News Reporter: Act Four: How to tell when a television show is doing a good job with a rape storyline

Wednesday 25 May 2016

Act Four: How to tell when a television show is doing a good job with a rape storyline

Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics

Sophie Turner as Sansa Stark and Aidan Gillen as Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish in “Game of Thrones.”
(Credit: Helen Sloan/HBO)

I apologize in advance for the technical difficulties with this week’s chat. We experienced a system-wide failure, but I managed to preserve all the great questions you submitted in advance of the problems, and I hope we were able to answer at least some of them in Monday’s Facebook Live chat. As is our tradition, I’m tackling one of those questions in today’s newsletter. And if you’d like to submit questions for the June 6 chat (I’m taking Memorial Day off to celebrate my parents’ 40th wedding anniversary), you can do so here.

This week, a reader has some thoughts on how we judge television shows that decide to tackle sexual assault as a subject.

I’m not sure that you ever ended up commenting on the big “Outlander” rape scene, but your recap’s point about Sansa’s exchange reminds me of why many of us found it so objectionable. Besides the graphic and often gratuitous scene itself (on which blame lies partially on Ronald D. Moore), who handled the topic far more deftly during his “Battlestar Galactica” days – what was most problematic was the miraculous recovery of Jamie afterwards in 15 minutes or less. This isn’t an outlier; [Diana] Gabaldon does this a lot with rape in her books, where victims seemingly have near-cartoonish resilience. Contrast this with Sansa, who is a vastly changed character and who made most viewers squirm with her exchange. I wish in the outcry over rape tropes that the outrage would extend to not just the scenes themselves but the portrayal of the PTSD and other anxiety disorders it provokes, and “Game of Thrones” finally got that right last night. “Outlander” hasn’t.

Obviously I am a long-term advocate for the idea that rape and sexual violence, and their long-term influence on both individuals and society, are one of the major subjects both of George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire novels and “Game of Thrones.” And I think this reader draws an important and useful distinction between the staging of a sexual assault in film or television, and the way that film or television show treats that rape as a long-term subject.

Long before Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) confronted Petyr Baelish (Aiden Gillan), Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) had been one of the most powerful symbols in “Game of Thrones” of how marital rape can distort a family and a regime. Viewers may have hated her in the first season for murdering her husband, King Robert Baratheon (Mark Addy) and then executing Ned Stark (Sean Bean) to cover up her crimes. But Cersei took the actions that she did in part to free herself from marriage to a man who loved another woman, and who hated and raped Cersei herself.

Now, the abuse and rape Sansa suffered at the hands of Ramsay Bolton (Iwan Rheon) are rippling through her actions in the same way. She hasn’t been crushed or destroyed by her experiences in the shell of her own home. But Sansa’s decisions as she takes steps to reclaim the North for the Starks are certainly informed by her desperate desire never to be returned to Ramsay’s custody, and her awareness that death would be the best she could hope for.

I’m not caught up on “Outlander,” and I’m not likely to be in the short-term, given the fearsome pile of screeners looming over my desk. But this reader is right to recognize that if a big, ongoing story decides to include a plotline that involves rape, it’s better if that rape means something, as it has on “Game of Thrones.”

That doesn’t mean that all characters have to react to sexual assault the same way for their stories to be valid or compelling; differences in circumstances, class, gender and time period could all produce different results. And it’s true that this standard makes it harder for us to draw immediate conclusions about whether a show has handled a rape story well or poorly. Instead, it’s an argument that processing a sexual assault story line takes time because it ought to. Our patience doesn’t have to last forever. But perhaps it ought to last longer than a single scene.

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