![]() Three Billboards is about Mildred Hayes’ (Frances McDormand) frustration with the law and her vigilante action in the wake of rape, which puts her in direct competition with the representatives of the law: Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) and Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell). What is disturbing is that by 2017, when Martin McDonagh released Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri very little seemed to have changed. This characterisation of feminism as vengeful is of course reductive and androcentric, but what if we take vigilante action seriously, as a symptom of the unmet demand for justice? It is in this light that the 1970s rape-revenge films became Second Wave feminist texts. 45 (Abel Ferrara, 1981), women’s calls for justice for the crimes that typically beset them, including sexual crimes, remained outside the law, outside of the reach of justice, in the realm of revenge and vigilante action. 2 In rape-revenge films from the 1970s such as I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978) and Ms. It is a challenge to the law: to paraphrase Francis Bacon, revenge puts the law out of office. ![]() Revenge is the justice of the marginalised, of those whom the law excludes. Denise: “You go, girl! You go fuck those cops up!” 1
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