I think about is that scene when she tells Peggy she’s getting married at Christmas, which is very painful, which shows she’s still devoted to this fiancé despite him raping her, nine years, she’s been there nine years and she’s back on Don’s desk and Peggy is getting her name on the door.”
“Matthew Weiner Q&A for Season 2″
August 16th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
I keep thinking about whether or not Joan will stay with that fiance because of the rape and I have come to the conclusion that she will because its not the first time he’s done it.
I was rewatching FTWTY and when Joan is on the couch with him, she wants to watch the White House special, she even says to him “you’ve got to see this” and tries to get him to watch the tv. But he doesn’t listen and pushes her down on the couch. She is willing this time, but she does turn her head to the right to see the tv which parallels her turning her head to the right during the rape scene. She gave in and appeared to be okay with it, but he was forceful and would not listen when she said she wanted to watch tv. I think that he is in the habit of forcing sex when he wants it and doesn’t care whether she does or not. And behavior like that keeps getting worse and worse until it culminates in the rape scene. But she won’t leave him because she’s used to him treating her like that. And I think that is very sad.