You want it darker?

My writing has always skewed dark, but lately I've been plumbing some new depths and taking more risks in what I am willing to write about, and that has gotten me thinking a lot about the problem of gratuitousness. My fic "Possession" is probably the darkest thing I've published, at least going by the sheer number of warning tags it required, but it also could have been a lot worse. I chose to tone some things down and exclude certain scenes I had considered putting in that could have bumped it into "Dead Dove" territory. I didn't choose to exclude these scenes because I was worried about offending anyone, nor because I was particularly uncomfortable with writing them. It was because I felt that including them would be gratuitous.

What makes something gratuitous is, as with most things in art, subjective. I'm sure there are people who would argue that some of the scenes I left in are still gratuitous. I settled on the rule of thumb that if you are using a scene to get a reaction from the audience without telling them anything new, it's gratuitous. And sometimes gratuitous is okay! For example, Videodrome (one of my favorite films) is incredibly gratuitous, and that's the point. Videodrome is about voyeurism, and it sends its message by making the viewer a voyeur. But in cases where you are trying to tell human stories and invoke pathos, gratuitousness is kryptonite because it is just so...disrespectful of the characters. By being too gratuitous, your story can cross over from cathartic to sadistic. A great example of this is Titus Andronicus. It's the 17th century equivalent of an exploitation film, and by all accounts, that was Shakespeare's intention in writing it. For that reason, it is most commonly done today as a black comedy instead of a tragedy because nobody can take it seriously as a tragedy. I suppose it's easier to watch a play where a girl is gang-raped and has her hands cut off if they make it hilarious. And it's definitely more fun to watch her dad bake the rapists into meat pies if he's wearing a blood-stained chef's hat.

WARNING: the following contains spoilers for the movie Wind River.

I recently watched Wind River on Netflix after having it in my queue for a while. In a lot of ways, it was very much my kind of movie. It was dark and visceral, but also beautiful and poetic. With a haunting score by THE Nick Cave and gorgeous shots of snow-covered landscapes, it had its tone down pat. It isn't the kind of movie that let's you go when you finish watching it. It sticks around afterward.

This song. Oh. My. God.

While I enjoyed the movie on many levels, there were two big issues I had with it. The first was the casting of a white man in the lead role, which I felt was unnecessary because it would have been so easy to make the character Native and center Native voices in a movie that is ABOUT missing and murdered Indigenous women. Which is not to knock on Jeremy Renner, who gave an amazing performance. I'm just sure there are lots of Native actors who could have given equally powerful performances, and then the story would have avoided falling down the White Savior hole.

My other big issue was *ding ding ding* the rape scene. I hated it for multiple reasons. First of all, I thought it was just lazy writing. In a film that tells its story by going back and forth between the past and the present, it would have flowed a lot better. But having a single flashback come out of nowhere in a mystery film to just show you exactly what happened is shitty writing. Not only does it disrupt the narrative, it's a glaring case of showing instead of telling. Nobody had even solved the case or put the pieces together in-universe. This wasn't Poirot explaining how he figured it all out. They just decided it had to spelled out for us for some reason, so they spelled it out. If they felt we needed a complete picture of the events, it would have been far more effective to have had Cory make Pete to recount it all on the mountain as part of his confession. Hearing every line of it agonizingly extracted from Pete's mouth as he faces down his well-earned comeuppance would have been much more gratifying for the viewer and much more respectful to Natalie's suffering.

Instead they just chose to...show her being raped. Why? It would not have been that hard to just drop a few more breadcrumbs for the audience to put together exactly what happened that night. We're not stupid. We knew from the beginning that she was raped. We knew that they murdered her boyfriend. As soon as the security guys started acting shady, we knew they had something to do with it. It's not that fucking hard to piece it together. So why do we have to watch every detail of it? To drive home how horrible it was? To make the viewer angry? We already knew it was so horrible that she ran six miles barefoot in the snow until her lungs burst and she died. We've been shown the heartbreaking toll her death has had on her family. We already know! We're already mad! That right there is the essence of gratuitousness. Telling us she ran six miles barefoot in the snow was already enough for us to understand how much she suffered. But they still went and made her suffering (and, by extension, the suffering of Indigenous women) into a spectacle for...reasons?

I'm definitely not saying it's inherently bad to depict rape or anything else. Pain and cruelty of all kinds ought to be confronted in art without kid gloves. I'm just saying that it's important as artists to ask ourselves why we are choosing to show certain things versus keeping them implied or offscreen. Making the audience uncomfortable is all well and good. In fact, I'd even say it's great. But we need to ask ourselves, "To what end?" I love being made uncomfortable when it makes me question my fears and prejudices or look at an ugly part of myself. But some things are uncomfortable in ways that don't want you to question or examine anything. They just want to make you feel dirty. And that is what is to be avoided.