The Female and Collective Redemption

I am currently reading an advanced copy of a book on the Iraq War and humiliation for a review that should come out in the next few weeks. I don’t want to give away too much of the argument here, but one interesting point the author makes is that Abu Ghraib was reframed by the media as a story about two female soldiers and their “bad apple” actions. The two women were publicly vilified and essentially humiliated to both misdirect the public away from other images of rape and murder from the prison and a broader debate about torture and the war on terror. But the condemnation of these women also served to absolve the country of its blame in the death and destruction of Iraq. Just as a few “bad apples” were to blame for the corruption scandal that plagued the corporate world a couple of years before the financial crisis started, a few “bad apples” were behind the horror of Abu Ghraib – not the administration and its position on torture; nor the majority of the public that supported the war before it started.

An interesting subtext of this discourse though was that women were chosen to be the major scapegoats, just as Martha Steward was absurdly chosen as the scapegoat of insider trading on Wall Street a few years back. And just as French women after World War II became the scapegoats for pretty widespread French complicity and cooperation with the Germans during World War II (see Verhoeven’s underrated Black Book for a wonderful filmic treatment of this dynamic at play). This is simultaneously the case on both sides of the ideological battle over Iraq. Those against the war and occupation used the situation of Iraqi women to fortify their argument, while often simultaneously supporting those that make women second class citizens and worse (Hussein ironically improved the position of women in Iraq dramatically during his reign) and by conservatives to misdirect attention from the failures of the Bush administration and the aforementioned debates on torture tactics, which often involved endangering women or humiliating males by engendering violence and the torture itself.

The point is that women are often the scapegoats for collective national guilt. Relating this to film, I find it interesting that in times of financial crisis the number of horror films increase – where women are tortured and killed in a pornographic display of violence that often involves the metaphoric penetration of women with a knife or other weapon. In Drag Me to Hell, the generally likable character Christine Brown makes an arguably unethical choice against her better judgment to try to win a promotion at work. While this decision was driven by two males, it ultimately leads her on a path toward death and damnation in hell. The question then becomes if she symbolizes our collective degradation as a society based on greed trumping ethics and common decency. Is then a woman the embodiment of this failure; even as men continue to make most of the decisions that lead us in this direction?