DOUGLAS KEESEY California Polytechnic State University Split identification: Representations of rape in Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible

This article critically examines rape scenes in two films of the ‘new extreme cinema’, Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2002) and Catherine Breillat’s A ma sœur!/Fat Girl (2001). On the surface, Noé’s disturbing long-take rape scene is clearly designed to foster empathy with the woman’s experience and to induce a physical aversion to rape. However, a deeper examination of the scene’s ambiguous techniques reveals that they actually work to split the viewer’s identification between the rapist and the woman he attacks. One function of this split is to lead the viewer – who is presumed to be male – along an emotional path from lustful aggression towards empathic understanding. Similarly, the film also provides audiences with a transitional figure – a male character who is almost raped – as someone with whom they can identify on the way towards identifying with the female. But this male character ultimately serves as a negative example when he moves to take revenge – an act which is shown to be an extension of the rape, part of the same masculinist ideology or myth of male inviolability perpetuated through the violation of others. Furthermore, the revenge is revealed as being the male character’s denial of his own complicity in the rape and of his own participation in ‘rape culture’. The rape scene i