[This fall I
watched Netflix’s Unbelievable, one of the most
compelling and important TV shows I’ve seen in a good while. The show opens up
a number of AmericanStudies conversations, so this week I’ll highlight and
analyze a handful of them, trying my best to avoid SPOILERS (but probably not
entirely succeeding). Leading up to a crowd-sourced post on the TV
recommendations of fellow AmericanStudiers—share yours in comments, please!]
On one
historical and one ongoing context for the show’s central theme.
Unbelievable is far from the first crime
drama to deal with sexual assault as a central theme—the entire third season of Broadchurch focuses on the
investigation into a rape, for one example; or there are the roughly 50% of Law & Order:
SVU episodes that deal with the crime, for another. But in my
experience, those shows focus most of their attention on the investigations,
and thus on the identities (mysterious at first, uncovered at last) of the
rapists. Unbelievable has such a
police investigation as one of its two plot threads, and I’ll have more to say
about it in future posts this week; but even that thread focuses at least as
much on the victims (and in some key ways more so) as on the investigation. And
the other plot thread (which receives roughly half of the total screen time)
follows all that unfolds for the show’s first victim after she is raped. All of
which is to say, I haven’t seen any other TV show that devotes more screen time
and more in depth attention to the experiences of sexual assault victims, a
purposeful choice that immediately and importantly sets Unbelievable apart.
There would be
lots of important ways to contextualize that thematic focus—not just sexual
assault, but the experiences of its victims—in American history and society. But
I don’t think it would be possible to AmericanStudy sexual assault without
foregrounding the experiences of African American women. For the 250 years in
which slavery was legal, sexual
assaults on enslaved African American women (generally by their masters,
but of course not limited to that community) were quite simply ubiquitous, a
defining feature of American culture. Even after the abolition of slavery, as historian
Danielle McGuire demonstrates so compellingly in her book At
the Dark End of the Street (2010), sexual assaults on African American
remained so common that they became a defining issue for the activists who
helped launch
the Civil Rights Movement. These histories are particularly ironic when we
consider the longstanding American myth of the threatening black male rapist, a
propagandistic falsehood that underlay
the lynching epidemic (among many other destructive effects). But even that
point risks losing sight of the women who should be at the center of our
collective memories of these histories, just as Unbelievable seeks to center its attention on the female victims of
sexual assault.
When we do
center the victims of sexual assault in our collective memories and our
contemporary attention, it becomes clear that these individuals are all too
frequently forced to deal with a second, more subtle and insidious but no less
damaging, layer of assault in the aftermath of the first. As a lawyer puts it
to a victim late in Unbelievable’s
8-episode run (in a scene whose specific context I won’t spoil), “no one ever
accuses a robbery victim of lying, or someone who says they’ve been carjacked.
It doesn’t happen. But when it comes to sexual assault?” Or, as an empathetic
therapist says to the same victim, “basically you were assaulted twice: once by
your attacker, then again by the police.” Of course rape is an intimate crime
for which there are rarely witnesses, meaning that the statements of the
victims take on added importance but can at times be difficult to corroborate. But
there is a wide chasm between recognizing those complex contexts and not
believing those victims, or even treating their statements with suspicion
(which, as the lawyer notes, is not at all the default position toward other
victims of crime). Doing so not only makes it harder for those victims to get
justice for what has happened to them, but, again, it risks echoing and even
amplifying the violence and pain they have already experienced and are continuing
to experience. One more vital context for sexual assault that Unbelievable helps us explore.
Next
UnbelievableStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts on
this post and show? Other TV shows you’d recommend and analyze?
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