Art prior to your present historical moment can be quickly judged, but the better move is to first critically witness it. I would like to tell you the following narrative arc is not immortalized in celluloid. I really would. But that would not be the truth.
A woman enters a bathroom, which she presumes reasonably is a private space. She disrobes. The familiar is, in the tradition of great horror movies, weighted in advance with menace. With the pulling back of a shower curtain, behind which she expects nothing, there is a shape that has no business being there. A man, specifically. There is a scream. Mayhem ensues.
Many private school, public school and college men (boys?) of the late 1970s through the late 1980s watched this and other cheapos at the first or second run cinemas, the drive-in, or in the privacy of their own living quarters given (in the early 1980s) the newly available videocassette recorder. The particular scene referenced above could be from any low-grade horror movie cribbing Alfred Hitchcock's “Psycho” (trust me, there were many), but it is not. It is 1984's underdog comedy “Revenge of the Nerds.”
“Revenge of the Nerds” is a movie I have known since early adolescence. This viewing, I focused on the scream provoked by the initial discovery of a sexually motivated intruder. This screaming woman is seen minutes later, trying to cover herself while calling her athlete boyfriend (and therefore by underdog comedy logic, villain) explaining "that nerd saw me naked." The aforementioned nerd/man barges into her room again, and she whimpers at him to get out while aiming deliberate, but light, blows on him. He joins his comrades to run through the hall, proclaiming, "It's going to be a great year." For him, maybe.
Later, after being rejected by the same woman at a paid kissing booth for charity, this same nerd/man follows this same woman into a funhouse disguised as her boyfriend, and proceeds (off-camera) to do something apparently "wonderful" (like "giving" fingering and cunnilingus under false pretenses to a person who has already explicitly rejected you). Upon immediate reveal, rather than a kick in the balls and call to the police, she asks to see this rapist after a later pep rally, then promptly rejects her jock boyfriend to be with the nerd.
A real, nauseating truth is that this theme can be found in many of the movies in the same geographic and historic period: namely, North American youth sex comedies from the late 1970s through the late 1980s. This aesthetic sub-universe is one in which many, many men currently in places of privilege and power now learned much of their moral cosmology. In these tales, triumph is not really a moral or philosophical victory, not one of reason against superstition, civilization against nature and/or base desire. It is simply a transference of women as reward chattel for a juvenile “top-of-the-hill” conquest. Or, in the terms of Otter from “Animal House,” women are used as reward for a really "futile and stupid gesture" performed on somebody's part. In the grim logic of cinematic everyman interpellation, particularly when that marketing bar goes as low as it did, we were all "just the guys to do it." Lewis Skolnick (nerd/man) of “Revenge of the Nerds” gets Betty (victim). Wyatt and Gary of “Weird Science” get trophy girls after tryouts on Lisa, their man-made Frankenstein sex doll. Bluto from “Animal House” after peeping on Mandy, assaulting Mandy and dressing as a terrorist pirate for homecoming, becomes a U.S. Senator with Mandy as happy wife.
We go now to a lesser-known classic of the 1980s, Brian De Palma's “Blow Out.” John Travolta is a sound engineer quested by his producer with finding the perfect recorded female scream to heighten a moment of onscreen terror. His involvement in a bit of political intrigue ends in the murder of a newfound female friend. Through this intrigue, he winds up with the recorded female scream his male audience demands. While quietly crying on final screening, Travolta admits, "It's a good scream." At what point do the rest of us, in the wake of this period, recognize a scream good enough to change our moral cosmology to a decent, human one?
